A year ago today, I woke up early (as always) to start my day. It was already going to be a busy one — Islamic State-affiliated terrorists had struck the Belgium city of Brussels while North America slept, killing dozens in near-simultaneous bombings at the airport and in the transit system. In Canada, it was also federal budget day.
And then Rob Ford died.
I don’t remember much about the rest of the day beyond that. Needless to say, it was busy. Three huge simultaneous stories strained — but didn’t break — the newsroom of the National Post, where I was working at the time as a columnist and editor. But what I do remember was the next day, as I reflected on the fact that the man who’d dominated the news in my hometown for years was gone … and it seemed more strange than anything.
It still does.
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As wild and disorienting as the Rob Ford scandals — plural, note — were for those in the media (and no doubt for the public at large), I’ve often thought that the end of the Ford era was somehow even more bizarre. The illness and eventual death of Rob Ford, taken by an aggressive cancer despite the best medical science could do to save him, slammed the door shut on the most interesting — if that’s the word — era in Toronto’s modern political history without ever really offering a chance for a sense of civic closure.
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Don’t misunderstand me. I’m a father of two myself, and the death of Rob Ford is first and foremost a family tragedy. You don’t have to like the man or what he did in office to agree that no young child should have to bury their father.
I genuinely wanted Rob Ford, a man I gradually became intensely critical of, to beat cancer and return to full health precisely because I never wanted to write a paragraph like this. I wanted him out of the mayor’s office, sure, but I also wanted him sober, healthy and there for his kids.
READ MORE: IN PICTURES: Rob Ford’s controversial career
It’s genuinely heartbreaking he’s gone, especially because so much of what his kids remember about their father will be interwoven with the scandals that consumed Toronto for years. The news articles and YouTube clips of his rantings will last forever.
READ MORE: Rob Ford crack video made public
But Ford wasn’t just a father. He was many other things: mayor, champion of the little guy, football coach and mentor. He was also a liar, an addict, a man who consorted with criminals, and someone dogged by starkly credible (if never proven) allegations of being verbally abusive, if not worse, in his marriage.
How the hell can these things be reconciled? How is the public supposed to feel on this, the first anniversary of his death?
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Rob Ford controversial crack video finally released to public -
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Former Toronto Mayor Rob Ford laid to rest -
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People come together to celebrate Rob Ford -
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‘Beloved husband and father’: Flowers, wreaths flank Rob Ford casket at city hall -
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Covering Rob Ford at City Hall -
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Rob Ford controversies -
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Rob Ford dies from rare form of cancer known as liposarcoma
For some, the answer is easy. Ford Nation never abandoned their guy (I suspect I’ll be hearing from them shortly). For many others, he was simply irredeemable — a position I respect, even though I find it curious that those fastest to declare him personally beyond hope were often those who’d always opposed his policies. Surely a coincidence.
I genuinely believe, though, that most Torontonians — and millions of other Canadians watching from afar — felt much as I did: disgusted by Ford’s personal conduct, dismayed by his obviously dysfunctional home life, and frustrated by his political failures, while still somehow hoping he could find a way back to something happier, something more stable.
READ MORE: Rob Ford: Will history remember his success or his crack scandals?
I wouldn’t have voted for Ford in the 2014 election campaign (and didn’t vote for his brother Doug, who stepped up to take his place on the ballot as Rob’s health worsened). But I was still, in a way, rooting for the guy. I didn’t want him to be my mayor, but I wanted him to live and, in some way, thrive.
What would that have looked like? Who knows?
If Ford had stayed clean, or something close to it, he may have done good work as a city councillor again, holding his colleagues’ feet to the fire without needing to shoulder the burden of the mayorship (which I believe played a serious role in taking an existing substance abuse problem and ramping it up into the nightmare that destroyed his term in office).
READ MORE: Rob Ford’s family releases tribute video showing former mayor in his prime
Maybe a clean Rob Ford would have been able to build a more stable personal life, a better home for his children. Or maybe Ford, like so many other addicts, would have fallen down again and again, confirming the suspicions of his critics and the worst fears of his supporters.
I’d bet more on the latter, to be honest. But it pains me that we never got the chance to see. One way or another, we could have made peace with a very complicated man and his place in our civic history. Instead, that process was cut off mid-turnaround attempt by the natural human instinct to not speak ill of the dead, especially because we know his children may one day hear or read it.
So we dance around the issue of his legacy. A proposal to name a stadium in his honour — something that would have been no problem for any other civic leader — leaves a strange taste in the mouth. We avoid talking about the lasting damage he may have done to our civic institutions, and his polarizing effect on our already dysfunctional municipal politics. We try to assess Rob Ford the politician without dwelling too much on what happened to the man.
But we can’t. The Rob Ford story never had a proper ending. That’s as true today as it was a year ago. I wonder sometimes if perhaps that’s why life so quickly returned to “normal” after he was gone. Maybe it’s easier to just pretend the Rob Ford years never happened at all.
Matt Gurney is host of The Morning Show on Toronto’s Talk Radio AM640 and a columnist for Global News.
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