Tory’s Resignation A Moral Necessity

On A Mayoral Disgrace

There is no ethical way to fuck someone you have any form of professional authority over.

I didn’t think this needed to be spelled out in the year of our Lord 2023, but there is no way to do it for one simple reason – even if you think you’re consenting of the events in question, there’s no real, actual way for you to do it if the person you’re fucking has promotions and firing authority over you. Whatever the subordinate might think, the line between consenting because you want to do whatever you’re consenting to and consenting because you worry if you don’t you’ll lose out professionally is never clear.

This is, of course, the same conversation about Bill Clinton, and if you had asked me five years ago I’d have said Bill was an asshole but the Lewinsky Affair shouldn’t have ended his Presidency. Now, I’ve changed my mind, because the simple fact is there’s no genuinely consensual relationship between the President of the United States and a college aged intern, and nor is there between the Mayor of Toronto and a staffer under their purview.

I know a lot of people have viewed the Tory affair allegations as a distraction from the mess Doug Ford is in over developers and bribes and weddings, but that fundamentally misses a key part of this – John Tory did a horrendous thing, and if he is allowed to stay in public life after this we will once again be allowing our politics to degrade just another step.

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We can’t continue to have the level of degradation of the public realm and the entire concept of ethics. We fucking can’t do this anymore, and every time we let someone get away with something the next one is worse for it. Think this is just about standards for conservatives? I routinely piss off my Liberal readers by actually acknowledging that SNC (and to a lesser extent) WE were bad. I think those scandals were real and substantial, and I have used my tool – my vote – to register my protest. I haven’t voted for the Liberals two elections in a row because of ethics.

The reason Doug Ford is acting so cavalierly with the developers? He believes there is no political price to be paid for corruption in and of itself. He thinks – and he’s really not wrong with our recent political history – that if he uses corrupt means to enrich his developer friends but it results in more houses and a housing crisis that is seen to be easing slightly, then he will get away with it. Is he right? I mean, Trudeau got away with Blackface and two big ethical scandals, so is he wrong?

And this is the problem – everyone knows they’re acting in bad faith and just relying on the fact that everyone else is also doing it. Ford looked at Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne hang on for 15 years because the alternatives were always dogshit. Now, he’s trying to do the same thing. And the problem is, so long as the political incentives say you won’t face any consequences for the corruption in and of itself, then we’ll never get a better politics.

Everyone has their pet way to make politics better, and a lot of people seem to think some form of electoral reform is the answer. The actual, practical one is for the public to be willing to actually exact a price for corruption and ethical failures. These sorts of scandals have to have a price on them politically if we want a politics moving forward with less of them. Tory thought it was okay to fuck a staffer because he thought he was Toronto’s King, and that he was invincible. Piercing that veil for him, and for everyone, is important.

Tory resigning or not is not, actually, an issue for Toronto, but a matter of public interest and concern across this country. Letting a man fuck a subordinate and face no consequence is pure and simply unacceptable, and anyone trying to get us back to the “real” story of Doug Ford can fuck off. This is a hugely important story, and pretend otherwise is a willful denial of reality. John Tory did a truly disgusting and unacceptable thing. In a world of insufficient consequences for the rich and powerful, this has to be easy enough to all agree on. I know it’s not, but it has to be if we’re going to have any future without these sorts of things happening all the time.

What a lot of the Tory discourse this week has missed is that this isn’t just a game of chess, an elaborate board with players moving all over the place. This is a human tragedy, and yet so much of the coverage and the reaction has devolved to a farce. In the rush to seem smarter than everybody else, to put together pieces of a puzzle that doesn’t exist, what has been missed is that John Tory did a very bad thing. He fucked a subordinate. I know I keep harping on this, but he fucked someone he had hiring and firing responsibilities over, therefore entirely invalidating the idea that there could be a meaningful way of saying no.

What he did is bad enough to see an end to his time in office. We don’t have to play whataboutism and pretend that because other people did worse things what he did wasn’t bad. It was fucking horrible. Tory did an incredibly horrible thing all because he was, I guess, horny, and now he has to pay that price. If he is allowed to stay in office the message that will be sent is that our sympathy and our deference goes to the perpetrators and not the victims. And if we send that message, we may as well give up.

This isn’t just about Toronto, but about the country we want to tell ourselves we are. We know that the story we tell ourselves about Canada – always being content to just not be the Americans – is bullshit, and it’s left us with a complacency about our own institutions. If we as a people really tolerate Tory un-resigning, then we deserve all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, for we will have decided that there is nothing bad enough to demand more from our politicians.

I’m not willing to concede that, because I want to believe our country can and will be better.

Please God may I be right for once.