Rob Ford to Metro Morning’s Matt Galloway: “I’m not a criminal”

Rob Ford to Metro Morning’s Matt Galloway: “I’m not a criminal”

(Image: CBC/Screenshot)

Rob Ford usually interacts with the Toronto press in massive, unruly scrums at city hall, where it’s easy for him walk away when the questions begin to probe topics he’d rather not discuss. In that context, this morning’s 15-minute, one-on-one interview with Metro Morning host Matt Galloway was an embarrassment of journalistic riches. It was a rare chance for someone to challenge Ford’s talking points, and Galloway seized it—although the mayor, who has become a master at changing the subject, didn’t make it easy. The full interview is right here, and it’s very much worth watching.

If the whole thing had to be summed up in one quote, it would be this one, from Ford:

“Well, I’m not a criminal, and if you’re going to make those accusations of me being a criminal there’s not much sense in moving ahead, because I haven’t been charged with anything.”

Which raises the question: what will he say when and if Toronto police do charge him with something? At one point, Galloway asked the mayor if he’d step aside if charged with a crime, and Ford dismissed the question as “hypothetical.”

And there was more.

Another decisive point in the interview came when Galloway tried to challenge the mayor on his claim that he has created 57,000 jobs during his term. Galloway countered that Toronto’s youth unemployment rate, at last count, was 23 per cent. Ford called the number “fictitious” and tried to refute it by claiming that 90 per cent of the kids on the high school football team he used to coach had part-time jobs. Here’s what the city’s unemployment rate—not just the youth unemployment rate, but the general unemployment rate—actually looked like as of February, according to the city’s economic dashboard report:

toronto-unemployment-rate

There was also some back-and-forth on Ford’s claim that he has saved “a billion dollars” over the course of his mayoralty, which the Star has spent a considerable amount of time debunking.

Again, the full interview is here, and it’s unmissable.