No matter where you travel in Canada, there’s no getting away from Rob Ford. Mere mention of his name in Halifax is enough to bring a crowd of several hundred to laughter, even guffaws. In Calgary, people fret about how his buffoonery makes the country look ridiculous in the eyes of the world.

But just when you think Ford’s banality couldn’t get any worse, any more humiliating and disturbing, it does.

Indeed, the more we learn about the chief magistrate’s willingness to use his office — first as councillor and now as mayor — for his own purposes, the more we cringe.

Even Superstorm Sandy, which enabled leaders from U.S. President Barack Obama on down to look and sound like leaders, elicited precious little from Ford. “If the power goes out,” he suggested helpfully, “drivers should treat any intersections that have traffic lights as four-way stops.”

“We’ve gotta take this storm serious,” he told listeners to his radio show, or words to that effect.

The fact the mayor can barely manage to string two sentences together comes as no surprise; what’s more shocking is his sense of entitlement. Here’s a man who honestly believes he has a personal right to demand that public funds — those proverbial hard-earned taxpayer dollars — be spent at his personal behest. That means anything from cleaning up around the family-owned factory to upgrading the football field where His Worship likes to play with the kids.

For a politician — a career politician — who got elected on the basis of stopping the “gravy train,” this is a bit rich.

Still, the most extraordinary thing about Rob Ford is that so many voters — 47 per cent — chose him. Though Ford Nation has been much reduced — it’s now more like Ford’s Corners — his election casts a deeply unflattering light on Toronto.

Either we were ignorant, and didn’t know any better, or so consumed with resentment his incoherence didn’t matter.

We can hardly claim we didn’t know. During his decade on council, Ford proved a lazy, petulant and ill-informed loudmouth. He lied under pressure and contributed less than nothing.

But what are we Torontonians so angry about? Is it David Miller’s mishandling of the 2009 garbage strike? Bicycle lanes on Jarvis? The vehicle registration tax? A depressed economy? Rising costs? Increased property taxes?

Miller might not have been greatest mayor Toronto ever had, but he did grasp the basic fact that the city is part of a larger world. He understood that Toronto is not an island. He realized that the forces now changing cities around the planet have also been unleashed here.

The industries that keep Toronto afloat operate in an international context. Economic crises in Europe and the U.S. affect us directly. In its own way, the SARS outbreak of 2003 was another reminder that we live in an age of globalization.

Global warming is our problem, too.

So are the lack of affordable housing, unemployment, congestion and Canada’s antiquated models of municipal governance.

Ford’s contempt for process is matched only by his indifference to the issues. It’s a quality that journalist Ivor Tossell, in his e-book The Gift of Ford, calls “uncompetence.”

“Uncompetence,” he has explained, “is when people start to suspect that competence is something the elites do, and think to themselves, “I should perhaps do something else.”

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Meanwhile, an another front, an Ontario judge must decide whether to throw Ford out of office after conflict-of-interest charges were brought against him earlier this year. All Toronto is waiting to hear the verdict. So is the rest of the country.

Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca