Rob Ford didn’t have the best first year in the history of Canadian mayors. There’s a decent chance his second will work out much more in his favour though. Much depends on how he handles the opportunity, but the opportunity is there, as the stars in the political galaxy have been shifting into a much-more Ford-friendly alignment.
Mr. Ford spent much of his first year engaged in gaffes and battles, many of them unnecessary. Keen on putting his cost-cutting agenda into place, he and brother Doug approached the mayoralty like two guys with a steamroller in a field of ripe pumpkins. They could hardly wait to send juice flying in every direction.
This didn’t always work out for the best. Brother Doug tried to go mano-a-mano with Margaret Atwood and discovered it’s harder to kayo a curly-haired septuagenarian novelist than you might imagine. It was also rudely brought to his attention that not all Torontonians consider a huge freaking mall with a giant ferris wheel to be the quintessence of modern urban design. The mayor left his home one morning to discover a CBC valkyrie with a plastic sword on his driveway, and didn’t handle it with the greatest of tact.
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