A Canadanomic

The Two Torontos

Toronto has hit the big time. I mean, when Ron Burgundy sings Loverboy’s “Working for the Weekend” on Conan in honor of Mayor Rob Ford, let’s just say T-dot is on the map. Sure, it’s for all the wrong reasons. But a shoutout on late-night American television can’t be ignored by the Canadian masses. My Facebook news feed runneth over.

Anyone who’s spent six minutes watching TV or browsing the Internet in the last few weeks has come across the Toronto mayor’s train wreck of a life: the admission to smoking crack; the invocation of a “drunken stupor” as an excuse for being high; the not having oral sex with a woman because he has “more than enough to eat at home”; his litany of apologetic non-apologies; and his national TV show with his doppelganger brother that lasted all of one episode. Now you can even hire a devil-worshiping comedy troupe in Toronto to take you on a bus tour of the most notorious sites in the crack-smoking scandal.

It would all be hilarious if it wasn’t so unseemly. And serious. There are ongoing allegations of domestic abuse and violence. The mayor appears to have an addiction problem. He also let a crack addict share a ride with his children while he himself was “out of it.” How often does that happen? Are those kids safe?

There’s been much handwringing about how Toronto got here. How did a city that’s one of the most diverse in the world end up with a mayor who makes both racist and homophobic comments? How did multicultural Toronto end up with a mayor who seems to revel in his lack of culture? How has Ford’s approval rating remained virtually unscathed, at 42 percent, as the scandal has metastasized?

In Brief

This is how George W. Bush feels about Rob Ford

Half of First Nations children live in poverty