It’s now in The Australian. I have been following this for a while (see here), but matters, it seems, have now escalated:

TORONTO’S city council has voted to strip Mayor Rob Ford of most of his remaining powers, in further sanctions against him following admissions of crack smoking and binge drinking.

The move, which Ford vowed to fight, effectively makes the city’s chief magistrate a figurehead, which Ford vowed to fight. [“Vowed to fight” twice in a sentence; he must really mean it.]

Leading up to the vote, debate on the motion descended into farce as Ford taunted hecklers in the public gallery, calling them ‘punks’, and at one point accidentally bowled over a female councillor as he charged across the chamber.

The civic leaders of Canada’s largest city had already voted last week to curb Ford’s official duties and yesterday went further in order to ‘restore the confidence of the public in the government of Toronto’, according to the deputy mayor.

But Ford, who has apologised for his hell-raising lifestyle and for obscene public outbursts, has vowed to fight both in court and at the ballot box to keep his job.

‘This is going to be outright war,’ he said.

So not how it was, but then nothing is. And as James Delingpole reminds us:

In 2001 he proposed that city councillors should have their $200,000 personal budgets slashed: ‘If we wiped out the perks for council members, we’d save $100 million easy.’ True to form he paid his own expenses out of his salary. He was also one of only four councillors to vote against a hike in property taxes. As Mayor, he has continued in this tradition by slashing the city’s bloated public sector payroll in the teeth of strikes and protests from the unions.

You know what Lincoln said when told that General Grant was drinking whiskey.

Tell me what brand of whiskey that Grant drinks. I would like to send a barrel of it to my other generals.

If you think the issue is that he was smoking crack and talking dirty you have obviously not been following politics over the last few years.

MY OWN VIEW: I probably should make it clear that my own view is that he is done for and must go as mayor. There are some lines that cannot be crossed and that is one. It is true that he was monitored perhaps smoking crack a year ago but the photographic evidence was ambiguous. Now that he has admitted it, however, he cannot stay in public life. Had he been on the other side, no one would ever have known, but he’s not on the other side so everyone now does know. These are the rules, and while they ought to be the same rules for both sides, that’s not how it is. But it is still remarkable to me that someone like him can become mayor of Toronto. It’s a very different place from how it was. Think of him as mayor of Melbourne, the Canadian version of Sir Les Patterson.