I shocked myself last week when I read Torstar chair John Honderich’s article about it, and realized I’d completely forgotten. This has been going on ever since Ford became mayor, the result of a July 13, 2010 article by Rob Cribb and Kris Rushowy about Ford’s high school football coaching career. He says the story got it all wrong, and threatened to pursue it legally, but never followed through.The Star says the story got it right.
But let’s say for a moment they got it wrong. Let’s say they said something that was not true that damaged the mayor’s reputation. Then he would have two reasonable options. He could take it on the chins, realizing he’s a public figure and that a refutation of the story by the mayor would have roughly the same reach as the story itself had, and leave it at that. Or, he could take up his legal rights and sue for libel, because we have laws that protect people, including public figures, from having reputation-damaging lies spread about them in print.
He chose a third, unreasonable course, the municipal version of taking your football and leaving the field. The Star made him feel bad, and so he won’t play with them anymore. It’s childish, but it’s also an odd sort of vigilantism. There are laws to deal with these disputes, and he chose to ignore them. As a lawmaker himself, this is odd behaviour, and calls into further question exactly what it is he thinks he’s doing in City Hall, on top of so many other statements, actions and decisions that imply he thinks it’s his job to ensure municipal government stands aside wherever possible, rather than leading or even helping.
But there’s something much more serious still going on here, and it’s about us.
There are a lot of political issues out there at all levels of government. Bike lanes, green space, energy conservation, tax-assisted parochial education, liquor laws: you could make a case that due to the interconnectedness of all things, all of those issues affect us all in some way or other. And of course, advocates do just that all the time. Take it or leave it. But this particular issue is generic, by which I mean, it not only involves everybody in this city, it involves everything in this city, because it’s information of all kinds that Ford is denying to the Star and its readers. It’s information about parks and sewers, about TTC fares and development plans, about the death of Cardinal Ambrozic and his thoughts on the death of Jack Layton. It’s about everything that comes out of the mayor’s office.
This affects us all, and we should not be standing for it. We, who elected him and those who support him in this stupidity, should not be allowing him to do this. Rob Granatstein, late of the Sun, wrote a fine article about the job Ford should have, that pointed out the man’s actual strengths, which are as a populist. It’s the thing about him that ultimately allows me some hope regarding the man.
He’s not an ideologue. He may think he is, and many of his supporters certainly think he is, but everything about his career as a councillor makes it clear to me that he is all about pleasing constituents on a one-to-one basis. Though he alienated himself from almost every other councillor, regardless of political stripe, before he was mayor, the one thing I heard several of them say about him was that he was darn good with his ward. If a constituent called his office to say the sidewalk was cracked out front of his house, Ford would be there, two planners by his side, to see what he could do about it. Often, apparently, the answer was nothing, but he was responsive. Which means we can actually do more about this mayor than we have been able to with more high-minded folks like Miller or Hall. Those people had a plan, and knew there would be opponents, and were less likely to change course as a result of that opposition.
But Ford is a businessman, as anyone who attended any all-candidates panels during the campaign would have heard again and again and again, no matter what the topic at hand. “What do you think of the city’s architecture,” one moderator asked him, during a discussion on that topic. “Well, I’m a businessman,” he said (I’m paraphrasing), “and I think people want fewer taxes, and for government to get out of their way.”
So he’s a businessman, and for businessmen, the customer is always right. So think of yourselves less as constituents or citizens – these are not concepts the mayor seems entirely clear on – and think of yourselves as his customers. Complain. Write him letters and emails, phone his office and register your dissatisfaction with his boycott. This isn’t a matter of being pro- or anti-Ford. You may like the idea of fewer taxes and less municipal government. This is not about that. This is a misbehaving mayor, and he needs to grow up.
By “us,” I’m also referring to the media of which I am a part. We should reverse the boycott. He should be submitting himself to the specific sorts of questions Royson James and Robyn Doolittle would be asking him. I think it wouldn’t be at all untoward for the rest of the news-gathering organizations the mayor is still talking to say collectively that if the mayor doesn’t talk to all of us, he’ll talk to none of us. (The likelihood of the entirety of the city’s city hall media abiding by this went down somewhat when Adrienne Batra, the woman responsible for enforcing Ford’s unconscionable media policy, was hired, unconscionably, by the Sun.)
You may think this is all moot. Because of course, this is just the mayor’s decision. He hasn’t forbidden any of the councillors from communicating with the Star, nor could he. And though he did recently ask reporters from other companies not to tell the Star about certain things, those reporters, being post-adolescent, didn’t listen.
Then there’s the issue of the way information moves around in any case, whether or not the Star has conspirators among the other news gathering bodies. Things go up online, press releases are left laying about. I don’t think the Star has missed a story, or lost any competitive advantage, by not getting quotes or information from the mayor’s office.
But by refusing to give interviews to the paper more of his constituents read than any other, he’s doing the same thing as ignoring the inner city people who didn’t vote for him. As a councillor, it’s perfectly OK to concentrate on your ward and ignore the others. But the mayor is the mayor of the entire city, including the ones who read the Star. In addressing the subject, he’s tried to make it seem like this is between him and some editors and reporters. But it’s not just them he’s not talking to.
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