MICHAEL FORD
Mayor’s nephew almost invisible during campaign.
This is a story about Michael Ford. In a way, it’s every story about Michael Ford because, while he’s in it, it involves him, he’s also peripheral to it, present, but never really an actor. In fact, he’s almost invisible.
It’s Sept. 12, at city hall, the last day for candidates to enter the municipal election or pull themselves from the ballot. When the office opens at 9 a.m. Mr. Ford is still registered. He’s running for council in Ward 2, the Etobicoke district his uncles, Rob and Doug, have held between them for the last 14 years.
Today, everybody knows what happens next. Rob Ford pulls out of the mayor’s race. Doug Ford registers in his place. Michael Ford gives up his Ward 2 dreams for a shot at the Toronto District School Board in Ward 1, which covers a larger chunk of Etobicoke. But on that day, no one had any idea how it would all play out. Reporters spent the morning huddled in little groups, inside the elections office, outside the back doors, in front of the mayor’s foyer, all searching for the tiniest scraps of information.
All of which is to say, people were watching that day. Lots of people. People paid specifically to know who’s who in city politics and what they’re doing.
And yet, when Michael Ford strolled into the elections office that afternoon, everybody missed him. He got all the way to the counter and halfway through submitting his paperwork before anyone noticed he was there. Even when they did, he didn’t get the kind of attention other Fords get at city hall. A reporter asked him what he was registering for. “School board, Ward 1,” he replied in his gentle, un-Fordian voice. And then he walked out, mostly unmolested.
There are many possible reasons this all went down that way — it was a weird, confusing day for one — but the most likely one is this: at City Hall no one really believed Mr. Ford had that much of a say in what happened, in the decision to pull himself out of Ward 2, or in the choice to set himself up in the school board race.
That’s just an assumption. No one outside the Fords knows for sure. But in the weeks since and, for that matter, the months before, Mr. Ford has done nothing to dissuade it. He has never spoken publicly about why he wants to be in politics. He has no published platform. He doesn’t have a website. There’s a debate in his ward Friday. He isn’t registered to go.
He also doesn’t speak to the media. Two weeks ago, he told another reporter from this paper he was just setting up his campaign and would be ready to talk in about a week. This week, after three days of going back and forth, he said he was too busy to talk. “Get back to me in a week or so,” he said via text message.
The election is less than four weeks away.
In the absence of the man himself, there is only his biography. But in Michael Ford’s case, that too is problematic.
In the public telling, Mr. Ford has always been a side character in his own, sometimes horrific, story. He first appeared in the press as an unnamed toddler, present in the home when his father, Ennio Stirpe, shot and killed his mother’s boyfriend in 1998. He was there again, in the home, as an unnamed “11-year-old son” when another boyfriend, Scott MacIntyre, shot his mother, Kathy Ford, in the face with a shotgun in 2005.
Michael Ford hasn’t said much of anything to the media
She survived but has since lived a life of turmoil: drug use, petty crime.
Those events aren’t Michael Ford. They don’t define him any more than his uncle Rob’s crack use or his uncle Doug’s business success. But the problem is, he won’t define himself either, not as a public figure or as a candidate for a board with a $3-billion annual budget.
Even his name, Michael Ford, is recent. He was born Michael Douglas Stirpe. He legally changed it this year.
Then there is a question of his youth. Michael attended Etobicoke’s Richview Collegiate high school. His campaign wouldn’t say exactly when. But based on old reports, he’s about 20 years old. Old LinkedIn profiles say he was a student last year at Humber College.
He works at Deco Labels, the company that made the family rich. But he is still a very young man without the kind of public record that can be probed for signs of where he might take the board, should he be elected.
That doesn’t have to be crippling. Morgan Baskin is 19. She’s running for mayor. She has a detailed website and appears regularly at debates. Ms. Baskin doesn’t think it’s fair to judge even young candidates on what they did in high school. But anything they say to the media during the campaign should be fair game, she believes.
The problem, again, is that Michael Ford hasn’ t said much of anything to the media. What he has done is canvass his ward, according to posts on his Twitter profile. The question, come Oct. 27, will be whether that, combined with the power of his name, will be enough to convince voters to give him a chance.
A Mainstreet Technologies poll published Sept. 22 suggests he has some work to do. The poll had him in second place, trailing incumbent John Hastings among decided voters 36% to 43%. A full 38% of the 572 people surveyed however, had yet to make up their minds.
Frank Bernardo is one of those undecideds. He has an SUV with a Ford Mayor bumper sticker parked on his driveway. He voted for Rob Ford in 2010. He plans to vote for Doug Ford for mayor this year.
But on Michael, he isn’t sure. “I don’t know anything about the guy,” he said. “I’m not going to vote for him just because he’s a Ford.”