Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story by Robyn Doolittle Page B

Fords commissioned a poll.
    The numbers showed that Rob Ford was the third-place choice for mayor. He saw an opening and made a run for that Hail Mary.

FIVE
    THE GRAVY
    TRAIN
    N ick Kouvalis pulled into the parking lot at Deco Labels & Tags in Etobicoke unsure of what to expect. He had never met Rob Ford. In fact, until a few weeks earlier, he’d never heard of him. But Kouvalis’s business partner, Richard Ciano, had gotten roped into joining the councillor’s mayoral campaign by a mutual friend of the Ford family. Ciano and Kouvalis, both in their mid-thirties, owned a political consulting firm called Campaign Research, which specialized in polling, voter identification, and strategy. The Fords wanted them to put together a campaign plan. Ciano had warned Kouvalis that they were in fact dealing with the Fords, plural. Brother Doug was the campaign manager, and he was very, uh, opinionated.
    Ciano took Kouvalis through the sales office entrance and up to the second-floor boardroom. There was a wall of windows, a long grey table, some simple chairs, and a whiteboard. It was all very plain. The candidate stomped through the doors in an old black suit, a crooked collar, and a tacky red tie. He was big, nearly as big as Kouvalis had been before losing 180 pounds. “Hey, buddy, nice to meet you,” Ford said, extending a hand. “Listen, I just want to let you know, I’m not going to tolerateany cancer on my team.” A startled Kouvalis wondered, That’s how you greet people? When Ford was out of earshot, he turned to Ciano. “How much are these guys into us for, and when are we getting paid?”
    Next, Kouvalis met the brother, who was a slicker, thinner version of Ford. The team was small, maybe ten people. Most didn’t seem to have much political expertise. As far as Kouvalis could tell, the majority were just friends of the family. After some obligatory go-team sabre-rattling, Kouvalis got down to business. Where were they with fundraising? What policies were they promoting? He was greeted with blank stares.
    Looking back at that first meeting still makes Kouvalis chuckle. “We were there to talk about the campaign and what it would be like. They were talking about door-knocking. They were talking about the lefties and the socialists, the Republican Party and the Tea Party, and their friends in the States who gave them advice. And I was trying to understand the policies.”
    Despite the rhetoric and shabby suit, Kouvalis liked Ford. They had a lot in common, especially politically. Ford wanted to make the Toronto Transit Commission an essential service, because two years earlier chaos had reigned when the union went on strike. He wanted to cut the size of council in half, because there were forty-four municipal wards and only twenty-two provincial ridings. It would save millions. Ford said the size and cost of the public sector had exploded under Mayor Miller, who was a lefty-socialist who cared only about downtown Toronto. Ford wanted to cut the waste at City Hall.
    Kouvalis bought the message, but he wasn’t sure how they could win. “They just didn’t strike me as normal political candidate types,” he said. “I didn’t realize, at that moment, that that’sexactly the campaign we were going to be running: the antiestablishment campaign.”
    THE CAMPAIGN THAT Kouvalis and Ciano inherited on April 1, 2010, wasn’t really a campaign. Several people involved at the time described it to me as “a train wreck.” The Fords had done little more than register a website, make a bunch of T-shirts, and print a few hundred “Ford for Mayor” placards. There was no policy. No platform. No budget. No message. No fundraising strategy. No battle plan. And no real understanding about why that was a problem.
    Kouvalis and Ciano needed a team. They recruited a twenty-four-year-old keener named Fraser Macdonald to handle communications. After graduating from Queen’s University, Macdonald had gone to work with Ciano at the