The interactive voice-response phone poll of 1,049 Toronto residents is accurate plus or minus three percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
I stare at this sentence. I am tapping on a wall here, listening for the hollow sound of an exit.
I seek a statistical flaw in a poll that says 60 per cent of residents want Ford to resign and 69 per cent think he has a substance abuse problem, but fully 33 per cent plan to vote for him in the next election no matter what. Forum says Ford is especially popular with people who earn less than $20,000 a year (approved by 49 per cent of them and 52 per cent of those at $20,000-$40,000), male (49 per cent), in York/Etobicoke (57 per cent), less-educated (55 per cent), Catholics (54 per cent) and those with children (49 per cent).
I take it Catholics forgive him, who knows, and people with kids just wanted to get off the phone. I’m not worried about the 6 per cent who want him as prime minister. I’ve met those people, I have run from them down the darkened streets of this city when the bus let me off.
But 33 per cent? We need to lower this number in time for Forum’s next phone call.
First, read Star City Hall bureau chief Daniel Dale’s withering analysis of Ford’s claim that he has saved Toronto $1 billion, which he has not. Ford is fantasizing, confusing “saving” with “avoiding.” He is insulting basic mathematics, he is adding walnuts and helmets and coming up with Mount Edith Cavell.
Math wins. In my dreams, that would bring his approval down to 25 per cent.
Then we study the degradation of alcoholism. Go to the bestselling memoir, Mother. Wife. Sister. by Rob Delaney (world’s greatest tweeter with a crush on Margaret Atwood), an alcoholic who wet the bed every night to the point where he bought a kids’ plastic bedsheet for his queen-sized bed. Girlfriends did not like this.
Alcoholism is awful. You are repelled. Ford loyalists are down to 20 per cent, theoretically.
Then we ask Ford’s less affluent supporters to imagine a hike in the minimum wage, something I entirely support. Imagine the TTC halved its fares instead of raising them out of reach as it just did. (Incidentally this would be a humane and sensible move that might end traffic gridlock.)
Ford Village, I’m not saying you’re going to get a raise or that you can now afford transit, I’m saying, “Imagine you were slightly less unhappy with your life, your nook and your children, which gave you a giddy feeling of emotional expansiveness that let you form a brief human connection with the fake warm digital voice on the Forum poll.”
I love my fellow citizens as they float on this paper-thin seasonal cloud of hope. Ford-fanatics are down to 12 per cent, in my mind.
I’m mixing mathematics and prayer, just as Ford does when he boasts about his fantasy budget achievement. In real life these two things curdle. But we’re stirring the pot anyway.
And now I suggest the possibility, which is plausible, that the mayor is not drunk or high or a terrible person — though he is all three, sometimes simultaneously — but that he is mentally unwell. Video will work here. Go to YouTube and watch him racing across the city council chamber as if he were on a football field to, as he later said, rescue his brother from a tackle by left-wing councillors. Instead he knocked over a councillor in a pantsuit. She was a small green stop sign, how did he not see her?
He is operating under delusions, and not just of grandeur. Who else would go to Casa Loma wearing a huge gold statement necklace? That’s not personal ornament, that’s home decor. I’d use it as a centrepiece this Christmas but I don’t have a table big enough to justify that level of ostentation.
Don’t you feel sorry for Ford? There, with a little work, I have his approval rating down to 6 per cent, that sorry level where people think he should replace Stephen Harper, and even the 6 per cent were probably saying that sarcastically.
All is well. It’s not, but it could be. It’s possible.