If something needed fixing, Ford was a good guy to call
With the passing of Rob Ford, Toronto has lost the only politician who could honestly be described as The Fixer at city hall.
The former mayor and city councillor stood alone among his colleagues for his willingness to roll up his sleeves and address the same problems that are the bread and butter of The Fixer column.
Part of Ford’s appeal was that he’d personally respond to requests for help. Even after he was mayor, he prided himself on returning phone calls, talking over the problem with constituents and trying to fix it.
He took a lot of heat from critics who said the mayor shouldn’t be focused on calling people back and riding herd over micro-issues, a job better left to junior staffers.
But Ford understood taxpayers better than most politicians. He never lost sight of the core function of his job — serving the public, not just on matters of policy, but on little things that amount to the face of local government.
His motto was “customer service,” a hugely popular approach with his natural constituency, which also softened up people who otherwise didn’t support him.
On Tuesday night, talk radio pro- grams were jammed with callers recounting how Ford personally returned their phone calls about mundane problems or showed up at their door, even after he became mayor.
Ford’s stormy relationship with the Star and his refusal to speak to our reporters is well known. But he would always talk to The Fixer.
It had a lot to do with his early days at city hall. When he was first elected as Ward 2 councillor in 2000, he was just 30 years old and a political neophyte. We’d been at the Star’s city hall bureau for five years.
A friend who was a prominent provincial Conservative called us after Ford got to city hall and asked if we’d help him out with a little friendly advice, should he need it.
After he launched into an extended rant at his first city council meeting, capturing the undivided attention of his fellow councillors, it was time to have a talk.
We told him new councillors are allotted a small amount of goodwill capital from their colleagues, like a handful of chips at a casino, and he’d just blown most of his.
He listened intently — not that it made any difference — with the aw shucks demeanour of a teenager who knew he had stepped in it and wished he hadn’t.
After that, we were always friends. Ford was among the most supportive of councillors when The Fixer was airing dirty laundry at city hall. He gladly provided information for some of our stories.
We last saw him just over a year ago, when he unexpectedly showed up at our son’s hockey game at St. Mike’s arena. He sat by himself in his green football jacket, looking lonely and drained from illness, but brightened up when we joined him.
Lately, we’ve been writing about parking traps on University Ave. Ford berated city staffers into starting a pilot project to alert drivers to them. But it didn’t work, and they have shown no interest in coming up with a better idea.
If Ford were still here, he’d have gone up one side of them and down the other over their lack of effort. What’s broken in your neighbourhood? Wherever you are in Greater Toronto, we want to know. To contact us, go to thestar.com/yourtoronto/the_fixer or email jlakey@thestar.ca. To read our blog, go to thestar.com/news/the_fixer. Report problems and follow us on Twitter @TOStarFixer.