Councillor Jaye Robinson was forced to talk about Mayor Rob Ford’s crack cocaine scandal at the grand opening of a Don Mills community garden. Councillor Paul Ainslie was forced to talk about it when attempting to speak to Scarborough constituents about the beetle that threatens local trees.
Councillors’ assistants giddily shared the latest developments in impromptu hallway gossip huddles and at a private transportation briefing. City bureaucrats who normally pretend to ignore city politics gave reporters knowing wide-eyed looks.
People showed up outside Ford’s office to heckle him with shouts (“take a drug test!”), heckle him with a cake (“Happy Birthday Rob, please resign”), merely to rubberneck.
There was a rap song. A reggae song. A dance song. A rock song. Popular Taiwanese animators released another mayor-mocking video. Prominent American pundits glued themselves to a CP24 video feed.
“I am literally staring at a bunch of Canadian microphones right now,” Chris Hayes, a MSNBC host, wrote on Twitter. Three minutes earlier, he wrote, “So it’s come to this: watching a live stream, anxiously awaiting news conference featuring the mayor of Toronto.”
It’s come to this: Kevin Clarke, an eccentric perpetual fringe candidate for mayor, showed up in the city hall press gallery on Friday afternoon to deliver crack pipes to newspaper reporters — and, by Friday afternoon, this did not seem especially weird.
“I don’t see an end in sight. It’s escalating. It’s intensifying,” says Robinson, a member of Ford’s hand-picked executive committee — who says he should take a leave of absence to straighten out his personal life.
Robinson, who was first elected in 2010, finds great meaning in the act of walking through the thick wooden front doors of city hall. For the last two weeks, though, she has entered the building somewhere else to avoid an unprecedented media crush that on Friday included a Time correspondent.
Councillors and their aides say they have managed to carry on with their normal duties. But there is widespread and growing concern that the turmoil caused by Ford’s refusal to address the scandal in detail is distracting from important municipal issues.
“When one of your core duties as an executive assistant to a councillor is to help generate attention for the good work they are (still) getting done, the media climate as of late has made that part of the job difficult,” says Robert Andreacchi, the top aide to Councillor Maria Augimeri, a Ford opponent. “It has almost been a blackout communication period for the last few weeks.”
The international frenzy was fuelled by palace intrigue. In five days, Ford lost five staffers to resignation: press secretary George Christopoulos and special communications assistant Isaac Ransom on Monday, policy adviser Brian Johnston and executive assistant Kia Nejatian on Thursday, and, on Friday, special assistant Michael Prempeh, who had planned to depart even before the scandal erupted.
While Ford’s second-floor personal office is shielded from public view, a transparent glass wall encloses the area where his staffers work. After both the Monday and Thursday resignations, Ford treated the waiting cameras to a rare spectacle: the mayor of Toronto stalking from room to room, clearly taken by surprise, trailed by a security guard for reasons unknown.
The visible chaos drew attention to personnel moves that would have been ignored until two weeks ago, when the Star and the U.S. website Gawker reported that Ford was caught on a cellphone video apparently smoking crack cocaine. Ford denies the allegations.
Before the scandal erupted, Ford’s hires were considered noteworthy only when they involved high-level posts or junior staffers with connections to his beloved football. On Friday, news outlets and councillors pored over the scant LinkedIn page of a new aide fresh out of university who will make about $40,000.
Attempting to convey a sense of normalcy, Ford made himself available to the media every day — more frequently than he ever did in any week that was indeed normal. But his news conferences left even sympathizers unsatisfied. In an effort to turn the spotlight to his advantage, he spoke at length about what he said were his fiscal accomplishments — and dismissed any specific question on the scandal with a terse “anything else?”
The list of unanswered questions grew as the Star reported sources said that the chief of staff Ford fired last Thursday, Mark Towhey, had gone to the police over concerns that another aide, David Price, was attempting to obtain the video. Sources then told the Star that Ford himself had blurted out a Dixon Rd. address where he believed the video was stored.
In his longest exchange with reporters, on Thursday, Ford said, “Things are doing great and we’re doing fine.” His sunny message would have been undermined by a sentence he scratched out in pen from the text of his speech on the third and fourth resignations. The sentence, captured by Star photographer Steve Russell, read: “Try to put yourself in their shoes — this has not been easy for any of us.”
The photographers surrounded Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong on Friday afternoon: Ford’s acting press secretary had announced that Minnan-Wong, the conservative public works committee chair, would be speaking in front of the mayor’s office.
On live television, Minnan-Wong began: “I wanted to announce today that effective June 12 the City of Toronto will be closing the Dufferin St. bridge south of Springhurst Ave. to all vehicular traffic over the GO Transit-Metrolinx rail corridor.”
He was making a boring bridge announcement. Business as usual, or what used to be.
Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: Daniel Dale
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