On June 11, the debate over the Gardiner Expressway was underway at City Hall. John Tory (open John Tory's policard) was in his seat, behind the placard reading “Mayor.” He had won the election eight months ago. He was about to win the contentious highway vote, which some considered the first major test of his administration.

There was a kerfuffle up in the gallery behind Tory’s back. Former mayor Rob Ford (open Rob Ford's policard) was greeting a group of schoolchildren. Reporters crowded around them, and the sound of camera shutters clicking filled the council chamber.

Ford was wearing a bright red track suit — like something out of a Cirque de Soleil adaptation of The Sopranos — that became the talk of Twitter. Scheduled to continue convalescing from cancer surgery until the fall, Ford had returned for the day to vote against Tory (and against everyone else) on the biggest issue of the year. For a while at least, he stole the spotlight during Tory’s big moment. Ford may have lost the election, but he can still effortlessly dominate this place.

Strangely, one of the places Ford still dominates is Tory’s own mayoral agenda. Aside from his cult of personality, Ford was defined politically in large part by his insistence on low taxes and the slogans “Stop the war on the car” and “Subways, subways, subways.”

What about Tory, in his first half year as mayor? He went to great lengths to keep tax increases below the rate of inflation. He’s made eliminating any small potential delay for car drivers his top priority (and virtually his entire Gardiner argument). He has continued to insist the Scarborough subway extension should be built, even as the efforts to reconcile it with his signature SmartTrack plan weaken the already weak case in favour of it.

Maybe this should not be a surprise. Tory often points out that alongside SmartTrack, these were the main planks of his platform: low taxes; car traffic moving faster; a subway extension in Scarborough.

Still, it seems weird to many observers, including many who voted for him. In politics the well-worn strategy is to deliver for your base — to dance with them what brung you. Whatever the contents of his platform, Tory does not seem to be doing that. Instead, he’s delivering for Rob Ford’s base, waltzing with the ones who tried to refuse him entry to the dancehall.

Tory built his election platform to present himself as Rob-Ford-without-the-drug-scandals-and-personal-drama. But the election results showed him winning big in places where Rob Ford was unpopular before the drug scandals. Tory’s voting support was strongest in Smitherman-Miller territory, the Anti-Ford Nation.

And now he is championing policy that is most unpopular in the places that voted for him most strongly in the election (as you can see in the council vote on the Gardiner, for example).

Why would he do that?

One theory is that he thinks his route to re-election lies in picking up former Ford voters. But assuming Rob Ford’s cancer goes into remission and he’s back on the ballot as he’s promised, those voters are likely inaccessible to Tory. It seems far easier, as a matter of political calculus, for Tory to occupy the centre and even hedge to the centre-left to make it impossible for Toronto’s NDP to effectively run a candidate against him. Tory became the consensus anti-Ford candidate in 2014. He could absolutely own that same real estate in 2018 if he weren’t actively enraging the most emphatically anti-Ford voters.

Another theory is that Tory wants to win over Ford voters on principle: in a famously divided city, he’s the “man from downtown” (literally and figuratively) who can reach out to champion the concerns of suburbanites. Someone who worked on Tory’s provincial Conservative campaigns once told me one problem when he was leader was that, “if he had to choose between winning the election and winning the endorsement of the Toronto Star editorial board, he’d have to think hard about it.” That is, he wanted to convince those who thought they were his opponents to like him. Now that he won this paper’s endorsement (for his mayoralty and his Gardiner position), the fiercest perceived opponents are different: they voted for Doug Ford.

One other possibility is both the most obvious and the weirdest: maybe he’s just keeping his promises. The rap on Tory as a candidate was his presumed malleability — from the left, Olivia Chow’s initial attack ads characterized him as a “flip-flopper,” while Doug Ford shouted the same message in his first debate appearance: “You flip-flop back and forth every day, John.”

Many who voted for Doug Ford thought they couldn’t trust Tory to keep populist promises. The twist is that I think many who voted for him also expected him to turn his back on his anti-tax, subway-champion, car-defending rhetoric after the election and become their beloved “CivicAction John.”

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So far he’s defying those expectations. To many people’s surprise — and to scolding from some high-profile campaign supporters — it suddenly turns out that Tory is not for turning. For better or for worse, for principle or for political calculation, the new mayor is still playing to the old mayor’s base. And thus the old mayor, in a new track suit, continues to dominate not just the attention spotlight, but the policy centre of our biggest political debates.

Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca . Follow: @thekeenanwire

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