{"id":17941,"date":"2012-11-27T10:01:32","date_gmt":"2012-11-27T15:01:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=17941"},"modified":"2013-05-25T10:04:31","modified_gmt":"2013-05-25T15:04:31","slug":"torontos-once-and-future-mayor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/11\/27\/torontos-once-and-future-mayor\/","title":{"rendered":"Toronto’s once (and future?) mayor"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Maclean’s<\/em>, Ivor Tossell<\/a> recounts the story of Rob Ford’s brief tenure as mayor of Toronto:<\/p>\n

At Toronto\u2019s City Hall, surely the most ambiently lunatic building in Canada, a stage was set up to launch the Mayor\u2019s Christmas Toy Drive. Eight small children had been procured to act as \u201chonourary elves,\u201d sitting cross-legged on a carpet at the foot of a Christmas tree, flanked by boxes of mini-trikes and construction cranes. A boxed CFL football sat ominously to one side. The mayor was scheduled to launch the drive at 1 p.m. An enormous crowd of reporters buzzed about. Interest in the mayor\u2019s event had amplified to unusual levels by news that the mayor had just gotten himself fired.<\/p>\n

For everyone who\u2019s ever bemoaned the fact that our democracy doesn\u2019t offer a way to recall politicians, witness Rob Ford: the man who couldn\u2019t stay mayor. In a ruling released this morning, a Superior Court justice declared Ford\u2019s seat vacant \u2014 a weirdly existential way of putting it \u2014 after finding the mayor violated the municipal conflict-of-interest act in a small-stakes, but entirely willful, transgression.<\/p>\n

Ford has been in office for two tumultuous years, in which his cost-cutting mandate quickly gave way to a scorched-earth war on the media, a succession of botched policies and a never-ending series of altercations, each more bizarre than the last. Giving the finger to a six-year old; chasing a reporter around a park near his home; helping eject a bus of TTC riders into the rain to get his football team a ride home. Finally, today, the mayor of Toronto was sent back to the voters to ask for his job back. In the end, Rob Ford recalled himself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Update<\/b>: Speaking for the defence, here’s Ezra Levant in his trademarked over-the-top style, comparing the Ford case to some other recent political scandals in Canada.<\/p>\n

<\/object><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Maclean’s, Ivor Tossell recounts the story of Rob Ford’s brief tenure as mayor of Toronto: At Toronto\u2019s City Hall, surely the most ambiently lunatic building in Canada, a stage was set up to launch the Mayor\u2019s Christmas Toy Drive. Eight small children had been procured to act as \u201chonourary elves,\u201d sitting cross-legged on a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,9,53],"tags":[343,213,636,413,207,101],"class_list":["post-17941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-law","category-politics","tag-crimeandpunishment","tag-newspapers","tag-robford","tag-scandal","tag-toronto","tag-tv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4Fn","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17941"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17941\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20425,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17941\/revisions\/20425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}