FORD CRACK VIDEO A SAD EPITAPH FOR TROUBLED MAN
Clip reminds us why he was unfit to be mayor
With the conclusion of legal proceedings against Sandro Lisi, Rob Ford’s scofflaw factotum, the crack video that sent Ford’s mayoralty and this city’s politics careering down an icy slope with a cliff at the end of it is finally in the public domain. It is an important municipal artifact from a period of madness Torontonians must always remember, so as never to repeat. But its contents may come as a surprise.
Accounts by those who had seen it suggested something manic, something utterly damning. “Rob Ford … is a wild lunatic given to making bizarre racist pronouncements. … One reason for this is that he smokes crack cocaine,” Gawker’s John Cook reported on May 16, 2013. “I know this because I watched him do it, on a videotape. He was f--kinghiiiiigh.”
Shortly thereafter the Toronto Star reported that Ford was “heard (on the video) calling (Justin) Trudeau a ‘fag’ ” and referring to members of his football team as “just f--king minorities.”
It was plausible enough. As three years passed, we saw plenty of damning mania from Ford: on the “I need f--kin’ 10 minutes to make sure he’s dead” video; on the Steak Queen/bumbaclot video; on the floor of city council; in Mark Towhey’s book. But the video isn’t spectacular. It isn’t manic. Viewers can decide for themselves what Ford does and doesn’t say, but a dispassionate viewer would have to concede very little of it is intelligible at all. (For the record, I sure don’t hear “f--king minorities” in the context the Star reported, and I don’t hear “fag” at all.)
The video is damning, in the sense that no one should ever be in such a condition. But its dominant impression is one of tremendous sadness. On a personal level, what we see here is a broken man in desperate need of help, wasted miles beyond coherence, waving a crack pipe around in someone’s basement while convicted drug dealer Elena Basso sings his praises and some bastard films him with profit in mind. Ford was at best a deeply flawed man when sober, but this is objectively pitiful. Had the video emerged at the time, I suspect it would have attracted more sympathy than scorn. Had Ford sought professional help and had it stuck, there is every reason to believe he would have returned a conquering hero.
For Torontonians, that’s perhaps the most important reminder from this last relic of the Ford era: even when sober the man was entirely unsuited to the mayor’s job, but it is entirely conceivable he could have won a second term. Toronto voters cannot afford to be so unserious about the city as to elect someone like Ford again, and Toronto politicians must stop making it so easy for people to be that unserious.
The video is a reminder that no addiction is exclusively an affliction of the poor and downtrodden, and that we ought to have sympathy for everyone who suffers. That’s something Ford never managed: as city council stripped him of his powers, he averred that he still took a “zero-tolerance” approach to “drugs, guns and gangs.”
WHAT WE SEE HERE IS A BROKEN MAN IN DESPERATE NEED OF HELP.
And it’s a reminder that Ford left behind questions that still deserve answers. How did he get away with the illegal behaviour police witnessed during their exhaustive surveillance of him? Did he really get rides home in lieu of drunk driving charges, as Mark Towhey claims in his book? Who else gets those rides, and in return for what? Given that Ford was expected to be an important witness at Lisi’s trial, and knowing his dire prognosis, how is it that the Crown never got around to compelling testimony from him in advance, thus potentially weakening its case on a serious charge?
Ford’s legions of fans would often protest that what he drank and smoked on his own time was no one else’s business. But the video reminds us just how spectacularly untenable that argument was. The mayor was consorting with criminals, behaving in a way that was all but a written invitation to blackmail, and then his friend allegedly set about trying to extort the video away from its guardians. It was not unreasonable to wonder if the fallout from all this got someone killed. The mayor of Canada’s largest city had to explicitly deny that he had anything “to do with” Anthony Smith’s murder.
In a few years, it might all seem like a bad dream. But the video reminds us it was very real, and it was bloody awful for everyone except journalists. Rob Ford happened, Toronto. And we let it happen.