There are two stories I like to tell about Rob Ford.



The first is the anecdote of the gentleman I met at a Rob Ford barbeque, at the height of the crack scandal. The “Ford Fests,” outsized festivals the mayor and his city councillor brother threw in their own honour, had become a seasonal rite in Toronto, with hundreds of cars snarling traffic for blocks around.

Reporters said they’d seen a tape of Mayor Ford smoking crack; Ford denied everything and called the media “pathological liars.” Ford’s supporters — and there were many thousands at this event alone, waiting in lineups to get free hamburgers and shake the man’s hand — felt that he was the honest one.

I asked the supporter, a small business owner from Scarborough, if his perception of Ford would change if the video turned out to be real. He didn’t pause. “No!” he said. Why? Because, the man explained, if he’d been caught out smoking crack, he’d have lied about it too.

That was Rob Ford: the honest liar. He lied a lot, but boy, you really got where he was coming from. You can trust this guy to be straight with his lies.

I think about that conversation all the time, to this day, as I try to make sense of Rob Ford the man, Rob Ford the phenomenon, and Rob Ford, the collective trauma that gripped the city where I lived in those years, writing about his mayoralty. It was a raw, visceral, emotive time, and it lasted four years. Underneath the coverage, the speculation, the infinite conversations over infinite bar tables and dinner tables, was the question: Who is Rob Ford? Is this an act? Is he cynical or genuine? Who’s pulling the strings here?

From the outside of Toronto looking in, Ford was a curiosity: How could a bunch of Canadians elect a fellow like this? From the inside out, however, there was so much more to it: suburban crusader, folk hero, addict, demagogue, underdog, bigot, and, in ways people might not want to admit, the reinventor of his city.

He came from the middle of Etobicoke, a wildly diverse part of Toronto, far from downtown, where well-to-do neighborhoods like his family’s meet with towering developments, home to booming communities of newcomers. Drugs were always a presence, including in the house where he grew up: His older brothers were reported to have been involved in the drug trade. Over a decade as a city councillor, he pursued a narrow, simple vision of his job, returning every call, tooling around in a beat-up minivan, talking to homeowners and apartment dwellers about their neighborhood concerns. His chief concern was not spending taxpayer money (especially not on things such as bike lanes, AIDS research, and watering plants at city hall that should probably be plastic, though exceptions could be made for things like police helicopters). His legislative record was obstruction and outbursts, but that suited people fine. Shy and awkward in person, he was comfortable on the phone and became a fixture on AM radio. The legend of Rob Ford, champion of the little guy — and, as some have argued, it really was a legend — grew.