Why Are Canadian Media Ignoring Rob Ford White Skin Privilege In Crack Scandal?
The issue of race has been ignored by the Canadian media in relation to the Rob Ford crack scandal. The question is why?
Canadians are not comfortable discussing race issues. Canadians pretend race is an American issue it is
not a problem in Canada. There is a facade that Canadians are not prejudiced or racist.
Canadian culture is indeed racist, but the racism is more covert not overt. Canadians engender this mythology race should be ignored.
An African American website, Uptown magazine has published an article about Toronto’s trainwreck crack smoking mayor and the subject of white male skin privilege. Why hasn’t the Toronto Star published an article about this issue? Where is the Globe & Mail editorial?
It seems to me the silence about Ford’s white privilege speaks volumes about Canadian society. By pretending race is not a factor in this crack scandal, the Canadian press are also a part of the quandary.
Ford’s whiteness is an integral part of the scandal. The shock and the horror Canadians have is, due to the fact Ford is white middle class. Since Ford is a public figure, and he’s hanging out with drug dealers, gang bangers, and other underworld people this upsets the Canadian media.
Smoking crack is associated with subaltern people not rich white folks like Rob Ford.
The lack of press about the ways in which white privilege works is due to the fact white people control the Canadian media.
The privilege being a white man grants Ford the ability to get a pass for his deleterious behaviour.
Does anyone honestly believe if Ford was a man of colour his supporters would be so forgiving? Ford’s white constituents give him a pass for his unprofessional behaviour because he is a white man. People of colour are judged at a higher standard than white folks. The people supporting Ford have sympathy for him because they identify with him.
The paucity of news or television broadcasts about the issue of race is not surprising since Canadians have polite bigotry. Canadians are polite racists, they are just bigots in private not public.
Link: http://uptownmagazine.com/2013/11/white-privilege-torontos-crack-smoking-mayor/
Obnoxious Mayor Rob Ford & Press Argument On His property.
Once again, Rob Ford makes a fool of himself after the police chief Bill Blair announces a crack video does exist. Blair has seen the video, and despite Ford’s lies his days are numbered as mayor of Canada’s largest city. Ford says he will not resign but he is a disgrace to all Canadians. Ford has a serious attitude problem and a sense of entitlement. Ford is acting as though he is some victim when he is not. If Ford had any class he would resign. Since Ford has no class he has the audacity to believe he can be mayor. Even right wing conservative media are not supporting Ford anymore. Ford connections to a drug dealer are serious. How can people take Ford seriously? Ford needs to go away and disappear he is such a joke.
Disappointing News: Gawker Editor Says Somali Drug Dealers Worried About Being Stereotyped & Rob Ford Crack Video Is Gone.
John Cook Today 5:43pm
Before the Rob
Ford
Crackstarter—our crowdfunding effort to purchase and publish a video of Toronto mayor Rob Ford smoking crack cocaine—reached its $200,000 goal last month, we let everyone know that we had lost contact with the people who have custody of the video. At the end of last week, after a long silence, the video’s owner reached out to the intermediary we have been dealing with. He told him the video is “gone.”
Related
(Update) We Are Raising $200,000 to Buy and Publish the Rob Ford Crack Tape
As you may have heard, Rob
Ford
, the mayor of Toronto, smokes crack cocaine. We’ve seen a video of him smoking crack cocaine, and the people who … Read…
For Sale: A Video of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford Smoking Crack Cocaine
Rob Ford, Toronto’s conservative mayor, is a wild lunatic given to making bizarre racist pronouncements and randomly slapping refrigerator… Read…
What does that mean? We don’t really know. A few days after we posted our story about having viewed the video in a car in a parking lot in Toronto, the owner went silent. Two Toronto Star reporters had quickly followed our report, claiming to have seen the same video. Both Gawker and the Star reporters were introduced to the owner of the video by the same intermediary.
The attention surrounding the breaking of the story had two important consequences: First, the owner of the video became angry at us, and at the intermediary. The owner was trying to sell the video, but he apparently didn’t want or anticipate the media circus that erupted after the story broke. We decided to break it, with the consent of the intermediary, after a CNN reporter called one of Ford’s ex-staffers about the video and word started to get out. The CNN reporter had learned about the video after we confidentially reached out to the network in an effort to partner in purchasing it.
Our decision to publish was informed by 1) a desire to get ahead of any rival stories that the gossip mill might generate and 2) a fear that, once Ford was privately alerted to the existence of the video, he would start trying to track it down. That decision lit a match on this story that made it much more difficult—and maybe impossible—to get a deal done and bring the video to the light of day.
Complicating matters was the fact that the Star’s coverage contained several details—including the rough location where its reporters viewed the video, the rough location where it was purportedly recorded, a description of the intermediary’s line of work, the ethnicity of the intermediary and the owner, and physical details about the video owner’s appearance—that may have been helpful in identifying and locating the owner. Indeed, according to the Star and other outlets, Ford himself told his staff that the video could be found at a Toronto address—320 Dixon Rd.—near the location where the Star reporters wrote that they viewed it. (Whether he deduced that location—which may or may not be where the video was actually stored—from the Star’s coverage or would have known anyway, we can’t say.)
The second consequence was that Toronto’s tight-knit Somali ethnic community became angry. The Canadian media seized on the Star’s repeated description of the owners as “Somali men involved in the drug trade.” The story quickly became about Rob Ford and his “Somali crack dealers,” and the Star’s public editor subsequently criticized the paper for “going overboard” on the references to the Somali community. We don’t know for certain the citizenship or immigration status of the video’s owner, but shortly after the story broke, the intermediary told me: “We’re all Canadians.”
According to the intermediary, these two factors—a fear of being identified, and a strong desire from the Somali community to make the whole thing go away—led the owner of the video to go to ground and soured the owner’s relationship with the intermediary. I frankly find it difficult to believe that a crack dealer would be more responsive to the desires of his ethnic community than to a $200,000 bounty. But I have heard independently from others familiar with the goings-on in Toronto that leaders in its Somali community have determined who the owner is and brought intense pressure to bear on him and his family. Toronto’s “Little Mogadishu” neighborhood is located in the ward Rob Ford represented when he was a city councillor; though he is a conservative and a racist buffoon, I am told he has long-standing connections to Somali power brokers there.
Which brings us to this past Friday, when the intermediary called to tell me that he had finally heard from the owner. And his message was: “It’s gone. Leave me alone.” It was, the intermediary told me, a short conversation.
“It’s gone” could mean many things. It might mean that the video has been destroyed. It might mean that it has been handed over to Ford or his allies. It might mean that he intends to sell or give it to a Canadian media outlet. It might mean that the Toronto Police Department has seized it and plans to use it as evidence in a criminal investigation. It might mean that it has been transferred to the custody of Somali community leaders for safekeeping. It might be a lie. The intermediary doesn’t know. Neither do I.
I do know that Gawker is currently sitting on $184,689.81 collected via our Rob Ford Crackstarter. (That’s $201,254 raised in total, less $8,365.23 in fees extracted by PayPal, $8,043.96 taken by Indiegogo, and $155 in contributions raised that we have yet to receive.) It is obviously our hope that someone steps up to claim this money and provides us the video.
The intermediary has claimed that a copy of the video was made and taken outside Toronto for safekeeping. We don’t know if that’s true, or if it is, whether that copy is also “gone.” We can still imagine any number of scenarios in which this video comes to light. If you are reading this, and you have access to the video, and you like money, please email me at john@gawker.com.
If this doesn’t happen soon, we will—as we initially promised when we launched the campaign—select a Canadian nonprofit that addresses substance abuse issues to receive the money.
Don’t do crack.
Globe & Mail Article: Toronto Ombudsman Finds Mayor Rob Ford Is A Racist Tried To Rig Civic Appointments!!
The Globe and Mail
Published Thursday, Sep. 27 2012, 12:57 PM EDT
Last updated Thursday, Sep. 27 2012, 3:43 PM EDT
Toronto Mayor Rob Ford is disputing the findings of a new report from the city’s ombudsman that alleges his office interfered in the civic appointments process, including asking bureaucrats to remove a line from newspaper advertisements seeking “diverse” candidates.
The report describes how unnamed employees of the mayor’s office meddled in the way the municipal government selects ordinary citizens to sit on some 120 boards, including the boards of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, the Toronto Parking Authority, the Toronto Police Services Board and the Toronto Public Library Board.
The mayor’s office first asked for post-election recruitment to be postponed, then demanded it be condensed into such a short time-frame that candidates could not be screened properly, according to the report from Toronto ombudsman Fiona Crean.
“It will look to cynics as if the fix is already in for appointments and the process is just for show,” an unnamed bureaucrat wrote to the city manager in a June 9, 2011 e-mail, expressing concerns about the tight timeline.
“We now have a governance process that is no longer based on any recognizable principles.”
Mr. Ford said Thursday that he “didn’t interfere in any process.”
“I’ve actually cleaned up the process that we had before. It’s a very clean and above board transparent process and it went very well,” the mayor told reporters after a ground-breaking ceremony for a new aquatics centre in Scarborough.
The report also found that the mayor’s office directed that recruitment ads not be placed in the Toronto Star, a newspaper with which the mayor and his councillor brother Doug Ford have a long-running feud.
“The [City manager’s office] informed my investigator that when they raised this with the Mayor’s staff, they were told that ‘we do not like the Star,’” the report says.
The mayor’s office denies it asked that the ad be kept out of the Star, according to the report.
In the end, recruitment advertisements appeared only in the National Post, Toronto Sun and Metro.
One of the goals of the city’s appointments policy is to fill boards with qualified citizens of different genders and racial and ethnic backgrounds, a subject on which the municipal government keeps careful statistics.
The report suggests the mayor’s office tried to undermine that goal.
“[City Manager’s Office] staff informed my investigator that they were asked by the Mayor’s Office to remove the statement in the advertisement that encouraged applicants from the City’s diverse population to apply. Staff refused to do so,” according to the report.
Mr. Ford said that was not true. “No, that’s not what happened,” he said, adding it was city staff, not his political staff that did not “reach out in terms of diversity.”
Asked if he was against diversity, Mr. Ford laughed. “That’s a ridiculous question,” he said.
According to a “diversity summary” of public appointments, 70 per cent of the citizens selected for boards under the Ford administration were white — the same percentage as in the second term of his predecessor, David Miller.
More men were tapped under Mr. Ford (70 per cent) than during Mr. Miller’s second term (53 per cent).
However, more applications actually flooded in under Mr. Ford than under Mr. Miller. The city received 1,927 applications for 167 positions in 2011-2012, up from 1,316 applications for 125 posts in 2007-2010.
At least one candidate with a serious conflict-of-interest nearly slipped through the laxer-than-usual process, Ms. Crean wrote.
In that case, the report describes an acrimonious closed-door meeting of the civic appointments committee at which an unnamed councillor pointed at staff and said, “I’m going to get you,” and added that bureaucrats had other councillors fooled, but not him.
“Some staff described the panel chair’s manner as ‘threatening.’ One staff described the process as ‘gruelling’ and ‘humiliating,’” according to the report.
The trouble apparently began when someone pointed out at a Nov. 16, 2011 meeting that a candidate who had previously been marked as qualified actually had a conflict-of-interest – he was an agent who appeared frequently before the adjudicative committee on which he was seeking a seat.
When the issue was raised, the same unnamed male councillor who allegedly threatened staff asked for those concerns to be put in writing. But a letter never surfaced.
The alleged threats from the councillor – who was also the panel nominating chair – came at the next meeting of the civic appointments committee, which was Jan. 16, 2012, although that date is not specified in the report.
Only one board was dealt with at both the Nov. 16 and Jan. 16 meetings: The Sign Variance Committee, whose nominating panel was chaired by Ford ally Giorgio Mammoliti.
Mr. Mammoliti said Thursday that he asked for such a letter at the Nov. 16 meeting, but he said he did not know if he was the councillor identified in the report.
He “unequivocally” denied threatening staff at the meeting. “Never in my 23 years in politics have I used that kind of language,” Mr. Mammoliti said in an interview Thursday.
The chair of the civics appointment committee, Frances Nunziata, said she did not recall any member of the committee upbraiding staff as described in the report.
Ms. Nunziata, the council speaker and a Ford supporter, said the mayor’s office did not tamper with her committee’s choices.
“Every decision that was made was done at the committee … I’m not aware of any interference or direction from the mayor’s office,” she said.
The ombudsman’s finding prompted harsh criticism from the councillors who chaired the civic appointments committee in Mr. Miller’s second term.
Councillor Adam Vaughan, a staunch critic of the mayor, said members of the current committee should be fired at mid-term and replaced with a new slate of councillors.
“I just don’t think they’ve done their jobs,” said Mr. Vaughan, chair of the committee in the second half of Mr.Miller’s last term.
Councillor Janet Davis, who chaired the committee in the first half of the same term, said Mr. Miller and his staff stayed out of the process. She called the alleged meddling by Mr. Ford’s staff “unprecedented and inappropriate.”
“The interference from the mayor’s office so compromised this process that we need to make sure that there are new guidelines and practices to stop it in future,” she said.
Ms. Crean and two of the city’s four accountability officers — the integrity commissioner and the lobbyist registrar — are locked in a battle with budget chief Mike Del Grande, an ally of Mr. Ford.
Citing their need to remain independent from city council, they have refused to provide a line-by-line accounting of their budget requests for 2013, according to Mr. Del Grande.
“The three of them, led by the ombudsman, are very, very concerned about their independence. I pointed out to them that it really doesn’t have anything to do with their independence per se, it’s reviewing their numbers,”he said.
Ms. Crean was ill and not available for interviews Thursday.
With a report from Elizabeth Church.
Toronto Star Slams Arrogant Toronto Mayor Rob Ford Says He Is A Disgrace & Should Be Thrown Out Of Office!!!
Rob Ford has made a fool of his supporters
What is there left to say about Rob Ford, a man so befuddled be can make good deeds look bad?
The mayor’s performance in court this week was a personal humiliation for him, a disgrace for the city.
What emerged was a portrait of man whose only defence is his own self-professed ignorance.
Whether Ford is as profoundly unaware of the world as he lets on is something the judge will have to decide, but faced with potentially career-ending conflict-of-interest charges, the mayor either had nothing to say or couldn’t remember.
Indeed, it has become frighteningly clear that the man elected to run the largest city in Canada has the attention span of a gnat, and even less curiosity.
He has no apparent understanding of something as basic as the law, let alone conflict of interest. In his mind, good intentions, as long as they are his own, are enough.
That’s why Rob Ford must go. Even if Justice Charles Hackland of the Ontario Superior Court were to dismiss the charges, the mayor has squandered the moral authority needed to run and represent the city.
Ford, who has made no secret of his contempt for process, can no longer continue as mayor.
Though Hackland won’t have to worry about a pattern of behaviour that goes back to the beginning of Ford’s career, the public will be more nuanced in its conclusions.
Ford has made a fool of his supporters, as much as himself. His indifference to rules of conduct comes out of his indifference to the larger political system — democracy itself, which he seems to assume means being popular.
Some worry that the judge ought not to interfere in something as sacred as democratic values, but that’s precisely why he must.
Ignorance itself isn’t illegal, of course, but when it’s so willful and brazen, it cannot go unchallenged. We have no choice but to question the chief magistrate’s decision to remain in a state of intellectual darkness when it affects his ability to fulfill his duties.
On the other hand, this is no MFP scandal. This case isn’t about greed or corruption. In fact, no one has ever accused Ford of being corrupt: He isn’t and doesn’t need to be.
As laudable as his motives might have been, however, his methods were anything but. Hitting up city hall lobbyists for one’s personal charity is obviously unacceptable — not to mention stupid — even if the reason was to “save kids’ lives.”
Ford then ignored repeated requests from Toronto’s integrity commissioner to repay the money, and spoke and voted at the council meeting debating the issue
The mayor’s largely legalistic defence has skirted the real issue — Ford’s unwillingness and/or inability to play by the rules.
But that’s why his supporters love him; he’s the anti-politician come in from the cold to rewrite the game. Guilty or not, he can’t lose. In their eyes, he’s forever innocent.
Ford’s fans forget that he is a politician, and after 12 years on council, a veteran, a careerist, son of a politician and brother to another.
Hackland’s judgment won’t be handed down for weeks; in the meantime, Ford has been rendered impotent, his mayoralty irrelevant. City council long ago wrested control of the agenda from his office, so his absence, real or political, will have little impact.
On the other hand, Ford’s unprecedented crassness has left city hall in a place it’s never been before.
Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca
Now Magazine Article: Toronto`s Mayor Rob Ford Is A Bully Yet Playing The Victim In Conflict Of Interest Trial.
For anyone but political junkies and the City Hall press corps dressed in their Sunday best, the deliberations that got under way Wednesday, September 5, in courtroom 6-1 at 361 University to determine if Mayor Rob Ford broke conflict of interest rules must have seemed anticlimactic.
All the media hoopla about the possibility of his getting turfed from office for some curious financial dealings involving his charity football foundation raised expectations of high courtroom drama.
But along with the technical arguments led by his legal team, the sight of Ford taking the stand in his own defence in that sorry tie he often wears at stressful moments like these was more pitiable than great political theatre.
The mayor cut a sorry figure, at times barely audible in his responses, making some of us wonder if he’d reached into the medicine cabinet for the Rescue Remedy this morning to take the edge off. The bellicose bully was nowhere to be seen.
Whether that was by design, to win a little sympathy, I’ll leave for the judge to decide.
But the narrative of this latest controversy to swirl around the perpetually embattled mayor is more complicated than the one the Fordists have been spinning.
If there was a conflict, they say, it was inadvertent, and all for a good cause anyway – namely, to help disadvantaged kids by buying football equipment.
The big question on everyone’s mind: is Rob Ford toast?
It doesn’t look good for Rofo. At least not on paper. The case against him, that he contravened the Municipal Conflict Of Interest Act by speaking to and then voting on a matter in council in which he had a financial interest – to wit, donations by lobbyists to his football foundation – is black-and-white.
Check the 147-page transcript of the deposition he gave a few months back in preparation for this trial. It’s so full of BS that a casual observer might think the mayor had Peter Gabriel playing on a loop in his head. (“I don’t remember, I don’t recall, I got no memory of anything at all.”)
Rob doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on. There was a direct financial interest involved: the $3,150 in donations to his foundation he was ordered to repay by the city’s integrity commissioner, but refused to come up with.
But it would take a very brave judge to impose the maximum penalty prescribed by law: removal from office and being barred from running for office for seven years. On the latter, the judge has discretion. So the mayor could conceivably get the axe but be allowed to run again in a by-election.
Lost in translation
Just how egregious was Ford’s transgression? The official line that the conflict charges against the mayor are politically motivated, an evil plot concocted by the left to take the man of the people away from his people, has coloured most of the mainstream media coverage. The Sun ran a story Monday, September 3, suggesting that straws are being drawn and lefty Joe Mihevc is being touted as a possible replacement. News to Citizen Joe.
When Team Ford hasn’t been playing the left conspiracy theory angle, the message track has been that the mayor doesn’t benefit from donations made by lobbyists to his football foundation, so how could there be a conflict?
But whether the mayor benefited financially is not so clear cut. He definitely gains politically from his foundation, that’s for sure, and doesn’t that result in a personal advantage? In April, he attended a public presentation of a fat cheque from the foundation to buy football equipment for the kids at Mother Theresa High School.
Let’s look at the facts. The donations in question were – and here’s the really iffy issue – made by lobbyists. And not just any lobbyists, but people doing business with the city. The court could view their donations as attempts to curry favour and get Ford to reciprocate by supporting their pet projects at council. Where I come from, that’s called a shakedown. Ford doesn’t seem to get that, or is simply playing dumb on the point. He has his own definition of what constitutes a conflict, and that is anything that benefits the city. Yup. You’re reading that right.
Was the mayor selling votes?
Ford apparently also solicited funds for his foundation from citizens vying for appointments to city agencies, boards and commissions. This is where the issue of his using city letterhead to cop said donations, which on its face might seem only a technical breach of the rules, becomes very problematic. His missives could be construed as intimidation – as in “If you don’t give, you won’t get Ford’s vote to sit on this or that board.” Those who complained to the integrity commissioner about receiving these letters reported feeling strong-armed.
What’s never been fully explained
Why has the entity that administers Ford’s foundation, the Toronto Community Foundation, accounted for only $37,294.68 in donations to the charity when the mayor has claimed more than $100,000 in donations on his website?
When asked about that during his deposition, Ford stammered, “That was inaccurate. I was probably saying it would be that much. It could total that much. It could in five or six… the years to come. I could easily fundraise that much money for it.”
More to the legal point
How could someone like Ford, who’s been in politics for more than a decade, pretend to be so ignorant of conflict rules? There’s a handbook. Councillors sign a declaration after they take office that they will “faithfully and impartially” exercise their duties and “disclose any pecuniary interest, direct or indirect, in accordance with the Municipal Conflict Of Interest Act.”
It’s not a formality. It’s a sworn statement, a promise to the public, signed in front of the city clerk. It’s the mayor’s duty to understand conflict guidelines.
Ford can’t argue that he didn’t understand the rules.
In the past, he’s excused himself from votes, declaring a conflict on some of the most mundane matters, including changes to parking times on the street where the family business in located.
The mayor received six letters from the integrity commissioner ordering him to pay back the money. He ignored every one of them.
Who wins?
Certainly not council’s left if Ford gets the boot. The last thing progressive forces want is to go into an election defending what looks like an attempt by the left to hijack the democratic process. Ford has already begun playing the spunky victim card, saying that if he’s bounced he’ll run again.
Who loses?
As attractive as the prospect of seeing Ford rousted from office may seem, a by-election to replace him would further divide a city whose council is just beginning to assert its authority despite constant distractions by the mayor.
Epilogue
The audit of his campaign expenses, another court date awaiting the mayor, may prove more problematic politically.
But in terms of the conservative brand and those charged with protecting it, i.e., the power brokers behind the scenes with agendas bigger than Ford’s re-election, there’ll be much to think about. Like whether or not the mayor has become a serious embarrassment and if it’s time to back another horse.
The wider public that voted for Ford seems to be taking note, and some of his friends in the usually favourable media, too, have begun to openly address the possibility of an exit, however remote. Former Ford insiders are chatting up a storm behind the scenes that can only mean one thing: more negative publicity is in the offing.
Team Ford seems to be smelling a change in the air. Two years from the next election, the mayor’s peeps are already in re-election mode, trotting out the mayor in the company of his family at the Ex and on summer vacation in Edmonton. The polling to identify unfriendly councillors he can topple in 2014 has already begun. But there’ll be more storms to weather before then. And by that time there won’t be much left of his Teflon coating.
Gayblackcanada 