Rob Ford lumbered into political office on the power of a lot of pretty pathetic promises. I didn’t vote for him but a lot of people did. Granted, the choices were miserable so it’s hard to blame everyone.

Nonetheless, one of the first things that Mayor Ford did upon taking office was to scrap the city’s Vehicle Registration Tax. A $60 charge for Toronto residents which appeared when you renewed your license plate sticker. When we lived in Toronto last year and I had to renew my plates I dutifully paid my $60. The fee went directly to pay for transportation infrastructure, something the city sorely needs to improve and, honestly, I pay enough taxes but I gritted my teeth and forked over the dough. I wanted to drive my car in an already congested city, I guess I gotta pay.

But of the few things Ford campaigned on eliminating the Vehicle Registration Tax was one of them and so it was the first to go. The elimination of the tax, Ford himself admitted, would cost the city about $64 million in lost revenue but would mean money back in the pockets of Toronto’s tax-payers and they could spend it however they wanted. Hilarious, given yesterday’s budget announcement.

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When you combine two of your most favourite things in the world the result is not always what you thought it would be. For example, combining a delicious cheeseburger with an equally delicious piece of chocolate cake probably won’t end well. Chocolate cakeburger, anyone?

How about combining two of my most favourite television shows? Holmes Inspection, the Mike Holmes branded inspection and renovation show, and Ghost Hunters, the SyFy channel’s flagship paranormal investigation franchise. The result, well duh, is Paranormal Home Inspectors and I’m not sure it’s all that much better than a chocolate cake burger.

Paranormal Home Inspectors is new this fall on Discovery Channel Canada. It’s based, as far as I can tell, mainly in and around Toronto and feels very much like Holmes Inspection in terms of production value and quality. But, of course, this show involves ghosts.

Let me take you through a typical episode.

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Or, “The Real Reason We Left T.O.”.

When it comes up in conversation, Maria and I never shy again from a good Rob Ford joke. We tell people that he’s the real reason why we left Toronto, and some of the time, it feels very much like the truth.

Although they said it couldn’t be done, although they said he’d need the support of council—which he’d never get—and the support of the people of Toronto—which he’d never have enough of—he’s doing it. Rob Ford is nearly single-handedly dismantling the City of Toronto.

He’s blown through the city’s surpluses created by Mayor Miller, he’s repealed taxes and fees which are going to have to be replaced with funding cuts, he’s declared war on the city’s social services and programming, and he’s flipping the bird not just to cyclists and pedestrians, but to motorists too. What’s more, Doug Ford, the mayor’s equally erudite brother, claims to have never heard of Margaret Atwood, one of this country’s most celebrated authors, after she spoke out against Ford’s earlier comments about closing Toronto libraries. That is, Doug Ford thinks that since there are more libraries than Tim Horton’s stores in his Etobicoke neighbourhood, some of those libraries have got to go.

What the Fords are doing to Toronto is not surprising, I don’t think, to anyone. If anything what’s surprising is how easily they’re getting it all done. With the Fords in charge, politics in Toronto feels more like schoolyard wheeling-and-dealing than it does governance of the country’s most populated city.

But,  if anything, Rob Ford’s alleged middle finger salute and his brothers comments about Margaret Atwood aren’t atypical but are becoming the norm. That’s because politics in Toronto, and elsewhere, are seeing the rise of a new kind of anti-intellectualism. A second coming of the Dark Ages.

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Hey people who are surprised at Mayor Rob Ford’s behaviour now that he’s in office: You voted for him!

The big news in the Big Smoke the past couple of weeks has been Mayor Rob Ford. But it’s not what the mayor’s doing, actually, but what he’s not doing that’s been making headlines.

Rob Ford was the candidate who ran on a platform of stopping the gravy train (toot! toot!), cutting waste in Toronto’s municipal government (slash! slash!), and the promise to answer every single phone call and e-mail he received to his office once he became mayor (huh?).

Right, it can’t be done. And you’re surprised he isn’t doing it?

What’s worse though is that Mayor Ford isn’t just reneging on his campaign promises (which is to be expected) he’s actually going even further to avoid the public.

Ford, now carefully controlled by his Public Relations wing, isn’t even taking questions from the media anymore. In his only appearance for the Canadian media this week, in a photo-op promoting his new anti-graffiti campaign, Ford wouldn’t answer questions about the federal election, the TTC, Toronto Community Housing, or his cost-cutting measures. Despite numerous controversial issues unfolding at City Hall, Ford refused to say a word. Talking to CBC Radio, he explained that he talks about what he wants, when he wants.

In a democracy? Really?

More over, according to journalists, Mayor Rob Ford’s daily itinerary, which you’d think would be publicly available as mayor of Toronto, can only be obtained through a lengthy Freedom of Information request. Seriously, the mayor of Toronto doesn’t release his public schedule unless you legally require him to. Talk about tight control.

And the thing is, there are issues that Rob Ford needs to be held accountable for. Like appointing former transition team members to prominent city jobs. One, to the position of sole head of the Toronto Community Housing Corporation. Another, as a private consultant on the new transit plan.

Other issues exist too that you would think warrant comment from the city’s mayor. The selling off of Toronto Community Housing rental units and resources despite long waiting lists to get into those same units, for one thing. Funding for Ford’s revised transit plan including finding billions of dollars worth of investment and the expense of canceling all those contracts (pegged at at least $64 million last time I heard), for another.

But Rob Ford is, apparently, accountable to no one—despite his promises.

Instead, he’s blown through the surpluses left behind by Mayor David Miller. He’s quashed that mayor’s transit plan which would’ve seen an expanded, more accessible transit system serving more neighbourhoods and people across the city. He’s facing an upcoming fight with the unions, a subway system that he can’t cost for, and a record deficit next year. He’s freezing property taxes, he’s cut the vehicle registration tax, and he’s got no real plan for recouping that money, or for making up for the city’s shortfalls in the next budget.

Through it all, however, he keeps on smiling, and laughing—just don’t ask him why, he’ll likely have no comment. Should we be surprised though? I don’t think so… and you vote for him!

So the Toronto Mayoral Election has dissolved into a contest between a wife-beating racist drunk and a high school drop-out who bled the Ontario taxpayers for a billion dollars. That is, I guess, to put it as bleakly as possible.

With no one of any real interest in the mayoral race it’s become, as with many contests in Canadian politics, a matter of a vote against instead of a vote for. Since only the criminally insane want Rob Ford for mayor—and those criminally insane, strangely enough, make up a significant portion of the city—everyone else is left voting, strategically, against a Rob Ford win. That means that everyone else has to vote for the person in second, George Smitherman, in an attempt to catapult him into first place and prevent a Rob Ford victory. But it means that voters, if they really want a say, can’t vote for their favourite candidate. A vote for Sarah Thompson or Rocco Rossi, if they were still in the race, would be a wasted vote. Both candidates stepped down because they knew that, because they knew they’d split the vote and it would mean a Rob Ford win.

In our first-passed-the-post system it’s winner takes all, even if that winner only takes a slim percentage of the overall vote. As the polls sit now, Rob Ford could win the seat for mayor of Toronto with only 25% as long as he had more of a percentage than anyone else. Indeed, much of the election talk these days has migrated from “who do you want to win?” to a question of “who do you not want to win?” as voters are driven not to elect who they think would serve our city best, but who they think can slip passed Rob Ford to capture the most votes overall, and win.

This kind of a situation highlights the weaknesses in our aging political system and it’s clear that frustration is building.

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So it seems that Furious George Smitherman is beginning to gain in the polls against Rowdy Rob Ford. The Toronto Mayoral election is turning, as they say, into a real horse race.

I mused here about the dangers of Rob Ford’s Toronto, and of the necessity for the other candidates—who were splitting the non-conservative vote between themselves—to band together behind one winning candidate to successfully challenge Ford. Well, we’re beginning to see this kind of challenge take shape. Yesterday, Sarah Thomson, the last-place candidate in the polls, decided to step aside and pool her support (and her supporters) behind the Smitherman camp. While it remains to be seen if any of the other candidates will do likewise for now there is, perhaps, a more pressing question to ask.

Do we really want Smitherman for mayor?

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Last week I had the absolute pleasure of spotting none other than Rob Ford, driving up Islington in a giant campaign-coloured RV. “He’s probably mowing down cyclists as he goes,” Maria said when I told her about it later. It was a brief and surreal event that’s haunted me since, much like the time I shook the hand of Stephen Harper and looked into those deep blue eyes of his. I knew not then what he was capable of. We do know a thing or two about Rob Ford though.

For a city coloured amongst the more liberal locations in the country I was surprised, upon moving to Toronto, to discover that the front-runner in the race for mayor is a right-wing lunatic. (To put it lightly, Rob Ford is nuts.)

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