Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story by Robyn Doolittle Read Free Book Online Page B

months without speaking. This is especially true for Doug and Rob, despite the fact that Rob frequently refers to Doug as his best friend, and that Doug is his brother’s fiercest defender.
    Their loyalty is ultimately to the family name, not necessarily to each other.
    ON FEBRUARY 18, 1995 , hundreds of people wearing Doug Ford baseball caps and waving Doug Ford placards marched into Scarlett Heights Collegiate to pledge their support for the scrappy tell-it-like-it-is owner of Deco Labels & Tags.
    It was the night of the Progressive Conservative nomination for the Etobicoke-Humber riding. The premier of Ontario, Bob Rae, a New Democrat, was expected to call an election in a matter of months. If the polls were any indication, his beleaguered government was going to take a beating.
    The early 1990s was a period of recession in Canada. Voters felt that Rae and the Ontario New Democratic Party had mismanaged the economy. The province was running a staggering deficit of twelve billion dollars. In an attempt to tame that beast, Rae had passed an austerity measure in the spring of1993 that forced public-sector workers to take unpaid leave, or “Rae Days,” as they came to be known. In doing so, he became just as unpopular with the left as he was with the right. New Democrat support was barely breathing at 14 percent. All the polls indicated a Liberal sweep. The party, led by Lyn McLeod, had the second highest number of seats in the legislature. They appeared poised to form a majority government.
    Enter Mike Harris, the colourful leader of the third-place Progressive Conservative Party. Harris positioned himself as the exact opposite of Rae. He pitched a “Common Sense Revolution” that would cut income tax rates by 30 percent, slash spending by six billion dollars, and force able-bodied welfare recipients to work for their cheques. Harris vowed to do away with affirmativeaction programs and get tough with criminals.
    Four candidates in Etobicoke-Humber were vying to become soldiers in Harris’s revolution. Doug Ford Sr. was up against a lawyer named Tom Barlow, local business manager Alida Leistra, and a small businessman and lawyer named Joe Peschisolido. The winner would take on Liberal incumbent Dr. Jim Henderson, a physician who had represented the riding since 1985.
    Doug Sr. won on the third ballot.
    It was the first political step by a Ford, and the beginning of a movement that would come to be known as Ford Nation.

THREE
    THE CANADIAN
    KENNEDYS
    C hris MacIntyre headed straight home from school on the afternoon of March 31, 2005. The fourteen-year-old was new to the neighbourhood and still making friends. Five weeks earlier, he had moved in with his dad and his dad’s girlfriend, Kathy Ford. They lived in an apartment above Kathy’s parents’ garage, which Doug Sr. and Diane had built for her after she ran into some trouble a few years earlier. The Fords were rich. They had their own label business, and Mr. Ford used to be in the provincial parliament. One of the sons was a city councillor.
    Chris figured they were pretty important people.
    Kathy, like his dad, wasn’t perfect. She’d had a lot of hard years, and she wore every one of them on her face. Both Kathy and Chris’s dad had drug problems. Both had criminal records. His dad had spent a lot of time in jail. But things seemed to be better.
    Chris had never seen his troubled father so happy. Kathy Ford was forty-five and Scott MacIntyre was thirty-eight, but the age difference didn’t seem to bother either of them. Scott said Kathy was “soulmate” material. She was good to Chris. She treated him just as well as she treated her own two children, aseventeen-year-old girl and eleven-year-old boy. Now, the five of them all lived together.
    Scott was an excellent cook. In the morning, he would make the kids eggs and hash browns with sausage. Scott would come into Chris’s room whisking a bowl of fresh hollandaise sauce, letting the noise wake him up.