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The Book of the Week is “Crazy Town, The Rob Ford Story” by Robyn Doolittle, published in 2014.
In this volume, the author described political shenanigans before, during and after a mayor of a major world-class city was caught: on video committing a shocking act, behaving badly, spouting inflammatory nonsense, and palling around with criminals. Canadian-style.
These cobbled-together writings of Doolittle, an investigative journalist, were chronologically disorganized and thus became redundant, but she did take a lot of trouble to fact-check and make the story suspenseful.
Rob Ford was born into a wealth family in May 1969 in a Toronto suburb. He and his siblings spent their own money to get him elected to the city council in 2000. For more than a decade, he amassed a grass-roots base of supporters whom he helped personally. Ford remained a “loose cannon” even after he and his siblings hired political consultants to advise him on how to get elected mayor of Toronto in 2010. He promised voters he would minimize taxes, cut the budget on subsidies of events and programs of a cultural nature, and cancel an already-in-progress, above-ground, light-railway project to plan and build a subway project instead.
In early 2011, Ford could brag that he had balanced Toronto’s budget without service reductions or tax increases. However, he got away with that only because he was coasting on surpluses from his predecessor’s prior years. By autumn, he was forced to propose budget cuts. As of spring 2012, “According to three former staff members and a close confidant, senior staff had been trying to get Ford into rehab for more than a year. They believed his drinking was affecting his job.”
The author considered the aforementioned video, “the scoop of the century.” Really?? Political wrongdoing has become a cliche in the past couple of centuries, even for world leaders, not just mayors. It has become trivial in recent decades because people have become desensitized to it. The scoop of the century really ought to be breaking news of a truly world-changing event that is, for instance, associated with large-scale genocide and / or atrocities, such as Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, the dropping of the atom bombs, or 9/11.
There are always going to be celebrity scandals, but global game-changers merit mention in the history books. They have big ideas behind them– although tabloid trivia is entertaining and a welcome distraction from infuriating and depressing politics.
Anyway, read the book to learn Ford’s entertaining story.