In writing my post from a couple days ago I, like the mayor, lost control of the narrative. It occurred about two-thirds of the way through, I turned from a critique of Mayor Ford to a blast at voters. Perhaps I was feeling a little misanthropic. But the wind just kind of pushed me that way.
What I really meant to say was…
How does a politician proceed to govern when everything he stood for as a candidate, every claim he made, every promise he pledged turns out to be a total fabrication, flight of fancy, complete and utter bullocks?
The list is long. The examples plenty.
Boatloads of gravy turn out to be merely dribs and drabs of the stuff. No Service Cuts Guaranteed means the exact opposite of what the mayor seems now determined to carry out. Cuts to the TPS and the TPL have been re-labelled ‘efficiencies.’ A $774 million operating budget deficit? What’s that you’re saying now? A $139 million surplus? Respect For The Taxpayers with an open and transparent process becomes this.
Mayor Rob Ford claims to have a mandate from the people of Toronto because he was elected by them last fall. But what sort of mandate is it when he’s proceeding to do the exact opposite of what he promised the voters he would do? That’s less a mandate and more of a con job.
The 47% of Toronto voters who put Rob Ford into the mayor’s office wanted gravy found without cuts, major or minor. They wanted a say in the decisions City Hall made. He promised no pain. His mandate consisted of an easy-peasy nip and tuck at the supposed excesses of municipal politics.
That’s not what he’s delivering. Nowhere on the campaign trail last year or in his Ford For Mayor literature did he tell the people of Toronto he would shutter libraries on Sundays or remove cops from the street. His spiralling favourability numbers indicate as much. 
A politician with no authority has forfeited his right to govern. It would do well for many of those on council to remember that the next time he and his most avid supporters wave around the mandate canard. It’s baseless. Mayor Ford is nothing like candidate Ford. What we saw is not what we’re getting. The promises he made have all been broken. Whatever there once was of a mandate has now sunk out of sight into the quicksand of empty rhetoric and crowd pleasing cant.
— more to the pointedly submitted by Urban Sophisticat