In some ways, Mayor Mel prepared us for Rob Ford and Donald Trump

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After the funeral for Mel Lastman on Monday, Toronto seemed like a quieter place. The city has produced a fair share of political characters, but no one has spoken to the town with the same unabashed huckster strength as Megacity Mouth, the first mayor of the consolidated City of Toronto.

Mayor Mel embodied the city’s hurried combination of global ambition and provincial uncertainty at a crucial time in civic history when he took office. He can be a clown – amusing, embarrassing – who happily expresses his love for the city. The voters were very happy and showed it by loving him back.

He grew up as a child on the streets of Kensington Market. He became a Rolls-Royce-driving furniture pitchman. He was then the talk-first-think-later politician who ruled North York and eventually the entire city, as the once funny face of the modern backroom Family Compact, before retiring from public life in 2003. Died Saturday at age that 88, he left a city that had changed drastically since he had grown up, one greatly altered by his years in civic office.

Lastman became prominent in a Toronto whose identity was partly defined by retail personalities – the Upper Canada -founded Eatons, the worthless Honest Ed Mirvish and Sam “The Record Man” Sniderman. Toupeed “Bad Boy” Mel Lastman, the supplier of cheese ball salesman clichés, fits amid the flashing lights of the new crowd.

The term “world-class” seemed to be an obsession during his years in office-a piece in a city where the World’s Biggest Bookstore and World’s Largest Jeans Store and the world’s tallest free-standing structure and the first fully retractable roofs were built as landmarks. A city is sometimes desperately trying to assert its place in the world in superlative terms – and Lastman is a fluent and fun speaker of that language.

I first met him when I was a kid in Toronto, and he was the apparent mayor-for-life of the then-city of North York, when he threatened to persuade the Toronto Maple Leafs to move to his suburb, or to mount a North York Olympic bid to compete with Toronto’s. Like government through self-glorifying publicity stunts. I mean, he named the North York civic square after himself while he was still in office.

But he shows his ambitions for his suburb: Mel Lastman Square is now in the middle of a highrise commercial and condo neighborhood that has grown from strip mall obscurity under his stewardship; it was served by a subway line on Sheppard Avenue that he, against all likelihood and sense of transit planning, was persuaded to exist.

He reconstructed North York’s identity, and thus and in many other ways, reshaped Toronto as well. The glass and steel walls of the condominium that now define the character of downtown Toronto first began to appear on what was vast vacant railroad land during Lastman’s time as mayor. Lastman’s campaign vowing not to raise property taxes has set a cheapskate ante for the next generation of politicians in Toronto. And his suburbs against the city’s election coalition and the angry repression of the provincial government will define the city’s political rhetoric ever since.

I started writing about the city and its politics back then while Lastman was mayor, and his “Sideshow Mel” habit and the controversies it provoked often got more real estate headlines than anything. Proudly calling on the army to deal with a snowstorm, excited Hells Angels, worried about the boiling life of “natives” on a trip to Africa, loudly cursing journalists and city council members, expressing his ignorance to the World Health Organization in the midst of the SARS epidemic, held a press conference to announce that he had an entire secret family claiming him for child support, while continuing to act as a commercial spokesperson for TV for his family’s business while serving as mayor… it’s a lot. It all happens while, it turns out in an inquiry, lobbyists bring US city staff and councilors to watch hockey games and carry bags full of money into City Hall’s parking garage for evening meeting.

After Rob Ford’s chaotic mayoralty fueled by the drug scandal and U.S. president Donald Trump’s narcissistic authoritarianism, it probably seems strange. But at that time everything seemed exhausting. And that’s disturbing.

Enough for you to trace the city’s history with dominoes falling in reaction: David Miller’s polished new broom is emerging in response to Lastman’s clown shows and corruption; Rob Ford’s skinflint populism is rising in reaction to Miller’s perceived elitism and city building; John Tory’s leniency in management appears to be a welcome breath after Ford’s turmoil. The history of aggregate Toronto continues from the tone set by Lastman.

And what most will remember is his tone: consistently, proudly proclaiming Toronto as “the world’s largest city.” Using his salesman’s instinct for over-statement on paper on the uncertainty of a city suffering after aggregation growing pains and still holding on to an identity.

I’m not the only one to think that a happy image of his being mayor is his appearance at the 1998 Pride Parade. Of all the accounts reluctant to participate, Lastman never attended as mayor of North York. But he thought it an obligation to join the parade as the new mayor of the entire new city of Toronto. When he joined a fire department float and fought in the water with the crowd, he seemed to have the time of his life.

The city was a rapidly changing place during Lastman’s years as mayor. Sometimes he shapes that change, sometimes resentment he accepts. But he has certainly always been the strongest voice expressing pride in what Toronto is and what it is. And in general he always seemed to enjoy doing it.

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