[URBAN NOTE] "Strange times in #FordCourt"

[rfmcdonald]

#fordcourt is the Twitter hashtag being used to denote Rob Ford's ongoing saga before the courts. John Lorinc's Spacing Toronto essay on the subject argues, based on Ford's testimony two days ago, that while Ford certainly did violate conflict of interest legislation, he did so almost innocently, his actions driven by a fatal lack of curiosity and self-examination that keeps tripping him up.

When you peel away all the political spinning, the legal wrangling and the sheer spectacle of what transpired in Courtroom 6-1 at 361 University Avenue, it is difficult to overlook the fact that Rob Ford, chief magistrate of Canada’s largest city, came across yesterday as a very lonely man, in it way over his head.

Shortly before 10 a.m., he entered and sat by himself at a long table on the respondent side of the cavernous courtroom. No one spoke to him, and he stared forward with that sullen, slightly bewildered look that so often clouds his face. He didn’t look back at the spectators. Just before the proceedings began, his chief of staff Mark Towhey, who spent the day in court, came up to him, whispered something in his left ear and patted Ford’s shoulder lightly before taking his seat.

The mayor spent the rest of the day on the witness stand, seemingly adrift in a miasma of legislative language, his memory constantly cloudy and his apparent understanding of key policy concepts impaired -- it must be said -- beyond belief. There were moments when he seemed to lose the train of Clayton Ruby’s questions, and others times when the abstraction of the cross-examination defeated him.

He sort of stuck to his script, repeating over and over again his strange and non-sensical definition of a conflict of interest: “For twelve years, I’ve always considered a conflict when the city benefits and the councillor benefits…”

[. . .]

Ruby closed the day by hacking away at this odd mantra, showing, at one point, a video from a 2010 council session when Ford gamely declared a conflict because the item on the agenda was about him, i.e., one of the many integrity commissioner reports that found him in breach of council’s code of conduct.

By this point, Ruby was going hard at Ford, raising his voice and telling the judge that his intention was to show a pattern of deceit and lying.

I must say I saw something slightly different: a pattern of almost pathological inattentiveness to the more nuanced details of the job of representing the interests of public. He admitted he didn’t read the councillor handbooks; didn’t bother going to councillor orientation sessions (his father, Doug Sr., he explained, had been an MPP, therefore he, Rob, knew what it meant to serve on a municipal council); didn’t bother informing himself of the legal framework of the position; didn’t seek to understand what circumstances would prompt the city’s legal staff to remind him, unbidden, to declare conflicts. So many questions left unasked.