“Is he shameless, or ignorant?”

That’s the eternal question about Rob Ford, voiced this week by Councillor Maria Augimeri to the Star: The occasion was the opening of a playground near Jane and Sheppard, a playground residents said the mayor took credit for building (“his exact words: ‘I started this,’” Talisha Ramsaroop said) even though he had voted against it. No matter, there he was last weekend, cutting the ribbon and bragging about his largesse.

Is he shameless, or ignorant?

Only days later, I found myself repeating that question as, during a debate in East York, the mayor insisted that the only “revenue tool” he’d support to build transit was the 0.25-per-cent property tax increase — $7 per household, he said — already approved by council for the Scarborough subway extension. There’s an obvious problem with his logic. That plan council approved is actually a 1.6-per-cent increase phased in over three years, which will cost the average household about $41 per year for the next 30 years.

Shameless, or ignorant? The same question, again and again.

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Well, that’s the question once you disregard the carnival funhouse of mayoral misfortune. When you gaze upon the profound lunacy of the crack smoking on video and the police investigation and the blitz tackling of a fellow councillor and the bragging about the all-you-can-eat buffet of marital bliss in his home, and so on and so forth, the only sane question to ask is: What! The! Hell!?!

But if you put those sideshows aside, and focus on his “record” as he’s always asking us to do, then you’re left to ponder either the soaring heights of his shameless dishonesty or the bedrock-cracking depths of his ignorance.

Take that same Scarborough subway extension, which he claimed to support because the LRT option would “rip up the streets” and cause traffic chaos. The LRT on that route, of course, would run in an already existing off-street corridor. Its tracks and vehicles would not go onto the road at any point. Meanwhile the subway construction would tear up and shut down whole swaths of Scarborough’s busiest streets for a decade or more. Does he not understand that?

Or his often-repeated claim to have saved a billion dollars: for the numbers to work you have to consider user fee increases as a savings, and also consider user fee decreases as a savings. You have to consider raiding reserve funds as a savings. You have to consider low interest rates as a savings. You have to count a police budget increase as a savings (compared to a phantom number representing a possible increase that could have been). In other words, it’s nonsense.

The biggest Ford-era budget miracle, the one that has allowed property tax increases to remain modest, is the doubling in revenue from the land transfer tax, a tax he promised to repeal. And still promises to repeal.

He claims taxes are lower now in Toronto than ever before, when in fact they have gone up. He claims to have improved TTC service, when in fact bus service was cut. He’s claimed, “We have not had a union strike since I’ve been mayor,” when in fact the library workers went on strike in 2012. He claims he never had a seat on the Waterfront Toronto board, even though every record shows he did have a seat for two years and never attended a meeting. Shameless? Or ignorant?

Some people call this nit-picking. But when you shave the beast to rid it of such nits, you realize there’s nothing left. The record Rob Ford lays claim to is a giant animal shape constructed entirely of nits.

Is he shameless, or ignorant? Those seem to be the options. If he knows what he is talking about, then he is being brazenly dishonest. If instead he is attempting to be truthful, then he suffers from an ignorance so profound as to be worthy of an Adam Sandler movie treatment.

To put it another way, is Rob Ford lying, or is he bone-crushingly stupid?

The answer is yes.

Yes, he is shameless. Yes he is ignorant. But even after he is confronted with the facts that would dispel his ignorance, he continues to make the same false claims. It seems impossible for any person to be as simultaneously unencumbered by knowledge of the facts as Rob Ford is, yet so belligerently certain in his insistence that he is correct. And yet, here we are. And here he is, opening playgrounds and running for re-election and hosting thousands of adoring supporters at his Ford Fest.

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The truth is that the distinction between dishonesty and ignorance makes no difference in the case of Rob Ford. The effect on the city is the same either way. And by now we already know that very well through four years of hard experience.

Which raises another big question, one for those supporters of his, and the 40 per cent or so of voters who say they’ll still consider casting a ballot for him.