Rob Ford has been called many things — a liar, a bully, a buffoon.

All true. But for me, our mayor is chiefly a hoax.

I wrote some time ago that a business case can be made for Ford’s removal, given that he has held back the civic progress essential to our economic prosperity.

Sadly, nothing has changed since that column a year or so ago.

And Ford’s contrition, such as it is, has been forced. In the mayor’s continual assertion of his victimhood, he’s helping us to forget Conrad Black and putting us in mind of Captain Queeg and the pilfered strawberries in The Caine Mutiny.

I say “hoax” because Ford’s resilient support among “Ford Nation” loyalists results from willful ignorance of how Ford has betrayed the very folks continuing to back him.

City expenditures, on a net basis, have continued to rise each year of Ford’s mayoralty. Property taxes have continued to rise accordingly. The deal Ford cut with the unions, which so anger the Ford Nation, and to which it believes Ford predecessor David Miller pandered, was surprisingly generous.

Well, actually, not so surprising, since taking a strike — which would be the courageous thing to do, as Miller did in resisting the demands of sanitation workers — so often is a ticket to electoral defeat. The public simply hates strikes.

Ford Nation put its man in power because he was the anti-Miller candidate. It did not inquire into who Rob Ford is. Now that we know — along with the writing teams on America’s late-night comedy shows — Ford Nation remains trapped in the denial phase of Kubler-Ross’s stages of grief. It won’t grasp that Ford is no more able to correct Miller’s alleged shortcomings than confront his own personal-behaviour issues.

Ford Nation won’t allow that it might have erred in imposing on Toronto as mayor an obscure Etobicoke councillor of conspicuous non-achievement. In his decade-long tenure, Councillor Ford was singularly obsessed with the trifling issue of his fellow councillors’ office spending — trifling given its minuscule portion of the total budget. (Less than 0.1 per cent.)

But Councillor Rob Ford had nothing else to contribute. Ford was so disruptive and belligerent a presence on council, hurling unfounded charges at his peers, that his disorderly conduct repeatedly required that he be threatened with removal from the council chamber, as you can still observe in YouTube clips today.

The billion-dollar savings that Ford claims to have reaped for Toronto are illusory, a hoax.

Ford Nation makes a distinction between the atrocious personal conduct of Ford and the governance “achievements” of which Ford boasts.

I won’t quibble here that a disqualification from leadership is failure as a role model.

A reasonable Ford apologist on CBC Radio last week readily conceded his disappointment with Ford’s public insobriety, the exposure of Ford’s lies about using crack cocaine, and the mayor’s apparent association with some of our city’s least creditable individuals.

“But I didn’t choose Ford hoping for a moral exemplar,” this fellow said. “I just wanted my property taxes to stop soaring.”

Well, you were fooled. Your tab for running the city has continued to climb. Far worse, Toronto has suffered three lost years.

Three years in which progress has ground to a halt on making Toronto the most eco-smart community in the world. Three lost years in cutting the cost and boosting the quality of municipal health and child care. Three lost years in eradicating GTA traffic gridlock that ranks among the worst in the world.

There’s more.

But the point is that we are in a classic Pogo fix. We allowed a craven incompetent to become mayor. And we’re leaving it to the criminal-justice system, which moves at a snail’s pace, and to a reluctant Queen’s Park to deal with a mayor who stands in the way of our assured prosperity.

It turns out, with regard to Ford Nation’s dismissal of Ford’s personal antics, that the personal is the political. Your man does not get along with people. Even Stephen Harper has distanced himself. So of course the things you wished for have not been done.

For months we’ve talked of little else than the mayor we let ourselves get snookered into for lack of voting intelligently. Yet I’m confident Ford will survive to make it four lost years.

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It’s not the Canadian way to remove, say, an ineffectual California governor in mid-term. As residents we aren’t petitioning Ford out of office, with accompanying protest rallies. That would strengthen the premier’s hand in forcing an early election to get ourselves a decent chief magistrate.

It’s been said that the people get the politicians they deserve. Is this a moment in our 179-year history when we break from our fat and happy ways and take control of our city?

I doubt it, but a man can dream.