Of course he would think that. For more than a year, he’s repeatedly demonstrated that he doesn’t particularly care if the business of the city gets done. For Ford, chaos might be the preferred course for Toronto’s government. After getting elected, the mayor spent close to nine months intimidating city council into doing whatever he asked. As soon as some councillors started standing up to him last year—burying Ford’s transit fantasy plan and replacing it with an LRT plan he hated—he stopped trying to govern and started campaigning for the next election, which is still 17 months away.
Since then, council has staggered around under the temporary and varying leadership of a shifting cast of councillors, changing its mind on plastic bags, bike lanes, and zoning bylaws; all the while, Ford’s opinion has been absent from the debates, preferring to tell listeners to his radio show that the 2014 campaign has already begun. His fellow CFRB host (and former mayoral candidate and leader of the provincial Conservatives) John Tory has become exasperated by this, recently telling an Empire Club audience that with the election a year and a half away, “the public would have, in my view, every reason to remind the current administration that they were already elected to govern and to deal with issues like transit, not just to get ready for the next election.”
