SoBL notes that Rob Ford is dead then asks:

How did this guy become a symbol for anyone to use as a top ticket figure? It says more about the donors that they could not figure out how to position someone else as their candidate for mayor. What is the goal of these guys? is it to maximize the value of real estate for the developers? Can the donors just debate onstage their proposals rather than place the fat puppets like Rob Ford onstage? Make Toronto safe? What is it? Do you know, because I cannot figure it out and this is how we get stuck with guys like Rob Ford supposedly in charge of major Western cities.

I’m Canadian, so I know a bit of Rob Ford. In fact, I’ve previously written a paean to Rob Ford.

Rob Ford was not a product of donors, he was a reaction to the elite class. He was a vaisya at war with Canadian brahmin class and he deserves our respect. The closest American politician to Rob Ford is Donald Trump.

Toronto is the largest city in Canada. It is also the cultural and economic centre of English Canada: it is what you’d get if you rolled up LA and New York into a single city and made it Canadian. Most of our major newspapers are centred there, most of our TV and movies are from there, Bay Street is our Wall Street, most of our major corporations are headquartered there (or in the Greater Toronto Area), and so on. It’s centrality has been waning, paricularly in the economic sphere, as Alberta’s oil-powered economy has grown over the last couple decades, but it still remains at the front.

The elites in downtown Toronto are exactly what you would expect if you mixed Manhattan, Wall St., and Hollywood together, then added a bit of Canadian socialism. They are the center of the universe in their own minds, and to them Toronto is English Canada. They are very much in a centre-left bubble.

Back in 1998, Toronto was amalgamated with a half-dozen municipalities into a single metropolitan municipality, against the wishes of those municipalities. The other municipalities are generally more middle-class, with very high numbers of minorities and immigrants. Since than there has been tension between the priorities of core Toronto, made up of the elites, and the amalgamated areas.

David Miller, the mayor prior to Ford, was a tax and spend politician. Increased spending was usually in line with the priorities of the elite Toronto core. Throughout his mayorship, Ford was a strong anti-spending advocate. As well, the Toronto elites were pushing a light rail transit plan that benefited their idea of good transit policy, while Ford pushed a subway plan that would have been more helpful for the amalgamated areas. Smitherman, Ford’s opponent, was more of the same, an elite governing for the elites.

Look at this electoral map:

Rob Ford was essentially the populist, working- and middle-class revolt candidate (like Trump) against the elitist core of Toronto. He wasn’t “respectable”, because anybody respectable would have been from the elite and gone along with elite opinions. He was just your average lower-middle class guy who liked football and decided to take a stand.

He may not have been the most competent or polished fellow, but he did what almost every “competent” and “professional” conservative politician fails to do: hold to his values, fight for them, and stand strong against the enemy. He was probably the strongest right-wing voice in Canada since Ralph Klein died and Preston Manning cucked himself. Because of this he was attacked by every respectable voice possible; he was so strong the brahmins of other countries banded together just to crush the small vaisya rebellion he led. They couldn’t let the other prols get out of line. Despite this he held firm and did not waver until the end. For that he deserves our respect.

Since his death, all we’ve really got left is Brad Wall, who isn’t as powerful, being the premier of puny Saskatchewan rather than mayor of the centre of the universe, but he’s probably the biggest conservative voice now. Stephen Harper was powerful, but he didn’t govern all that particularly right-wing. Other than the Canadian Wheat Board and the gun registry, his government was barely distinguishable from Chretien’s Liberals in the 90’s, despite what the tribal wailing and gnashing of teeth of the Brahmin class may have made you think.