Hundreds celebrate legacy of ex-mayor
Supporters cheer Doug Ford’s promise to keep up the fight
At the cavernous convention centre where Rob Ford launched his 2010 mayoral campaign, fans gave his brother Doug the same rock-star treatment on Wednesday night.
“We will continue on with what Rob started,” Doug Ford, the ex-councillor, told several hundred people at a celebration of Rob’s life at the Toronto Congress Centre in Etobicoke.
The crowd cheered loudly and then mobbed him. Security pushed him through the crowd to to a private glasswalled area from which Ford matriarch Diane watched the melee.
Ford did not reveal how he plans to keep “Ford Nation” going, which could include him or a relative seeking to fill his brother’s Ward 2 council seat and potentially running for Toronto mayor in 2018.
“What Rob started changed politics right across the country and it’s about respecting the taxpayer,” Doug added.
“We’re never, ever going to see a politician that loved the people so much — he was the champion of the little guy, the new Canadian that didn’t have a voice, the union rep, the front-line worker.”
Gianna Priore, wearing a Ford Nation shirt, said she hopes Doug — the Ward 2 councillor from 2010 to 2014 and his mayoral brother’s chief defender during a multitude of scandals — will run for office either municipally or provincially so she can continue supporting the Fords.
“And if Michael runs, we’ll support him, too — he’s great,” she said of the Fords’ nephew, a soft-spoken school trustee chatting with supporters nearby.
An ethnically diverse crowd danced to live ska and classic rock, made short work of a free buffet and cashed in free tickets for a beer or glass of wine.
Sheree Smith, of Richmond Hill, ob- served the racial diversity of the gathered Ford supporters, noting her own AfricanCanadian heritage and the turbanned group of Sikh men nearby.
“He cares for the common people,” said Smith who, like many at the party, is not actually a Toronto resident. However, again like many others present, that didn’t prevent the Richmond Hill woman from having a specific Rob Ford story — she said Ford personally visited a friend of hers and helped her get a new kitchen in her TCHC apartment.
Not everyone was welcome at Wednesday evening’s festivities.
Ford chief of staff Dan Jacobs confirmed that David Price, Ford’s former logistics director, had been barred from entering.
Price, who lined up with members of the public for the funeral earlier, while onetime colleagues from Ford’s staff were ushered in as family guests, gave an interview to the National Post in May 2015 in which he talked about difficulties finding a job after working for Ford, who he said “was frequently not sober during the day.”
Later, Rob Ford’s widow Renata, looking stricken, walked alone to the stage where her husband’s fans hugged and consoled her.
Her husband, mayor from 2010 to 2014, succumbed on March 22 to pleomorphic sarcoma, a fast-growing cancerous tumour that develops in connective soft tissues.
During the struggle with the disease, Ford elected not to seek re-election as mayor, instead running for (and easily winning) his old Ward 2 seat in Etobicoke.
The evening at the Toronto Congress Centre was the final event in a days-long period of public mourning for the controversial former chief magistrate. He lay in repose at city hall on Monday and Tuesday; then on Wednesday there was a large public procession, a funeral at St. James Cathedral and a burial, the latter a private ceremony.