Blog readers outside Canada, and maybe even those outside Ontario, might be starting to forget about the alleged drug scandal that seemed set to topple Toronto's oafish Mayor, Rob Ford, a few weeks ago. Led by the Toronto Star, the media were trying to track down a video that supposedly showed Ford smoking crack cocaine and uttering a variety of racist and homophobic epithets. That video never did appear, and the scandal fell off the front pages.
However, just as things seemed to be quietening down, Toronto police staged a massive series of dawn raids, known as Project Traveller, that appeared to center on people and homes in some way associated with the mystery video. The press were, naturally, all over this like a rash, but were stymied yet again when police Chief Bill Blair declined to confirm or deny that the Mayor (or the video) was linked to the raids in any way. The Chief argued that any matters related to the raids should only become public at such time as the matter went to trial -- which could be many months hence.
The Toronto Star, in particular, was furious with Chief Blair. The major media outlets then got together to approach the courts to argue that release of the warrants and other materials that enabled the raids to take place was in the public interest. A judge has now ruled that partial versions of these materials should be made available to media lawyers at the end of August, with the Crown prosecutors obliged to provide an explanation of their reasons for any sections they choose to redact.
Begging the Star's pardon, but it's not really difficult to see why the police wanted to keep a lid on things. The Star's relentless lust to be judge and jury on all matters affecting Ford is liable to make it very difficult for the Mayor to get a fair hearing in court, if it ever comes to that.
Back in March, the Star accused Mayor Ford of groping a woman at a function he was attending in his official capacity. Ford denied it vehemently, and there were no witnesses. However, one of the Star's resident harpies, Heather Mallick, penned an absolutely disgraceful article in which she accused Ford and found him guilty as charged. The evidence? The look on the faces of Ford and the gropee in a picture taken at the event, and Mallick's entirely personal view of how the two parties to such an incident would behave.
If the matter had ever come to trial, Ford's defence counsel would have been able to keep any woman who had seen that issue of the paper off the jury. But it never did come to trial: the police have a rather higher evidentiary standard than Heather Mallick does, and it emerged that the gropee had been defeated by Mayor Ford in a couple of elections, raising the possibility that she might have had a hidden agenda. The story sank without trace within a week.
Given the Star's rabid anti-Fordism (the groping story is just the latest among many it has blazoned across the front pages), there can be little doubt that the paper would go completely over the top if it emerged that Ford and the video were connected to the Project Traveller raids. As far as Ford himself goes, that might not matter too much anyway. The main court of opinion for him should be the Toronto electorate: he faces re-election in November 2014. However, the Star's blunderbuss approach might well make it much harder for the police to secure convictions against the dozens of lowlifes and ne'er-do-wells they picked up in the raids, which would be a much more serious matter.
An enduring irony in all this is that Ford's support base actually seems to solidify the more the media attack him. The Mayor is a boor and a fool and he ought by rights to be unelectable, but the Star and the rest of the media might just saddle Toronto with him for a second term.
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