There’s been much handwringing about how Toronto got here. How did a city that’s one of the most diverse in the world end up with a mayor who makes both racist and homophobic comments? How did multicultural Toronto end up with a mayor who seems to revel in his lack of culture? How has Ford’s approval rating remained virtually unscathed, at 42 percent, as the scandal has metastasized?

What I’ve found most interesting in the debate about Rob Ford is the attempt to parse out “Ford Nation”—that seemingly monolithic swathe of voters living in the suburbs. The stereotype is that the suburbs are all about big backyards and SUVs and barbecuing on the deck, and that the people there are the Canadian counterparts of the American Tea Partiers. They are fiscal conservatives and just want to be left alone with minimal interference from big government. Ford Nation loves Rob Ford because Rob Ford is just like Ford Nation.

Sure, the suburbs have their share of million-dollar “monster homes” and upscale neighborhoods, just like there’s poverty in Toronto’s downtown core. But we don’t often talk about how, in large parts of Toronto, suburban also means poor and non-white. Without a discussion of that, any portrait of Ford Nation is ridiculously incomplete.

I left Toronto some years back and now live on just the other side of its northeastern border. But I grew up on the outer edge of what is now Toronto back in the days before amalgamation—before the ominously named “megacity” came into existence. Back then, Toronto referred only to a small region that comprises today’s downtown. Metropolitan Toronto used to be six separate municipalities which, in 1998, came together in one jagged, hulking mass called the City of Toronto.

In our hearts, however, the old municipalities live on, if not politically than certainly as part of people’s sensibilities. Culturally, Toronto still means downtown. And Scarborough—where I grew up—is still called “Scarberia,” a way to poke fun at its perceived distant and vast nothingness. (It was a perfectly nice place to live, by the way.)

Talk to people who live and work downtown about life in the suburbs and you’re bound to hear something, first and foremost, about how unreachable the suburbs are. If you do manage to find your way there, there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do. It’s all urban sprawl and cars. People in the old city of Toronto, meanwhile, are perceived as elites, living lives filled with frilly extras like museums and street festivals. They all ride bikes, drink lattes, and don’t worry about taxes because they have money to burn.

It’s worth keeping in mind that voter support for Ford in Toronto’s 2010 municipal elections was not crushing. Just over 800,000 people voted in the municipal elections (about 53 percent of voters), and almost half of them voted for Ford (47 percent). If you look at a map of the voter breakdown, you’ll see Ford won every single ward of every pre-amalgamation municipality (the suburbs). The candidate who came in second, George Smitherman—he was a member of the provincial parliament and a cabinet minister—lost by almost 100,000 votes, and dominated in the downtown core.

The coverage now, like the conversations back then, has framed the 2010 mayoral race as one that pitted the urban cosmopolitan elite against the rednecks of the suburbs. It’s a convenient narrative, but it ignores the fact that Ford’s message resonated among those people who see themselves as the most marginalized: the non-white suburban poor.