Two weeks ago in this space, I wrote a column about women in the news locally, nationally and abroad and the importance of their voices being heard. This week, my attention can’t help but turn to a certain man… Toronto mayor Rob Ford.
The continuing train wreck that is Rob Ford has inspired fiery conversations and pop psychoanalysis in the Courier newsroom. Did something terrible happen to him as a child? Did he not get enough attention from his parents? Is he so filled with self-loathing he can’t see he’s on a path to self-destruction? Or is he just a run-of-the-mill self-centred drunk who thinks Toronto is his own personal fiefdom?
I doubt there is anyone in the country who doesn’t think Ford should, at minimum, seek help for his plain-as-day addiction to alcohol. Some of my fellow newsroom scribes have more sympathy for the embattled mayor than I do, however. He has an addiction, Fiona, they say. It’s consuming him. Agreed, but my sympathy has limits when the story is no longer about Ford, but what is best for the City of Toronto. Ford should know that and do the right thing.
Why? None of my co-workers were parented by an in-denial alcoholic. Ugly memories are seared into my hippocampus. Because of my upbringing, I have little to no tolerance for falling down drunks, like Ford, who seemingly has no honour or shame about his embarrassing behaviour, given his public role as the mayor of Canada’s largest city and despite many people around him willing to help him get the help he needs. He has people who care about him.
Ford is darn lucky. That his brother Doug (finally) publicly agreed on this point shows even his enablers are coming around to the notion of telling him to get help. But not enough of them are stepping up. Bizarrely, his mother Diane is opposed to him stepping down to go into rehab. In a TV interview Thursday with Toronto-based CP24, she said what her son needs to do —in this order— is get a driver, lose weight, get an alcohol detector in the car, avoid bad people and maybe get some counselling “for anything.”
On Friday, Ford’s lawyer stated the mayor is “considering” rehab. How many more videos of seeing himself in a drunken state does he have to see before he actually goes? I’d say he’s hit his rock bottom, but that is obviously for Ford to figure out for himself. It doesn’t help when he has a family that is in denial about his problem. “Rob, you gotta maybe smarten up a bit and get back on line,” his mother said in the CP24 interview. “He has a problem, he’s got a weight problem, a huge weight problem… and I think that is the first thing he has to attack because this will change your whole demeanour… and everything else will fall into place.”
Wow!
Ford is in the privileged position of being able to access the best rehab centres in the country if he so chooses, unlike many addicts across the country who have no money. Surely, the City of Toronto will foot his rehab bill. Bizarrely, his mother doesn’t want him to take time out and to go to a rehab facility. “Rob needs to be moving. He has an active mind and an active body... If he was really really in dire straits and needed help I’d be the first one and put him in my car and I would be taking him… He isn’t there. He isn’t there.”
Wow again.
Mostly, though, I think about his two young children who surely just want a dad who’s going to be around to watch them grow up. Would he really like his kids to grow up and be just like him? No, of course not. He practically said so himself in a media scrum where, yet again, he had to apologize for another video that surfaced in which he curses a blue streak and threatens to kill someone while three sheets to the wind. Yes, he was “extremely inebriated.” But he also said:
“When you’re in that state… I hope none of you have ever or will ever be in that state.”
If Ford won’t seek help for himself or the citizens of Toronto, he should look his two children in the eyes and run to the nearest rehab facility.
Stepping down as mayor to seek help is not an admission of failure, Mr. Ford. It is a sign of bravery. Show your kids what true courage is. I wish my father had been able to.
