As many other twitter feeds have pointed out over the weekend, the mayor’s return will also be the beginning of a redemption narrative that, if the Toronto newsmedia don’t change their game, could give the scandal-battered Ford campaign enough of an edge to turn that re-election bid into an actual re-election.
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Rob Ford, contrite after journeying to the Muskoka wilderness and there wrestling his own personal demons, seeks the ultimate (well, perhaps the penultimate) redemption: if not of body and soul, then of mandate. And Toronto voters, having just forgiven Kathleen Wynne and her Liberals their manifold sins at Queen’s Park, will bestow the same blessing upon the brow of our repentant magistrate.
It’s a pretty hopeful narrative — and it might be an effective one, so long as Toronto voters maintain a certain obliviousness to certain matters of, well, fact.
For instance, there is the matter of the casual structure of the mayor’s rehab, for what he would only describe as alcohol problems, in which he was able to conduct interviews, return telephone calls and travel the highways and byways of cottage country.
There is the matter of his Escalade, after a fellow rehab patient, Lee Ann McRobb, was charged with impaired driving while behind its wheel. How intense was Mayor Ford’s work in rehab? Was it sufficient?
There is the matter of the mayor and his brother’s reported apparent intervention on behalf of an American printing company that the Ford family’s Deco Labels was friendly with in an unsuccessful attempt to garner a city contract.
And the matter of the extent to which the Ford brothers reportedly intervened on behalf of a Deco client in unsuccessful pursuit of property tax grant.
Doug Ford has insisted that he and his brother and Deco are blameless. But the question remains: how much interest does the mayor have in looking after the taxpayers dollars?
And those matters don’t even go near the questions still arising from the police surveillance, Ford’s friend Sandro Lisi, or the vile stream of racist and sexist and homophobic slurs that flowed from Ford’s mouth in the last slew of videos, that ultimately led to the mayor’s leave of absence.
I suspect that more Torontonians than just a few of those speaking up on twitter are worried that the mayor won’t be made to address these points satisfactorily between now and the election.
And they are right to worry. Toronto’s news media is well-equipped and diligent, but it lacks the apparatus to compel Rob Ford or Doug Ford to answer straightforward questions in a straightforward way. Even had we the power of subpoena, the only thing we might compel is a longer interview, with more follow-up questions.
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The Toronto media is not going to go silent.
We’ll be outside the mayor’s office seven days from now, waiting for his speech, and when it’s done we’ll try to ask questions that are important and relevant. If the answers that we get don’t seem truthful, we’ll dig deeper to try and get the truth another way.
And the story of Mayor Rob Ford’s 2010-2014 term of office will continue to unfold. As best as we can, we’ll try and make sure that story is strictly non-fiction.