Canadian Cincinnatus

A great campaign strategist aligns with a dumb politician

The strategist is Nick Kouvalis, the incompetent politician is John Tory. According to the Toronto Sun:

“The man behind Mayor Rob Ford's winning 2010 campaign is poised to work against him this year.

Nick Kouvalis will be working for John Tory's mayoralty campaign if the radio host and former Ontario Progressive Conservative leader decides to run, a source told the Sun.”

Two years ago, I attended a seminar at the Manning Networking Conference on political strategy led by Kouvalis, Tom Long (Mike Harris’s architect) and Guy Giorno (Stephen Harper’s former Chief of Staff). I left that session riding a mile high. I thought: so there are campaign strategists out there on our side who actual do Get It. They’re not all a bunch of pathetic, lame-o Red Tory appeasers.

“Kouvalis helped Ford sweep into the mayor's office in 2010 and served as his chief of staff for the first few months of his term.”

Rob Ford’s 2010 campaign was one of the most perfectly run political campaigns I have ever witnessed. It was the Six-Day War of politics. Prior to 2010, whenever strategists intoned that message discipline was one of the most important factors in campaigning, that the only way to get your message across to the people is to repeat it endlessly and refrain from getting sidetracked on peripheral matters, I said yeah, yeah, but I didn’t really Get It. Rob Ford’s “stop the gravy train” message changed that. It permeated every aspect of Toronto’s culture. Even the most thoroughly apolitical were well versed in it. I said, oh, so that’s what you guys meant. 

“Reached for comment on Wednesday, Kouvalis would only confirm that he believes Tory - who lost the 2003 mayor's race to David Miller - can win the 2014 election.

‘John Tory can win this election because he is fiscally conservative, can get support for his plans and get the votes through council,’ Kouvalis said.” 

Kouvalis is a very smart guy, one of best in politics. But he is dead wrong here. In 2003 I also thought Tory was a competent politician. But his bumbling, disastrous reign as head of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party forever dispelled me of that notion, and it should have done the same for Kouvalis and any other sentient being. I could write articles about Tory’s bumbling (and I have: here and here), but suffice it to say, John Tory’s performance was so breathtakingly incompetent, on so many different levels, that he forever disqualified himself in my eyes as a viable candidate for any office. I think he is possibly the most incompetent conservative politician that I know of (though John Boehner is currently making a good run for that title).

By propping up a useless candidate with a brilliant campaign manager, all Kouvalis will succeed in doing is to convert an also-ran joke into a spoiler. Thanks to this misalignment of the stars, Olivia Chow may be able to sneak into office from the left.

And then, the residents of Toronto had better start praying.

Rob Ford is right about the Toronto Island Airport expansion

According to the Toronto Sun: 

‘Deputy Mayor Norm Kelly said Wednesday he wants to delay the debate of Porter Airlines’ push to expand and fly jets out of Billy Bishop City Centre Airport until the new year while Mayor Rob Ford vowed to try to push ahead at Thursday’s meeting.’

The main airport serving Toronto is the gargantuan Pearson International Airport (Canada’s biggest airport), located outside of the City of Toronto’s boundaries and surrounded by a perpetual traffic jam of brobdingnagian proportions. One of the few indisputable recent improvements in our growing city’s infrastructure has been the rise of the Island Airport as a small and efficient commuter airport located within the heart of downtown. If you want to go anywhere from Quebec City to Chicago to Washington DC, your best choice by far is Porter Airlines at the Island Airport.

Unfortunately, the Island Airport is hated by the tiny island community, composed mainly of noisy, politically connected NIMBY’s. Their protector was Toronto previous mayor, the arrogant and incompetent David Miller. But fortunately, by cancelling the proposed bridge to the airport, he unwittingly ended up giving Porter the contractual penalties they needed to fund their initial aircraft purchase. The island residents are completely unjustified in their opposition to the current airport expansion: modern jets are almost as quiet as the turboprops flying there now - planes that they also opposed when they were first being proposed.

Championing controversial but necessary common sense ideas, like the airport expansion - ideas that the city’s insulated elite oppose, is the reason I support Rob Ford, in spite of his glaring personal problems.

But say, I hear you respond, isn’t Deputy Mayor Norm Kelly also in favour of airport expansion?

‘A city staff report going to the executive committee on Thursday recommends delaying the approval of any expansion plans until at least 2015. It calls for further study of Porter Airlines’ push to expand and fly jets out of Billy Bishop City Centre Airport.

Kelly said he’s trying to “bring along as many people as possible in support of this initiative.”

He denied the deferral was a tactical retreat.

“A tactical manoeuvre, you can move laterally on the battlefield as well,” Kelly said.

Ford said he and Kelly have “different views on Porter. I want to move ahead with it, we’ve discussed this long enough, we’ve debated this issue, we’ve consulted with the public, we’re not dealing with a fly-by-night company,” Ford said. “I don’t see what a deferral for one month is going to do. 

“I’m going to move a motion that we go ahead with it and you’re either onside or you’re not onside.”’

Ford is right. The issue has been debated to death. The opponents of airport expansion are implacable obstructionists, willing to seize on every opportunity to delay or stop the airport – their ultimate and only goal. Kelly is just equivocating. If this much-needed addition to Toronto’s infrastructure is going to happen, strong leadership is required.

Toronto needs its crack mayor back!

Toronto City Council’s unintended gift to Rob Ford

Heading into the 1988 federal election, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was cruising to defeat, weighted down by a thousand petty scandals. Then a miracle happened. The Liberal-dominated Senate did something that the unelected Canadian Senate rarely did until that point: they rejected the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement that Mulroney had staked his political reputation on. They told him that it was such an important piece of legislation that passing it in Parliament was insufficient. It needed to be ratified by the voters. As a result, the election was transformed from a referendum on Mulroney’s venality into a referendum on free trade. Thus transmogrified, Mulroney won the election in a walk. The Liberal Senators thought they were giving Mulroney a shit sandwich; in reality, they baked him a victory cake.

So it is in 2014, when Toronto City Council voted to strip Mayor Rob Ford of his powers. As a result, from now on every misstep in city hall is the fault of the city’s left-wing establishment; and by leaving him as a ceremonial mayor, they let Ford retain enough of a public profile to capitalize on their screw-ups. Demonstrating the instincts of a natural politician (the kind of instincts that are totally alien to that manor-born buffoon, John Tory), Ford immediately capitalized on his new-found freedom by pouncing on an unforced error made by City Council. The very first act of the Ford-free City Council was to vote in a property tax hike. In response, Ford announced that now that he is gone, the gravy train is back.

You know what? He’s right.

In related news, the latest polls show that Rob Ford is now more popular than Barack Obama.

Oh noooo: John Tory is thinking abour running for mayor

Just when you thought the Rob Ford scandal could not get worse, it does: former mayoral candidate and former Ontario Progressive Conservative Party leader John Tory is mulling another run for Toronto’s mayor.

In many ways, John Tory is the mirror image of Rob Ford. Tory is sober, industrious, and conscientious, with a presidential bearing who is completely incompetent. Until Tory arrived on the scene, I had always believed Joe Clarke to be the most useless politician to ever exist – of any party, any level of government or even any country. But John Tory’s bungling reign as leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative party dethroned Clarke as the most useless political leader ever.  As I argued yesterday, while Rob Ford’s personal life is a train wreck, his track record as Mayor of Toronto has been solid.

Both Ford and Tory are perfect examples of how personal and public virtue need not go together. 

If you don’t believe me, answer this question: what election has Tory ever won? Aside from his PC Ontario leadership bid, his only electoral success among the general public was a by-election win in the safest conservative seat in the province when he was the new leader of the PC’s. That’s it. In the general provincial election, he repeated Ernie Eves’ shameful shellacking, except that he added to Eves’ failure by losing his own seat as well. When he tried to get back into the Provincial Parliament, he lost the second safest conservative seat in the province. As a political strategist, he managed Kim Campbell’s 1993 election campaign (!), the greatest single loss of any party in Canadian history (losing 154 seats, from an original 156 seats). You would think that would be enough for anybody to reconsider a career in politics. 

In his private life, Tory has had a lot of big jobs, but – at least as far as I can tell - all (or almost all) of them were due to either to his father, or his father’s friend, Ted Rogers.

The prospect of John Tory becoming the standard-bearer of conservatism in Toronto scares me a hell out of a lot more than the next salacious revelation about Rob Ford’s personal life.

Andrew Coyne: elitism vs. Ford Nation

In the struggle between the elites and the populists – as personified by Toronto’s embattled mayor, Rob Ford, and his Ford Nation supporters - the National Post’s Andrew of the well-heeled Coyne family takes the side of the elites:

“And of all his enablers, the most culpable are the strategists, the ones who fashioned his image as the defender of the little guy, the suburban strivers, against the downtown elites, with their degrees and their symphonies — the ones who turned a bundle of inchoate resentments into Ford Nation. Sound familiar? It is the same condescending populism, the same aggressively dumb, harshly divisive message that has become the playbook for the right generally in this country, in all its contempt for learning, its disdain for facts, its disrespect of convention and debasing of standards.” 

Hmm. Sounds like Canada’s populists are pretty dumb.

But then again, by any objective standards, Rob Ford has been Toronto’s best mayor. Why do I say that? Look at the record. The current City of Toronto was amalgamated in 1998. In that time, we have had three mayors: Mel Lastman, David Miller and Rob Ford. In terms of greatness, I would rate them this way: OK, awful and good – respectively.

Why would I rate Ford as good? Forget about his personal life for a moment and look only at his public record: he eliminated the car tax, eliminated the plastic bag tax, he balanced the budget, he privatized half of Toronto’s garbage collection, he took many steps to clean up the corruption at Metro Housing caused by Miller’s cronies, and he browbeat a Scarborough Subway extension out of the subway-hating Ontario Liberals. 

Which other mayor can match this record? Not Lastman; and certainly not David Miller, whose reign was an unenviable string of failures and screw-ups. From Miller’s war on the car (i.e. the tax-paying commuter), to the unnecessary cancellation of the island bridge (which triggered contractual penalties that Porter Airlines used to purchase its initial aircraft fleet), to his bungling of garbage collection (each one of his decisions in this regard seemed to have been designed to increase costs, add complexity and reduce efficiency), to his neglect of subways, and to his insane fetish for streetcars (the most inefficient and inflexible means of public transit known to man), which resulted in his neighbourhood-killing St Clair Avenue streetcar right-of-way, David Miller was a sober, respectable catastrophe.

So between a knuckle-ragging Ford Nation Neanderthal like me and a well-bred elitist like you Andrew, this is why Rob Ford generates such strong residual good will among Toronto’s residents. We don’t care if he isn’t respectable in the eyes of Jon Stewart.

In contrast, none of the personal failures and ‘criminal activities’ that Coyne catalogues have any direct bearing on his job. Underlying all the salacious details Coyne provides is this fact: at the time of this writing, Ford has not been charged with (let alone convicted of) any crime, and that many of the criminal activities that Coyne lists are guilt-by-associations (assuming that they are true in the first place).

But Coyne’s article and my response raises a larger question: where is the truth ultimately to be found, among the elites or among the populists? Who can you trust more? 

The correct answer to this question is that no group of people is a reliable repository of truth. On some things, the elites are right, on others, the populists are right. It all depends on the issue and the circumstance.

What we can however be sure of is that one of the great strengths possessed by free societies like Canada (at least for the time being) is that our elites enjoy no monopoly, and that they can be replaced over time. The great strength of our country is that we are governed by conflict – free-market competition, political competition and an adversarial legal system – not by an org chart, like the Soviet Union or the Assyrian Empire. This ensures that nobody becomes complacent and that truth can be a useful ally of the underdog.

Recently I find myself sympathizing more with the populists than the elites. This is because the centralization of today’s society has swollen the power of today’s elites to unhealthy extremes. One would expect a small government advocate like Andrew Coyne to appreciate that.

Howard Levitt: “How Rob Ford can not only keep his job, but weather the storm and become a political legend”

Over at the Financial Post, Howard Levitt has the best piece I have yet read about the unprecedented situation Toronto faces with its mayor.

The first part succinctly explains the durability of Rob Ford’s popularity:

1) Ford’s supporters feel disenfranchised from municipal government, perceiving themselves as receiving little benefit from City Hall. … They perceive Ford’s agenda … as in their interest.

From my perspective, personal problems aside, Ford has racked up more substantive achievements than any mayor our Megacity ever had. Under Ford’s predecessor, David Miller, Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough were irrelevant.

2) On the theory of “an enemy of my enemy is my friend”, many Torontonians recoil at the prospect of the re-enactment of the tax and spend David Miller regime or its present day embodiments of Adam Vaughan or Olivia Chow.

The Toronto elites really do not fathom the extent to which the arrogant David Miller and the sanctimonious Adam Vaughan make the skin of ordinary people crawl with disgust.

3) Similarly, they are reflectively suspicious of the left-liberal media or downtown left-wingers like Clay Ruby, the vanguard of those attacking Ford.

Ditto. 

4) …They see his opponents as an elite whose interests are inimical to their own and who never gave Ford a chance. That is why the more these groups attack him, the more popular he has become.

Ford’s opponents have the Toronto Star to thank for the people’s perception of them. The Star has gone out of its way to attack him unfairly every chance it got, such as when they printed an ‘expose’ about how Ford cheated on his diet by eating a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. On a more substantive note, the failed lawsuit to unseat him was a transparent attempt by anti-Ford partisans to use lawfare to achieve what they couldn’t at the ballot box.

5) While they don’t want a crack smoking Mayor, that seems the lesser of the two evils.

Well said. I don’t want a crack smoking Mayor either, but a crack smoking Rob Ford is better than a stone-cold sober David Miller – or worse, Adam Vaughan. Yeechhh!

The second part of the article offers excellent political advice:

Ford should explain, with humility, the relentless, ruthless and unprecedented (in this country) pressures he has been under since becoming Mayor. He can truthfully portray that his opponents never accepted him as their Mayor or gave him a chance, that their attacks have descended to repeatedly trespassing on his property, frightening his daughter and attacking his family.

The pitiless and public brutality of Ford’s enemies is his strength.

He should say that he has never experienced such viciousness before and was not, personally or temperamentally, equipped for this bullying. But he can claim that, rather than succumbing to his detractors, he stuck to his mandate and focused on doing his work.

As I keep saying, Ford’s substantive record is very good.

However, he must acknowledge that these personal attacks upon himself and his family have taken a severe emotional toll. He responded, he should explain, by turning to drink and, a couple of times, something stronger, as an unfortunate escape.

Since the underlying facts are true and the reaction understandable, most will believe and sympathize with him.

He then has to advise that he is seeking treatment and using his accumulated vacation time to obtain that assistance now. He should provide a definite return date. If he does not do that, his opponents will resist his ever returning.

If he does all of these things and returns rehabilitated and refreshed, his resurrection could become a political legend and he, to his opponents’ chagrin, an unstoppable force.

 If things really end up this way, heads will explode at the Toronto Star.

But first, go read the whole thing.

Rob Ford at Toronto’s Remembrance Day Ceremony: An Eyewitness Account

I happened to attend the City of Toronto’s Remembrance Day Ceremony, held at the Cenotaph in front of Old City Hall yesterday. As a result, I saw first-hand Mayor Rob Ford’s ‘controversial’ attendance.

His speech was well received by those in the crowd, but a really interesting thing happened after he laid his wreath. The way things were set up, the main dignitaries sat to the left of the Cenotaph, and the old war veterans sat directly to the right (these would be the people this ceremony honours). The script called for the wreath-layers to approach the Cenotaph from the left and depart from the right, walking directly past the vets. As an invited guest of the City, I sat in the block of seats in the center so I had a good view of everything.

After Ford had laid his wreath, and was about to walk past the veterans, they waved him over. When he got there, many of them wanted to shake his hand. Some of them wanted to have their picture taken with him.

He was the only dignitary the assembled veterans showed any interest in. All the others – Karen Stintz, Denzil Minnan-Wong and an angry-looking Thomas Mulcair - elicited no reaction at all when they walked past the old soldiers. 

While the media was over this ceremony like a pack of hyenas, I am not sure how many of them will report this Rob Ford story.

 

Ann Coulter on conservatives: stop abandoning your leaders when they get into trouble

Ann Coulter has for a long time made the point that a key difference between liberals and conservatives is that conservatives throw their own to the wolves the moment they get into trouble while liberals circle the wagons and fight to the bitter end for their people. Contrast the way liberals defended Bill Clinton over his countless scandals and the way conservatives threw South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford under the bus in 2009.

While the Bill Clinton tale is well known to all, perhaps you have forgotten Sanford. He was the conservative governor of South Carolina who proved to be one of the best dissenting voices against Obama during the early years of his presidency. Before Sanford’s scandal, the Cato Institute rated him the best governor in America. The reason for his fall from grace: for several days nobody knew where he was.

It was subsequently found that he was in Argentina with his mistress. Conservatives competed with each other in calling him a creep and a pervert for cheating on his wife. For his heinous crime, the man who was the leading conservative governor was censured by the State House with a vote of 102 to 11. To my knowledge, the South Carolina Governor does not carry the launch codes of the Plametto State’s nuclear arsenal with him. 

Ann’s point is that when you don’t back your leaders, you can’t expect people to step up to the plate to be your leader, and therefore champion your causes. This dynamic is operative in Canada as well. Consider all the “law and order” conservatives who call for Rob Ford’s head over his (yet unseen) crack video, in spite of the fact that Ford has proven himself to be – in spite of his myriad personal failings – the most effective conservative leader the City of Toronto ever had.

If, at some later date, you find yourself complaining, “how come there aren’t there any real conservative in poltics these days?”, you only have to look into the mirror to answer that question. 

Who wants to be your champion?

The Rob Ford scandal in perspective

It is instructive to compare the press’s treatment of the Rob Ford crack video to the revelations that came during the last federal election that Jack Layton was caught at a rub and tug. Nary a speed bump on the road to Layton’s greatest political triumph.

Then there is Ford’s previous mayoral opponent, George Smitherman. During the last Toronto mayoral election, Smitherman had confessed to a five-year addiction to a drug that he described as being a part of the “Toronto party scene”, that wasn’t injectable. Hmmm… I wonder what that could be.

Furthermore, there is also the kafuffle over Smitherman’s husband’s brief unexplained absence that necessitated a police search. I noted some ambiguous comments Smitherman made at the time that could be interpreted – reading between the lines - as a possible admission that perhaps, maybe, his “party drug” addiction-problem isn’t quite in the past. What reaction did this statement, the obvious mental distress of his husband (whose nature went unexplained), or the possible danger that their combined personal problems might impose on their adopted children elicit?

Nothing to see here. Move along.

At this point, I see a possible rebuttal to my creative juxtapositions popping up in the comments section: so what does any of this have to do with Rob Ford? His guilt or innocence has nothing to do with Smitherman or Layton. You’re just trying to muddy the waters with stuff that has nothing to do with Rob Ford’s crack pipe.

Actually, these episodes hold a great deal of relevance; mainly because they provide a necessary perspective on the flexible standards that Ford is being judged by. While I have long believed that our legal system is an ass with regard to 90% of the laws currently on the books, there is one legal principle that I absolutely insist on: it is the principle that people be judged the same way, by the same standards. The great strength of our legal system - and Canadian society in general - is that we try to ensure that the laws apply equally across the board. Of course, we sometimes don’t achieve this lofty standards, but we try.

Therefore, if it can be shown (as I just did) that The Toronto Star et al have one standard for Ford and another for their fellow-travelers, than the accusations against Ford have been demonstrated to be nothing more than partisan point scoring.

Personally, I don’t know the truth regarding the personal problems of any of these people, nor do I care - neither Ford’s, nor Layton’s, nor Smitherman’s. History has shown that flawed individuals can make great leaders. One of the greatest leaders of the 20^th century – Winston Churchill – operated on a pint of whiskey a day at the height of his glory. Canada was founded by a man who was a well-known drunk. Conversely, many squeaky-clean, boy scout-types are complete fuck-ups when in charge. Who would you like running Ontario – Dalton McGuinty or Ralph Klein?

Looking at it this way, in three years, Rob Ford has proven that he can out-governed the tony David Miller with one crack pipe tied behind his back.

How Rob Ford Can Win the Next Election in Toronto

The Toronto Star is breathless in their excitment because Police Chief Bill Blair says that there is a video of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford doing...something. The sharks are circling, smelling blood in the water, but Rob Ford could climb out from under all of this slime with one statement to the press, followed by a lot of honest hard work. What follows is my proposal for a press statement, but keep in mind, I wrote this, not Rob Ford. I have no idea what his habits are or what he's thinking. Here's what I believe he should stand up and say to Toronto:

Folks, I have an addiction problem. It's alcohol. While under the influence of alcohol, I have had black out periods, which some people have used to manipulate and incriminate me in hopes of blackmailing me or selling the story to the media for substantial profit. It saddens me that some of these individuals are young men who initially reached out to me for help.

Many cultures are aware of the dangers of alcohol, and I must admit that I have been blind to the damage it has done to me while I was in denial about my addiction. I have joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and I will attend meetings. Obviously I can't invite the press to these meetings to protect the identity of other members. I will, however, ask AA to designate a representative to keep the media informed about my progress.

I've read that the eigth step of this journay will be to apologize to those I have wronged, and while I have a long way to go before I can reach that eighth step, I would like to take a moment apologize to my family for the times I have not been home while out drinking, and to my staff for the extra work and stress I have caused them. They have all been very supportive.

I will be returning to City Hall on Monday morning because I feel the best way I can fight this addiction is to work, and I especially look forward to the rewarding work of continuing to reduce the taxes paid by the citizens of Toronto.

I would ask the media to not hunt around my backyard or ambush me in my driveway in the future. My home is my refuge from the stress of work, and I need that peace more than ever as I come to terms with this affliction.

This will be a long and difficult road, but I with the support of my friends and family and the good citizens of Toronto, I know I can beat this addiction, and together we can do great things for Toronto.

End statement.

Please note so I don't get sued: I made this statement up. I have no idea how much Rob Ford actually drinks or whether he is an alcoholic.

This statement would, however, answer a lot of questions for voters and would put Rob Ford in a positive light, as a hero struggling with an addiction, one who has suffered unprecedented scrutiny and stress as mayor of Toronto at the hands of the Toronto Star and the CBC. And here's the best part: if he's not an alcoholic, swearing off drinking will be easy. If he is an alcoholic, joining AA will extend his life and make him a happier, healthier person.

Is this a cynical Machiavellian political move? It depends upon how much Ford drinks. Since the Star likes to carefully document every time he appears tipsy at a city event, it certainly wouldn't surprise anyone if he announced that he had a drinking problem.

Of course the sharks at the Star and CBC will still circle, but any further attacks will make them look like intolerant bullies. Left wing councillors who don't offer their support for his efforts at reform will be percieved as mean spirited. In one press statement, all of Rob Ford's opponents in the media and on council will be utterly gutted.

But of course the hard work is that Rob Ford would have to follow through, join AA whether he thinks he's an alcoholic or not, and stay dry. The press conference will be the easiest part.

Mike Downtown