Rob Ford obit

Rob Ford, Blustery Ex-Mayor of Toronto Whose Struggles Went Public, Dies at 46

He was not on the list.

Rob Ford, the combative former mayor of Toronto who gained international notoriety with his confession of crack cocaine use, his public drunkenness and his belligerent clashes with other public officials, died on Tuesday. He was 46.

His office announced his death but gave no other details. Mr. Ford had been undergoing treatment for malignant liposarcoma, a rare form of cancer, since September 2014.

Along with his brother Doug, Mr. Ford was a controversial figure in Toronto politics for years, drawing support largely from conservative residents of suburban communities that had been absorbed into the City of Toronto. In 2013 he acknowledged smoking crack cocaine during one of his “drunken stupors,” as he put it.

After his cancer diagnosis, Mr. Ford withdrew from his mayoral re-election campaign in favor of his brother, who was defeated. But Rob Ford did win the seat on the City Council that Doug Ford had held.

The son of a millionaire, Mr. Ford built his power base among mainly blue-collar, right-wing voters — “the Ford Nation,” he called them — in five former municipalities that joined Toronto in 1998. Mr. Ford was a lifelong resident of one such suburb, Etobicoke, where he was born on May 28, 1969.

He echoed his constituents’ view that urban elitists were inflating taxes through social service programs and excessively generous contracts with public sector unions.

In office he took a bellicose approach to governing, engaging in profanity-laden shouting matches with City Council members and journalists.

Mr. Ford ran for mayor in 2010 after the incumbent, David Miller, a center leftist, decided not to seek re-election after a 39-day garbage strike, which had created the impression that the city was heading out of control. The Ford brothers concentrated their campaign on the suburbs, promising to “stop the gravy train” at City Hall.

Mr. Ford showed little interest in much of the city’s business during his time on the Council or as mayor, but he clearly relished the glad-handing side of politics and followed up on constituents’ complaints about matters like garbage collection. Sometimes he visited them personally.

Mr. Ford’s father, Doug, had been a member of a Progressive Conservative provincial government with a populist, anti-elitist bent, but it was not immediately obvious that as a young man Mr. Ford would follow a similar path.

After a single year at Carleton University in Ottawa, where he played on the football team but was disappointed not to start a single game, he joined his siblings at their father’s successful adhesive label business.

Much of Mr. Ford’s political career was guided by his brother Doug, who also succeeded their father at the label company.