The following is an expanded version of an article that appears in the Winter 2011 issue of Spacing magazine. After Adam Giambrone dropped out of the mayoral race in February, 2010, Shelley Carroll waited for a call that never came.  "None of the people in my political life who I expected to call me, called." This was the second time that Councillor Carroll (ward 33, Don Valley East) had to make a serious decision about whether to run for mayor.  The first came just a couple of months earlier.  As soon as Mayor David Miller made his September 2009 announcement that he would not seek a third term, potential successors began organizing at an unprecedented speed. The post–Miller scramble Carroll assembled an election planning committee ("a mixture of Liberals and New Democrats, which was nice"), whose members included: Ryan Merkley, her former executive assistant, who'd been an advisor to Miller since 2008; Janet Davis, the ward 31 councillor who ended up supporting Joe Pantalone; Graham Mitchell, Davis's executive assistant; and David Caplan, the Liberal MPP for Don Valley East and former Minister of Health who took the fall for the eHealth scandal. But while Carroll was exploring her options, others (like Giambrone) were already lining up their money.  "There was no decision about, 'okay, we need a progressive,'" she told me in an extended interview this past January. Instead it was about "who was going to have which Bay Street fundraiser." Some potential candidates were requiring immediate pledges of support. "If you went and spoke with the logical people about how best to maintain the progressive [movement], they were already committed" to one candidate or another.

Two weeks ago, Rob Ford succeeded in his longtime quest to rid City Council meetings of modest, taxpayer-funded refreshments. The following week, however, he and his brother took councillors by surprise by personally purchasing food for everyone. Anthony Schein, formerly an assistant to Councillor Joe Mihevc, sent this letter to the Toronto Star outlining the troubling implications of this shift. The paper didn't print the letter, so we present it to you here. Re: Free cookies, pizza for councillors — courtesy of Ford, Dec. 17 Mayor Rob Ford and brother and Councillor Doug showed their Respect for Taxpayers — and their largesse — at Thursday’s Council meeting, catering baked goods and pizza for all 45 councillors and senior City officials out of their own pockets. While their volunteerism and hospitality are admirable traits, both are underwritten by the Ford brothers’ enormous personal wealth, and both are troubling signs of the administration’s ideological tilt. Mayor and Councillor Ford see themselves as patrons, whether of council, of the arts, or the poor. Indeed, then–Councillor Rob Ford’s website routinely listed his thousands of dollars in personal donations to charitable (as well as political) causes. Who needs sound public policy, when we can depend on the generosity and largesse of the elite? Who needs a social welfare system, when we have charitable giving from the wealthy? This attitude permeates virtually all elements of the Fords' policy approach — whether then–mayoral candidate Ford’s offer to personally help buy street drugs for a sick constituent, his belief that an arts and culture plan can be replaced by selling tickets to galas, or the belief (articulated at a Latino-organized mayoral debate) that youth-oriented social programs could be replaced by football teams and cheerleading squads.

Photo by HiMY SYeD / photopia. The Budget Committee held a meeting during the lunch break of Thursday's Council session. It lasted from 12:45–12:50 p.m.  Only their second get-together (and the first at which business was conducted), there were only two items on the agenda: 1) "Establishment of Sub-committees of the Budget Committee," and 2) "Election of Vice Chair." Number 2 resulted in Doug Ford being named the committee's second-in-command — no surprise.  But buried in item 1 [pdf] are the details for the public's only opportunities to provide input during the expedited (i.e., rammed through) 2011 budget process. The public consultations, broken down by community council area, are as follows: ** NORTH YORK DISTRICT: January 19, 2011, at 6:00 p.m. in the Council Chamber of the North York Civic Centre (5100 Yonge Street, at North York Centre station) * TORONTO AND EAST YORK DISTRICT: January 19, 2011, at 6:00 p.m., in the Council Chamber of the East York Civic Centre (850 Coxwell Avenue, at Mortimer Avenue) * SCARBOROUGH DISTRICT: January 20, 2011, at 6:00 p.m., in the Council Chamber of the Scarborough Civic Centre (150 Borough Drive, at Scarborough Centre station) * ETOBICOKE YORK DISTRICT: January 20, 2011, at 6:00 p.m., in the Council Chamber of the York Civic Centre (2700 Eglinton Avenue West, at Keele Street) **

Comparing the geographic representation of Miller's and Ford's Executive Committees. Pretend there's an asterisk in ward 4 (explained in a bullet point below). On a recent edition of Metro Morning, Councillor Adam Vaughan argued that — for strictly practical reasons — it is foolhardy for Mayor Ford to not have placed any representatives from the former City of Toronto on major committees. "The reality is is that when you try to stage something like the G20 or when you have to run a streetcar line through a dense urban neighbourhood, as opposed to a differently built neighbourhood north of the 401...it's a different experience," the ward 20 (Trinity-Spadina) councillor explained. "And just as I wouldn't expect to have the expertise to manage affairs in Giorgio Mammoliti's part of the city, or Denzil Minnan-Wong's part of the city, I think they need my advice — and not just my advice but the advice that I bring to the table on behalf of the businesses and the residents I represent — when making critical decisions about infrastructure investments, about how to stage a parade, about how to effectively govern the city." Running counter to this is the myth that Mayor Ford's committees are merely an inversion of Mayor Miller's and that the people speaking out about the exclusion of the downtown are simply sore losers. What's getting lost in the discussion is that while Miller's committees indeed drew most heavily from the core, he would usually make an effort to include representation from each of the city's major districts. I've made up some graphics to illustrate the contrast in Miller's and Ford's approaches to populating their Executive Committees, Budget Committees, and Toronto Transit Commissions.  (Vaughan also cites Ford's appointees to the Police Services Board and Toronto Community Housing Board as similarly problematic, but because neither is exclusively comprised of city councillors, illustrating their memberships in map form is not quite as straightforward.)

Tuesday morning, at a Queen's Park media scrum, Mayor Rob Ford declared, "As you know, there was never a vote on council for Transit City, and if there was I'd like to see that." Well, Rob.  Okay. At its meeting of July 16–19, 2007 — four months after Mayor Miller and TTC Chair Giambrone unveiled Transit City at a press conference — City Council voted to set the plan in motion.  As part of the "Climate Change, Clean Air and Sustainable Energy Action Plan," Council adopted the following ...

"The Toronto Police Service, with very little lead time, I think did a job that can only be described as extremely professional and to the highest standards." (Near-complete press conference video: part 1, part 2.) Toronto's civic leadership has failed.  The inability of our representatives to utter anything helpful, comforting, or non-bullshitty during or after one of the bleakest weekends in this city's history is nothing short of a travesty. If the public's faith in democracy was damaged by the mass arrests, detentions, and beatings of peaceful protesters, journalists, and random pedestrians, then it was positively slaughtered by our politicians' indifference to these things. The Police Services Act prohibits elected officials from directing the activities of a police force; this is absolutely fine, and is exactly as it should be. But I am hugely doubtful that it is the intention of the Act to muzzle politicians and prevent them from addressing their constituents in a time of crisis. That said, when a handful of our leaders finally emerged to talk to the media on Monday morning, I kind of wished they'd stayed in their burrow. Mayor David Miller's own press conference was dismissive at best, delusional at worst. Early in his remarks, he encouraged people to attend the upcoming Tall Ships festival at Harbourfront. Twice. This was not an effective diversion technique.

City spokesperson Brad Ross (now with the TTC) pleads with Rob Ford to give up his chase after Globe columnist John Barber. On Tuesday, March 11, 2008, the anonymous Ceyla16 uploaded the video "Councillor Rob Ford in action" to YouTube.  Originally devoid of any contextual information, it sat there for two and a half weeks before being discovered by Toronto Life's short-lived Preville on Politics blog.  Two days later, it was posted here.  And then a day after that, I tracked down both its origin (the documentary Hogtown: The Politics of Policing) as well as the specifics of the argument at its centre (the details of the in camera Police Board vote on whether to renew then–Chief Julian Fantino's contract). In the course of my digging, I also uncovered the identity of the user who posted the clip on YouTube and emailed him to ask if there was any particular reason he put it online; at this point, my Torontoist piece had already gone up, and I was just considering adding an update.  The fellow did in fact get back to me the next day, but I never got around to appending his explanation, and then kind of forgot about it. (I also later learned that the person I referred to as "Unidentified reporter" was in fact the Star's Catherine Porter.) But as the clip has not only gotten renewed play in recent months but has also inspired a sitcom, I've found myself wanting to tell the last little bit of the story, which in turn resurrects another long-past Ford controversy:

At his Transportation Policy Launch / $250-a-plate fundraiser on Friday, George Smitherman delivered a 3251-word speech.  (I'm going by his official "speaking notes," to which he stuck very, very close.)  After 1059 words of introduction, he addressed the following topics, in order: • Expansion of public transit (including a broadly-sketched financial rationale): 1383 words • Cycling policies: 170 words • Vehicle registration tax and disruptions to motorists: 80 words • Limited free TTC rides for seniors: 85 words Not necessarily an unreasonable ratio, but enough to make clear that everything other than public transit is an afterthought in the context of Smitherman's "Integrated Transportation Plan."  (The "backgrounder" distributed to media — and posted online here — is actually more interesting than the speech itself, and also has a section concerning what Smitherman would do for pedestrians.) John Lorinc, Steve Munro, and just about everyone else (including me!) have already written extensively about the transit stuff, so let's now take a look at the 170 words about cycling initiatives:

As though you hadn't already figured that one out, huh? When even Toronto Life headlines a blog post "Non-existent poll gives Rob Ford fictional lead over Smitherman," it's fair to say the jig is up and that the oft-recurring gossip is bogus.  What is interesting, however, and is the explanation I so very much want to believe, is that it was supposedly a rumour deliberately planted to test the laziness of the City Hall press corps. A call to the senior staffer who we were told had started the whispers "for fun" didn't really yield much in the way of an admission: "I know not what you speak of," followed by repeated refusals to comment on the matter or any related issues.  Fair enough.  Hardly incriminating. But it's not so much the origin that interests me as it is the purported motive.  Here's a breakdown of how the story played out, media-wise:

Yesterday afternoon, Rob Ford apologized to Dieter Doneit-Henderson, an HIV-positive gay man, for his well-documented 2006 remarks about people with AIDS.  By the bizarre logic of the Toronto Star, the Rob Ford campaign, and of elections in general, Doneit-Henderson is a synecdoche for all those who could possibly have been offended by Ford's ignorant comments. (I am reminded of the South Park episode in which Stan's father utters the n-word on Wheel of Fortune, subsequently says sorry to Rev. Jesse Jackson, and is later admonished that "Jesse Jackson is not the emperor of black people!") In any case, why is Ford bothering to express remorse at all? According to an email sent out to supporters on Sunday night, his AIDS comments are only an issue because "special interests, lobbyists, and elites" want to distract from his fiscal policies. Here's what it said: