Last winter, Lean and Doug Ford cooked up a plan to revive the Mayor’s Ball for the Arts, a long-dormant Lastman institution, which aimed to raise $1 million for the Toronto Arts Foundation while accomplishing a much more urgent goal: convincing the city’s wary culturati that, despite the mayor’s threats to cut arts grants and sell off theatres, the Fords are not cultural philistines. “There was a message out there that Rob didn’t support the arts,†Doug notes, “which was just not true.â€
Kicking off ticket sales last January, Lean invited some of the city’s leading arts patrons to a reception in the private members’ lounge above the council chamber. There, before a crowd that included former Lieutenant-Governor Hilary Weston, the Ford brothers gave brief impromptu speeches designed to establish the family’s bona fides as enthusiasts of the arts. After the mayor welcomed the crowd, predicting the ball would be “fantasticâ€â€” an adjective he seems to apply to everything, even some lost council votes—Doug regaled guests with tales of their father as an art collector who would travel the globe buying up treasures by the crate load. “My mother would go ballistic,†he recalled. “The house was just loaded with paintings and sculptures. The condo in Florida, the plant—they’re packed with art. We’ve even got all these Chinese vases that we bought at auction when Honest Ed’s restaurant went out of business.†In a crowd where collections lean toward the Group of Seven, awkward glances were exchanged, but Ford was unstoppable. “People tend to think of Rob and I in terms of sports,†he said. “But Rob, in school he loved theatre. In Grade 13, he was in The Princess and the Pea.â€
