Ford Supporters Aren’t Just Suburban Stereotypes

Rational men and women, not unintelligent knuckleheads, are responsible for Toronto’s new mayor.

It took my wife and me almost 45 minutes to vote on Monday, between standing in line-ups and filling out forms.

Thirty seconds after we got back home, the Toronto mayoral race had been called. The result didn't surprise me, though Rob Ford thumped George Smitherman more thoroughly than I had predicted.

I, of course, voted for the loser. But I know a few Ford supporters. You could even say I've been doing research on them over the past 10 months of municipal campaigning. Or you might just say that I've been drinking beer with them. In either case, I've noted my results, and here they are.

First, the political ignorance of Ford supporters has been vastly overestimated. Take, for example, a retired in-law of mine, who I’ll call “Jim.” Jim knows far, far more about what goes on in the city than I do. Every time a condo is slated to go up within a mile of his residence, he protests: calls his councillor, phones his MPP, and attends all the meetings with the developers. And his councillor knows Jim, too, and apparently seeks to avoid him sometimes by sneaking out of his office through the back door. That's how engaged Jim is in city politics.

In Jim’s opinion, city politics is corrupt, and Rob Ford is the guy to clean it up.

What Jim doesn't know or care much about is the actual mechanics of city politics, like the weak mayor system – how the mayor has only one vote and can't really do anything if he can't put together a working coalition of councillors. And so, I'd say to him, don't you want a guy like Smitherman, who has been there at the provincial level, has actually handled billions of dollars, and has demonstrated that he knows how to do the necessary coalition building?

Then Jim would mention the eHealth debacle and that line of argument would stall out.

Ford is his guy – the metaphorical grease bomb that Jim wants to set alight and lob over the ramparts of city hall. Both Jim and Ford are operating under the assumption that the fire will make things right, and, in any case, how can they get any worse? Send in the clown (to vary the metaphor) because the rest of the clowns are already here – which I find to be a fairly compelling argument.

“Sammy” is a bit of a different story. He's a big (over six-foot) Sri Lankan who runs a bar I frequent. In fact, I think Sammy lives in his bar; I'm pretty sure I've never seen him under natural light. And he recognizes a bit of himself in Ford: a small businessman who works hard and follows every penny, and for the money he sends to the city gets nothing but endless construction outside of the entrance to his establishment.

As for Ford's unfortunate ventures into political incorrectness and racial stereotyping, they don't seem to bother Sammy. His bar is located in a lower-middle/working class neighborhood, and draws quite an ethnic mix. I've heard Sammy tell the guy ranting at the end of the bar to shut the hell up because he was making people crazy; I've heard Sammy tell a mostly black softball team that they should come by on Sundays rather than Saturdays for their after-game parties because they frighten the old white guys that inhabit the place on Saturday afternoons. In other words, his approach to Toronto's ethnic bouillabaisse is, like Ford's, indelicate.

How am I supposed to tell him that he should find Ford offensive?

So there you have two specific instances of rational men following the Ford phenomenon. They're the people behind his victory, not the anonymous knuckle-draggers you keep hearing about.