By Roger Annis, Nov 8, 2013
Yesterday, Canada’s Minister of Finance Jim Flaherty got all teary-eyed over the behavior and fate of Toronto’s crack-smoking mayor Rob Ford.
Turns out, Flaherty is a “close friend” of the millionaire, dysfunctional Ford family. He was asked about the mayor at a business function in Toronto where he is preparing another blunderbuss budget to continue demolishing social and environmental programs and boost the fossil fuel industry. He began to speak, teared up and paused for 15 seconds, then mumbled brief nonsense about Ford family standing behind the errant son and helping him overcome his demons.
Flaherty’s spectacle occurred on a day when a new, two-minute video of the mayor was made public by the Toronto Star. It was filmed sometime earlier this year. In it, Ford is raging against a unidentified person, saying he will f***ing kill the person, ‘tear his eyes out’, etc. He appears to be intoxicated on some kind of drug.
The finance minister has no similar tears or sympathy for Canada’s impoverished pensioners. At the same budget meetings in Toronto, he once again declared that he opposes any improvements to the Canada Pension Plan.
For years, Flaherty and the Harper government have been cleverly skating around pension improvement pressures coming from Canada’s trade union apparatus and its political party, the NDP. When pressure heats up, as in the summer of 2011 when mass protests were threatened by the unions, he says ‘Ok, ok, I’ll think about pension increases and get back to you.’ The union leaders cheer and sit back. The pressure subsides and Flaherty goes about his business as before.
Union and NDP inaction is so bad, and public will for pension improvements is so strong, that provincial governments are musing about taking their own action, specifically of creating supplementary provincial pension plans. For a host of reasons, not least the will of premiers, the idea of provincial plans is unlikely. So we sit and wait.
Flaherty’s tears for Rob Ford are a reminder of the ties that bind the federal Conservative government to the Toronto mayor and his criminal advisors. In August 2011, newly reelected Prime Minister Stephen Harper put in a telling appearance at the annual, summer picnic spectacle of the Ford family and its ‘Ford Nation’ supporters. Harper congratulated Ford on his election the previous year. He went on to say (from a Toronto Star report on Aug 3, 2011):
“Many of you may remember Rob endorsed us in the [May 2011 federal] election. That helped a lot,” Harper told the crowd in the video. “Rob is doing something very important that needs to be done here. He is cleaning up the NDP mess here in Toronto.”
The prime minister said his government had cleaned up the “left-wing mess federally” and said he hoped to “complete the hat trick” by turning Ontario blue come the Oct. 6 [2011] provincial election, a comment that elicited applause from the crowd.
Canada’s unions and the country’s hard-working pension advocates should be making plans for mass protests on Parliament Hill demanding immediate and substantial improvements to the Canada Pension Plan. It is naïve and a betrayal to continue to pretend that the federal and provincial governments will act without such pressure.
Ford’s continued presence in the mayor’s chair, meanwhile, is another troubling sign of the slide in Canada towards authoritarian rule. (See my recent article on this subject, pertaining to Canada’s Senate scandal.) The spineless city council of Toronto, which, let us remember, unanimously endorsed the police-state actions of its police force during the G20 summit meeting in the city in 2010, cannot even bring itself to adopt a resolution demanding the resignation of the mayor. Prominent civil right lawyer Clayton Ruby says Toronto police are treating Ford’s activities and associations with kid gloves and are withholding vital information that should be in the public domain.
An independent investigation published last year said the Toronto police were guilty of massive violations of civil rights during their infiltrations and violent provocations directed against the G20 protests in 2010.
This article was first published on the Vancouver Observer, Nov 8, 2013. It has been slightly updated since then.
See also:
* ‘Deconstructing Mayor Rob Ford’s fiscal record’, by Daniel Dale, Toronto Star, Nov 9, 2013
* A Nov. 4 article in Rabble.ca by Jesse McLaren looking at the austerity and reactionary social program that Rob Ford and his backers have sought to implement since his election in 2010
* A May 2012 article in Toronto Life by Marci McDonald examining the political rise of the wealthy Ford brothers, inspired by their late father’s deep hostility to the 1990-95 NDP government in Ontario under Premier Bob Rae.
Three letters from the Globe and Mail, print edition, Nov 8, 2013:
1. Re: Stop Enabling Ford (editorial, Nov. 7) There is a simple and eloquent way for Toronto city councillors to stop enabling the city’s discredited mayor. By a unanimous or two-thirds majority vote, they could petition the provincial Legislature to enact emergency legislation removing the mayor from office until the next election. MPPs of all parties would be hard pressed to deny or delay such a consensus request.
Yes, council does not have the legal authority to unseat the mayor. But they do have the power to urge the province to do so. The question is whether they have the courage. – Greg Sorbara, Richmond Hill, Ont.
2. What Toronto really needs is a Toronto Spring, with Nathan Phillips Square flooded by thousands of chanting demonstrators who refuse to leave until Rob Ford makes his exit. – Paul Thiessen, Vancouver
3. The photo on your front page showed Rob Ford accompanying students on Take Your Kids to Work Day at city hall (Ford, Police In Talks Over Video – Nov. 7). Mr. Ford consorts with known criminals. He has lied to us. He is the worst possible role model to give tours to impressionable students. Why is the school board allowing students to be exposed to him?Why do we continue giving him a public, self-serving forum?
I suggest a sit-out. Every time he speaks in council, in fact every time he enters the council chambers, all councillors who oppose this farce should leave the room until he gets the message: We are tired of him, and he no longer represents us or acceptable public behaviour. – Randy Johnson, Toronto
Postscript:
The Toronto Star‘s Chantal Hébert writes in her Nov. 9 column of the ties that bind Rob Ford’s administration to the federal Conservative government. She explains:
“There is a jarring disconnect between the Conservatives’ punitive judicial agenda, their much proclaimed law-and-order principles and their efforts to look away from the public transgressions of the man who runs Canada’s biggest city and the disruptions to Toronto’s municipal life that result from them…
“But Ford’s downfall also plays to the emerging central theme of Harper’s own pre-electoral discourse. In a keynote address to his party convention last weekend, the prime minister set out to regroup his troops around the notion that he is an underdog fighting the good fight on behalf of the average Canadian.”
* * * * *
See these two articles on the ties between the federal Tories and the Ford administration in Toronto:
Rob Ford enablers: The strategists
By Andrew Coyne, columnist, Postmedia, November 16, 2013
PM Harper has hug-a-thug program for the mayor of Toronto
By Tim Harper, columnist, Toronto Star, Nov 18, 2013
