Can Olivia Chow take advantage of the miraculous resurrection of her dying campaign? That is the biggest question that emerges in the aftermath of last week’s weirdness.

The question of whether Doug Ford can win is already answered: We don’t need polls to know he has no chance. If Rob wasn’t going to win — and he wasn’t — Doug surely won’t. He’s a terrible politician, and no one knows that better than Doug himself, who was aching to leave politics before suddenly emerging as an allegedly leading mayoral candidate.

On the other hand, Doug Ford was born to be a spoiler, and in that role he is now perfectly positioned. It’s hard to see how or why he could harm Chow, other than raising the familiar critiques of leftist policy. On that ground, most voters already know where they stand. But Doug sure can make life miserable for front-running candidate John Tory, and there are plenty of reasons to believe that is exactly what he will do.

He does it simply by being there — a Ford who has no chance of winning and therefore little power to inspire an anyone-but-Ford movement among voters. Until last week, that incipient movement had all but elected Tory. Polls showed that a disciplined anti-Ford electorate had chosen its champion, with much nose-holding among the mushy middlers, and it wasn’t Chow.

Last week, the overriding imperative among sensible citizens was to prevent Rob Ford from returning to City Hall as mayor. Now that’s gone.

Judging by the line Doug Ford has already taken against Tory, he might as well be a Chow mouthpiece — uttering the fiery truths the cautious left-winger can’t bring her own self to say. When Tory advised women to get ahead in their careers by learning to golf, Doug leaped at the chance to attack him as “part of the one per cent,” “part of the Establishment,” and “one of the elites.” Not to mention, as a father of four daughters, a “chauvinist.”

All true — and you heard it first from Doug, not Olivia. With Tory now leading the race, we’ll almost certainly be hearing it again. To get anywhere, Ford has to pull Tory down. The next bizarre turn of this already dizzying campaign could well be an outbreak of class warfare between millionaire populists. The entertainment never ends.

In any event, Chow has a second chance. Rob Ford’s exit restores the theoretical advantage she always had as the only leftist in the race, but lost in the shadow of that candidate’s outsized personality. As she herself noted, clear choices about actual policy can now come to the fore.

Chow is already taking advantage of the opportunity, lumping Tory and the new Ford together as ideological twins. That wasn’t really possible with Rob Ford, whose popular appeal transcended ideology. He was the man of the people — working people whom leftists like to consider theirs — and Chow’s claim to that traditional NDP constituency almost seemed absurd by comparison. The fact that she was the struggling immigrant and he was born rich made no difference to the ironclad perception.

In other words, Rob Ford’s exit removes the magic from the stage. Nobody felt its power more forcibly than the Chow campaign, which learned from many focus groups to revere the mayor’s ability to connect with voters — and to realize the extent to which its own candidate struggled to do that. Hampered by her accented English and a semi-paralyzed face, Chow will never be a great communicator. Left to her own devices, she can only win on policy.

Her problem is that Doug Ford can certainly connect — in his own distinctive, usually volatile way. And Tory is putting his recent experience in talk radio to good use, having morphed successfully from sober statesman into glib pitchman. Despite the immediate boost her campaign received from the Ford switch-up, Chow still struggles to communicate.

Until last week, that failure was sad but excusable. Chow was being squeezed out by a solid majority of voters who only wanted one thing: to see Rob Ford gone. Now that strange fate has done the job, she has an open field before her — and no excuse for lagging.

John Barber is a freelance journalist.

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