Unstoppable?
A sneak peek at this week’s cover story, on Rob Ford
Mayor Rob Ford answers reporters question April 11, 2013 on the Porter Airlines announcement to expand their flight service from Billy Bishop Toronto Island Airport. (Moe Doiron/The Globe and Mail)
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A week and a half of madness at Toronto city hall and Rob Ford, his world crashing down all around him, shows no sign of stopping.
In the June 10 cover story of Maclean’s, which hits newsstands on Thursday, senior writer Nicholas Köhler considers the slow-motion implosion of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford. It is a soap opera interlaced with the dark night of a Toronto mayor’s soul, told with the unrelenting momentum of tragedy, according to a plot centred around a video file that may or may not exist.
“Anxiety over how Ford’s mayoralty could end comes amid unprecedented, fast-paced developments at city hall,” Köhler writes. “It has been a relentless chronology.”
The momentum driving Ford became established years ago, during those heady days in the fall of 2010 when his campaign team briefly worried that Ford was doing too well in the polls, that they had peaked too soon.
The pressures of the job, one source tells Maclean’s, led Ford to drift into substance abuse problems early on in his term as mayor, when he stopped listening, came into work late or not at all, ceased alerting his office to his whereabouts, and refused to be accompanied by handlers from his office.
Soon top aides began hearing that Ford was buying mickeys of alcohol, purchases he asked his lower-wrung staffers to keep secret.
His mayoralty has unspooled according to its own unforgiving logic since then, and his options have now diminished to one between resignation and self-destruction.
Maclean’s chronicles Ford’s descent in its latest cover story, “Rob Ford. Unstoppable?” Watch for the story online in the coming days.
In the meantime, keep watch on Macleans.ca for the latest developments: