For the tens of thousands of West Indian immigrants who live within the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) Rob Ford, the city’s current mayor has always been a polarizing figure. Several months ago, when legal action over a conflict-of-interest dispute narrowly failed to remove him from office, the national broadcaster polled passers-by in two parts of the GTA. Downtown, the CBC found no one willing to defend the mayor’s record. Instead he was dismissed as stubborn, insensitive, and confrontational. Further afield, however, especially in his home district, Etobicoke, the pattern was reversed. Support for Ford was almost universal, particularly among recent immigrants. Several respondents indicated that they would stand by their councillor regardless of what his muckraking opponents tried to smear him with.
Few of these loyalists could have imagined how sorely they would be tested. During the last few months allegations have surfaced that Ford groped the buttocks of a former political rival while intoxicated; that he was asked to leave a function because he was visibly drunk; and, most recently, that there is video evidence of him consorting with known drug dealers and allegedly smoking crack cocaine.
The video became a full-blown intrigue in its own right after the American gossip site Gawker tried to raise $200,000 through online crowdfunding to pay the drug dealers who had filmed it. The resulting confusion has been instructive. At first Gawker’s figleaf for its extremely dubious undertaking was that it would “donate 100% of the proceeds to a Canadian non-profit institution that helps people suffering from drug addiction” if the deal didn’t go through. After more than $160,000 had been raised the site conceded that it was no longer able to contact the drug dealer. Donors were warned that Gawker’s “confidence that we can consummate this transaction has diminished.” Other commentators pointed out that even if the campaign did raise the necessary funds it faced serious legal and ethical hurdles when transferring such a large sum to known drug dealers.
The mayor, meanwhile, refused to comment on the allegations beyond dismissing them as nonsense, and he fired his Chief of Staff on Thursday, reportedly after being criticized for his failure to respond to the latest allegations. All of this further heightened interest in his colourful private life.
Rarely has municipal politics in the city of Toronto produced such a slew of tabloid fodder, even during Ford’s long and controversial tenure as a city councillor. But while there has been endless speculation about the mayor’s considerable personal flaws, comparatively little attention has been paid to the much larger questions that he failed to resolve, most notably the multi-billion dollar questions of what sort of mass transit the city should adopt during the next decade. A recent proposal for a downtown casino was also scrapped during the last week but the city council’s deliberations on this and other important matters have been largely overshadowed by the current scandal.
What is happening in Toronto right now, happens on a daily basis in many other parts of the world. The tabloidisation of modern reportage has made us too familiar with the failings of the rich and famous, and less and less capable of focusing on moral and political questions that their personal crises illustrate. Providing no laws are broken checkered private lives should be important only insofar as they affect public functions. To treat them otherwise is to read the news like a soap opera. If and when ‒ as now seems likely ‒ the Mayor resigns in disgrace, the city will still have to deal with all of the divisive issues that are simmering while he remains in office.
The marketability of news-as-gossip has become so pronounced in recent years that a great deal of reporting avoids tackling serious and complex issues until they can be attached to a famous face. Breast cancer becomes a hot topic because Angelina Jolie writes about her mastectomies; domestic violence becomes important after Chris Brown assaults Rihanna; racism is discussed because the Spanish golfer Sergio Garcia makes an ill-considered joke about eating ‘fried chicken’ with Tiger Woods. Now substance abuse is the flavour of the month, at least in a certain part of Toronto. Presented as another instalment in the saga of the rich and famous, these issues are forgotten as quickly as they are raised largely because they are being looked at through the prism of celebrity reportage.
There are good reasons to dislike like Rob Ford. He is vulgar, incurious, arrogant and surprisingly prejudiced for a public figure in a modern multicultural metropolis. He has made little or no effort to accommodate his critics and has treated the local press ‒ admittedly hostile on more than one occasion ‒ with a cynicism more suited to a dictator than a mayor. But none of this changes the fact that the public sphere has gone seriously awry when it has become permissible for drug dealers to seek lavish compensation for a video that exposes the allegedly illegal behaviour of a prominent public figure in a major city. That their request could be taken seriously and funded by a well-publicised campaign is one of the more discouraging signs of the times.
