Non-Canadian readers of this blog (you're the majority, by the way) will surely remember Rob Ford, the larger-than-life Mayor of Toronto who was struck down by cancer at an early age. For a foul-mouthed, racist, misogynistic, booze-fueled drug addict, Rob was surprisingly popular with the voters. Even people who deplored everything he stood for would admit that he was impossible to dislike if you met him in person.
During Rob's improbable decade of prominence in Toronto politics, his older brother Doug was always the eminence grise in the background. Doug shares his late brother's right wing populist policy stance, but is nowhere near as likable. The old joke might well apply to him: why do people take an instant dislike to Doug Ford? Because it saves time.
Well, like him or not, Doug Ford is coming back into active politics. He had been planning for some time to take a run at the Toronto mayoralty late this year, but now a bigger opportunity presents itself. Last week, the slightly creepy leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party, Patrick Brown, was felled by a sex scandal. With a provincial election due in June, the party finds itself scrambling to select a new leader, and Doug Ford has thrown his hat into the ring.
Ford launched his campaign on Monday with a press conference held in the basement of his mother's suburban home. (You really couldn't make this up). His pitch to the voters was entirely predictable: the PC party has been captured by "the elites", who don't want Doug in the race, but he's going to take it back from them and return it to the people.
This kind of talk might seem incongruous coming from the mouth of a man who inherited his considerable wealth from his businessman father, but it's an approach that worked for Rob Ford, and of course for Donald Trump. It would be cruel to say that the "elites" Ford is referring to mainly consist of people who can read and write, but it wouldn't be entirely wrong. As with Rob Ford and Trump, the bulk of Doug's support is going to come from the less educated portions of society, the kind of people who think "libtard" is a clever putdown.
It remains to be seen whether the rhetoric and barely-concealed thuggishness that works with "Ford Nation" in Toronto will sell in the rest of the Province. It's possible that the 200,000 PC party members will fancy his chances enough to make him leader, but rather less likely that he can actually win the Provincial election. Then again, much the same was said about Rob Ford when he ran for mayor. In any case, Doug has a ready-made fallback position: since the PC leadership election will be completed by the end of March, and the Provincial election is in mid-June, he can just re-enter the mayoral race if he isn't successful at the higher level.
It will be all Doug Ford, all the time in 2018. Buy a tin hat and cancel your cable TV and internet subscriptions if you want to stay sane.
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