“There were only two rules in my company. The first: The customer is always right. The second: The customer is always right. In politics, one must have the same approach.” Rob Ford has no doubt: the honeymoon with voters is destined to last to Oct. 25.
According to polls, that will be the day Toronto definitively turns a page and crowns the Etobicoke North city councillor as successor to David Miller. After a quiet start – when many simply considered him a flag-bearing candidate covering that centre-right political area monopolized by Giorgio Mammolito – Ford has managed to carve out a consensus.
Then, in the next part of the mayorship campaign, he caught up to front-runner George Smitherman, and has now become the man to beat. Controversial, harsh, and blunt, the Ward 2 councillor has dominated political challenges in Toronto the past few weeks, has dictated the terms of debates, and has thrown hot issues out onto the table, identifying the electorate’s open wounds on more than one occasion.
There is just one rallying cry: turn a new page and archive for once and for all the seven years of the Miller administration, putting a definitive end to the era of “political correctness” at City Hall: enough with the words and proclamations and the great intentions. What is needed at the Megacity – this is Ford’s argument – is action, damningly concrete and objective action.
With “Toronto Inc.”, the client-voter is never right, being forced to suffer daily from an ineffective, wasteful, self-absorbed political class that is unable to respond positively to the needs of citizens. Ford based his election platform on this basic issue – and with this as starting point, the Etobicoke North candidate leads the mayorship race.
“We have a serious problem at City Hall,” Ford tells Corriere Canadese/Tandem, “that of spending. We city councillors, along with our lavish salaries, have a $53,000 expense account – taxpayer money that is throw into the wind each year, spent on partying, limousines and French courses. All this has to end. In my election platform, I proposed to cut these uncontrolled expenses, because all the councillors with the exception of Douglas Holyday, Frances Nunziata, and the undersigned, have squandered this money without justification.”

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