What should Toronto do in Rob Ford’s honour?
Rename the Etobicoke Civic Centre after him, as Rebel Media lobbied after the former mayor’s death on Tuesday? Or maybe Mr. Ford’s namesake should be a library, Gay Pride event or bike lane that he opposed, his critics grumbled.
In fact, the one-of-a-kind, one-term mayor already left a legacy – something unique, surprising, and maybe a little underappreciated.
One part of it is Kim McGillivray, who was shopping with her twin sister at a Dixon Road plaza the day of Mr. Ford’s death. The 41-year-olds had never cast a ballot in their lives before they decided to do so in 2010 for his sake.
“I don’t vote. I don’t really get involved in that stuff,” said Ms. McGillivray. “But sometimes you’re just like, ‘You know what? For a couple of these times, we should totally vote for this guy.’”
Toronto’s last two municipal elections saw a huge jump in voter turnout powered partly, especially in 2010, by people who were inspired for the first time ever by a blunt North Etobicoke councillor.
In two such polarizing elections, many people also cast their first ballots to try to keep Mr. Ford out of office. Of the 394,000 additional people who were voting by 2014, compared with 2006, there’s no way to know exactly how many were Ford supporters or opponents. But a slightly disproportionate uptick in the city’s suburbs, his strongholds, suggests he brought many tens of thousands of new participants into the democratic process.
Whether another candidate will ever impress these people again, building on Mr. Ford’s feat – and if so, how – is another question.
“He just always seemed to be speaking the truth,” said Ms. McGillivray.
“He had his own money. He’s not looking for money or fame. This guy didn’t care – clearly,” she said. “He … made a complete asshole of himself on a regular basis. Clearly he didn’t care. He loved politics.”
Ms. McGillivray said she may never vote again. She followed the most recent provincial and federal elections more closely than usual, with a strong dislike for Liberal premier Kathleen Wynne, but to vote she would need to be “gung-ho and all-in,” she said, and no one was quite like Mr. Ford.
No other politicians had ever broken into Ms. McGillivray’s consciousness before 2010, either. But by that year, when Mr. Ford first ran for mayor, they had heard about him from friends and family: how he coached their kids, and about the Fords’ label business, which sometimes sold to the custom framer where Ms. McGillivray worked.
“Rob Ford, you’d see him everywhere. He’d talk to everybody. You could call his cellphone. You could e-mail him,” she said.
“I didn’t want to be one of those ignorant people that just jump on and don’t really know the platforms,” she said. “So this time around, we kind of got a little bit of news, went through the stuff and decided, ‘Hey, you know, for once in our lives we should finally vote.’”
The other thing that brought the Ford family to her attention was all the dark news that surrounded it, including the violence suffered by Mr. Ford’s sister, Kathy, who had fought drug addiction. By election day in 2014, Mr. Ford’s own drug use was common knowledge. But the twins didn’t hesitate to again vote for his brother Doug, who ran in his place after the former mayor was diagnosed with cancer. In a way, the scandals helped motivate them, they said.
“It’s not like every other politician doesn’t drink or smoke weed on the side … people just don’t catch them and videotape them,” said Ms. McGillivray.
Amy Quintero, a 23-year-old employee at a Rogers retail store nearby, said all the criticism heaped on Mr. Ford, and his reputation for bad behaviour, was also why she jumped at the chance to vote for him as soon as she turned 18.
“People had too many negative things to say about him and I just kind of felt the opposite,” she said. “That’s what made me support him.”
She didn’t know about “his plans for the city,” she said.
But she has kept up the habit, voting in the federal election in the fall after paying close attention to the parties’ platforms. The candidate who appealed the most, and who reminded her of Mr. Ford, was Justin Trudeau, she said.
She liked his plans to lower taxes for low-income families and thought he would support immigrants like her parents, but the main draw was a certain approachability.
“I think the [biggest] factor in it is, honestly, their charisma with people,” she said. “With both, you either like them or you don’t.”
Municipal elections have notoriously low turnout. What Toronto has seen in the past decade is very unusual: 39 per cent participation in 2006 rose to 51 per cent in 2010, then again to 55 per cent in 2014, the highest-ever turnout since Toronto amalgamated.
But no studies could have easily predicted Toronto’s about-face. The single biggest factor that drives up municipal voter turnout is an exciting mayoral race, and a strong public dislike for the incumbent helps, said Ryerson University politics professor Myer Siemiatycki.
That helped boost the numbers in 2014, when many of the new voters seemed determined to kick Mr. Ford out of office. But the year of the first major increase, in 2010, there was no incumbent to hate; the numbers seemed to spike dramatically just on the strength of the personalities involved, particularly Mr. Ford, said Daniel Rubenson, also a politics professor at Ryerson.
“That was a special case,” he said.
Toronto’s lowest voter turnout is always in its suburban fringes, but proportionally, suburban voters have recently increased their participation slightly more than urban-dwellers, Mr. Siemiatycki said. That suggests much of the extra voting was for Ford candidates, since they had strong support in those areas.
In hindsight, Mr. Siemiatycki said, “the Ford appeal was, in particular, to a large cohort of Torontonians who felt very disaffected and excluded from city hall.”
A person is more likely to vote in any given election if he or she has voted before. But beyond that, research shows that people are unpredictable. Toronto showed that most recently in the federal election by voting in Liberals across the city, including in many districts that had picked Doug Ford the year before – even after Stephen Harper campaigned with the Fords, Mr. Siemiatycki said.
“The people who were galvanized by Rob Ford [were] not similarly galvanized by Tim Hudak and by Stephen Harper,” he said.
The McGillivray sisters say they’ve started looking up campaign news online and will keep doing that even if they’re never moved to cast another ballot.
“I think I’ll be a little more into everybody’s platforms, see what I would choose,” said Ms. McGillivray. “I can’t even say I’m a totally on-board person.”