58 toronto life December 2018loving but eccentric, tough and impossible to please. It made
the boys hypercompetitive—with others but also with each
other. When they played football or hockey, they played to win,
and when they won, they rubbed it in your face. After amal-
gamation, Doug Sr. lost the nomination for his parliamentary
seat to Chris Stockwell, a political veteran and member of the
establishment that the Fords despised. From then on, no mat-
ter how much power they accrued, the Fords always identified
as political outsiders.
Two key elements of the Ford political strategy are acces-
sibility and accountability. As a councillor, Rob was known for
his attention to his constituents. That strenuous transparency
did not extend to the media, and much of his life was deliberately
hidden from the public. Doug has continued both traditions.
While campaigning this year, he handed out his card to every
plant worker and rink rat he met. In September, he received
8,750 calls from constituents. He continues to make public
appearances, sometimes several a week. But, like Rob, he also
refuses to share his schedule with the media. His preferred
network is Ontario News Now, a faux news channel that tri-
umphantly broadcasts highlights from Ford pressers and events,
funded with taxpayer dollars and produced by Lyndsey Van-
stone, a PC deputy communications director who once entered
a contest to become Charlie Sheen’s assistant. This fall, Ford’s
team packed press conferences with young staffers who would
drown out reporters’ questions with their applause. Before I
started reporting this story, I met with Laryssa Waler, Ford’s
director of communications. She wasn’t sure if she’d let me
interview him, explaining she was torn between wanting the
public to know the “real” Doug and protecting him from the
Toronto media, which had been unkind to him. My subsequent
interview requests were declined, and cabinet ministers and
staffers were equally unresponsive.
When you do get him alone, Ford is a tireless extrovert who
oscillates between disarming charisma and calculated menace.
At the photo shoot for this story, he said, with a tight smile, that
if he didn’t like the pictures, he would take the photographer “out
like a cheap date.” As a kid, Diane has said, he was a schmoozer
who could talk his way out of anything. At Deco, he kept a man
cave, outfitted with a full bar (though Doug doesn’t drink),
sports memorabilia and a pool table, where he would routinely
host buddies like Justice of the Peace Bobby Hundal and Toronto
Police Superintendent Ron Taverner. On the campaign trail,
he held rallies with 600 people in attendance and posed for
pictures with every fan. One acquaintance recounted a storyof Ford, heading in an OPP cruiser to a meeting at Jane and
Finch, stopping the car when he saw a couple of teenagers
hanging out on a street corner. He jumped out, asked the kids
what they were doing, if they had jobs. What sounded pater-
nalistic to me was, to this person’s mind, evidence of Ford’s
ease with just about everybody he meets. “He feels that he can
persuade anybody to get on the right track.”
Onstage, his folksiness can be ham-fisted and excessive.
Where other conservatives might tout Ayn Rand as an inspira-
tion, his philosophical lodestar is Dale Carnegie. But one- on- one,
Ford is appealingly jocular and congenial. “He’s a born salesman,
so he has that persona—the big smile, the glad-handing, the
backslapping,” says Peter Milczyn, the former city councillor
and Liberal minister of housing. As with any salesman, once
he gets what he wants, he can turn off that charm abruptly. John
Filion, who calls Ford the second most complicated person he’s
ever met (number one was Rob) says, “He can be a very pleasant
guy to have lunch with, and then another time the big fist will
come down in your face.” He can be infantile, thin-skinned, a
man who holds a grudge forever and also a man who loves, who
needs, to be liked. He came out of his first meeting with Trudeau
furious at the prime minister’s condescension: “That son-of-a-
bitch got up and said, ‘Do you know about the Geneva Conven-
tion?’ That son-of-a-bitch lecturing me?”
And yet this curious combination of qualities is almost exactly
what so many people seem to want in a politician—lovable some-
times, a tough guy at others. A scrapper who tells it like it is. Doug
has said that Rob’s undoing was that he was “too real.” As far as
voters are concerned, Doug is just real enough.T
he Fords have occasionally been called the
Kennedys of Etobicoke, a fatuous compari-
son that Doug himself scorns not so much
for its inaccuracy as for its whiff of elitism.
But if you want to compare him to anyone
in American politics, imagine a figure equal
parts former U.S. president George W. Bush,
pugnacious Providence mayor Buddy Cianci and, sure, why
not, Donald Trump. The Trump comparisons are a little too
easy, but they’re not off-base. In fact, Ford likened himself and
his brother to the American president in 2015. “Donald Trump
is borrowing from us,” he told the National Post. Both Ford and
Trump are larger-than-life demagogues who hijacked political
parties that didn’t want them. Both have been, more or less,
successful businessmen, with silver spoons jammed into their
mouths by domineering fathers. Both are aggressively narcis-
sistic yet perplexingly insecure. Both have a love-hate relation-
ship with the media. And both possess a fluid, sometimes
contradictory, ideology that shifts between conservatism,
populism and libertarianism.
If Ford bears some resemblance to Trump, what’s far more
important is how little he resembles Patrick Brown. This time
last year, Brown was leader of the Ontario PC Party and almost
certainly the next premier of Ontario. But he wasn’t quite who
the Tories thought they were getting. Once he became leader,
he tried to move the party closer to the centre. He was in favour
of revenue-neutral carbon pricing, came to support Wynne’s
updated sex-ed curriculum, marched in Toronto’s Pride parade.
“Coming out of the Patrick Brown experience,” Kory TeneyckeWhen Patrick Brown
appeared in a photo
with Ford, John Tory
would text him to say,
“What are you doing?”
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