The Mayor of Toronto is a man named Rob Ford.
He and his older brother Doug, a city councillor, loom over the city like a tag-team wrestling duo about to leap off the turnbuckle of the grappling ring. They both have small, beady eyes, thin, almost colourless hair and lack subtlety. They believe in football, small government and telling it like it is.
These guys are always in the news, and like a couple of angry patriots they wage daily battles with the cultural elites they imagine slouching through the fancy architecture of downtown nibbling Vegan sandwiches.
In looking at the Ford Brothers, it’s important to remember that Rob’s ascension to Mayor was a vividly divisive one. He lost every riding in the densely populated core of city to George Smitherman, a furious and flawed gay politician, and won every exterior, suburban riding in the Greater Toronto Area. There’s been a tension ever since, with the Fords exhibiting a contempt for the issues of the downtown elites who seem to turn their noses up at the big-box culture of suburbia.
The Fords are intent on stopping the gravy train and those who would ride it, and if that means banning bike lanes, calling 911 when they see somebody spraying graffiti, flipping people the finger or telling Margaret Atwood to go fuck herself, so be it!
Most recently the Mayor floated the idea of shutting down libraries as a cost-cutting measure. Doug, the older, smarter brother, supported this notion by saying that it was easier to find a library than it was a Tim Horton’s donut shop. This was meant as evidence that libraries were too plentiful, and obviously, not as important in the day to day life of normal people at donut shops.
People went crazy.
It’s been a long time since I’ve habitually visited a public library. Like most people I know, the need just isn’t there anymore. The old notion of the library as the primary source of information is outdated, with a universal library now available at our fingertips, and the honest to God truth is that if the library right across the street were to close I, and relatively privileged people like me, wouldn’t miss it, but other people would.
Many of the libraries in the downtown core service those with limited opportunities. These people don’t have Kindles and many of them might not even have jobs or predictable and safe places to sleep. The library is a place to go during the day. It’s a cool and inspiring sanctuary that provides the Internet, books and magazines, other people and some peace and order that for many is something that’s entirely elusive in the chaos of their lives. This is hugely important, and if city libraries are no longer full of children poring through the Encyclopedia Britannica and writing essays, so what?
In the Ford city-view people with problems, be they social, economic or otherwise, are weak and places like libraries are not way stations in difficult lives but enabling shelters for lazy deadbeats. Cities, of course, are full of people with complicated problems and exist in part as economical delivery systems to address these issues, taking on more than its share of social responsibilities so that those who choose to live in the suburbs– for whatever reasons–don’t have to. It’s ridiculous that a city like Toronto, one of the largest and most diverse metropolises in North America, would have governance in the form of a Mayor who is so vividly anti-city, wanting nothing more than to bring an NFL team to town and strip Toronto of the culture that makes it a city and turn it into a kind of interior suburb.
Some days I think that they just wandered into a strip mall sports bar at last call, found the guy who had eaten the most suicide wings and told him, “Hey, you won the game show, you’re now the Mayor of Toronto!”