May Rob Ford rest in peace. That was, for good reason, the major sentiment of the week of his funeral, during which the man was mourned and remembered fondly — or at least respectfully — by thousands, including many who were his political opponents in life. I expressed some good memories and admiring thoughts as well, and meant them sincerely.

But I want to write one more remembrance of Rob Ford and evaluation of his legacy before putting the subject to rest, because I think it’s important, given the position he held. I want to recall, for the sake of the historical record, that he was a disastrously bad mayor and a toxic political force in Toronto.

Excuse me for being blunt. It’s not comfortable to write this so soon after his too-early death from cancer. But in the fog of mourning and genuine well wishes, I’m worried that the important lessons I hoped Toronto had learned during his administration are in danger of being forgotten. They were lessons Toronto learned at great cost, and we cannot afford to repeat the experience.

To be clear, I am not talking about the crack scandal, nor directly about the many personal struggles and troubles in Ford’s life it exposed. Those are well remembered, I think. So well remembered, in fact, that they cloud our memories of what came before.

And what came before was this: An administration that intentionally divided the city through crude, drummed-up, often hurtful rhetorical warfare. An administration that was openly contemptuous to expertise, evidence, and reason, and also to both the niceties of civil governance and the ethical rules that ensure its integrity.

An administration led by a mayor who was either wrong or lying or both in many of his public statements about matters of policy, politics, and controversy.

An administration that demonstrated, unintentionally, that its entire premise, the commonsense idea that government is outright wasting billions, is nonsense. One that tried (and sometimes succeeded) in cutting programs and services that helped the very people Ford claimed to represent.

An administration that was, we often forget, a massive failure, defeated partially or completely on virtually every major vote after his first year in office.

It has been widely remarked that Ford’s political program was derailed by his addiction scandals. But this is not true. The addiction scandals were the biggest explosion of his years in office, but they came after — long after — the train of his administration had sped off the tracks, crashed, and lay in a smoldering, unfixable heap.

Polls taken months before we ever heard a whisper of the crack video showed him convincingly losing a re-election bid against a variety of imagined contenders. Toronto had rejected Ford’s politics long before they came to know the man’s personal demons.

As I’ve written before and journalist John Lorinc observed recently, the real turning point of the Ford administration occurred in July 2011, barely half a year after he’d taken office. That’s when hundreds of people lined up all night to address the city’s budget committee, to beg the city not to implement “efficiencies” Ford had been pushing as a waste-cutting way to save money.

Efficiencies like ending school breakfast programs. Like eliminating snow removal on side streets. Like no longer fluoridating the water. Like, as his brother famously stressed, closing libraries.

There was swift public outrage: If this was what Ford was talking about when he talked about “waste” and inefficiency, then the whole premise of his program was in doubt.

A 14-year-old named Anika Tabovaradan from Scarborough crystallized the public uprising when she cried and trembled as she begged the committee not to close libraries, because they were the place she could study, since she couldn’t afford a computer at home.

“When I get to use the computers in the library and do my homework, I’ll be able to get a good job someday, get some good education.”

Anika’s plea provided a strange contrast to Ford’s famous commitment to personally serving the vulnerable, returning their phone calls and showing up to get the cracks in their public housing walls fixed.

But this was always the problem: his idea of customer service to them was only personal, face-to-face help. He was outright hostile to any institutional or systemic fix that would help people so that they no longer needed the personal intervention of the mayor.

He cut bus service, raised user fees on community programs, let public housing crumble.

Ford’s committee voted to ignore Anika and the others and send all the proposed cuts on for further consideration. But when the budget finally came up for a vote, council rebelled and reversed many of his proposed cuts. And after that, he never regained control of the council agenda: famously, they even reversed his transit plan.

There’s more, of course. He constantly divided the city bitterly into “us” and “them” to fuel the resentment that was the engine of his popularity: bike riders versus car drivers, “downtown elites” versus suburbs, “traditional” values like his versus those celebrated at the Pride parade that he so steadfastly refused to march in.

He lied, repeatedly and frequently, including making up a defamatory story about my colleague Daniel Dale that he later had to retract and apologize for. He repeatedly broke council’s integrity rules and almost got thrown out of office by a judge who accused him of a “stubborn sense of entitlement,” “willful blindness,” and “ignorance.”

He and his staff tried to bully city employees (as the firing of a TTC manager and a later ombudsman’s report showed) and his council colleagues.

And he failed to understand that the city moves forward — or anywhere — because people find compromises they can live with or persuade their opponents to change their minds. He refused, angrily, to compromise, and demonized people who disagreed with him. And because of that, his political agenda was rejected very early in his term as mayor.

Still, the city’s progress on many things — transit building not least among them — has been delayed by years because of the experience.

In part, Ford is fondly remembered by many because he gave voice to a feeling of alienated outsider status that so many people feel — some legitimately, some less so. He embodied that feeling, in ways legitimate and less so.

But very early in his term, Toronto learned that simple howling resentment is not a substitute for the complicated, difficult, nuanced work of fixing the system that produced it. Doing that requires bridging divides, not driving wedges into them; it requires fixing policies and systems, not merely personal visits; it requires working from facts, not from stubborn, ignorant convictions.

By halfway through his term as mayor, Toronto seemed to have learned those lessons. I hope we have not already forgotten them.

May Rob Ford rest in peace. And may the politics he represented rest with him.

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A PRE-COCAINE TIMELINE

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Oct. 25, 2010: Rob Ford is elected mayor of Toronto

Surprising many, the city councillor who was long proud of losing many votes 44-1, is elected to the mayor’s office on a platform of “stopping the gravy train” and “respecting taxpayers.”

January-July 2011: Ford’s successes

In his first seven months in office, Ford repeals the vehicle registration tax, has the TTC declared an essential service, cuts councillor expense account limits, contracts out garbage collection west of Yonge St., and cancels Transit City, to be replaced by his own plan for a privately financed Sheppard subway.

July 28, 2011: All-night hearings on budget cuts

After proposals to slash programs (such as ending snow removal on side streets and cutting school breakfast programs) and close libraries, public resistance is crystallized in an all-night meeting in which 169 citizens beg to stop the cutting.

August 2011: Port Lands Ferris wheel fails to spin

Doug Ford announces a plan to scrap Waterfront Toronto’s decades-long plan for developing the Port Lands and replace it with a developer-led malls-and-amusements scheme. A public uprising turns city council and several members of Ford’s own executive committee against the plan, and the mayor is forced to kill the proposal.

January 2012: Ford’s budget rewritten

After the all-night meetings and other public resistance, Ford waters down his proposed budget cuts. But at the city council vote, councillors water them down further, reversing millions in proposed cuts. The mayor loses the vote on his own budget.

February 2012: Transit City back from the dead

Ford’s administration successfully negotiates labour contracts to avoid a strike. But in an unprecedented move the same week, Ford’s appointed TTC chair, Karen Stintz, calls a special meeting in which Ford’s plan for a Sheppard subway is killed, and the previous LRT plans of Transit City are largely restored. In a separate, later development, Stintz leads a move to build a subway extension to the Bloor Danforth line, a movement Ford is sidelined for but later claims as a victory.

June 2012: Can’t fight his way out of a plastic bag fee

A proposal by Ford to repeal the 5-cent fee on plastic bags devolves into city council mayhem as city council actually winds up voting to ban plastic bags altogether. Although the ban is later reversed, the episode shows how little control — or even influence — Mayor Ford has left over the city’s government.

Nov. 26, 2012: Ford ordered out of office for conflict of interest violation

Ford had been subject to many reprimands for ethical violations from the city’s integrity commissioner. In one case, he voted to excuse himself from paying a fine as punishment — a clear-cut conflict of interest. A judge, citing his “willful blindness” to the rules, orders him removed from office. The decision is overturned on appeal because, the court rules, technically the integrity commissioner did not have authority to impose such a punishment and therefore the vote should never have taken place.

May 2013: Crack scandal begins

The Toronto Star and Gawker publish reports that Ford has been captured on video apparently smoking crack cocaine, launching the scandal that dominated news of Ford’s mayoralty for the remainder of his term and saw council formally strip him of most of his authority.