Ford admits drinking after video surfaces

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/01/2014 (4382 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TORONTO — Toronto Mayor Rob Ford ended weeks of adamant vows he had given up alcohol by admitting Tuesday he was drinking the previous night, after a video emerged of him in a rambling, profane rant.

The poorly framed video of the largely incoherent Ford using Jamaican swear words was posted on YouTube anonymously, and appears to have been filmed at a restaurant called Steak Queen in the city’s northwest.

Ford admitted he had been drinking, but said it was on his “own time.”

“I was with some friends and what I do in my personal life with my personal friends, that’s up to me,” Ford told reporters outside his city hall office. “It really has nothing to do with you guys.”

The mayor denied he was on drugs the previous night but wouldn’t say how he got home from the restaurant in that state.

In the video, Ford uses profanity, appears to imitate a Jamaican accent and uses the Jamaican swear word bumbaclot, references Toronto police Chief Bill Blair and counter-surveillance, though full sentences cannot be made out from the audio.

Ford said he did not think the language he used was offensive or discriminatory.

“It’s how I speak with some of my friends,” he said.

A second video was posted to YouTube on Tuesday night purporting to show Ford sitting with a friend at the same restaurant Monday night.

“When I saw him, he was not drunk and he was not even drinking; he was sitting with a friend and respectable,” the text with the posted video said. The video does not show the face of the man said to be Ford.

The other man in the video appears to be Ford’s friend, Alexander Lisi, whom police charged last year with extortion, alleging he tried to get his hands on the infamous video that appears to show Ford smoking crack cocaine.

Coun. Michael Thompson, the city’s only black councillor, said the mayor’s interpretation of “supposedly being Jamaican” was offensive.

He called it another unfortunate situation in the “unravelling of Rob Ford,” saying many fellow councillors were skeptical of Ford’s claims of sobriety.

“We’ve been fairly silent in just waiting for the next thing to occur,” Thompson said. “I think we all had sort of concluded it was only a matter of time.”

Ford has repeatedly said he hasn’t had a drink since November — after a month in which reams of allegations in police documents he did drugs, drove drunk and consorted with gang members were released by the courts.

The mayor has denied those allegations, which have not been proven in court, but did admit in November he had smoked crack cocaine, likely in one of his “drunken stupors.”

Coun. Joe Mihevc said it appeared from Monday’s video Ford was “off the wagon.”

“It was his commitment that he would clean up his act,” Mihevc said. “What this shows is that he has not done that.”

— The Canadian Press