Guys, Doug Ford has it all figured out.
(Ladies, polling suggests you will not be voting for his brother with much enthusiasm, so Doug isn’t talking to you right now.)
But back to Doug: Toronto’s Chief of Police Bill Blair has lost it, the elder Ford brother says. He’s persecuting mayor, brother, and controlled substance connoisseur Rob Ford with a totally out-of-control investigation, all for no good reason.
Or is it just no good reason we can see? Doug knows how deep this thing goes, and it’s all about John Tory, who announced his mayoral campaign this week. “Folks, put the dots together,” Doug said yesterday, per the Toronto Star.
“John Tory. Andy Pringle was his chief of staff. They’re good buddies. Andy Pringle, the chief and John Tory are all good buddies. And I find it very, very suspicious in my opinion that all the dots are finally connecting as I said they would.” Move over, Glenn Beck—Doug Ford has some things to teach you. I mean, if we can’t trust the guy who was inept enough to lose the crucial voter data from Ford’s 2010 campaign, who can we trust?
See, to people familiar with the story, or even familiar with the laws of Ontario and Canada, the ongoing police investigation into Rob Ford is a pretty straightforward matter of a man who’s admitted to smoking crack cocaine in circumstances that led to no small amount of violence as people tried to obtain the video of said crack-smoking. Even if Ford wasn’t involved in the murder of Anthony Smith, and even if you don’t believe Scott MacIntyre’s allegations that he was beaten savagely in jail at Ford’s behest, police seem to have, at the very least, built against Sandro Lisi a solid case of extortion and threats out of all of this.
In response to the mayor allegedly suborning criminal offenses in a city that’s growing increasingly sick of its mayor, Doug and Rob’s new talking point is that the mayor “isn’t perfect.” No. Shit.
Smoking crack? Not perfect. Serial drunken stupors? Not perfect. Known to police? Not perfect. Felonies (allegedly) committed because of your irresponsibility? Not perfect. Made a laughingstock of Canada’s largest city? Not perfect.
Being a laughable, innumerate, barely intelligible mayor, even when you’re sober? Hey, nobody’s perfect.
In another city, the sitting-for-now mayor accusing the chief of police of corruption for the act of investigating a clear suspicion of criminal activity would be beyond the pale. Toronto resides, now, perpetually beyond the pale. This is what the Fords have done to us. Every obscene provocation is just another incremental nudge for them.
If there’s any objective at all to this insanity, it may be to try to muddy the waters for the election campaign—to plant seeds of conspiracy, to place the blame for their failures on anyone but them. But this may be assuming too much: there’s no reason to think the Fords have a plan beyond the current news cycle, and substantial evidence to conclude they couldn’t execute such a plan even if they had one.
In any case, the entry of people such as Tory and Karen Stintz into the race—joining David Soknacki, who announced early and has carved out an early niche for getting attention disproportionate to the candidate’s support—likely means that one way or another, Ford is done. People will flock to Tory early, and maybe Tory will actually, finally, run a winning campaign. Hey, the law of large numbers suggests it’s possible.
If Tory falters, voters will scatter to Stintz, Soknacki, or the as-yet undeclared Olivia Chow—but all of the evidence we have today suggests somewhere between half and two-thirds of the city’s voters wouldn’t cross the street to spit on Ford in October.
Which is why Rob and Doug are going so utterly, batshit, barking at the moon, Carrie’s-wall-from-Homeland crazy. They will do absolutely anything to try to win, and no scruple, ethic, moral, or shame will restrain them. So buckle up, it’s going to be a long year.
