Of Moose and Addicted Men - Toronto’s most colourful mayors
Toronto has been situated on the TV map with February’s launch of Law and Order Toronto: Criminal Intent. Full disclosure - I haven’t seen this show. With the proliferation of streaming services, I don’t have the money or the time to keep up with them all. If it’s not on Netflix, I’m not seeing it. But no Torontonian will have missed the ads or will have been immune to the pride of having at last been recognized by this 30+ year Law and Order phenomenon. Nor can we help being chuffed at having a show filmed here for an American audience where the CN tower has not been judiciously kept out of the frame, for indeed, we are often the filming location for dramas set in New York or Chicago.
Law and Order watchers will know that plots are inspired by real-life newstories and I suppose you cannot really blame the franchise for picking our most famously colourful mayor, the late Rob Ford, as a storyline for the Toronto series, but honestly, can we just drop it?
Ford was a city councillor for a decade before he was elected mayor. As councillor, he was the lone naysayer on many votes. An eccentric with family wealth, he personally covered the costs of many things other councillors put through their office budgets. He railed against a wide range of services he saw as unnecessary costs to the taxpayer. He views seemed so out of step with the mainstream that his 2010 run for mayor seemed a long-shot. With incumbent, progressive mayor, David Miller, not seeking a third term, the serious contender was a provincial Liberal cabinet minister, George Smitherman, who’d been in former Mayor Barbara Hall’s office in the 90s when I worked there. He knew politics and he knew the landscape. The other viable candidate was Joe Pantalone, a long-time left-wing City Councillor. Ford stunned us all, however, with his victory.* Well, obviously he didn’t stun us all, given he won with a large majority. However, many of us cried.
We already knew a thing or two about embarrassing mayors. After Toronto’s 1998 amalgamation with its inner-suburb neighbours, Etobicoke, York, North York, East York, and Scarborough, former North York Mayor, Mel Lastman, rocketed to victory. He did so defeating the very serious, progressive, former lawyer, councillor, and single-term Toronto Mayor, Barbara Hall. Lastman had started his career as as furniture salesman and his Noooobody TV ads had become a Toronto meme long before hogtown became The Six, and long before we knew what a meme was. Lastman’s term provided plenty of chances for us to feel mortification: before a trip to Mombasa in 2001, he joked that he imagined himself “in a pot of boiling water with all these natives dancing around me.” FFS. Another time, he called in the army in a snowstorm. Yes, it was a lot of snow, and yes, Toronto has typically seen snow in the winter, but the army was admittedly a bit of overkill. (the pic below is of me the day the army came - they didn’t come onto my street)
But Mayor Mel’s most significant claim to fame (!?) was his Moose in the City initiative in 2000. Toronto became a moosopolis, with 326 oversized, painted moose dotting Toronto’s landscape, including on the roof of a house in a residential community on Mount Pleasant Ave.** Corporations paid $6,000 for them, artists received $1000 to paint them, and they were sold off at auction. Lastman was roundly criticized for caring more about moose than about serious problems plaguing the city, including homelessness.
But Lastman was just a warmup act for serious Torontonian embarrassment. Not long into Ford’s four year term, we were all stunned with stories about his drug addiction and the events that followed put us on the map in a way we’d sooner have avoided. His appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live was horrifying to anyone who cared about our international reputation, longing for the steady environmental and low-key approach of Ford’s predecessor, David Miller. Even moose were easier to stomach. Kimmel said it all with his intro: “our first guest tonight has tripped, bumped, danced, argued and smoked his way into our national consciousness.” Seriously? His populism though was breathtaking. Wiki says that when his DUI charge was made public, his popularity increased by 10% in the polls.
I have a first-hand taste of the hold Ford had over the public. During the height of the Ford controversy, I arrived home from work one day to find Ford’s trademark black Escalade parked across the street and the mayor himself, his cheeks puffed and red to match his nose, his sausage-cased arms hoisted skyward at the city-owned tree in front of my neighbour’s house. Known as a politician who dealt with all calls personally, he was investigating a complaint he’d had about the willow weeping over the stop sign, creating an unsafe intersection. His heightened state was clearly fuelled by a few “cold ones.” Equally clearly, he’d driven himself there. His presence had attracted our local MP, Mike Sullivan, who lived a few houses up the street. Commuters pulled over to high five Ford, including a police cruiser, but no-one gave Sullivan more than a polite nod. This was Ford Nation at its height. I felt like vomiting.
So I guess it’s no shock that Law and Order Toronto features a crack-smoking mayor storyline.
But oh it is so, so disappointing.
* I still enjoy my Ford, Pantalone, and Miller handmade finger puppets from “The Political Circus,” each with a card noting “Each mayoral candidate is handmade in Ottawa. Their heads are filled with polyester stuffing.”
** I recently found a collection of photos my fellow-Torontonian sister, Judith, gave me years ago documenting this playful and slightly bizarre development in an otherwise sensible city. We were all secretly kind of fascinated by it, notwithstanding those valid concerns that Lastman was distracting us from the real urban issues that were brewing. Most moose are long gone but there’s one at Bayview and Moore Park and another on top of a mechanic’s shop on Scarlett Road not far from where I live. If you know of others, please let me know!
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