openpolitics.com

Perceptions of a new divide between haves and have-nots emerged, exemplified by an epidemic of traffic-snarling condo construction and a growing class of young, affluent creatives. To those who weren’t benefitting from the boom, or who simply preferred Toronto as it had been, the city’s council and left-leaning mayor seemed élitist and out of touch, content to levy taxes from their perch downtown.

.. Out of this alchemy of expansion and resentment came Ford, who died on Tuesday of pleomorphic liposarcoma, a rare form of cancer, at the age of forty-six. In 2013, his fame, long established in Canada, spread to the United States after Gawker, followed closely by the Toronto Star, reported the existence of a video depicting the mayor smoking crack. For six months, Ford denied the allegation, before finally admitting to using the drug “in one of my drunken stupors.”

.. Running for election in 2010, he had emerged as an improbable but genuine political phenomenon—one that in many ways anticipated a certain Republican politician with whom Americans have become intimately acquainted. Large, brash, and uncouth, Ford engaged in behavior and made utterances that would have sunk a traditional politician, but that appeared to enhance his standing with his core supporters, who called themselves Ford Nation.

.. That he won the election was no accident, however. Though he played the buffoon, especially in his later American media appearances, Ford was at the outset a calculating political operator, who fronted a mayoral campaign that a rival official told me was the most sophisticated he’d ever seen in Toronto. The operation that I witnessed combined deep political know-how—careful polling, sophisticated robocalls, dogged debate coaching—with the recognition that the last thing many Toronto voters wanted was an actual politician. Ford and his team relentlessly co-opted the critiques of his political rivals, and even his own gaffes, in order to advance a perception of Ford as an outsider, unafflicted by conventional insider politics.

.. When I asked one of Ford’s handlers, Nick Kouvalis, why he was content to have Ford chronicled as he ate, where another candidate might have found it unflattering, he gestured at the crowd. “Look at his supporters. They’re all overweight,” he said. This method of creating identification worked; as one voter told me, “When you insult him, you insult us.”

.. But when the crack-video allegation came to light, in 2013, even that seemed, in a way, to play to his narrative. Ford’s vices had put him in contact with some of Toronto’s outcasts and outlaws, and he’d indulged them in a part of the city where few politicians ever went. Infamously, he was photographed in a hoodie, arm in arm with three young men linked to the drug trade, including one who was shot and killed that same year. The men were standing outside the home where the smartphone footage of Ford smoking crack had purportedly been shot, in the city’s tough northwest, not far from some low-income housing complexes.

.. After Ford’s admission that he’d smoked crack, the council stripped him of most of his mayoral powers, but he never lost the support of his base.