Congratulations, Rob Ford: you’ve finally made me despise you

The first thing you see after leaving the baggage carousel at Toronto’s Pearson airport is an enormous photograph of Mayor Rob Ford. In it, the former high school football coach grins in his blingy regalia, teeth yellowed, one eye squinting in a semi-wink. His scalp is flushed and shiny through a receding blond hairline and his excessive girth spreads well beyond the frame. The overall effect is of a bloated albino lab rat on the wrong side of a thyroid drug trial. I always felt a bit sorry for him looking at it. Not any more.

Last week details of a video emerged that features the mayor, shirt unbuttoned, apparently smoking crack cocaine. In the 90-second film he reportedly sniggers, pants, catches his breath, calls Justin Trudeau, leader of the federal Liberal party a ‘fag’, declares himself ‘fucking right wing’ and proceeds to light up a glass pipe and get high as a Georgia pine.

Shot on a mobile phone, the video was shopped around the north American media by a couple of suburban Somali-Canadian drug dealers before being shown to three reporters — two from the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest newspaper and a publication with a history of dogging the scandal-embattled mayor, and the other from the New York-based gossip website Gawker.

The owners of the video reportedly tried to hawk it to the Star first, receiving an offer of $40,000 (Canadian) which they declined. They told Gawker they were holding out for six figures. Gawker, not a publication known for its subtlety, has since launched a ‘Rob Ford Crackstarter’ campaign, seeking to raise $200,000 (US) from its readers to buy the video. At press time they’d raised just under half. As pressure has mounted on Ford to address the scandal (his only response so far has been a scrum in which he called the reports ‘ridiculous’ and dismissed them as a smear campaign) the city has held its breath in suspense, wondering who would get their hands on the video first: the media or Ford?

When the story broke last week I was, like most Canadians, absolutely riveted — then mortified to the bone.