Toronto Mayor Rob Ford

Media mavens and politicians around the globe are surely watching with fascination the groundbreaking approach to managing news coverage now being pioneered by the mayor of Canada’s largest city.

We speak, of course, of the gambit by Toronto’s slapstick neo-Con mayor, Rob Ford, to refuse public documents to the Toronto Star, thus depriving the country’s historically most-aggressive daily newspaper of such important scoops as canned complaints by city officials about Occupy Toronto and a vital report on progress repairing potholes.

Now, I have to pause for a moment to explain why I’m rather fond of Mayor Ford.

First, he is proof that Alberta is not the only place in Canada that elects politicians with the potential to become national embarrassments. This makes it harder for the big city media to break out the banjos and start plinking out Yankee Doodle in two parts whenever the topic of my home province comes up, which can be embarrassing, all the more excruciatingly so because it seems justified at times.

Second, because for all the damage he has inflicted and surely will inflict on metro Toronto, Ford is enough of a buffoon that every time he opens his mouth he provides what is known as a “teaching moment” to the good people of that city and the rest of us about what neo-Cons really stand for and what happens when you elect them. So it is not in every way a bad thing when the Canadian answer to the Big Apple (the Somewhat Sizeable Prune?) elects a hillbilly mayor who climbs into a cage to do battle with the country’s largest metropolitan daily.

The story, for those of you out here in the West who have missed it so far, has to do with a report in the Star written when His Worship was just an oversize neo-Con goon, still running for his current job. The Star made allegations about the then-pre-mayor’s aggressive style at a high school football game in which he was coaching. Mayor Ford denies the allegations; the Star stands by them.

His Worsh was so furious about this report that he threatened to sue the Star for defamation. However, for some reason, he decided not to proceed through the courts. Who knows? Ford seems like an impatient man and perhaps legal action just takes too long. Whatever…

Instead, he announced there would be no press releases, or anything else, sent to the Star until that august journal prints a front-page apology for the 2010 story. So no hiding it on Page 2, you media weasels! However, one suspects the Star’s actual sin was not the coaching story so much as its failure to reliably support the neo-Con candidate in Toronto’s 2010 civic election, unlike the usual suspects in the corporate media.

Additionally, Mayor Ford — who has apparently concluded that la cite, c’est moi, although likely not in those words — has called for a boycott of the Star.

This idea seems to be supported by plenty of neo-Con boobs in Toronto’s suburban sticks, judging from the Star’s comments section. Leastways, as of last evening, there were 1,153 comments on the paper’s website story, with Ford ally Stephen Harper’s Online Tory Rage Machine in full rhetorical flight and the paper’s defenders for once giving as good as they get. The tone can only be described as intemperate.

Apparently in an effort to rub salt in the Star’s wounds for missing the story about the pothole report, Ford has also called on the good people of Toronto to read the largely fact-free Toronto Sun — which happily serves the role of Pravda for both his and the prime minister’s offices. The sun is a newspaper that stands accused of racism, sexism, homophobia, jingoism and just making it up as it goes along.

Since an apparently roughly equal number of Torontonians support the Star as support the mayor’s boycott idea, one suspects the Star’s circulation is likely to increase as a result of this highly entertaining brouhaha.

For its part, the Star says it will file a complaint with the city’s integrity commissioner over the polarizing mayor’s refusal to alert the paper about his schedule and his public statements.

Of course, you have to know that the famously aggressive Star — the paper that discovered Gerda Munsinger (Who she? — ed.) in her hiding place, for heaven’s sake! — is going to do more than file a complaint with the office of the ethics commissioner. The paper’s still large and highly competent staff will be ferociously digging into the affairs of the mayor, his family and his political allies for dirt, ridiculous remarks (of which there is bound to be no shortage) and anything else they can heave at him.

Case in point: the weekend’s Star scoop about an idiotic suggestion by Mayor Ford’s brother Doug, who is a Toronto city councillor, that Toronto schools tap into the community service expertise of the Ultimate Fighting Championship mixed martial arts league. UFC, the Star solemnly pointed out in a story that has been atop its website for two days, “has become notorious for its brutal, bloody, no-holds barred fighting. Mixed martial arts events were banned in Ontario until this year.” Oh, and by the way, the paper added in the next sentence, Ontario’s just announced anti-bullying legislation “seeks to curb aggressive behaviour in Ontario schools.”

Once upon a time, this kind of thing might have bounced off Mayor Ford, and, who knows, maybe it still will. But one suspects it will have more impact now that his support in public opinion seems to be, in the Star’s felicitous phrase, “dropping like a rock.” No doubt this is why the Ford Bros. are working hard to provoke a citywide strike by civic employees that they can try to play to their advantage in public opinion.

Nevertheless, one simply can’t shake the feeling this going to end badly, and very publicly, for his Worship.

This post also appears on David Climenhaga’s blog, Alberta Diary.

David J. Climenhaga

David J. Climenhaga

David Climenhaga is a journalist and trade union communicator who has worked in senior writing and editing positions with the Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald. He left journalism after the strike...