‘Bully’ seeks crack-smoking brother’s mayoral power
‘‘Rob isn’t a bully unless he’s drunk or high. Doug is a bully.’’
Senators wants special seats
Palmer United Party Senator Jacqui Lambie wants dedicated indigenous seats in federal parliament. The rookie senator, who spoke of her Aboriginal heritage in her maiden speech to parliament, is calling for indigenous political representation to reflect the population. Indigenous Australians make up about 4 per cent of the population, so with 226 seats in both houses of parliament that would create about nine seats. Lambie said the move would create more indigenous-focused debate and allow private members’ bills focusing on indigenous issues. ‘‘These rights . . . over time will lead to practical outcomes and a closing of the gap between indigenous and nonindigenous disadvantage,’’ she said. The Tasmanian senator cited Maori seats as evidence the policy would work. AAP The four-year reign of Rob Ford, the crack cocaine-smoking, binge-drinking mayor of Toronto, has been troubled enough.
Now the long-suffering Canadian city is being invited to put its fate in the hands of another rumbustious political pit bull: his elder brother.
Doug Ford, who entered the mayoral race after Rob withdrew on Saturday, citing health reasons, is in some ways a polar opposite of his younger sibling. For one thing, he is a teetotal vegetarian.
But the Ford boys, who share the same heavyweight wrestler’s build, are birds of a feather when it comes to bravado, bluster and unstinting allegiance to family and fiscal conservatism. They would also seem to share a propensity for getting into trouble.
John Tory, frontrunner in next month’s mayoral race, said the pair were ‘‘cut from the same cloth’’ and denounced Doug as an ‘‘insult machine’’ whose candidacy represented ‘‘more of
Toronto councillor Doug Ford prepares to sign his paperwork needed to run for mayor at City Hall in Toronto. the same – maybe worse’’.
As a city councillor he was accused of ‘‘corrupt and corrupting behaviour’’ for handing out $20 bills to constituents. He caused outrage by accusing a home for young autism sufferers of lowering the tone in a posh city suburb. He then called the wife of the district’s mayor a ‘‘Polack’’. He has lashed out at journal- ists, too, labelling one a ‘‘Jihadist’’ and another ‘‘the most biased person in Toronto’’.
More worryingly, The Globe and Mail in Toronto claimed Doug Ford had ‘‘trafficked in large amounts of hashish during the 1980s’’.
The paper said that he ‘‘repeatedly denied the allegations and vowed to serve the paper with a notice of libel, but never did’’.
As if that were not enough, he is also accused of being nasty.
‘‘Rob isn’t a bully unless he’s drunk or high,’’ said a former city hall official. ‘‘Doug is a bully.’’
The Ford brothers’ change of candidates followed the wayward mayor’s hospitalisation for a stomach tumour.
‘‘I need to focus on getting better,’’ Rob Ford wrote in a statement.
‘‘There is much work to be done, and I can’t give it my all at this point in time.’’