OBITUARY: ROB FORD DEAD AT 46
Former Toronto mayor was in office briefly but cast a large, strange shadow
What surprises most in retrospect are not the words themselves. After all the endless replays, even the late-night jokes can’t shock anymore. Instead, what sticks out are the little things: the background, the cadence, the colour of his tie — black with football logos running up and down its length.
On Nov. 5, 2013, Robert Bruce Ford, then three years into his only term as Toronto’s mayor, stepped from the elevator near his office. He turned to face waiting reporters, then shocked the world. Yes, he told them, he had smoked crack cocaine.
“Am I an addict?” he continued. “No. Have I tried it? Probably in one of my drunken stupors.”
Ford will be remembered as many things: as the crack mayor, as the fat mayor, as the mayor who had more than enough to eat at home. But his political legacy is larger and stranger than all of that.
In his brief, tumultuous time in office, Ford never stopped surprising. He provoked anger in some and disgust in others. But for a large subset of the city — through it all and certainly to the end — he was the guy, their Everyman saviour, the one who was looking out for “us.”
Ford was born on May 28, 1969 at Humber Memorial Hospital in Etobicoke, Ont. He was the fourth child and third son of Douglas Ford Sr., a politician and label magnate, and Diane Ford (née Campbell), a powerful matriarch who helped direct her sons’ political careers.
Ford grew up in a kind of troubled privilege. He had issues with addiction.
“Robbie liked his weed,” a high school friend told reporter Robyn Doolittle, in her Ford biography Crazy Town.
He also liked to drink, a lot, Doolittle wrote, and he dabbled in cocaine.
On Nov. 13, 2000 Ford was elected as a city councillor in Etobicoke North, on the western edge of the newly amalgamated megacity of Toronto. In his new job, he quickly earned a reputation for angry rants and pennypinching. “He was very marginal,” said James Cowan, who covered Toronto city hall for the National Post between 2002 and 2008.
When Ford announced his bid for mayor in 2010, most observers thought it was a bit of a joke. Political watchers have spent years trying to understand the campaign that followed. On Oct. 25, 2010 Ford rolled to an easy, though still shocking, win with 47 per cent of the vote. By early 2012, Ford’s behaviour began to overshadow his policies.
In the last 24 months of his mayoralty, Ford appeared in two different videos smoking crack cocaine. He was routinely intoxicated in public. He told reporters, live on television, that he would never proposition a staff member for oral sex because he had “more than enough to eat at home.”
Then in September 2014, in the middle of the mayoral campaign, doctors diagnosed Ford with malignant liposarcoma, a rare form of cancerous tumour. He immediately dropped out of the mayoral race and registered instead to run for city council. Before and after winning that election, he underwent aggressive chemotherapy and eventually had his tumour removed. But, last fall, the cancer came back.
Ford was admitted to hospital in early March of this year. He died Tuesday, at age 46.
When he bowed out of the 2014 mayor’s race, he was polling in a respectable second place. Even after the crack, after the criminal associates, and the chaos, Ford remained a totem for much of Toronto.
A flawed Everyman, he reflected the city to those who long felt ignored.