In 1950 the mayor of Toronto, the Hon. Hiram E. McCallum, objected to the display of a painting in an art exhibit at the Canadian National Exhibition. "Sailors and Floozies" had outraged the mayor and other moral guardians of the city by depicting seamen cavorting with strumpets.
"Toronto the Good," as it was called, without irony, was for much of the last century probably the most God-fearing city in North America, fixed in a Victorian ideal of rectitude enforced by a fire-and-brimstone religious lobby. The Lord's Day Alliance imposed a kind of civic coma every Sunday: no shopping, no drinking, no movies, no sports — no nothing. The other six days were no hedonistic jamboree, either.
By the third millennium, that stony bastion of Protestant piety lay as buried and forgotten as ancient Troy. Toronto was the fifth-most populous city in North America, vivified by hundreds of thousands of immigrants of every ethnicity, admired for its balance of economic power, cultural diversity, sophistication and civic enlightenment. It even had its own prestigious international film festival. The actor Peter Ustinov described Toronto as "New York, run by the Swiss."
Then came 2010 and the election of Rob Ford as mayor. He spent the next four years trying his best to turn Toronto the Good into something like Deadwood, run by the Snopeses.
Ford was 300 pounds of redneck belligerence with the face of a malevolent baby, playing to his sour constituency of have-nots by sticking it to the Toronto establishment — just about anybody who could spell — without noticeably achieving anything else.
That Ford was a frequent two-fisted public drunk, enjoyed the occasional crack pipe, insulted and berated anybody not charmed by his boar-in-a-china-shop act and consorted with lowlifes, ad nauseam, royally pained the conscientious but endeared him to the rest. He earned the distinction of being the first Canadian politician to serve as a punch line on late-night American talk shows.
Torontonians were of course horrified as the mayor's antics drove their city's proud self-esteem almost daily ever further into the gutter. Even his recent gesture of entering an alcohol rehab program became a fiasco: His Honor had no sooner left the facility than he was back to publicly boozing it up.
But then, on Sept. 12, Ford announced he was undergoing treatment for an abdominal tumor and withdrawing from the coming mayoral election. He named his all-but-twin brother, Doug, to run in his place. Nobody gives Doug a chance; Rob's charisma, or act, or spell, is non-transferrable.
Thus ends a four-year nightmare.
But won't some pangs be felt? Rob Ford gave Toronto and Canada something they'd never had — scandal, notoriety, even a bizarre kind of bad-boy glamour — and it felt sort of thrilling, this flirtation with decadence.
In a nation so long doomed to live in the shadow of its vulgar, show-offy neighbor, earnestly toeing a straight line, a renegade churl — a renegade Canadian churl — had got and held the attention of millions of Americans who had always seen their northern neighbor as a nation of Dudley Do-rights.
They'll never admit it, but Ford-hating Torontonians, after this moment in the spotlight, are going to secretly miss it — even the sneers, the ridicule and the jokes.
When, if ever, will it shine so hot and bright on their fair city again?
Bruce McCall is an artist and writer living in New York, and a Canadian citizen. He wrote this article for the New York Times.
