Stephen Harper is a famously cautious and sober political leader, often described as a control freak. According to Paul Wells's The Longer I’m Prime Minister, the best book on the departing Conservative Party leader, he often goes over his speeches and carefully deletes any phrasing that might be colorful or draw attention to itself. He wants his speeches to be as bland as possible.

And yet, on Saturday night, in a desperate last-minute attempt to save his flailing campaign to be re-elected as prime minister of Canada, Harper made his case at an event hosted by former Toronto Mayor Rob Ford and his brother Doug at the Toronto Congress Centre, on 650 Dixon Road, in the semi-industrial suburb of Rexdale. Rob Ford was on his home turf: Rexdale is the seat of his political support, and where he still serves as city councillor; the Congress Centre is where he launched his 2010 campaign for mayor and held his victory party, and where he launched his 2014 campaign, which was derailed by a cancer scare and unsuccessfully taken over by his brother Doug.



The Centre is also just a mile and a half from 15 Windsor Road, the crack house where a notorious 2013 video was shot, apparently showing Rob Ford, then serving as mayor, greedily inhaling from a crack pipe and muttering racist and homophobic imprecations, complaining that the football team he coached was made up of “fucking minorities” and referring to Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau as “a fag.” Even closer to the Convention Centre is 320 Dixon, a dilapidated and crime-ridden apartment complex which once housed the Dixon Road Bloods, the street gang that allegedly had possession of the Ford crack video. In his various exchanges with Dixon gang leaders, Rob Ford and his minion Sandro Lisi allegedly offered them $5,000 and a car as well 1.5 kilograms of marijuana in the hopes of recovering the video and also the mayor’s stolen cell phone.

How did Harper, with his carefully cultivated image of being a boring hockey dad who wears dowdy sweaters, end up in a event hosted by the most notorious and scandal-ridden figure in Canadian history? That's one question I had as I attended the event. The other unknown was how closely Harper would embrace Rob and Doug Ford, who is himself reportedly a former hash dealer and is as intemperate in his own way as his infamous sibling. Would Harper try to keep the Fords hidden in the background or openly embrace them?

To understand the surprising Harper/Ford alliance, you have to know about Rexdale, where I grew up and still live. If Toronto were a French city, Rexdale would be called a banlieue, a semi-autonomous suburb on the margins of a large urban centre. Rexdale’s marginal status isn’t just geographical. As with the banlieues of Paris, it’s a working-class, immigrant neighborhood, unserved by municipal resources like transit. The neighborhood abuts Toronto’s Pearson International Airport, so low-flying jets are a constant presence. The major local employer is the Woodbine Racetrack, and there is a talk about building a casino. This is not an area that will ever gentrify.