Ford talks music, not surveillance
Mayor avoids questions on police use of plane to track him while vowing to bring Texas-style music festival to GTA
AUSTIN— Mayor Rob Ford raved at length about a music festival on Friday, but he would say nothing when talk turned to the Star’s revelation that the police had conducted surveillance on him using a Cessna airplane.
“Any other questions?” the mayor said when asked about the plane. His brother Councillor Doug Ford, however, confirmed to the Toronto Sun’s Joe Warmington on Friday that the Cessna had been “circling around and around . . . for five straight days” over his family’s Etobicoke house.
The mayor has avoided talking at length about the arrest of his friend Alexander “Sandro” Lisi on drug charges. As reported previously by the Star, a special squad of Toronto police detectives have been investi- gating the mayor as well for some time.
A person with a connection to Rob Ford said he noticed the plane following him, adding that it flew low and was noisy, it was reported earlier.
The mayor himself devoted much of the day to enjoying and taking inspiration from a renowned Texas outdoor music festival he was visiting — so much so that he immediately pledged to bring something similar to Toronto.
According to councillor Gary Crawford and Music Canada president Graham Henderson, Ford’s promise is not far-fetched. In a private meeting after Ford’s tour of the Austin City Limits Music Festival grounds, C3 Presents — the company that runs the festival — expressed an interest in launching a similar event in Toronto, Henderson said. “It’s not ACL Fest, because that doesn’t translate; you can’t have Austin City Limits in Toronto,” Henderson said. “I think what (Ford) is saying is that he wants to bring a major outdoor festival like this . . . to Toronto. And I’ve gotta say, from my perspective: hallelujah. “We identified that as a major hole in the Toronto music offering.” Ford raved at length about the festival after walking the grounds of Austin’s Zilker Park in the early afternoon in a dark suit that left him sweating heavily under the hot sun. “We’re going to have this happen in Toronto,” the mayor told reporters. “We’ve just got to find a venue; it might not be this big, but what I’ve seen today — look at what it does for the economy, look at what it does for tourism, look at what it does for jobs. This is a win-win-win right around.” Henderson, a booster of the Fordled Toronto mission to Austin, said the mayor’s presence in Austin was helping to “focus” C3’s attention on Ontario’s capital. “For all of the distractions” related to Ford, Henderson said, “there’s very serious opportunities here for the citizens of Toronto, for the musicians of Toronto — very, very serious opportunities that can be realized because we did this.”