Rob Ford tries 31 times to derail John Tory’s budget

City council approved mayor John Tory’s first budget on Wednesday evening, but not before reckoning with a classic Rob Ford sideshow. The former mayor and current Ward 2 councillor moved 31 motions on the budget—far more than any other councillor. Each one was an attempt to dismantle some small part of Tory’s spending plan, by doing things like reducing the amount of money the city spends on planting trees, eliminating security guards at libraries and cutting the mayor’s office budget. Like most of what Ford does politically, these proposals were mainly symbolic. He tabled them to create a fuss, probably with no expectation that any of them would become law. For the most part, they didn’t. City council voted 29 of them down. (Two minor ones—on the city’s grants program and its purchasing management—passed.)