Mayor Crack Pipe

Canadians are commonly thought of as being weird, nuts or even socialists — at least by their neighbors to the south, who consider their health insurance to be nothing less than the work of Satan.

Great, they invented ice hockey, that rough winter game that often ends in knock-down, drag-out brawls and which is just as popular in the U.S. as it is in Canada.

As if they want to make sure they have all the cliches covered, citizens in the multicultural metropolis of Toronto are now forced to deal with a mayor they won’t find easy to get rid of. Toronto’s Mayor Rob Ford, who resembles an overinflated, ex-hockey playing crack addict, has defied all the rules and conventions. The 44-year-old conservative is known to have smoked crack with underworld bosses, gotten rowdy even though it wasn’t St. Patrick’s Day and gotten into both verbal and physical confrontations with his opponents.

His brother — Councilman Doug Ford, who also serves as an adviser to Mayor Ford — characterized attempts to call early elections as a “modern-day coup d’état.” Meanwhile, the mayor is not even considering stepping down and intends to stay in office until elections next year. It’s a case for the psychiatrists — or at least for Hollywood, which is filming more and more movies in Toronto. At least a segment of Toronto’s electorate appears, meanwhile, to be savoring Ford’s excesses.

Anyone who thinks this is just a case of Canadian chutzpah need only look southward to Washington, D.C., where Mayor Marion Barry was caught red-handed smoking crack in a hotel in 1990. Barry spent six months in jail and was re-elected as mayor in 1995.