The Mayor of Toronto is a massive embarrassment to my city. Yesterday, one of the Toronto Star’s city hall politics reporters filed a story that Rob Ford wants to buy a slice of the park adjacent to his house so that he can build a bigger security fence. The reporter behind the story, Daniel Dale (and this is according to his own account, which differs from the mayor’s), went out to the park of which Ford wants to buy a piece and was taking pictures of the park and, it would seem likely, Ford’s fence, for the story.
Apparently Ford, who is possessed of an intellect of which a goldfish would be ashamed, decided that a city politics reporter who Ford presumably sees most working days around city hall, was a threat to the safety of the clan Ford. Apparently, Ford came tearing out of his house and into the park, yelling and screaming at the reporter. Ford apparently had his fist cocked, threatening to punch the reporter. He told the reporter to drop his camera, his audio recorder and his blackberry. The reporter, in understandable fear given that Ford is a very big man, did so and fled to his car. In an act of ultimate hubris, Ford went back into his house and called the police to file a trespassing complaint against the reporter.
So to recap, the mayor of Canada’s largest city has decided that a politics reporter, standing on public property taking a picture of public property and a fence on private property is a threat to the safety of the family that lives behind that fence, that this justifies threatening said reporter and it justifies wasting police time on a frivolous trespassing complaint. To get a sense of how silly it is that Ford would feel threatened by Daniel Dale, I wanted to post pictures of both of them, but weren’t able to find any of either of them that met fair use. I advise you to Google for yourself to see.
This is just the latest embarrassment that Rob Ford has inflicted on this city in his term as mayor, and before that in his ten years as a city councillor. A very good summary comes from a Toronto Star editorial against him when he was running for Mayor:
- 2002: called Italian-Canadian city councillor Giorgio Mammoliti (who it is worth noting is now a close ally of Ford on council) a “scammer” and a “gino-boy”
- 2003: Moved a motion in city council that Toronto be declared an “refugee-free zone”, called the decision to ban cosmetic pesticides a sign of dictatorship
- 2005: called fellow councillor Gloria Lindsay-Luby a “waste of skin”, and said that if cyclists are killed in traffic accidents it is their own fault for riding on the street
- 2006: ejected from a Toronto Maple Leafs game for being drunk and disorderly, including calling fellow attendees “communist bastards”, then lied about it, denying he was ever there, until confronted with positive proof that he was, at which point he apologized; fought a $1.5 million program to reduce the spread of HIV/AIDS, stating that he didn’t understand why more women were getting HIV/AIDS and suggesting it was because they were sleeping with bisexual men
- 2008: caught on tape saying “oriental people work like dogs … they are slowly taking over” only to later claim that he meant it as a compliment; arrested and charged with assault and threatening death, though the charges were later dropped
So this is the jackass we have as mayor of Toronto. And we have to put up with him for another 2.5 years until the next election. Kill me now.
Story from the Toronto Star.
