[URBAN NOTE] "The Highly Effective Idiot"

[rfmcdonald]

Toronto journalist Philip Preville writes in Slate about Ford's record. As Preville notes, the litany of scandals that have gradually paralyzed the Ford administration have taken Ford to a point where he's no longer effective. Might he have effected some change first?

Until last week the embarrassment that is Rob Ford was our little secret, but now the world has discovered our shame. Toronto is an ambitious city, eager to join the world’s top civic brand names alongside New York, Washington, Paris, and Beijing, instead of being forever relegated to the B-list with Helsinki and Lima, Peru. But it is a strangely contemporary kind of ambition. Torontonians love their city like a helicopter parent loves his kid: proudly but protectively and smothered with projected anxiety.

We want everyone to know Toronto is full of potential, home to stunning Libeskind architecture, gleaming condo towers, solvent banks, and Richard Florida. We did not want anyone to know about Rob Ford. We are embarrassed he was elected, we tell friends from afar who now inquire in droves. We’ve been saying it among ourselves for months, as though it was all someone else’s doing. But we did elect him—and not with entirely disastrous results.

In a city rife with cosmopolitan affectation, Rob Ford has proved to be a highly effective populist. During his 10 years as a suburban ward councilor, Ford built the base of his political support by answering all his calls personally, then showing up on voters’ doorsteps to solve their ensnarement with the civic bureaucracy. His speeches in the council chamber were remarkable only for their inanity. But on budget day, the anti-tax crusader would rail against waste and overspending to the delight of the press gallery.

[. . .]

Once Ford took up office in the Clamshell—local argot for Toronto’s spaceship-like Viljo Revell–designed 1960s city hall—he moved fast to act on his mandate. With the assistance of Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday, a staunch fiscal conservative and a veteran of many council battles, Ford started by slashing councilors’ office budgets. He then dissolved the board of Toronto’s public housing corporation, the largest in North America, whose buildings were rampant with criminal activity and bedbug infestations. He later fired the head of the Toronto Transit Commission, which had sunk into ineptitude, and replaced him with an Australian dedicated to customer service.

Ford has also managed to flatline city expenditures while revoking a much-loathed $60 annual vehicle registration fee. Then he aced his first round of labor negotiations: The city’s largest unions agreed to his terms with barely a whimper, even as he outsourced half the city’s residential waste collection to the private sector. He’s no Michael Bloomberg, but his list of accomplishments is nothing to sneer at, especially when you realize, as the world surely does by now, that he’s a fairly dim bulb.