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Comments
The Toronto Star (i.e. a real newspaper) claims to have seen the video.
Oh my.
The full(?) story.
Jeez.
Six figures to buy the video? You'd think it'd be better to just send/upload it to as many places possible. I'm not familiar with Canadian politics, but surely they'd get more people to believe it if they show it to as many people possible.
oh my god
And now there's an Indiegogo campaign to buy the video.
crack is whack
C'mon, someone troll this entire process by posting it on Youtube.
lol, public good (or bad?)
Honestly, I think making it public would've made more sense anyway.
Presumably they're in it for the money, not because they have something against the mayor.
Y'know what, I'm gonna call bullshit on this until I see it posted to youtube. (And even then it will be subject to standard review procedures.)
It's pretty clear at this point that the video exists. (The Toronto Star is not really known for making shit up, even if Rob Ford claims otherwise.)
Whether it's really Ford in the video, and whether he's really smoking crack, is less certain, I suppose. It certainly looks more likely than not to be real at this point though.
I just randomly found this article. Apparently there were a bunch of raids targeting someplace relevant to the video.
I guess this might mean something, but I'm not really sure. Sounded like they found cocaine, but no mention of anything that proves whether the mayor had anything to do with it.
The police have been tight-lipped about whether their investigation has anything to do with Ford.
As any police force should be until they have firm evidence either way.
So it looks like the police found the video or something.
I'm necroing since Nyktos mentioned it in updates.
Yup. (I would've posted in this thread but I was on my phone at the time and fuck finding things not on the first page.)
And indeed, the police have had a months-long investigation into Ford. This isn't surprising since they recently arrested someone with "connections" to him. (The rumour at the time was that he's Ford's dealer, which the recently-released documents back up.)
One blogger pointed out that the crack-smoking might be less damaging to his career than the fact that the "only honest politician in Toronto" spent five months trying to cover this up.
I guess I haven't been keeping this up to date. Then again, the non-Canadian media seem to be paying attention now, so you guys probably don't need me to. Nonetheless, recent occurrences...
Monday: Rob Ford apologizes for a bunch of things on his radio show (mostly various public drunkenness incidents...though he's still "not an alcoholic" just like he's "not a crack addict"). Not among those things: smoking crack and then lying about it for half a year.
Tuesday: Rob Ford admits that he has smoked crack "in a drunken stupor". Because that makes it okay, and also explains all the lying. Everyone on the planet tells him to resign. He doesn't. Also he claims he has nothing more to hide, so clearly he's not done with the lying.
Thursday: Another Rob Ford video shows up in which he, clearly very drunk, shouts and rants about how he's going to kill some unidentified person. Apparently this is not isolated behaviour. This time he apologizes pretty quickly.
Also a city councillor has drafted a bill to remove a bunch of power from the office of mayor until the next election, which looks likely to pass. Another councillor (who has traditionally been a Ford ally) has sent a letter to the province asking them to remove Ford from office, which they don't actually have the power to do.
So I heard on NPR here that Ford is not only not apologizing for smoking crack but simultaneously announced his intention to run for re-election?
He announced he was going to run a while ago. But he did confirm that he still plans on doing so...
You have to imagine his opponents are happy about it though.
Karen Stintz, who literally seems to be selling herself as "Rob Ford without the scandals", probably does. The thing though is that even now, all evidence points towards Ford being completely capable of winning another election. The campaign doesn't begin for a few more months anyway and we don't know all of the candidates, but Ford's hardline supporters seem to think that the whole thing is a "media witch-hunt" against Ford.
Gah, I do not get this. The people in the Greater Toronto Area and in the actual city of Toronto I've interacted with seem to be, for the most part, not morons. They seem to be, for the most part, people who wouldn't vote for a candidate like this. I'm just a horrible judge of character, I suppose.
He was the only viable right-leaning candidate in 2010, and people in the suburbs wanted their subways subways subways.
And then he "saved" the "city" a "billion" dollars so obviously he deserves to be reelected.
The fact that the majority of the people of Toronto would want a right-leaning candidate actually comes as a surprise to me.
It's not necessarily the case that they would. Ford didn't win a majority of the popular vote (though checking he came much closer than I thought at ~47%). First-past-the-post is a funny thing that way; being the only viable candidate on either side is advantageous. Also most of his support was from the suburbs so not necessarily from the people you'd have encountered if you were downtown. (It is most definitely not a coincidence that it was a conservative premier who merged those suburbs into Toronto against the wishes of basically everyone.) And then there's the fact that we'd come off eight years of a left-leaning mayor who lost a lot of popularity toward the end of his second term.
Is it oddly appropriate that what you describe is similar to a form of gerrymandering known as "cracking"?
Heh. Yes, I think it is. ^_^
I don't keep up with local politics anywhere near as much as I should, but I do remember that prior to Ford's election there was a garbage workers' strike followed by a transit workers' strike. Watching garbage pile up would get on anybody's nerves, and everybody I know downtown relies on the TTC to get where they want to go, so I guess Ford promising that "services will not be cut, guaranteed" (according to his Wikipedia page) was what a lot of people wanted to hear. Not necessarily just in the suburbs.
Still, I can't say I care for what I've read of his positions. It says he named paramedics an "essential service", meaning that paramedics can't strike, and all right, I get the logic behind that, because that would result in a lot of people dying and that would be bad.
But getting the TTC also named an essential service? What the fuck? That's overkill. The trains not running on time is not the end of the world. Unlike paramedics--or cops, or firefighters, or whatever--going on strike, there's no danger of anybody dying. So now I guess TTC workers, if they're made to work unreasonable hours or in really bad conditions or for obscenely low pay or whatever, basically just have to take it up the ass from the city? Screw that.
Well they can do things like work-to-rule, at least. And as I recall part of being an essential service is that both sides of the arrangement must agree to binding arbitration in the case of a dispute, so the City doesn't just get to do whatever the fuck it wants.
Not that that means the TTC should be an essential service; it probably shouldn't and all evidence points to Rob Ford just generally being anti-union. I have to say, though, that the TTC union kind of dug their own grave with that strike. I don't care how serious your dispute is, transit workers walking off the job late Saturday night with no advance warning is a colossal dick move.
In any case, here is a Real Thing Rob Ford Said in relation to his public drunkenness incidents: "I said it would never happen again, and it has never happened again at the Air Canada Centre."
That last thing sounds like it came out of a comedy. Which is, uh, sad.
Oh yeah, I guess I forgot about that detail of the TTC strike since I live in Oakville rather than in the city and thus didn't have to actually deal with it firsthand. But yes, now that you mention it, if you want public support then the last thing you should do is strand everybody far from their homes at midnight. It was a dick move, and it wouldn't have killed them to just not show up for work the next morning. Everybody being stuck at home would be a lot less inconvenienced.
*facepalms*