Ford Nation by Rob Ford

Author:Rob Ford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2016-10-19T04:00:00+00:00

THE WATERFRONT AND CHICAGO trip notwithstanding,and not counting the media, Rob’s biggest problem was council itself. From the beginning, there were a few councillors who openly aligned themselves against Rob, no matter what was to come. Adam Vaughan (Ward 20, Trinity-Spadina), Shelley Carroll (Ward 33, Don Valley East), Janet Davis (Ward 31, Beaches-East York) and Josh Matlow (Ward 22, St. Paul’s) were probably the most prominent, and not surprisingly, all of the wards they represented were downtown or close to it. I wouldn’t go so far as to call them “enemies,” but they certainly made a habit of trying to stop Rob wherever they could or turning their backs on him in council sessions.

As a matter of fact, Josh Matlow had a radio show called The City that aired on Sunday afternoons on Newstalk 1010. He loved to get on there and chirp away at us for two hours. He and his guests would criticize Rob’s initiatives, such as the Scarborough subway and the elimination of the land transfer tax, or he’d use the show to give a platform to second-rate media muckrakers like Now Magazine.1

So I finally called up 1010’s program director, Mike Bendixen, and I said, “I’ll make you a deal. We’ll take over the show, Rob and I, and your ratings will go through the roof.”

Sure enough, we took over The City from Matlow in February 2012 and the ratings immediately shot up. But more importantly—and it took us a little while to realize this—the show gave us a way to unofficially set the agenda every Sunday for the following week. We had every councillor, as well as a good number of politicians from beyond city hall, tuning in to hear what we had to say. So in that sense, we had Matlow to thank for the opportunity—even if he might not have agreed.

Apart from Matlow, Adam Vaughan was probably the worst of Rob’s critics. He tried to get in Rob’s way about everything, from Rob’s football coaching to his bullshit conflict-of-interest trial to his tough-on-crime ideas.2

Having some left-wing ideas is one thing, but I think these councillors were obsessed with protecting union leadership and spending public money. It seemed to me that none of them had any comprehension of balancing the books. I could only shake my head in disbelief—we were trusting these people to be leaders?

Then, later in 2012, another ridiculous obstacle presented itself. This was a conflict-of-interest case, brought against Rob by a private citizen, and it was something between an annoying distraction and pure horseshit. The whole thing started back in 2010, right in the middle of our first campaign. To summarize: Back when he was a councillor, Rob had raised $40,000 for his football foundation. He’d used his office letterhead to reach out to various corporations to help him with the fundraising. After some complaints about it from other councillors, the integrity commissioner, Janet Leiper, ordered Rob to refund the donors a little over $3,000, which Rob had used as start-up costs and spent on football equipment.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.