He was perhaps the worst mayor Toronto has ever had, and the strangest and most compelling character in the history of Canadian politics, and today Rob Ford is gone and his loss feels like a crater has opened up in the city’s psyche. What will we do without him? The man who has been the centre of our civic story — a hero to some and an opponent to rally against to many others, the ballot question in the last election even after he dropped off the ballot, a story with more twists and turns than a novel to follow in its anger and oddness and sadness and astonishing, occasionally hilarious, turns. For better and for worse, Rob Ford defined a big part of Toronto’s story, of who we are and how we are, over the past decade.

And now Rob Ford is gone, and you can be sure we will not see another like him. He died Tuesday morning after 18 months of treatment for a rare and aggressive cancer that ended his bid for re-election as mayor when it was diagnosed in 2014.

Though I spent a whole chapter of my career lamenting his shortcomings, his death from cancer fills me with sadness. In sympathy for his family, who have lost a son, a brother, a husband, and a father too soon at age 46, but also in sombre recognition of what he meant to Toronto, a city whose conflicted relationship with its 64th mayor ended not at the ballot box, where it always seemed that it should, but in palliative care at Mount Sinai Hospital. The loss feels oddly personal, because his relationship with Toronto was intensely personal.

Across the city and around the world, people are likely to be remembering him first and foremost as the “crack mayor.” How could you not? That drug scandal, and the affiliated police investigation it spawned, was the strangest chapter in his story — in our story with him — the thing that made his one of the most well-known names in the world.

But I have been thinking about an earlier episode. Do you remember in 2012 when the city’s press corps used to gather weekly to watch the mayor weigh himself on a giant circus scale outside his city hall office? His brother Doug, his closest friend and adviser, would be there cracking jokes about his weight while the press peppered the mayor with questions about how city council was revolting against him to reverse his transit plans — because it was virtually the only time, back then, when he made himself available to the press. The whole thing, the “Cut the Waist Challenge” that saw Ford trying to publicly lose 50 pounds, had been dreamt up by his brother as a distraction from the complete meltdown of his authority as mayor, in the wake of a series of city council uprisings. It turned into an ongoing humiliating drama for him as he stopped losing weight and started gaining it and became increasingly terse and nonsensically combative in his responses to policy questions, until finally he called the whole thing off a month early, in failure and frustration, after literally falling off the scale.

You had so much of Rob Ford’s mayoralty and political life summed up in those moments: the sideshow atmosphere, the family psychodrama, the love-hate relationship with the press, the constantly conflicted relationship with his fellow councillors, in which he relished the role of the underdog when he could not play the bully. And you had his personal struggles intimately intertwined and overshadowing the official business of the city — his personal struggles becoming the official business of the city. And while I and others would rage at the hijacking of civic priorities in his service, it was impossible not to feel sorry for him, personally, to empathize with this man on the scale, as he faced failure in his political agenda and his personal health goals in front of the entire city. And, later, in front of the entire world.

He was born into modest wealth and moderate local political power, but Rob Ford was an underdog, a man who inspired sympathy in his guilelessness, his bumbling, sometimes childlike personality, his obvious difficulties. It was part of how he rose to power — a man whose poll numbers went up immediately after his mug shot appeared on the front page of the newspaper. The same elements were there later when he faced being thrown out of office by a judge for a football-charity related conflict of interest, and still later when he was repeating, “Everything’s fine,” as his staff and city council allies abandoned him in the midst of the crack scandal.

And it was part of how this right-wing tax-cutter became an unlikely — and ultimately counterproductive — champion for those in the inner suburbs, some of the poorest neighbourhoods in the city. Whatever else he was, Rob Ford was a man who would come and stand in the rain outside your house to hear your complaints about garbage pickup and try to help, a man who told his staff there was no priority in the city higher than returning the call of a constituent without water. People loved him, in all his contradictions, personally. And he loved them.

Rob Ford’s mayoralty did not, ultimately, accomplish much for those who supported him, I don’t think. But it unalterably changed the city’s impression of itself and its political debate. It is in large part because of Rob Ford that all policy-makers in the city now consider the lagging fortunes of Scarborough and North Etobicoke a key priority on the city agenda. It is in large part because of Rob Ford that people on the street are conversant in the finer points of transit ridership debates. It is in large part because of Rob Ford that a large and still active anti-Ford constituency of Torontonians considers city politics a spectator sport. And a participatory sport.

A lot of people have compared Donald Trump’s recent rise to political prominence to the Rob Ford populist phenomenon, and there are a lot of parallels. But no one will ever feel sorry for Trump. And no one will ever say of Trump, “he’s essentially a nice guy,” or “he means well.” People have always said those things about Rob Ford, and likely they always will.

After everything, I still say it: he meant well. The first time I met him, he encouraged me to run for office, because he encouraged almost everyone to run for office. The last time I met him, after years in which I relentlessly attacked him in the strongest terms, he called me “Mr. Keenan” and talked about his respect for me and tried to sell me a bobblehead to benefit a hospital fundraiser, because he encouraged almost everyone to buy a bobblehead. I think he was the worst Toronto mayor I’ve ever heard of, and that we’ll spend many years digging ourselves out from under his short but destructive political legacy. But I think he tried his best to be a nice guy, and he meant well, and he brought out the best in many of his opponents, and his smile could disarm you and make you like him despite yourself.

There are a lot of people in this city — tens of thousands, no joke — who spoke to him on the phone or in person because he always called them back, and for many of them he is the only powerful politician they’ve ever spoken to. He gave them the feeling they had access to power, for once. That’s something real.

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Something personal. It was always, always personal with Rob Ford. And now he’s gone, and Toronto will miss him, personally. He is gone too soon.