Toronto Mayor Rob Ford has reportedly been caught on video smoking crack cocaine, the Toronto Star reports:
Two Toronto Star reporters have viewed the video three times. It appears to show Ford in a room, sitting in a chair, wearing a white shirt, top buttons open, inhaling from what appears to be a glass crack pipe. Ford is incoherent, trading jibes with an off-camera speaker who goads the clearly impaired mayor by raising topics including Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau and the Don Bosco high school football team Ford coaches.
“I'm f—ing right-wing,” Ford appears to mutter at one point. “Everyone expects me to be right-wing. I'm just supposed to be this great.…” and his voice trails off. At another point he is heard calling Trudeau a “fag.” Later in the 90-second video he is asked about the football team and he appears to say (though he is mumbling), “they are just f—ing minorities.”
Gawker is raising money to purchase the video.
Ford is notoriously anti-gay. Snubbing the city's Pride parade is the least of his anti-LGBT accomplishments. The Globe and Mail listed many more of them in an article published in 2010:
Aug. 4, 2010: Mr. Ford endorses the views of a fundamentalist Christian pastor who said same-sex marriage could "dismantle" a "healthy democratic civilization." Appearing alongside Pastor Wendell Brereton, Mr. Ford says: "We're together. We have the same thoughts." He adds: "I support traditional marriage. I always have. But if people want to, to each your own. I'm not worried about what people do in their private life. I look out for taxpayers' money."
June 28, 2006: During a council debate on public-health grants for community-based AIDS-prevention programs, Mr. Ford says: "If you're not doing needles and you're not gay, you won't get AIDS, probably."
June 14, 2005: Mr. Ford questions the utility of grant programs for transgendered and transsexual people during a council debate. "I don't understand. No. 1, I don't understand a transgender, I don't understand, is it a guy dressed up like a girl or a girl dressed up like a guy? And we're funding this for, I don't know, what does it say here? We're giving them $3,210?"
June 13, 2001: Mr. Ford questions a grant for a video about homosexuality in Toronto's South Asian community, telling The National Post: "I have no problem giving money out to physically or mentally handicapped children or seniors, but spending $5,000 on this video is disgusting, it is absolutely disgusting to spend this amount of money on this, whatever it was called, video."
No doubt the city's LGBT community won't miss him.
