Yaz's Blog

Let me get a few things out of the way: having observed Rob Ford’s career for a decade and having actually spoken to him and tried to understand him, I believe him to be phenomenally simple-minded. He has the temperament of a child, with the corresponding tendency to deny any wrongdoing until evidence emerges that he is lying. The number of friends he has made on city council during a decade there is disturbingly close to zero.

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So, deep breath. What will Mayor Rob Ford’s Toronto look like? It’s safe to say the entire plant-watering staff at City Hall will be laid off. And city councillors will be brown-bagging lunches to meetings rather than having them catered. One expects that council would accept the fact that he has a mandate to cut on those two fronts, at least (achieving savings well into the five figures on a $7-billion budget!).

Aside from that, we know what Rob Ford says his Toronto would look like: the mayor would personally return every phone call; streetcars would be decommissioned and subways would be built in the suburbs; council would lose half its members and each councillor lose half his or her office budget; arts and culture spending would be slashed or outright eliminated; more police would be hired and a law-and-order chief would be given carte blanche to be tough on suspects and neighbourhoods; taxes would be cut, the union would be busted or humbled and garbage service would be contracted out.

One could spend a lot of time analyzing the implications of all this. For starters: fewer councillors with fewer resources could not provide the “excellent customer service” Ford promises; eliminating streetcars would increase gridlock rather than alleviating it while suburban subways would doom the TTC to ever larger operating deficits; and tax cuts coupled with an increase in the police budget would destroy the city’s finances.

But here’s the most disturbing truth of all: it’s not worth going into detail about the city Rob Ford promises because it’s pure fantasy. Mayor Rob Ford has absolutely no chance of enacting his agenda and will, as a result, grind the city to a halt, undoing seven or more years of progress and creating a situation much like the one he claims he’s addressing now.