By Nathaniel Moher
There’s been a lot of talk about Toronto Mayor Rob Ford as of late. Yes, he smokes crack. Yes, he gets so drunk sometimes he smokes crack. And yes, he’s got “enough to eat at home.” But I think the main point that everyone is missing, is how easy it apparently is to run the city of Toronto.
As most of you know, I like to have a little drink now and . . . now (I’m on my third bottle of Jim Beam this morning). I mean, the whole reason I became a writer was because it was much easier to stumble from my bedroom to my desk than it was to try and stumble to my car and then . . . what’s the nice way of saying “drive drunk”? But, now that I know that you can get into drunken stupors, or drink and drive, and still be Mayor of Toronto, well sign me up for the next election.
I mean, I would have thought that, at the very least, being a guy who gets so drunk that he can’t remember whether or not he smoked crack would have some sort of negative effect on running a major city, but apparently I was wrong. Apparently running the city of Toronto is so easy, that even a guy who can’t remember if he smoked crack, because he was just so damned drunk, can do it.
Even better, you don’t have to be consistent in what you believe. Like Ford, for instance, you could be the tough on drugs, “I support the police” mayor, and the whole time you’re doing drugs and refusing to talk to the police after they figure out that you smoke crack.
Which to me means you can just say whatever you think the people of Toronto want to hear, and then do the exact opposite, if it gets in the way of what you want to do (which, in Rob Ford’s case, is to smoke crack and then not talk to the police about it).
But the icing on the cake (or in Ford’s case, the cocaine sprinkled on top of the crack he’s about to smoke — I don’t know if that’s a thing, because unlike Rob Ford, I don’t smoke crack), is that once all this comes out, once the world finds out that you’re a man who gets so drunk you black out and smoke crack, you still get to be Mayor! And even better, City Council will strip you of all your responsibilities! So you still get to be mayor, but you don’t have to do anything. (It’s the closet Ford will get to being appointed to the Canadian Senate . . . until of course, Harps appoints him to the Canadian Senate. At which point, Ford can then just use taxpayer money to buy his crack.)
If you thought it was easy for Ford to be in a drunken stupor and smoke crack when he actually had responsibilities as mayor, just think about how easy it will be for him now that he has no responsibilities.
And I think it’s a wonderful revelation that running the city of Toronto is so easy that even a man who get blackout drunk and smokes crack can do it. Not only are there a lot of kids out there who were probably worried that their own crack smoking would get in the way of achieving their dreams, but there’s a lot of homeless drug addicts out there who need hope that one day they too can perhaps run the fourth largest city in North America.
That, or drunken investigative journalists looking for a new career.
Nathaniel Moher is a television writer living in Vancouver. This column first appeared in The Flying Shingle.
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