Crackhead mayor who made Toronto’s liberals cringe
1969-2016
STRING OF OFFENCES: Rob Ford leaves the hall after being elected as a city councillor in the 2014 municipal election in Toronto ROB FORD, the former mayor of Toronto who has died of cancer at the age of 46, hit headlines for all the wrong reasons in November 2013 when he was forced to admit to a string of offences including drink-driving and smoking crack cocaine, “probably in one of my drunken stupors”.
Ford’s admission, made after it was revealed that he had been caught on video smoking the drug (after six months of denials), embarrassed a city where it is still only possible to buy spirits from the Liquor Control Board, leading the council to strip him of most of his powers and to suggest he take a break from his duties.
A police file that surfaced around the same time as his admission, featured police surveillance images showing Ford urinating in public and heading into some woods with an accused drug dealer and extortionist, then on bail.
Several video recordings went viral, variously showing Ford in a council meeting miming a drunk driver, smoking some sort of pipe in his sister’s basement, making murder threats in a drunken rant and making explicit references to oral sex in a public speech.
Yet none of this seemed to affect Ford’s popularity. After the mayor offered a feeble apology for his behaviour on radio, a caller rang in comparing him to John F Kennedy.
Ford refused to resign. In fact, he used his radio confession to announce his campaign for re-election in 2014. And, although the scale of his problems had become clear only in 2013, Toronto voters knew when they first elected Ford in 2010 that he was a flawed man.
The youngest of four children, Robert Bruce Ford was born on May 28 1969 in the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke.
A keen footballer, he was sent by his father to a Washington Redskins summer camp but failed to make the grade and after dropping out of university worked at his father’s firm.
In 2000, Ford married Renata Brejniak, and that year was elected to represent Etobicoke on the Toronto city council.
In outbursts that outraged Toronto’s liberal establishment, Ford raged against the city donating money to Aids prevention on the grounds that “if you are not doing needles and you are not gay, you wouldn’t get Aids”.
When, in 2010, Ford defeated the green-energy-loving (and openly gay) George Smitherman for mayor of Toronto, he successfully cast himself as a traditional family man, contrasting his wife with Smitherman’s husband — even though it was well known that Ford had been charged with domestic violence and threatening to kill his wife in 2008.
In office Ford privatised refuse collection, cut city councillors’ budgets and eliminated the bicycle lanes that his suburban supporters claimed interfered with traffic.
Friends said his private world had started to unravel in 2006 after the death of his father, when he began drinking to excess and sometimes using hard drugs.
In April 2014, Ford announced that he was taking leave of absence to seek “professional help” for his addictions. That September, abdominal cancer was diagnosed.
Ford is survived by his wife and two children.— © The Daily Telegraph, London