Ford digs himself into a subway hole

Martin Regg Cohn, Opinion, The Toronto Star:

The last time he swaggered into Dalton McGuinty’s office, Rob Ford was at the top of his game — lording it over the premier, wearing his fresh electoral mandate like a wrestler’s prize belt. After a mere 25 minutes, the mayor emerged triumphant last December to declare he’d remake Toronto’s subway system in his own image.

Now, Ford has returned to Queen’s Park showing his tummy to a Liberal premier who appears, eight months later, to have nine lives in the opinion polls. His swagger gone, the mayor is asking for a modest “advance” to dig him out of a financial hole so he can start tunnelling the Sheppard subway extension.

Bereft of his once-shimmering prize belt, Ford looks increasingly like a mayor with no clothes — but for the cap in his hand.

Speaking in public later, both men were muted and measured. No one wants to be seen playing politics at the expense of Toronto’s transit paralysis.

But their body language spoke volumes.

Ford hunkered down as he pressed past a crush of reporters. Standing awkwardly before a microphone, he indulged in a strange soliloquy by asking himself questions and then not answering them.

“I know the questions you’re going to ask me about what we talked about, so I’ll answer your questions before you ask about what we talked about,” Ford declared pre-emptively, blinking nervously.

He didn’t, really. Nor did he put to rest the talk of bad blood between them, having once threatened, on talk radio, to unleash “Ford Nation” upon the premier.

A contrite Ford mumbled awkwardly that he’d known McGuinty “a long time,” but then babbled, unprompted: “I don’t have a great friendship because I’ve never known him that well.”

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