Well, this is interesting: Doug Ford is out to make me a liar. Or at least a wrong-er. When Ford announced his candidacy to lead the provincial Conservative party on Monday, I was quick to predict it would likely wind up being a warm-up act for an eventual bid for the Toronto mayor’s job. I explained it was a no-risk, high-reward scenario: if he won, he had a good shot of being premier; if he lost, he’d just have gotten two months of a campaign head start before the civic election that doesn’t start until May.Well, Ford says it ain’t so. In radio interviews Wednesday, confirmed by Ford to the Star Thursday, he flatly denied there remains any chance he’ll be on the municipal mayoral ballot. “I will not be running for mayor,” he told my colleague David Rider. “I just can’t keep going back and forth.” Even when asked specifically, by Rider and by his radio interviewers, if the answer applied even if he lost his bid at the leadership, he was as unequivocal as he ever is about anything. “No chance,” he said.Now, just because Doug Ford says something, doesn’t make it true. Many people will not be entirely shocked if, in the event Ford loses the PC leadership race, he suddenly hears the chants and pleas of Ford Nationites crying out to him for a change of heart, given the sorry state of their mayoral prospects. It could happen. But let’s not be cynical. Ford insists he will not run for mayor under any circumstances. Do we, the people of Toronto not owe it to him to take him at his word? To hold him to his word? In the spirit of generosity, let’s try that. If we do, we see the frame of the city’s election radically shift. Not just the city’s election, but the city’s entire political landscape.It is impossible to understate the influence of Doug Ford and his late mayoral brother Rob on the city’s politics for the past seven years. Everyone will recall that wh ...
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