A new radio show hosted by the mayor and his brother may offer our first off-the-cuff look at Rob in a long time. Whether that's good news for him is questionable.
So Rob and Doug Ford are going to have a radio show. Starting at 1 p.m. this Sunday on CFRB 1010, the mayoral family will be hosting a two-hour talk show where, in Doug’s words, “you’re going to get the straight goods… from Rob and I. You aren’t going to have the media twisting it around like they’ve been twisting it around for the last year and a half.” It’s not entirely clear to me whether this will be a good thing for the brothers Ford. As Doug said in the same breath, “It’s going to be controversial at times.”
Indeed, it’s already controversial, at least in my Twitter feed of Toronto political junkies and raving leftist conspiracists. The propriety of an elected official having an open propaganda forum on a news radio station is questionable, some say, though David Miller and Adam Giambrone and Josh Matlow all had radio or TV shows. And what of poor displaced councillor-host Matlow’s feelings, others ask, or I imagine they do, quietly, while making snarky remarks about never having seen him offer no comment before.
Whatever the ethics or advisability of the Ford show for the radio station, though, it is bound to also be interesting and controversial—perhaps refreshingly so—for listeners and followers of Toronto politics who wonder exactly what the heck is going on in the mayor’s head. It’s been a long time since we got a full-blast dose of Rambling Rob. Once upon a time, Rob Ford was famous his red-faced, unhinged rants on confusing sexuality, disease prevention, multiculturalism and, of course, government ethics and spending.
But as he ran for mayor, these rants became less frequent. Sure, we’d still hear a surreptitiously recorded conversation about scoring prescription drugs on the street now and then, or the odd outright lie memory lapse about his personal history. But compared to the Ford of old, candidate Ford was a message-discipline machine, robotically repeating the phrases “Gravy Train” and “Respect for Taxpayers” no matter what the scenario, or occasionally carefully reading scripted notes when he had to say more.
Nick Kouvalis, the pollster and strategist who ran the Ford for mayor campaign, bragged shortly after the election that shutting up the brothers Ford was one of his key accomplishments:
“Yet it wasn’t just anger that propelled Ford to victory—it was Kouvalis’s masterful campaign and his tough-as-nails control of the Fords. ‘No one’s ever stood up to these guys before,’ Kouvalis told Maclean’s. ‘I did.’ … Kouvalis rehearsed his candidate hard for the 100-plus debates the candidates lumbered through over these last nine months. Quick to anger, Ford could lose his cool. Kouvalis practised his candidate, picking at his sensitivities—for example, Doug Ford Sr., his father, a former Mike Harris provincial Tory who died in 2006—over and over again like he was picking at a scab. Ford was all focus throughout the campaign as a result.”
And if he had seemed tamed on the campaign trail, the management of his public comments since then has made that period seem like the straight-talk express. Since virtually the day after he was elected—or less than a day after, since his controversial and somewhat dismissive performance on CBC Radio ran less than 24 hours after the election ended—the mayor has rarely opened up in public. He almost never speaks at city council meetings except when delivering a speech to open the meetings. If he speaks to an item, he has to take questions on it from councillors, so he’s largely avoided that rage trap. When he’s asked any question that might seem remotely controversial, he clams up.
Or often, he just repeats his same talking point whether it addresses the question or not—I helped arrange a transcript of one of his scrums into a poem recently because I was struck by the bull-headed beauty of his non-responsive repetition. His former advisor, Adrienne Batra, was quick to unceremoniously bat down any question that threatened to force Rob to respond off-the-cuff, even once famously waving in front of TV camera and childishly talking over the audio in an attempt to make the footage useless. And just as the words “that meeting was irrelevant” slipped out of his mouth after a recent council vote, his new communications director attempted to shut the show down to taunting from nearby councillors.
Of course, we have had outrageous Ford communication controversies, but they mostly come in the form of leaks from his informal moments. He talks on the phone while driving, allegedly gives the finger to those who mock him, swears at 911 operators… he is a talking sideshow, but his advisors have helped him keep the circus that occurs when he thinks out loud from appearing in official places.
Doug Ford? Well, he has helped pick up the slack somewhat. He’s shown on several occasions that he can ramp up the nutso as effectively as his brother used to, and when questioning outgoing TTC GM Gary Webster at a recent city council meeting, he also unlocked the famous Ford rage.
And now we’re going to get two hours of the brothers on the radio every week, presumably unsupervised (it’s hard to imagine mayoral advisors in the studio cutting off the Ford brothers’ microphones when they go off script). And that may be a good thing. I expect Rob himself is certain this will pay off and put him back on track to controlling the agenda again—it was his direct contact with voters on the phone and in person, and his weekly appearances on a radio show as a council crank, that built his popularity in the first place. And he may be right: Perhaps oddly, Ford in the past has seemed most sympathetic to voters when he has appeared to be most like Homer Simpson.
But it may not be the worst thing for the city’s political conversation to be able to eavesdrop on the Ford brothers speaking off the cuff and—one hopes—taking calls from those who raise complicated points or challenge them. Given the freedom to express himself, the mayor will give listeners a chance to evaluate what he is saying on its merits. He’ll finally be free to express himself and his vision, and with all that airtime to fill, there will be no excuse for him not to explore whatever nuance he sees in the topic. It may be a chance for him and his brother to display unsuspected depth. It may be, instead, a place to let their ignorance and belligerence become transparent for what it is—”just the right length of rope to let them hang themselves,” as Anthony Oliveria put it. But certainly they will have an audience of both supporters and detractors hungry to hear them expound, and analyze and dissect their performance and arguments afterwards. It’ll be a refreshing bit of freedom to witness the brothers Ford free-associate.
And that’s probably a good thing. It’s hard to have a debate when one side relies exclusively on canned slogans and backroom political maneuvering. Good, bad and ugly, we’ll actually get a chance to hear what they mayor thinks rather than hear him read a script one of his advisors has given him. That may confirm the hopes of his boosters and the fears of his critics, or it may sometimes surprise both listeners and his staff. If the mayor’s side of Toronto’s many open arguments has any substance or depth at all—or if it doesn’t—we’ll soon know. The city deserves to have some idea that the mayor is aware of what the issues facing the city are, and to know what he thinks about them, if he thinks about them at all. And starting Sunday, we may finally get that chance. And if nothing else, it’s likely to be an entertaining sideshow.
