At the very end of last month, Rob Ford had a problem. New revelations were breaking almost daily in the ongoing crack and drug scandal tied to the mayor and his family, and the press was hounding him for a detailed response he refused to give. So as long as they were all standing around waiting to broadcast anything he said or did live on TV, he’d use them to change the topic.

On May 31, he kicked off this strategy by giving a long speech about the Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC). He recounted the details—$1,000 chocolates! Spa days!—of a two-year-old spending scandal. “I moved quickly and decisively to clean up this disgraceful mess,” he said, to emphasize what he considered an important policy success story. “Folks, I am so proud to stand before you today and tell you that we have turned the corner at Toronto Community Housing.” Then, in a scene that’s now become somewhat infamous, he greeted all questions about the drug scandal by asking, “Anything else?”

Well, there was something else, it turns out. One week later, Toronto’s ombudsman, Fiona Crean, issued a shocking report detailing some ways in which the TCHC has decidedly not turned a corner. Her report dealt with the evictions of senior citizens, many of them suffering from mental health problems. In case after case, Crean enumerated how people were thrown into the street or the shelter system with little or inadequate notice and no personal contact.

One developmentally disabled tenant was wrongly evicted after 30 years at TCHC and continued trying to pay off her rental arrears while living in a homeless shelter. When an 88-year-old man disappeared, staff declared his unit abandoned and then continued to withdraw payments from his bank account for months without trying to find out what had happened to him. Still another tenant saw his balance owing jump from $45 to $3,000 because of a paperwork error. He died of a heart attack in hospital weeks after being evicted—and staff continued attempting to collect his outstanding balance for seven months after his death.

Even before the report, everyone acknowledged that the nearly $1-billion repair backlog in city social housing urgently needs to be addressed. Suddenly, we had further evidence of gross mismanagement that ranges in seriousness from callous to life threatening.

In a telling session of city council, Ford attempted to deal with this problem by screaming at the messenger. He said he disagreed with the report, though it soon became clear he hadn’t even read it. He said he wasn’t aware of any problems with seniors being evicted, since no one called his office to complain about it. He added, “I don’t care if you’re two years old, 20 years old, or 200 years old, you’re not going to live for free.” And then, in a sputtering rage, he accused his council opponents of being “the problem.” He concluded by saying, “Nobody supports Toronto Community Housing more than I do.”

Ford skipped the vote on Crean’s recommendations for improving the eviction process. His brother and his deputy mayor were alone in voting against them.

The same week, Ford’s budget committee met to discuss what to do with the $248-million surplus left over from last year. Some councillors suggested applying it directly to TCHC’s repair backlog, but the committee members refused to consider such a motion, and voted to accept staff’s recommendation that some of the money be used for capital works projects and the rest be squirreled away by topping up the city’s reserve funds.

Toronto continues to be captivated by Ford’s alleged ties to the massive gang-and-murder-related police raid carried out last week. But the mayor’s attempt to turn the focus to a policy issue has shed a different light on the problems Toronto faces under Ford. Because he treats policy issues as personal ones, phone calls to his office are the only evidence he accepts and personal constituent visits from the mayor are the only form of service to residents he considers important.

Meanwhile, real people continue to suffer. Anything else?

Despite refusing to acknowledge the crack scandal that won’t go away and overshadows everything he does, the mayor has been out campaigning for re-election, and it looks like the central plank in his 2014 platform will be a line of billion-dollar BS. That is, Mayor Rob Ford and his brother Doug have been proudly, repeatedly claiming that he’s “saved” taxpayers in Toronto $1 billion since he got elected. It’s a lie. A bald-faced, outright lie that he seems to think he can get away with by simply repeating it again and again. Here’s the truth: Torontonians are paying more today in taxes and fees than they were on the day Ford was elected. And the city is now spending more on programs and services than it was under David Miller. There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of that, except that Ford is claiming the opposite.

So what about that billion-dollar boast? For weeks now, people have been scratching their heads trying to figure out how he came up with the number. Finally, this past weekend, he offered some math on his radio show—and relayed it on Twitter via his communications assistant Amin Massoudi—but his numbers do nothing to help make the case. Ford counts user-fee decreases as a savings, and then counts user-fee increases as a savings, too. He selectively tallies some labour deals for $89 million in savings, but doesn’t mention the $27-million-per-year cost of his banner raise to police officers nor the tens of million more that TTC workers will get as a direct result of his plan to make the TTC an essential service. He counts savings from office-expense budgets but doesn’t mention increased costs in other areas. In essence, he’s just pulled a bunch of unrelated and sometimes contrasting numbers from the budget and added them together to make $1 billion.

But the line items he cites and the ones he doesn’t cite are just noise. If we’re talking about cutting spending, the total budget is what matters, and that’s gone up. In 2010, when Ford was elected, the city’s gross operating budget was $9.214 billion. In 2013, it was $9.433 billion. The budget—the amount of taxpayer dollars being spent—has increased by $219 million.*

If, instead, we wanted to talk about saving taxpayers money, we could look at tax and fee rates. The only number on Ford’s list that would actually be useful in a claim he’s “saved” taxpayers money is the $200 million over four years from ending the vehicle registration tax—that’s the only money that people could notice by looking at their bank account. Ford cut that fee, but since then he’s upped all kinds of others to more than make up the revenue: City finance staff estimated in 2012 that new and increased user fees implemented in Ford’s budgets would cost taxpayers more than $20 million a year. TTC fare hikes of five and 10 cents over two years cost taxpayers who take transit an additional $45 million dollars per year combined. So Rob Ford cut the fee for driving a car by about $50 million per year, then raised fees for parents using parks facilities and people riding subways, among other things, by $65 million a year. Total net cost to “the taxpayer”—since Ford insists there is only one—is $15 million per year. He also raised property taxes, which are about $179 million more in 2013 than they were in 2010.

I’ve already heard and read plenty of people parroting Rob Ford’s entirely fictional claim—just as they repeated his imaginary claims about a gravy train wasting billions of dollars last time around. It was hard to counter the waste rhetoric because it was so unspecific, but because he’s shown his math this time, we can see he’s failing at basic arithmetic.

To recap: The city’s surplus this year is smaller than Miller’s was in 2010. City spending has gone up about $200 million per year under Ford, and he’s increased the taxes and fees Torontonians pay to the city by about $200 million per year as well. We can debate whether taxes and spending could have or should have gone up more, and we can debate whether this is the best way to measure the city’s health. But there’s really no debate about one thing: Ford’s billion-dollar boast is a flat-out lie.

BUDGET SURPLUSES, BY YEAR

MAYOR MILLER

2006: $93.6 million

2007: $95 million

2008: $88 million

2009: $354.8 million

2010: $367 million

MAYOR FORD

2011: $292 million

2012: $248 million

CORRECTION, JUNE 14, 2013: An earlier version of this article stated the 2013 gross operating budget was $9.405 billion, an increase of $191 million since 2010. This was actually the budget from 2012. The correct rounded budget number for 2013 has been inserted, and the subsequent math corrected. We regret the error.

As a rule, people aren’t interested in talking about reforming democracy or government—hey, stay awake!—unless they think that doing so will rig the system in favour of candidates they like. But spiteful democratic reform is worse than a weak-sauce argument—it’s a corruption of the very concept of democracy.

And yet we hear it again and again. We hear it in the service of good ideas, like the ranked balloting proposal that’s coming to city council next week (many argue that without vote-splitting, Rob Ford might never have won). And it comes up as support for bad ideas, like when Rob and Doug Ford promise to cut the number of councillors in Toronto (and spend radio airtime fantasizing about the Gord Perks vs. Sarah Doucette and Adam Vaughan vs. Mike Layton battles that would result).

But the place you hear it the loudest these days is in the vocal downtown sovereigntist movement that’s been swelling (again) since the most recent Ford scandal broke—where folks are suggesting de-amalgamating the former municipalities of Metropolitan Toronto. The preamble to this manifesto proclaims that the Ford brothers were foisted on the Real City of Toronto by a bunch of selfish rubes from Scarborough, North York, York, East York, and Etobicoke. The proposed solution, then, is to let Ford Nation go ahead and govern itself while the grown-ups of Bay Street, Queen Street, and U of T get on with building Torontopia.

Of course, they’re right that amalgamation itself was a mistake. But they’re wrong to think we can, or should, try to undo it 15 years later.

First of all, the daiquiri’s already been blended, and trying to unmerge the constituent ingredients would be an administrative nightmare. Second, the big issues that most frustrate the city—transit and transportation, policing, affordable housing—would still need to be managed across the region by a larger body, just as the big issues were managed by Metro before amalgamation. Which means that a suburban majority on the regional council would still outgun the downtown on almost all the really important issues.

Third, and maybe most interestingly, is that if separating downtown were possible, it would still be entirely selfish and irresponsible. A growing majority of the most troubled neighbourhoods in Toronto are in the suburban areas, mainly because those are increasingly the more affordable parts of Toronto. The proposal to erect a political wall has the whiff of white flight: The wards that Ford carried in the last election are places where ethnic “visible minorities” are an actual majority, while the downtown is more than 70 per cent white. All 13 of the city’s “priority neighbourhoods” are in the inner suburbs, where the average income is 30 per cent lower than in the old City of Toronto. So be careful how you discuss “these people” screwing up Toronto politics: De-amalgamation looks a lot like segregation by ethnicity and wealth.

Of course, the suburbs are also the places where transit sucks, where riding a bike is difficult and where old highrise tower neighbourhoods are crumbling. If those areas are voting for people like Rob Ford, a good democratic approach might be to ask them why, instead of threatening them with exile.

There are governance changes we can and should make to ensure better local democracy in Toronto: entrusting more local-issue decision-making and spending power to the ward or neighbourhood level might be a start. And, yes, that ranked balloting idea should be adopted either way, because it would ensure a majority of citizens choose whoever wins.

As for Ford’s suggestion of cutting the size of city council? Without other dramatic changes, it would just make government less responsive and more alienating for citizens—his supporters included. That makes perfect sense, since by now it’s entirely clear that Ford himself is a significant hindrance to good government in Toronto. But remedying that problem doesn’t involve thinking of ways to reform the democratic system—it simply involves using the democratic system we have to defeat him at the ballot box.

The Rob Ford follies long ago took over pretty much my full-time workday—the breadth and importance and sheer volume of the mayor’s political and personal ups, downs, and even-further-downs squeezing out most other topics I’d like to write about. This isn’t ideal, but it has kept a roof over my kids’ heads, so who am I to complain? I think of it as “Fordlandia”—more a state of mind than a place, where every minute of every day something even more absurd will happen, and the apparently obvious consequences of that absurdity will never appear to arrive.

But now Fordlandia has grown, expanding like a fog to envelop not just my work day and the business at City Hall, but almost every aspect of city life. I go to the grocery store and people are gossiping about how Gawker’s “Crackstarter” campaign has reached its $200,000 goal. I sit in the bleachers at my kid’s t-ball game and those beside me share stories about growing up in Etobicoke in response to The Globe’s allegations about Doug Ford’s high-school drug dealing past. I turn on late-night TV to unwind and laugh, and find that the subject of the jokes is this place in which I live.

“Business as usual,” says the mayor when he stands up in front of reporters to address the fact that two members of his senior staff are reported to have resigned on principle because of a speech he gave denying the existence of a video that other members of his staff claim may be connected to a serious crime. Channelling Sheryl Crow, he adds, “Everything is fine.”

In reality, we are pretty Fording far from fine. And making things worse, there seems to be no way we can emerge from the eye of this tornado until the Ford weather system itself dissipates entirely.

Worrying that this is all a distraction from the city’s real, pressing business has become the thing to do—I’ve done it myself, in a series of pieces over the past weeks and months. But looking frankly at the amassing evidence—I assume even more will emerge between the time I write this and the time you read it, since every hour brings new information of unprecedented shock value—it’s impossible to deny that this Ford fiasco is a pressing piece of real city business.

When the mayor is denying the existence of a video that allegedly shows him smoking crack, even as his most senior advisors are talking about the location of the video and whether they should try to get it, then talking to the police about how it may or may not possibly be connected to a murder, I think that the city has a legitimate leadership question on its hands. When three quarters of his senior staff leave his office over the matter, we have to be seriously concerned about who is running this ship. As journalist John Lorinc has asked, who will steer the city if, god forbid, there is a sudden natural disaster or terrorist attack or other civic crisis? We don’t know, because the man whose job it would be is already in the midst of an ever-worsening crisis. Toronto-based consultant James Aldersley reports he’s been asked to brief a U.S. hedge fund that is revising its stability assessment of the city in light of this scandal. We are beyond personal business here. We are in a governance crisis.

Of course, there is a base of Ford supporters—a large one, maybe 25 per cent of voters—who will never think any of this is the mayor’s fault. They will, in fact, believe the Ford brothers’ claims that every element of the story is fabricated from whole cloth by a conspiracy of media maggots and establishmentarian elitists who do not like their tax-cutting ways. But believing that now requires the conviction that the conspiracy includes the entire staffs of the Toronto Star, CBC, The Globe and Mail, Toronto Sun, and Gawker, as well as Ford’s former staff members, and also stretches to include members of the Toronto Police Service. Either they are all lying or the Ford brothers are. No matter, Rob Ford soldiers on, claiming to be undaunted. “Everything is fine!”

Maybe to Ford it looks fine—a simple extension of the controversies that have followed his entire career. But throughout them all, an inability to acknowledge the truth and act on it has defined Ford’s mayoralty. “Business as usual.” God help us all, he’s right about that.

This week, city council had to deal with two large pieces of business: one issue of substance and one issue of alleged substance abuse. The former—the decision at a special council meeting to forbid any new or expanded gambling operations in Toronto—was completely overshadowed by the latter. And that points to an ongoing crisis of leadership at the top of Toronto’s government that is only getting worse with each passing week.

By the time the two issues converged on Tuesday, the story of the explosive drug allegations about Mayor Rob Ford was so familiar it became all-consuming. On May 16, the U.S. website Gawker and the Toronto Star both wrote that their reporters had seen a video, shown to them by self-professed drug dealers, that appeared to show Ford smoking from a crack pipe while making homophobic and racially derogatory remarks. The news had been everywhere—and a crowd-funding effort to raise the money to buy the video and make it public had already raised over $90,000.

Meanwhile, the mayor had barely addressed the charge, other than to briefly call it “ridiculous.” He’d cancelled his radio show, and refused all interviews since the story came up. So, four and a half days later, when he stood to make a speech about the casino before council, few were even paying attention, because they wanted answers about his alleged crack use that he wouldn’t provide.

At that point, Ford’s failure—his refusal, actually—to deal with or even specifically deny the bluntly stated allegation that he has, within the past six months, smoked crack cocaine in the company of drug dealers, was a shock to the city. But perhaps it shouldn’t have been: Ford’s entire career has been one long series of bitter arguments following outrageous charges about his personal behaviour. Was he or was he not arrested for pot possession and for driving drunk? Did he or did he not give the finger to a schoolgirl, or read while driving on the highway, or drunkenly berate strangers at a Leafs game? Did he grope Sarah Thomson? Every week seems to bring a new crazy story about the mayor’s comportment. In some cases he has made denials that later proved to be lies. In some cases he has admitted wrongdoing. In some cases he has flatly denied the charges, and in the absence of evidence, the news value of the controversy fades, especially when the next one arises.

One problem now is that Ford is the mayor who cried wolf—so many denials have turned out to be false, and so many others linger in the background, that our impulse is to believe whatever we hear. (The idea, put forward by his dwindling band of supporters, that this is all a plot hatched in Toronto Star headquarters, only rings hollow.) Can we believe this guy about anything? And when he stays silent for days instead of saying anything at all about the most potentially damaging story of his career, what are we supposed to think?

Which leads to the more general problem: This parade of sideshows that has long dominated City Hall has now taken over entirely. Whether or not any of the details of these specific allegations turn out to be true, we know that the next personal controversy is right around the corner. And the city’s business is held hostage to the personal-life crises, real and rumoured, of the mayor.

Only Ford can conclusively end this distraction—he could do himself, his supporters, and the city a great service by stepping down to deal with whatever needs dealing with in his personal life and leaving his political causes under the management of leaders who won’t constantly draw attention from them. But I don’t have very high hopes that he will do that.

Perhaps the best we can hope for is that the mayor remains silent, not just on this issue but on all of them, so that city council can keep its focus on the important business of the city—even as the press was distracted, council voted down Ford’s own motion to kill a downtown casino in favour of approving one from councillor Mike Layton to ban any expansion of gambling in the city. Then voters in the election next year can decide to end the sideshows once and for all.

WHAT ELSE THE $200,000 FROM GAWKER’S CRACKSTARTER CAMPAIGN COULD PAY FOR

1 year-long paid leave for the mayor (his salary is $167,770)

16 “In the Action” season-ticket packages for the Blue Jays ($12,000 each)

7,400 shares of Tumblr-powered Yahoo! ($27 each)

0.03 per cent of the cost of the Ontario government’s cancelled gas plants ($585 million)

100,000 “safe crack use kits” (approximately $2 each)

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As our senior editor Edward Keenan wrote after Rob Ford’s famed 911 call incident in October 2011: “Incivility and unbecoming behaviour are his whole brand.”

In light of the news you might have heard about Toronto’s mayor this morning, we’d just like to present for you again a few memorable incidents in the bizarre, troubled history of the ongoing Rob Ford clown show.

1999: Rob Ford is arrested for failing to take a breathalyzer test after being pulled over, and also charged with possession of marijuana.

2002: Ford refers to Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti as “gino boy.”

2005: Ford calls Councillor Gloria Lindsay Luby a “waste of skin.”

2005: Ford says the following: “No. 1, I don’t understand a transgender, I don’t understand, is it a guy dressed up like a girl or a girl dressed up like a guy? And we’re funding this for, I don’t know, what does it say here?”

2006: Ford says, “If you are not doing needles and you are not gay, you wouldn’t get AIDS probably, that’s bottom line.”

2006: After being thrown out of a hockey game in which Ford berated those sitting nearby, he apologized, claiming he had been drinking and was under a lot of stress.

2008: That time he said “orientals” who “work like dogs” were “taking over.”

2008: Ford is charged with assault and uttering a death threat after a domestic dispute with his wife Renata. Weeks later, the charges were withdrawn.

2010: That time he offered to score a stranger drugs on tape.

2010: Ford endorses anti-gay-marriage pastor Wendell Brereton.

2011: A mother claims Rob Ford gave the finger to her and her six-year-old daughter after they scolded him for talking on his mobile phone while driving. Ford claimed this was “not accurate,” and responded to a television reporter’s question about it with a fit of sustained laughter, ending the interview. Later he clarified that he had been on his mobile phone, but denied making a rude hand gesture.

2011: Ford goes to the cottage instead of the Pride Parade.

2011: The unforgettable 911 call controversy.

2011: The Star reports that the Youth and Family Violence Unit was investigating two domestic disputes at the mayor’s house in two months, including one after his in-laws phoned the police.

2011: Ford draws a complaint from a women’s group after suggesting into a live microphone that he could think of a word that starts with “B” to call a woman speaking before his Executive Committee.

2012: Ford charges at a Star reporter on a parcel of property behind his house.

2012: Ford skips the Pride Parade again.

2012: Rob Ford, “party animal.”

2012: That whole conflict-of-interest thing.

2013: The Star reports Ford was “asked to leave a gala event celebrating the Canadian armed forces last month, because organizers were concerned he was impaired.”

2013: Sarah Thomson alleges Ford grabbed her ass at a party. The night before International Women’s Day.

2013: Ford goes on a “magnet blitz” in a parking lot.

Have we forgotten any of Rob Ford’s many unbecoming incidents? Please let us know in the comments section below.