His near-total lack of knowledge about the job he was supposed to do is not debatable. Instead, he offered his own creative and completely wrong idea of what constituted a conflict of interest—after having been warned multiple times that he was in a conflict and should not speak, and did so anyway.
But he was ultimately a poor public servant, choosing to do what he loved instead of learning to do what was needed. However, this sort of behaviour only accounts for some of his lies, and not all. There was a second sort of lying Rob Ford engaged in frequently: the lies he would tell to cover his ass.
These lies were nastier. Over the years an identifiable pattern emerged. Rob Ford would do something bad, sometime because he was drunk or high. He would lie about having done it. He would get insulted when it became patently obvious that he was lying. And, eventually, he would come clean and admit the truth.
Depending on the severity of what he had done, he would show remorse for his actions—or, much of the time, he would not. In between the beginning and end of every Rob Ford scandal came the attacks on those he felt had wronged him. He had to apologize after a defamation case was brought against him when, in an interview with Conrad Black on Zoomer TV, he lied about Toronto Star reporter Daniel Dale when he suggested the respected reporter was a peeping tom or pedophile.
He threatened staffers with defamation lawsuits for making statements to the police about his behaviour. Practically from the start of his mayoralty he refused to give the press his daily schedule —perhaps because he arrived dramatically late to work so often, frequently arriving after noon. He repeatedly skipped city council meetings to go coach the Don Bosco high school football team. Ford had begun campaigning for a second term as mayor, warning his rivals: "Keep your head up and make sure your chin strap is done up pretty tight.
But after being diagnosed with cancer, he abandoned his run, but was easily re-elected as a councillor in his Etobicoke riding. Even though he wasn't mayor, he managed to generate headlines and irk those in power. Need an example? Increasingly, however, it was Ford's health that kept him in the news. He underwent major surgery to remove a tumour in his abdomen as well as several rounds of chemotherapy, but then doctors found more tumours on his bladder.
Ford admitted the news of the cancer caught him off guard, but told reporters: "All I can do is fight, and I'll keep fighting until the day I die. Here's a look back at some of the more memorable moments during his mayoralty. Social Sharing. There was rarely a dull moment when Rob Ford was Toronto's mayor. Stop the gravy train. RAW: Rob Ford takes a fall 9 years ago Ford admits he smoked crack 8 years ago You can leave the conversation in one downtown Starbucks, walk fifty or a hundred feet to the next downtown Starbucks, and find yourself immediately back in the middle of the very same discussion.
But really, when you get right down to the nuts and bolts of the question—Why, exactly, did a reasonable kind of place like Toronto elect its current mayor? Why we did it is the least of our problems. The only point worth making at this juncture is that Rob Ford turned out to be a staggeringly bad choice.
The problem is this. Such as:. If you smoke crack. If you let late-night visitors smoke pot in your City Hall office. If you consort with criminals. If people with whom you were recently photographed —in front of a suburban crack house, it should be noted— start turning up dead , or splayed on the ground beneath windows from which they have just mysteriously fallen.
If you publicly malign the reputations of any politician, civil servant, or journalist who correctly raises the suspicion that the Mayor has a substance-abuse problem. If and it was this offense that seemed to really rattle many Torontonians you urinate in public —or, to be fair, if you urinate in public enough to be captured on police surveillance cameras.
Oh, and about those police surveillance cameras: you should probably resign as the mayor of Toronto if you are the subject of a costly police investigation—during the same period that you, as mayor, will preside over the upcoming police-budget debates at City Hall.
All this has been particularly worrisome, especially for older voters.
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