Advice for Mayor Rob Ford’s next chapter: Be super boring

Rob Ford may have beat the rap in divisional court last week, but the mayor of Toronto still finds himself in a tough spot. He’s spent the last few months distracted from day-to-day issues, stuck dealing with various legal entanglements. And his hold on council and ability to control the city hall agenda remains shaky at best.

It’s not a great place to be, especially with just eleven months to go before election season begins in earnest. As good as it might feel to put his big court case behind him, a boast that Ford narrowly avoided being tossed out of office on a conflict of interest charge definitely won’t work on a campaign sign.

Assuming lawyer Clayton Ruby’s long-shot appeal to the Supreme Court doesn’t go anywhere, what Ford has now is an opportunity to define the next chapter of his mayoral term. After winning the right to keep his job, it’s time to prove that he actually wants to do it — and that he can do it well.

My advice? He should learn to be boring.

I’m talking uber boring. Like watching-paint-dry boring. He should be like that middle section of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movie, the part where the characters just walk around for hours and eat breakfast. He should be that, only multiplied by 1,000.

Ford needs to be monumentally, unbelievably dull.

Because being interesting sure hasn’t worked. The mayor has bounced from blow-up to blow-up, controversy to controversy, since he took office in 2010. Something has to change.

A shift toward the boring shouldn’t be that hard. Most mayors in Toronto’s history have managed to pull it off, to various degrees. The nuts and bolts of municipal business — operating budgets, debt management, zoning — are not hugely exciting to most people.

Ford could start by working on being transparent. Nothing kills a politician’s mystique faster than regular press briefings that highlight the minutiae of the job. And actually releasing his day-to-day schedule — putting the spotlight on the various dull ribbon cuttings and rubber chicken dinners that politicians attend — would go a long way toward ensuring that photographers aren’t always camped out looking for him.

Past that, Ford should find an agenda for the next year that’s achievable. He needs to shy away from grandiose issues — transit or the waterfront, for example, where his ideas have fallen flat — and instead stick to bread-and-butter matters that fit with his history as a successful retail politician. A large-scale push to improve customer service across city departments could be just the thing.

But whatever his agenda, the bombastic, headline-grabbing Rob Ford needs to disappear, to be replaced by a reserved, by-the-book politician. For the next year at least, the mayor of Toronto has got to become the mayor of Dullsville.