Mobilities, 2015

Vol. 10, No. 3, 402–422, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2014.880563

Stopping the ‘War on the Car’:

Neoliberalism, Fordism, and the Politics of
Automobility in Toronto

ALAN WALKS
Department of Geography, University of Toronto – Mississauga, Mississauga, Canada

ABSTRACT This article interrogates the politics of automobility in Toronto under the regime
of mayor Rob Ford, who came to power in 2010 promising to ‘stop the war on the car.’
The election of Ford, and the thrust of his subsequent agenda, came as a surprise to many in
the city, due to Toronto’s reputation as a cosmopolitan diverse transit-friendly global city.
The Toronto case study allows for the analysis of the relationships between Fordism, automo-
bility, and the politics and rationalities of neoliberalism. Instead of seeing neoliberalism as
something external or imposed, its contested politics are rooted in diverging social and
economic interests directly derived from Fordism and the system of automobility, with oppos-
ing political-economic factions both drawing on different elements of neoliberalism.
Authoritarian populist neoliberal regimes like the Ford administration in Toronto, and the
roll-back austerity they promote, are not antithetical to automobile Fordism, but on the con-
trary represent an attempt to protect and reinvigorate it in the face of the forces of de-indus-
trialization and financialization. As such they receive their support from social groups
irrevocably invested in the continuation, and irrationalities, of the Fordist system of automo-
bility. This has implications for how the politics of neoliberalism might unfold in the future.

KEY WORDS: Mobility, Infrastructure, Political culture, Neoliberalism, Fordism, Local

government, Elections, Municipal policy, Urban form, Toronto, Canada

Introduction: New Fordism in Toronto?

In the municipal election of October 2010, the ‘straight-talking, penny-pinching’
councillor Rob Ford beat out the early front-runner, former Liberal Party provincial
government cabinet minister George Smitherman, for the vacated job of Mayor of
the City of Toronto, Canada’s largest city.1 The extent of Ford’s victory surprised
many among the media where, even among reporters for the (then-) Ford-supporting
Toronto Sun newspaper, ‘nobody believed it was possible’ he could win (Strashin,
cited in Bradshaw 2010, A15). Despite being a card-carrying member of the
Conservative party, Ford was in fact not the choice of the city’s traditional

Correspondence Address: Alan Walks, Department of Geography, University of Toronto — Mississauga,

3359 Mississauga Road, Mississauga, ON L5L 1C6, Canada. Email: alan.walks@utoronto.ca

© 2014 Taylor & Francis

 Stopping the ‘War on the Car’ 403

center-right business elite, who mostly stumped for Smitherman (see Goddard 2010).
This was partly due to Ford’s reputation as an ‘outsider’ and a ‘simple, bumbling,
uncouth, rough-around-the-edges politician’ (James 2010) with a penchant for pro-
fanities, intoxication, and misdemeanors,2 and partly because Ford’s policies were
seen as too far to the right amongst Toronto’s elites. The sense of entitlement that
Smitherman felt toward the mayorship, inculcated through support and grooming on
behalf of the business community, is evident in his assessment that he ‘lost the elec-
tion that was mine to win’ (Smitherman, cited in McLean 2010, A10).
Much of Ford’s policy platform has come right out of the roll-back neoliberal
austerity playbook (see Peck and Tickell 2002) – promising to cut city spending,
eliminate arts and environmental programs, reduce property taxes, lay-off city work-
ers and privatize city services like garbage collection, sell off city buildings and
other assets, reduce the number of city councillors, and eliminate the city’s ‘fair
wage policy.’ As someone who never spent his taxpayer-funded councillor’s budget,
but instead paid for his office expenses out of his own (well-lined) pockets, Ford
embodies the neoliberal zeitgeist of self-made entrepreneurialism, individualism,
self-reliance, and respect for the ‘taxpayer’.
However, it is Ford’s policies related to transportation and mobility that often took
center stage in the campaign. Vowing to ‘stop the war on the car,’ Ford promised he
would cancel the Transit City plan that had taken eight years to prepare (and that
had already been launched) and that would have built new light-rail train lines into
the suburbs. As well, he promised to replace Toronto’s well-loved streetcars
(above-ground trams running on rails) with buses, and cancel the city’s vehicle regis-
tration tax (VRT) (see Rider 2010). Ford was able to fuse in the public discourse his
twin promises of rooting out corruption and waste, and scrapping Transit City, via
the slogan he repeated at every opportunity: ‘stop the gravy train!’. Then, declaring
‘Transit City’s over and the war on the car is over,’ the new mayor in his first week
on the job (along with his brother Doug Ford, who was elected in Rob’s old council
ward) convinced the newly elected and now prominently more right-leaning Toronto
City Council to cancel both the Transit City initiative and the VRT (Kalinowski and
Rider 2010). Later on, he and his brother were able to get council to agree to a
motion to remove recently laid bicycle paths (Hume 2012). Commentators
questioned how a large, liberal, cosmopolitan, dense, and diverse global city such as
Toronto, known for its well-respected governance and transportation systems, could
elect such a mayor, especially given other more provincial, seemingly ‘conservative’
cities such as Calgary had elected left-leaning visible-minority candidates (Hume
2010).
There are clear parallels between the politics pursued by Ford, both during the
campaign, and during his tenure as mayor (discussed in more detail below), and
those pursued by other politicians adhering to variants of neoliberal ideology.
Indeed, Ford is the most outwardly ‘neoliberal’ of the candidates that ran for mayor,
and his platform and political philosophy fit dominant conceptualizations of neoliber-
alism and ‘neoliberal suburbanism’ (Harvey 2005; Peck 2011). Ford’s approach has
hints of what Robinson and Barrera (2012) refer to as ‘twenty-first century fascism.’
Filion (2011) refers to the Ford administration as ‘Toronto’s Tea Party.’
Yet, at the same time, mayor Ford’s story presents problems for contemporary the-
orizing of both the suburban locus of support for neoliberalism, and the ideological
relationship between neoliberalism and regimes of accumulation such as Fordism
and post-Fordism (see Aglietta 1979). Neoliberalism has been theorized as the ideo-
404 A. Walks

logical accompaniment of the post-Fordist restructuring of the economy toward a

globalized cosmopolitan financialized capitalism, and as a remedy for the rigidities
and sagging profitability of Fordism (Harvey 2005). Suburban populations are con-
ceptually expected to support neoliberal policies out of a desire to avoid responsibil-
ity for funding social programs, welfare-state income redistribution, and/or public
infrastructure in the cities (Walks 2004). However, Ford’s support in Toronto derives
not from post-Fordist exurbia, nor from the gentrified and financialized new inner
city, but from the quintessential Fordist (inner) postwar suburbs that furthermore can-
not secede from the city, being a part (and indeed the political majority) of the cen-
tral-city government. These postwar suburbs contain the poorest residential
populations within the Toronto metropolitan area, and the highest concentrations of
recent immigrants and racialized minorities. It is Ford’s main opponent Smitherman
who received financial and political support from the most prominent business elites,
including those aligned with global finance capital, while Ford and his family dispro-
portionately funded his own campaign.
Mention of the Ford namesake raises the importance of mobility and automobility.
This has been an under-appreciated and under-theorized aspect of both neoliberalism
and shifting regimes of accumulation. It is argued herein that the crisis of Fordism,
and the politics of neoliberalism, are intimately tied up with the politics of automo-
bility. However, in the Toronto case, recent politics do not fit well the exclusionary
politics of ‘secessionist automobility’ predominant in some US cities (Henderson
2006), because supporters of Ford perceive themselves instead to be anti-elitist,
inclusive and working class. Instead of the dominant perspective counterposing neo-
liberalism to a Keynesian-inspired Fordism, the rise of divergent neoliberalisms are
fundamentally rooted in Fordism, automobility, and hydrocarbon-based (fossil) capi-
talism. Roll-back neoliberal politics, and what Stuart Hall calls ‘authoritarian popu-
lism’ (1985, 2011), could not have evolved except from and through the crisis of
Fordism, and has in part emerged not to consign Fordism to history, but to uphold
certain inequities and irrationalities of Fordism. It is thus fitting that such a politics
has been (re)articulated within Toronto through a politician (and his brother) with
the surname Ford.
This article has four inter-related objectives. The first is to analyze the politics of
the Ford campaign and administration, both before and after the 2010 election, and
to empirically explore the bases of his support. The second is to explain how the pol-
icy approach of the Ford regime could acquire political support in a seemingly pro-
gressive and transit-friendly city such as Toronto. The third aim is to draw on these
analyses to shed light on the relationships between automobility, neoliberal politics,
and Fordism, demonstrating the political importance of mobility within a restructur-
ing of the political economy of cities in the developed world. The fourth objective is
to interrogate, using the approach of the Ford administration in Toronto as a case
study, the rationalities of neoliberal Fordist governance. The article begins with anal-
ysis of the literature regarding neoliberalism, Fordism and post-Fordism, and dis-
cusses the ideological relationships between pro-car backlash politics and neoliberal
ideology. I then introduce the case study, and discuss how it relates to the restructur-
ing of Toronto’s economy and polity in the run up to the 2010 municipal election. In
doing so, I draw on both newsmedia reports of the election campaign and the policy
actions following in its wake, as well as quantitative multivariate analyses of the
aggregate municipal election data (all data examined in this article are in the public
domain). Discussion of the theoretical implications of this case study and of the
 Stopping the ‘War on the Car’ 405

relationship between the concomitant rise of politics of automobility and of neolib-

eral populism then follows.

Neoliberalism, Fordism, and Automobility

Neoliberalism is often incorrectly thought to have emerged as a result of the demise
of Fordism, and by implication an economic system built around automobility. The
tenets of neoliberalism – privatization, economic liberty, free trade, individualism
over collective decision-making, the promotion of market mechanisms and discipline
across diverse fields of economic and political life – were in fact hashed out in prin-
ciple through negotiation at meetings of the Mont Pelerin society, and in practice
through trial and error in public policy since that time (Harvey 2005; Peck 2010).
The rise of neoliberalism, as articulated both in public policy and the election of neo-
liberal political parties and politicians beginning in the late 1970s (Thatcher, Reagan,
etc.) is often seen as a response to the crisis of Fordism that emerged with the OPEC
embargo and recession of the early 1970s, and as the ideological accompaniment to
the rise of ‘flexible accumulation’ (deregulation of labor and financial markets, glob-
alization of production, etc. see Harvey 2005) and post-Fordist production tech-
niques (reorganization of production into small-scale/ batch processes that can be
quickly retooled, the spatial fragmentation of production into numerous loosely affili-
ated suppliers, just-in-time delivery, etc.).
As a result, scholars typically place Fordism and neoliberalism in opposition, as if
they represent two distinct and coherent political-economic regimes or policy plat-
forms. Filion and Kramer (2011), for instance, argue that despite the fact that neolib-
eralism arose in order to address the exhaustion and stagflation of Keynesian
Fordism, paradoxically neoliberalism presents a barrier to the needed transformations
of the dispersed auto-dependent city begat by Fordism. While I do not disagree with
the latter conclusion, I argue that the assumed paradox rooted in a distinction
between neoliberalism and Fordism requires re-evaluation, and that furthermore,
automobility provides the conceptual link required for understanding the rise of dif-
ferent forms of neoliberal politics in contemporary cities.
While the term was coined earlier, automobility came to be sufficiently theorized
through the work of Freund and Martin (1993), Rajan (1996), and particularly
Sheller and Urry (2000) and Urry (2004), who posit automobility as a coherent
non-linear, complex, path-dependent, self-organizing (auto-poietic and automatic)
system of movement operating under its own logic, and producing specific forms of
(autonomous, autobiographical) subjectivity. The system of automobility (what
Freund and Martin earlier called ‘the auto-industrial complex’) needs to be taken
seriously in any explanation of political-economic change due to a series of six
factors that determine its ‘character of domination’ (see Sheller and Urry 2000). The
build up of powerful economic interests associated with each of these factors worked
together to ‘lock in’ political support for (and from) the institutions undergirding the
‘steel-and-petroleum’ auto-system and drive out all weaker competing visions in
places like the United States and Canada over the early twentieth century and
through the postwar period. Investment in this system, combined with the socio-spa-
tial logic of ‘autospace’ and its imprint in urban form (Freund and Martin 1993), par-
adoxically ‘coerces people into an intense flexibility’ where one has little choice but
to drive and to structure everyday decisions around this choice (Urry 2004, 28). It is
because of this ‘power to remake time and space’ (Ibid., 27) that automobility is of
406 A. Walks

such prime importance to social and political theory. Perhaps most importantly, auto-
mobility ‘produces desires for flexibility that so far only the car is able to satisfy.’
(Ibid., 29) Seiler (2008) has provided an excellent genealogy of the rise of automo-
bility in the United States and its cultural and political contours.
While it may seem obvious, there is significant overlap between what Urry calls
the system of automobility, and Fordism. Paterson (2007, Chap. 5) discusses just
how central the car and automobile manufacturing have been to Fordism at every
level, from the importance of Taylorism to production practices, to unionization and
other labor practices (that allowed the working class to afford a car), to the size and
scope of large automobile manufacturers and sectors such as steel, rubber, and petro-
leum, to the mass consumption which drove economies of scale, Keynesian state
interventions that bolstered demand, to the corporatist cooperation between the state
and the large automobile manufacturers, such that it could be said with a straight
face ‘what is good for the country is good for General Motors, and vice versa’ (Volti
1996, 678). Without the advent of the motor car, what we know as Fordism would
not have existed, nor been possible. As articulated on the ground, the regime of
accumulation known as Fordism, and the rise of the system of automobility, are
effectively the same thing.
Furthermore, the restructuring of production most often associated with
‘post-Fordism’ (so named because its theorists did not consider that a truly ‘new’
regime of accumulation had yet arrived) involved ways of enhancing automobile
production (via ‘lean’ production, just-in-time delivery, redeployment on the shop
floor, technological fixes for small-batch custom production, etc.) (see Kawahara
1997; Paterson 2007). Post-Fordism and its counterpart flexible accumulation have
not undercut the ability to profitably produce automobiles, nor have they hampered
the reproduction and enhancement of the cultural, political, economic, or technologi-
cal system of automobility. On the contrary, they collectively represent transforma-
tions to the economic and social organization of production necessary for system
maintenance.
As the ideological counterpart to flexible accumulation and post-Fordism, neolib-
eralism has played a key role in justifying the kinds of labor, tax, and trade practices
that capitalists profiting from global expansion of the system of automobility have
demanded. On the one hand, this has involved the reduction of trade barriers to
allow production and resource extraction to move into new territories, and to open
up new markets for the products of the auto-industrial system (not only cars, but
road building, planning, architectural, and engineering expertise, etc.), while at the
same time reducing taxes, benefits, and wages for local labor, forcing workers to
compete on cost with those located elsewhere, thus maintaining firm profitability and
protecting the investments in existing plants and infrastructure. On the other hand,
neoliberalism has promoted the deregulation of finance and ‘financialization’ of the
economy (see Epstein 2005), which stimulates the shifting production offshore, and
enhances household access to credit, helping smooth continuation of automobile con-
sumption even in the face of growing inequality and stagnant real incomes. Crouch
(2009) refers to the neoliberal deregulation of finance that began in the 1980s as rep-
resenting ‘privatized Keynesianism’ in that it is no longer the state but private house-
holds who are doing the borrowing to stimulate demand in the face of economic
stagnation (arising from the crisis of Fordism).
Of course, there are many ‘actually existing’ neoliberalisms at play in the world
(Brenner and Theodore 2002; Larner 2000), and although they may generally share
 Stopping the ‘War on the Car’ 407

a core set of ideological dispositions, not all neoliberal politics or governance

regimes will be as supportive of automobility. Competing visions, both rooted in
neoliberal ideology but emphasizing different elements, have come to dominate poli-
tics in some places, and not all such visions will promote the car. The politics of
roll-out neoliberalism (Peck and Tickell 2002), tied to financialization and invest-
ment in public–private partnerships, includes the potential for conflict with roll-back
neoliberalisms dealing with state retrenchment. It is in fact through existence of this
latter dynamic that I argue a politics of automobility built around the politicization
of transportation policy has arisen in the contemporary city, particularly in those glo-
bal cities seen to be at the cutting edge of post-Fordist economic restructuring like
Toronto. The kind of neoliberalism aligned with what Robinson and Barrera (2012)
call ‘twenty-first century fascism,’ is particularly prone to the defense of the system
of automobility at all costs.

Politics of Automobility, Neoliberal Ideology, and Rationalities of Ignorance

Pro-car political movements have adopted a number of different strategies and aims,
and the campaigns they pursued have taken on a diversity of forms (Freund and
Martin 1993, chap. 5; Paterson 2007, chap. 3; Rajan 1996). Nonetheless, their justifi-
cations share a number of ideological similarities. As Paterson notes (2007, chap. 3),
a key assumption of defenders of automobility such as Dunn (1998) is that the
automobile and the infrastructure needed to support it arose due to the autonomous
preferences and agency of individuals making decisions in a free and open
market: i.e. automobility is an expression of aggregate demand and thus ‘what peo-
ple want’. A counterpart to this assumption is one equating the autonomous mobility
afforded by the car with personal and political freedom (Lomasky 1997). Speed
limits, paid parking, road tolls, speed cameras, automobile registration fees, fuel
taxes, traffic calming measures, and on-road bicycle lanes, among other things are
thus portrayed as attacks on personal freedom, political rights, and thus democracy
itself (see Paterson 2007, chap. 3). Because any restriction on the car is seen as an
attack on individual preferences and liberties, political movements that oppose auto-
mobility, regardless of origin (even if from low-income households that cannot
afford a car), are typically accused of being elitist and against the interests of the
majority. Such arguments are aided by criticisms made on behalf of automobile man-
ufacturers and the oil industry of fuel efficiency and pollution standards as impinging
on affordability and thus the ability to pursue one’s chosen form of mobility (Huber
2013; Rajan 1996). A common refrain is to charge any attempts by state policy,
whether aimed at commuting behavior, automobile ownership, or modal share, with
the label ‘social engineering’ – the exercise of state power imposed against the free
will of individual subjects (see Paterson 2007).
There is a clear parallel here between this philosophical defense of automobility
and the original premises of neoliberal thought in the work of Hayek (1944). Hayek
posits a fundamental opposition between a society that develops according to compe-
tition among free agents exercising their individual preferences in the marketplace,
and a society planned by the state. Planning presumes the state has apriori knowl-
edge regarding individual desires and values, and in turn what policies might then
lead to the maximum welfare and utility, yet this means imposing the will of a select
few on everyone in contravention of the real interests of the majority. In contrast, a
system of competitive free markets facilitates the mediation of people’s preferences
408 A. Walks

through the price mechanism, with price signals providing information on what
people ‘really want’. Because Hayek equates political with economic freedom, any
attempt to plan or intervene in the market is an affront to both political and eco-
nomic liberty. If and when imperfections arise in the operation of capitalism, the
reaction is to blame the state or collective interference, and to look for state regula-
tions that need eliminating (Peck 2010).
Of course, as many have pointed out, the assumption that automobility (or
Fordism for that matter) has arisen ‘freely’ without planning or help from the state is
fundamentally flawed. The state has built and maintained virtually all of the road
infrastructure, has subsidized coal, oil and gas exploration, bailed out the automobile
manufacturers on numerous occasions, and actively neglected public transit in order
to promote automobile consumption. Meanwhile, the low-density ‘sprawled’ auto-
mobile city has been from the beginning stringently planned through the use of zon-
ing ordinances, as well as subsidized in many places via highway construction,
mortgage interest tax deductions, and state-provided mortgage insurance (Flink
1988; Freund and Martin 1993; Paterson 2007; Wolf 1996). The automobile city pro-
duced in and through Fordism is in fact the product of an especially aggressive form
of state-supported social engineering.
However, ideologies are necessarily simplified constructions of the world, and
political victories are decided by who is more convincing, rather than who is correct.
Dunleavy and Husbands (1985) argued that the Tories in the UK were able to build
political support for the privatization of public transit systems by discursively con-
trasting subsidized public transport users with unduly taxed and overly regulated pri-
vate motorists, while making invisible the much greater public subsidies provided
for road building. Castells (1978) was thus wrong to expect that the rising need for
the state to subsidize collective consumption in the face of the crisis of Fordism
would automatically lead to left-leaning coalitions in support of the welfare state.
Instead, those whose livelihoods were rooted in what Dunleavy called the ‘private-
individualized mode of consumption’ – the classic automobile-dependent owner-
occupied Fordist suburbs – were inclined to support lower taxation, coupled with
privatization or reduced subsidies for housing and public transit. For those living in
the automobile suburbs, such a politics were ‘doxic’ in that they involved almost
perfect alignment between real material interests and subjective assessments, and
thus framed as ‘natural’ and ‘common sense’ and outside the realm of political
debate (see Cresswell 1996). Huber (2013) argues that conceptions of neoliberal
‘entrepreneurial life’ in the United States, in which households are seen as the meri-
torious masters of their own domain and thus entitled to be left alone by the state,
are based on the largely hidden energy subsidy provided by cheap oil making possi-
ble the auto-dependent postwar suburbs.
Key to this discussion are what Davies and McGoey (2012) call the ‘rationalities
of ignorance’ inherent in neoliberal thought. As noted above, the ideal Hayekian
neoliberal world is one in which individuals are free to pursue their personal desires
free of state intervention. The role of the liberal state is to maintain a normatively
blind and neutral ‘scientific-moral agnosticism’ with respect to what people value
and how they go about expressing it, and the ‘most significant fact about this system
is the economy of knowledge with which it operates, or how little the individual par-
ticipants need to know in order to be able to take the right action’ (Hayek 1945,
cited in Davies and McGoey 2012, 70). Thus for Hayek ‘ignorance-is-fairness’ and
it is his ‘respect for ignorance’ that underlies his ‘revulsion to state planning’ (Ibid.,
 Stopping the ‘War on the Car’ 409

79). Denial of course is counterpart to ignorance. Peck (2010) points to the role
played by ignorance and denial in driving forward the neoliberal agenda, with every
new crisis of the free market seized upon as further evidence of some assumed mis-
anthropic state intervention or regulation, paradoxically working to justify ever dee-
per neoliberalization. By countenancing ignorance, neoliberal ideology is open to
manipulation, both in the form of political populism, and in commercial predation.
Indeed, ‘the limitless, unbounded and infinitely exploitable nature of ignorance … is
what makes ignorance the political and commercial resource that it is’ (Davies and
McGoey 2012, 80).
To be sure, neoliberal tenets can be just as easily employed to critique, as to
justify, low-density automobile suburbs. Beito, Gordon, and Tabarrok (2002) fall into
this second category, arguing similar to Dunn (1998) and Lomasky (1997) that what
they call the ‘voluntary city’ expresses the values and desires of the American public,
including a natural disdain for planning. Zoning here is not equated with planning,
but instead presented as a ‘natural’ and apolitical outcome of revealed preferences for
low-density auto-dependent living. Taking a different tack – marshaling neoliberalism
but for the opposite argument – Solomon (2007) contends that the postwar ‘sprawl’
and inefficiency of Toronto’s suburbs is the result of the undue imposition of
planning, zoning, and misplaced transportation subsidies – if only the state had not
got involved but left the business of city-building to the market, the postwar city
would have developed in the more compact, mixed use, walkable, urbane, and civi-
lized manner of its now-gentrified pre-Fordist inner city urban pattern. Not only do
these contrasting arguments show that neoliberal ideology is flexible and adaptable,
but also that it can be harnessed to justify as ‘natural’ and deserving quite different
ways of life and policies attached to different kinds of urban environments. It is such
a conjuncture that underlies the evolving politics of automobility in Toronto.

From Permeable Fordisms to Neoliberal Politics: The Toronto Case

Toronto’s economy experienced its most rapid growth during the postwar period of
high Fordism, its ‘golden age’ extending from the 1950s into the late 1980s (Donald
2002a). Lemon (1996) posits Toronto as exemplary of modern Liberal urbanism ca.
1975. Much of its postwar form is one of automobile-dependent ‘entrenched urban
dispersion’ (Filion, Bunting, and Warriner 1999), including what are locally known
as the ‘inner’ suburbs (so-called because they are located within the former Metro
Toronto, amalgamated into the new City of Toronto in 1998). Due to its diversified
economy, Toronto has been able to weather most recessions better than classic
Fordist industrial metropoli in the US, including the deep but short-lived recession
of the early 1980s. During its ‘golden age’, Toronto was known as the ‘city that
worked’ (Donald 2002a; Lemon 1996).
Perhaps most important, but often overlooked, is the fact that the extended
Toronto region is the center of Canada’s automobile industry. Its outer suburbs are
home to 12 automobile assembly plants operated by five of the largest manufactur-
ers: GM, Ford, Chrysler, Toyota, and Honda. The Toronto region is also where
virtually all (18) of the Canadian headquarters of global automobile manufacturers
are located, as well as more than 300 independent parts suppliers and plastics
manufacturers, with huge spillover effects on other aspects of the local economy
(InvestOntario 2010). As recently as 2006, it is claimed that the extended Toronto
region produced more light vehicles (cars and light trucks such as pickups, minivans,
410 A. Walks

and SUVs) than all of Michigan (2.4 million vs. 2.2. million vehicles), while Toronto
is said to be the third-largest transportation equipment manufacturing region in North
America (GTMA 2013). At the very same time, Toronto is the center of the financial
industry in Canada, home to the headquarters of all of English Canada’s five large
banks and many of its processing centers, Canada’s main stock market (the Toronto
Stock Exchange), and the majority of its large insurance companies. These two sec-
tors follow a clear spatial dichotomy: whereas the financial industry is highly
concentrated in Toronto’s core, the automobile industry is dispersed among the
postwar suburbs.
Donald (2002b) partly attributes the Toronto region’s success during much of the
postwar period to its peculiar variety of ‘permeable’ Fordism, which allowed it to
remain governable under a culture of cooperation that existed among the two-tier
metropolitan planning system and the oversight of the provincial government. Mean-
while, the position of Toronto’s financial sector benefited greatly from the loosening
of regulations on finance and globalization, which allowed the five large banks to
expand operations into the US market and global investment banking (Erman 2013).
Furthermore, throughout its golden age, the Toronto region’s place within the North
American automobile market remained secured through the ‘auto-pact’ agreement
signed in 1965 between the US and Canada, encouraging branch manufacturing
plants producing for export to the US economy to locate in the Toronto region.
Toronto’s regional economy was thus able to integrate global innovations in produc-
tion and remain competitive in automobile manufacturing, and until recently, in steel
production nearby in Hamilton.
Although the auto-pact did not end until 2001, the North American Free Trade
Agreement effectively removed the tariff wall protecting Canadian branch-plant man-
ufacturing. The subsequent recession that hit Toronto through the early 1990s was
the one to finally bring the full crisis of Fordism to Toronto. No longer a city-region
‘that worked,’ unemployment doubled. Established cultures of cooperative gover-
nance fell apart, and both policy-makers and voters began searching for more radical
explanations and solutions. A deeply neoliberal Conservative (officially ‘Progressive
Conservative’ – PC) government was elected at the provincial level under the pre-
miership of Mike Harris, rapidly implementing a 30% income tax reduction, and a
massive roll-back of the welfare state (including cuts to welfare benefits, public sec-
tor lay-offs and service cuts), as well as attacks on unions and the restructuring of
local governance that would result in amalgamation of the city (for a discussion of
the history of political and policy change in Toronto and the province of Ontario
over this time, see Boudreau 2000; Boudreau, Keil, and Young 2009; Donald 2002b;
Filion and Kramer 2011; Keil 2000, 2002; Kipfer and Keil 2002). While the political
preferences of voters living in the postwar Fordist suburbs had been diverging from
those in the inner cities since the mid-1970s, the political gulf now widened to the
point that the PCs could rely solely on the suburbs (both inner and outer) for their
victory, with very little support within the old city, who were far more likely to vote
for parties of the center and left (Walks 2004). Indeed, the amalgamation of the city
by the conservatives was partly meant to dilute the power of left-leaning inner-city
councillors, who received their support from the prewar inner city, and to promote
the power of right-leaning politicians who received their support from the (inner)
suburbs who now constituted the majority (Keil 2000; Sancton 2000).
What is often misunderstood is that in implementing its radical neoliberal restruc-
turing package, the Conservative government under Harris was primarily attempting
 Stopping the ‘War on the Car’ 411

to maintain the profitability and competitiveness of Ontario’s auto-industrial complex

in the face of the heightened global (or rather, continental) competition unleashed by
the free trade agreement (Courchene and Telmer 1998). The Harris government was
supported by the suburban working class, many of whom earned their livelihoods
from the extended auto-industrial economy. Even nearby Oshawa, Canadian home of
General Motors, and until then a stalwart union town with a consistent history of
electing the left-wing New Democratic Party (NDP), fell to the Conservatives. There
was thus no inconsistency, but much symbolism, in having Conservative government
unveil its 2003 budget at the largest automobile parts manufacturing plant in the
province, instead of in the provincial legislature as is tradition (see Mackie 2003).
‘Common-sense’ neoliberalism (Keil 2002) was about keeping the system of auto-
mobility, upon which Ontario depended, functioning. The body of Fordism would be
maintained by cutting off the limbs of some of its supposed core attributes, including
the fair deal with labor and the trade-off between higher taxes and universal provi-
sion of quality public services.
While building for a number of years, the actions of the Harris government now
cemented in place the current spatial-ideological divide based on the politics of auto-
mobility in Toronto. Two of the first acts of the Harris government in the mid-1990s
involved scrapping the ‘photo radar’ system for catching speeding highway drivers,
and cancelling all of one and most of another of the new long-awaited subway train
lines through the now-declining inner suburbs that the NDP had commissioned and
for which construction had already began. This can be contrasted with the direction
of a previous PC government, which in 1971 had cancelled an unpopular express-
way and channeled the costs into the building of a new subway line into the inner
suburbs, during Toronto’s ‘golden age’ of course. Meanwhile, financialization of the
economy and gentrification of the inner city proceeded apace through the 1990s
recession, and changed considerably the social, economic, and political character of
the old pre-Fordist city (Hutton 2008; Walks and Maaranen 2008). Within the newly
amalgamated ‘mega’ City of Toronto, the political leadership flipped between an
older suburban salesman-turned mayor who aimed to prevent tax increases while
overseeing the amalgamation of city services, and a younger urbane left-leaning law-
yer, associated with the gentrifying downtown and a friend of urbanist Jane Jacobs,
who campaigned against extension of the small Toronto island airport (see Boudreau,
Keil, and Young 2009). Key projects of the latter, mayor David Miller, included a
promise to build 1000 km of bike lanes, and a plan called Transit City to extend pub-
lic transit into the inner suburbs, two-thirds of the costs of which he was able to con-
vince the newly elected Ontario Liberal provincial government to cover.

Ford and his Suburbs: The Rise of Neo-Fordism in Toronto

The financial crisis preceding the 2010 mayoral election not only led to an immedi-
ate recession, but also a very distinct shift in the political economy of the Toronto
region. Automobile sales dropped, and vehicle production plummeted by 40% from
2.5 million in 2007 to 1.5 million in 2009 (GTMA 2013; InvestOntario 2010, 6).
Large automobile companies had to be bailed out by the federal and provincial gov-
ernments, sending government deficits sky-ward (Ferguson and Van Alphen 2009).
The province of Ontario lost 121,000 manufacturing jobs over the course of a single
year in 2009 (Usalcas 2010), most of which can be assumed to relate in some way
to the automobile industry. Although unemployment shot up from 6% before the
412 A. Walks

crisis to 9.8% shortly before the election,3 this was mainly felt among industrial
workers, who were spatially concentrated in the postwar Fordist suburbs. These
‘inner suburbs’ within the now-amalgamated City of Toronto have filtered down in
income very dramatically. Roughly 40% of neighborhoods in the amalgamated City
of Toronto fall into what Hulchanski (2010) calls ‘City 3’ – the declining city
(income decline more than 20%), virtually of them located in the postwar suburbs.
This group of neighborhoods saw its average income drop by 37% between 1970
and 2005, and by 2005 had an average income only 66% that of the City as a whole
(Ibid., 22).
Yet at the same time, for those working in Toronto’s financial industry ‘the gravy
train’ has continued ‘spinning their ventures into gold’ (Taylor 2009). When the
financial crisis hit, the federal government responded by supporting the financial sec-
tor through liquidity injections and the Insured Mortgage Purchase Program, provid-
ing capital to banks so they could ramp up the issuing of mortgages and expand
their operations (Walks 2014). This largely benefited gentrifiers in the downtown
where the banks are located. Among metropolitan areas in Canada, Toronto has
experienced the most rapid gentrification of its inner city housing stock, largely due
to the strength of the financial sector (Walks and Maaranen 2008). By 2006, much
of Toronto’s inner city had shifted into what Hulchanski (2010) calls ‘City 1’ – that
part of the city seeing incomes rise more than 20% since 1970. By 2005, at 217% of
the overall city average, City 1 had an average income more than thrice that of City
3, and less than half the proportion of low-income households (14% vs. 30% in
City 3).
The three leading candidates on the ballot crystallized distinct political fault lines
within Toronto’s voting population. Conservative Rob Ford’s approach centered on
austerity, populism, and appealing to suburban interests in preventing the shifting of
resources from roads to public transit. The Toronto region has been intensifying rap-
idly, both in land use and population, but with very little expansion in road or transit
infrastructure, leading to an increasingly frustrating and congested commute (Filion
and Kramer 2011). Ford’s main ‘rhetorical devices’ (campaign slogans) were to ‘stop
the gravy train’ and to promise to ‘stop the war on the car,’ the latter increasingly
used elsewhere by neoliberal politicians and pundits whose lineage traces back to
Bruce-Briggs’ (1977) polemic book (see De Place 2011; Paterson 2007).
In contrast to the blunt, ‘loutish’ (Hume 2012) and seemingly working class (but
in fact, wealthy) Ford pushing the roll-back of the state, the smooth-talking, openly
gay Liberal-party ex-cabinet minister George Smitherman was an advocate for the
‘roll-out’ neoliberalism of public–private partnerships, and represented the emerging
cosmopolitan world of global finance and the condo-living elites of the rapidly gen-
trifying inner city. Yet, while slick, articulate, and the candidate most often promoted
by the business community, Smitherman was tainted by provincial scandals linked to
(in fact) public–private partnerships he had promoted and that smelled of financial
impropriety (Cohn 2011; Talaga 2009), which in the aftermath of the global financial
crisis only helped to highlight the contrast with Ford’s anti-gravy train message.
Nonetheless, it is instructive that both Ford and Smitherman advocated privatization
during the campaign, although Smitherman still favoured transit planning.
There is a clear geographic pattern to the election results (Figure 1). Despite attain-
ing only 36% of the vote, Smitherman won a clear plurality across a contiguous set of
neighborhoods located within the old (pre-amalgamation) City of Toronto, as well as
a couple of pre-1945 communities at its edges – that is, virtually all of Hulchanski’s
 Stopping the ‘War on the Car’ 413

Figure 1. Plurality Victor by census tract, (Amalgamated) City of Toronto 2010 mayoral
election.
Note: Municipal elections in Toronto run on a first-past-the-post basis.
Sources: Produced by the author using electoral results aggregated to census tracts. Special
thanks to Zack Taylor, who re-aggregated the raw election data from the smaller polling
stations (the units at which the raw data is publicly released) to census tracts (for more
information on the aggregation process, and for maps aggregated at different spatial scales,
see Taylor 2010, 2011).

(2010) ‘City 1.’ These are the areas of the city experiencing gentrification and new
upscale development. Ford, on the other hand, was the first choice in every single
neighborhood within the postwar Fordist ‘inner suburbs’ of Etobicoke, North York,
and Scarborough (election results are here aggregated to census tracts, which are
proxies for neighborhoods). Overall, 47% of the total voting electorate voted for Ford,
compared to 36% for Smitherman, and 12% for third-place Joe Pantalone.
The variables predicting support for each of the Mayoral candidates at the neigh-
borhood level are presented in Table 1. The standardized coefficients (β), which
allow for comparison of the relative strength of each variable, are perhaps most tell-
ing here. Of all the independent variables in the model explaining neighborhood-
level support for Ford (shown in Figure 2), the one with the largest explanatory
power is the proportion who drive to work ( β = 0.371). In fact, on its own this vari-
able accounts for a massive 56% of the variability of the vote for Ford (i.e. if one
just knew this one fact, one could predict support for Ford with 56% accuracy at the
neighborhood level). This is stronger than the variable delineating the older prewar
housing stock from the postwar stock, which by itself accounts for 47% of the vari-
ability in the Ford vote (in the regression model, this has a β = −0.215).4 While these
variables show some overlap, the level of correlation (r = 0.32) is not strong enough
to warrant excluding either from the model. When entered together in a separate
model, these two variables together account for a full 73.9% of the spatial variability
in support for Ford. All together, these results point to a clear spatial division of the
electorate articulated by modal split and urban form (meanwhile, home ownership
shows very little zonal difference and has little effect).
 Table 1. OLS regressions – Toronto mayoral election, 2010.
Pantalone % Smitherman % Ford %
Independent variables (2006 census): B β (Sig.) B β (Sig.) B β (Sig.)

Average household income (by $10 k) −0.132 −0.103**

414 A. Walks

% Change in average household income, 2001–06 −0.014 −0.043

% Persons in private households with low-income −0.053 −0.045
Unemployment rate, 2006
% Employed in managerial occupations 0.381 0.156*** −0.430 −0.158***
% Employed in manufacturing −0.166 −0.174** −0.409 −0.187*** 0.331 0.135***
% Employed in social science, law, and teaching 0.200 0.072* −0.374 −0.121**
% Employed in professional applied sciences
% Employed in arts, literary and recreational jobs 0.429 0.306*** 0.350 0.109*** −0.702 −0.196***
% Without a high school diploma 0.252 0.376*** 0.126 0.082* −0.410 −0.239***
% With university degree 0.225 0.293*** −0.168 −0.196***
% Married −0.198 −0.135*** 0.194 0.118**
% Families with kids at home
% Seniors (age 65+)
% Foreign born 0.124 0.331*** −0.304 −0.352*** 0.081 0.084
% Chinese −0.106 −0.212***
***
% South Asian −0.100 −0.212*** 0.301 0.267 −0.237 −0.197***
% black/Caribbean −0.082 −0.114*** 0.087 0.047
% Other visible minority 0.222 0.128*** −0.265 −0.136***
% Change in visible minorities, 2001–2006 −0.085 −0.036* 0.160 0.061**
% Dwellings rented
% Dwellings single-detached
% Dwellings row or semi-detached 0.096 0.107*** −0.119 −0.119***
% Dwellings apartments more than five stories −0.039 −0.202*** 0.043 0.099*** −0.037 −0.076**
% Dwellings built before 1946 0.047 0.199*** 0.064 0.119*** −0.130 −0.215***
% Drive to work −0.135 −0.323*** −0.275 −0.287*** 0.398 0.371***
Constant 12.945 46.330 46.749
R2 0.858 0.946 0.934
Adjusted R2 0.730 0.891 0.868

Notes: Models show support for the three main candidates for mayor, ordered from left to right on the political spectrum. Units of analysis are census tracts (proxies for
neighborhoods). Coefficients are those remaining in the model after backwards regression. Significance = ***p < 0.001, **p < 0.01, *p < 0.05. Source: Calculated by the
author from aggregate electoral results (dependent variables) and Census of Canada, 2006 (independent variables) aggregated to census tracts.
 Stopping the ‘War on the Car’ 415

However, what is not also obvious from the separate models reported in Table 1 is
that the variable that best explains the distribution of the support across all three
candidates simultaneously – predicting with 67.7 accuracy the mix of votes across
candidates – is the proportion of the labor force employed in manufacturing in 2006
(this compares with 60.9% for the proportion who drive, the second-strongest
variable when entered in this way). Of course, by 2010 many neighborhoods had
witnessed a recent drop in the proportion employed in manufacturing. This raises a
crucial point – the politics of automobility are intimately tied up with the politics of
de-industrialization, which had been ongoing for two decades at the time of the 2010
election. Ford’s victory rode the populist revenge of the de-industrializing suburbs
who cannot help but be, due to severe limitations in urban form and high concentra-
tions of industries and workers dependent on the auto-industrial complex, heavily
invested in the system of automobility and thus Fordism itself. Polarizing, ignorant,
and bombastic Ford is, for many of those living in the inner suburbs (who have been
branded ‘Ford Nation’ by the media and by Ford himself ), ‘the only one who makes
sense when he talks’ (Doolittle 2010, GT4). The contrast with the slick transit-loving
Smitherman only helped drive the wedge in further.

From Politics of Automobility to Rationalities of Neo-Fordism in Toronto

The Ford regime in Toronto provides food for thought for any futurist wanting to
understand how the politics of Fordism might unfold in the twilight of the auto-
industrial complex at larger scales, both in its symbolism and policy thrust. This is
not because Toronto is necessarily representative of other large cities, but because it
somewhat uniquely encapsulates the larger problem within its own boundaries. In
Toronto, as noted above, the diverging sectoral bases of a political support are rooted
in spatially distinct urban realms, resulting in a city with a particularly contested pol-
itics around transportation and economic policy.
Setting the tone for Ford’s rule was his inauguration at council, at which Ford
asked his friend, TV hockey commentator Don Cherry, to introduce him. In his
speech, Cherry lashed out at ‘left-wing kooks’ and ‘all the pinkos out there that ride
bicycles and everything’ (Grant 2010b). This was not out of character for Ford, who
earlier said it was cyclists own fault if they were killed, since ‘roads are built for
buses, cars, and trucks, not for people on bikes’ (Mahoney 2010). Sure enough, the
Ford administration moved to spend $280,000 to remove bicycle lanes that had cost
the previous Miller administration $59,000 to install, provoking political protests and
sit-ins in front of the lane-removing vehicles when the time came (Doolittle 2012a).
Furthering the symbolism, as the bike lane removal was being scheduled, Ford’s
brother Doug (who won Ford’s old council seat and who often appeared at his side)
bought Ford one of the largest and most expensive SUVs for his birthday, so he
could represent the people while ‘insisting on driving his own vehicle’ to his job
(Hume 2012). Ford was reproached (but never charged) with giving some of the
people he represents ‘the finger’ for showing their displeasure at his talking on his
mobile phone while driving his SUV to work, an illegal act under Ontario traffic law
(Hasham 2011).
Ford’s regime exemplifies both the revulsion to ‘planning’ and the ‘respect for
ignorance’ at the core of neoliberal philosophy, articulated in ambivalence toward
democratic decision-making and due process. Ford has frequently sought to defend
his authority as mayor in terms of the ‘mandate’ given to him by the ‘people,’ while
416 A. Walks

Figure 2. Vote for Rob Ford, City of Toronto 2010 mayoral election (%).
Notes: The northwest corner of the city, an area known as Rexdale in the old municipality of
Etobicoke, contains the council seat to which mayor Rob Ford had previously been elected,
and which was won by his brother Doug Ford in 2010.
Source: Produced by the author using electoral results aggregated to census tracts.

simultaneously deriding the same mandates given to locally elected councillors

whose constituents disagree with his policies. In announcing the end to the Transit
City plan (on his first day as mayor), Ford attempted to prevent council from even
voting on the motion, arguing he alone should be able to undo eight years of plan-
ning. This, it might be noted, is not dissimilar to the actions of the earlier Harris pro-
vincial government, which unilaterally canceled two subway lines as soon as it took
power (and it is worth noting that the largest donation to Ford’s election campaign
came from Harris’ own firm) (Dale 2013).
Ford has nonetheless sought to appeal to the need for enhanced mobility among
both medium- and low-income suburban voters by proposing tunneling subways
under the street, as long as they facilitate the free flow of cars above. Yet, Ford
opposed road tolls or tax increases for this purpose, instead suggesting that the pri-
vate sector would do the job of building the subway lines, despite evidence to the
contrary (leading to accusations of subterfuge), and has advocated building casinos
to pay for transit (Rider and Brennan 2013). Ford had his allies fire ‘without just
cause’ the general manager of Toronto’s Transit Commission (TTC, the agency that
runs public transit in the city), when council backed the TTC head against Ford in a
separate vote on transit (Kalinowski 2012).
Rationalities of ignorance have been key to the ‘governmentality’ of the Ford
administration. Tossell (2012) argues Ford has ruled with what he calls ‘uncompe-
tence’: a willful, proud, and ‘dogged’ pursuit of ignorance with intent to create false
truths and foment misunderstandings. However willful or not, such an approach
would not be successful if this had not also aligned with the subjective ‘common
sense’ experiences and interests of those to whom they were meant to appeal. Elite
opinion, largely associated with urban professionals in the core (including
 Stopping the ‘War on the Car’ 417

Smitherman), has generally been aghast at the lack of respect for facts and expertise,
and instead proposed ‘third way’ roll-out neoliberal approaches that maintain the
emphasis on privatization while respecting a role for expertise (Doolittle 2011). Yet,
faced with a financializing economy of the core in which many residents in the dein-
dustrializing Fordist suburbs have little hope of partaking, it is not so surprising that
many continued to be receptive to Ford’s simplistic, populist story, even if they must
embrace denial to accept it. The symbolism is often more important than the reality,
helping explain why cyclists are painted as so threatening to the Ford administration
– they transgress the doxa of ‘common-sense’ Fordism presuming the benevolence
of auto-industrial economic development. A similar rationality pervades the federal
Conservative government’s painting of environmentalists and their peaceful protests
against the tar sands as a ‘threat to national security’ justifying their covert surveil-
lance (Leahy 2013). The more the auto-industrial complex falters, the greater the
dependence on rationalities of ignorance and a politics of denial to maintain political
support.
As in many (but not all) cases of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’, the political
culture of the Ford administration evolved into one reminiscent of ‘authoritarian pop-
ulism’ (Hall 1985, 2011) and ‘twenty-first century fascism’ (Robinson and Barrera
2012). Its masculinist, dismissive paternalism is evocative of the political culture of
early postwar Fordism, in which the benevolence of (Fordist) capitalism was taken
as self-evident while social and cultural difference, not to mention criticism, was
derided. Once installed, the Ford brothers began communicating ‘directly with the
people’ through a weekly radio program on a radio station sympathetic to Ford.
Instead of undertaking policy analyses and proposing new policies during council
sessions, the preference of the Ford administration was to introduce their ideas, and
critique other council members or city planners, on their radio show. Through such
direct appeal, Ford maintained his popularity with his core supporters in ‘Ford
Nation’ (Rider 2012a). When a prominent Canadian author publicly criticized the
Ford brother’s advocacy of closing city libraries, the Fords used their radio show to
attack her credibility while also claiming ignorance of who she even was (Allen
2011). When the city’s medical officer of health released a report proposing lowered
speed limits on residential streets to enhance walking and bicycling, the Ford broth-
ers took to the air to admonish the messenger as ‘nuts, nuts, nuts’ and ‘embarrass-
ing,’ with Doug Ford questioning ‘Why does he still have a job?’ (Rider 2012b).
The City of Toronto’s own ombudsman reported that city planners, staff, and manag-
ers were working in a ‘culture of fear’ for their jobs, due to a blatant lack of respect
for due process, and that Ford and his allies had gone out of their way to restrict
appointments to only those people who share their distinct political views (Doolittle
2012b). Ford’s approach has been characterized by the local media as one of ‘knives
out for those who speak the truth’ (James 2012).
Despite campaigning on a promise to end waste and corruption (‘end the gravy
train’), Ford overspent and sourced inappropriate financing during his mayoral cam-
paign (Dale 2013), and has been investigated for using his city office staff and
resources for the private football teams he coached (Moloney 2012). Ford was found
in violation of the city’s conflict of interest legislation when he voted on a council
matter of direct financial interest to himself, even after many of his council allies
implored him to refrain, but was allowed to hold on to the mayorship due to a legal
technicality (Lorinc 2012). In all cases, Ford pleads ignorance, while refusing to
apologize. Of course, Ford was not always successful, and council was able to
418 A. Walks

eventually wrest control over aspects of the city’s agenda and reduce his powers. Yet
Ford maintained popularity among supporters despite gaffes and seeming improprie-
ties, due to the hopes he represents among those who find themselves irretrievably
invested in Fordism. Policies advocating intensification and the shifting of resources
toward transit merely accentuate for many the contested nature of the metropolis in
which the intensifying and gentrifying inner city is increasingly only accessible to
the financial elite. In prior times and countries, beset by financial crises and the
decline of an earlier Fordist coal-based economy running on rails, voters threw cau-
tion to the wind and elected populist leaders who promised to ‘make the trains run
on time’. In the twilight of Fordism, the equivalent is now ‘stopping the war on the
car’.

Conclusion
Neoliberalism is not monolithic, nor does it constitute a specific era or standard way
of doing things. Instead, it a political ideology driven by a core set of values that are
sufficiently abstract as to allow for flexibility in implementation. Actually existing
neoliberalisms are quite variable, and the differing ways they embed rationalities of
ignorance (and denial) make them malleable when applied to political strategy. Roll-
back and roll-out neoliberalisms can be associated with quite different policies at dif-
ferent times. As the case study documented in this article demonstrates, rationalities
of governance are influenced by, and articulated in, an emergent politics of automo-
bility. However, it is not the automobile per se that is at the root of such a politics,
but the temporal and spatial dynamics of the rise, and now twilight, of the auto-
industrial complex of Fordism and the system of automobility. While rooted in clas-
sical liberalism, the rise and success of neoliberalism(s) did not occur in a vacuum,
but followed the rise and then crisis of Fordism. Neoliberalism, flexible accumula-
tion, and post-Fordist economic restructuring have not been implemented in order to
undercut or supersede the (Fordist) system of automobility, but instead to rescue,
reinvigorate, and globally expand it in the face of sagging profitability, jettisoning
some of its assumed core tenets in order to save the economic and political body in
which so many powerful agents, from firms to households to the state, are irrevoca-
bly invested. The genealogy of neoliberalism is rooted in automobile Fordism.
For this reason, neoliberal-populist politics are inherently bound up with the poli-
tics of automobility, with particular strains invested in protecting and masking the
irrationalities of the auto-industrial complex. Political divergence increasingly occurs
between competing neoliberal visions, loosely dividing along the lines separating a
de-industrializing Fordism from a globalizing and financializing economy marked by
a cosmopolitan political habitus – each ideologically justifying (while simultaneously
masking) particular forms of social engineering. In Toronto, such distinct interests
are spatialized within the urban fabric of the central city itself, articulated predomi-
nantly between the Fordist (auto-dependent) suburbs seeking to ‘stop the war the
car,’ and the intensifying urban core benefiting from credit-driven gentrification. It is
foremost in cities such as Toronto where trends toward both processes – de-industri-
alization and financialization – are most evident, and their spatial manifestations
most acute and immutable, that such a politics of automobility is most likely to arise.
The more irrevocably each socio-spatial group is invested in distinct and opposing
aspects of these political-economic formations and habitus, the more polarized will
be their politics. The rise of the Ford regime in Toronto is predicated on these spatial
 Stopping the ‘War on the Car’ 419

divisions, and the highly politicized disagreements over transportation policy that
have resulted. Toronto thus acts as an exemplary case study for analyzing the politics
of automobility because it embodies within its boundaries the larger problem around
the contested politics emerging at the twilight of Fordism and the distinct articula-
tions of neoliberalism they produce. As the politics of neoliberalism move forward,
they will be inexorably bound up in the politics of automobility.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Pierre Filion and Anna Kramer of the University of Waterloo, and
Zack Taylor of the University of Toronto, for comments on a previous version of this
paper.

Funding
This research was supported by a faculty research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), for the project Automobility and Urban Canada: Politics, Spatial
Mismatches, and Implications for Citizenship.

Notes
1. Descriptives like these (penny-pinching, simple, bumbling, uncouth, outsider, etc.) have been
commonly employed in discussions of Ford in the media, and are here cited from articles by
McLean (2010, A10) and James (2010, GT5). The previous mayor, David Miller, had won two
consecutive elections but chose not to run in this contest, leaving it wide open. The current City of
Toronto was created in 1998 by amalgamating into one single unit the former lower tier municipal-
ities of the (old) cities of Toronto, York, North York, Etobicoke, Scarborough, the borough of East
York, and the upper tier Regional Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto.
2. Ford has been arrested thrice, including for assaulting his wife in Toronto, and for possession of
marijuana and driving while under the influence of alcohol (Grant 2010a; Mahoney 2010). He has
a history of insulting his fellow councillors, being drunk and belligerent in public, and has been
associated with drug dealers (Mahoney 2010; White and Hui 2013). Valverde (2012) calls Ford’s
approach ‘the Coach’s Corner philosophy: give no quarter, read no book, avoid no fist fight, make
friends with no foreigner, and use no words longer than one syllable’.
3. Calculated by the author from the monthly Statistics Canada, Cansim II database, Table 2,820,109,
unemployed labour force in the Toronto, Oshawa, and Hamilton census metropolitan areas. The
dates of the unemployment data are December 2007 (6%) and September 2010 (9.8%).
4. A variable indicating the proportion of the housing stock built before 1946 is included to delineate
the preWar gentrifying housing stock from the post-war areas, instead of a dichotomous variable.
This is done to ensure comparability among all independent variables in the model, which are thus
here entered as continuous variables. Taylor (2011) has demonstrated that when entered as dichoto-
mous variables, dummies delineating residence in the inner suburbs vs. the prewar inner city
explain much of the spatial variation, but this then dominates the effects of continuous variables
that map onto this geography. Note that there are no surveys of individuals to draw upon, hence
the need to analyze the aggregate election results at the level of neighbourhoods.

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