The New Yorker, 07 November 2013, Torontos Rob Ford Problem, by David Macfarlane ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ . . . But really, when you get right down to the nuts and bolts of the question—Why, exactly, did a reasonable kind of place like Toronto elect its current mayor?—you have to conclude that it doesn’t matter anymore. Why we did it is the least of our problems. The only point worth making at this juncture is that Rob Ford turned out to be a staggeringly bad choice. The problem is this. Nobody knows what to do with a mayor who will not resign, even though he has ticked most of the boxes in the “You should resign immediately if…” section of the customary understanding between elected officials and their electorates. Such as: If you smoke crack. If you sometimes find yourself in the condition that Mayor Ford has now immortalized as “a drunken stupor.” If you let late-night visitors smoke pot in your City Hall office. If you consort with criminals. If people with whom you were recently photographed—in front of a suburban crack house, it should be noted—start turning up dead, or splayed on the ground beneath windows from which they have just mysteriously fallen. If you publicly malign the reputations of any politician, civil servant, or journalist who (correctly) raises the suspicion that the Mayor has a substance-abuse problem. If you are seen reeling through the streets of Toronto on several festive occasions while being, in the Mayor’s own vivid description, “hammered.” If (and it was this offense that seemed to really rattle many Torontonians) you urinate in public—or, to be fair, if you urinate in public enough to be captured on police surveillance cameras. Oh, and about those police surveillance cameras: you should probably resign as the mayor of Toronto if you are the subject of a costly police investigation—during the same period that you, as mayor, will preside over the upcoming police-budget debates at City Hall . . .
Posted on: Fri, 08 Nov 2013 18:55:26 +0000
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