Mark Towhey

Mark Towhey (born 1964) is a Canadian management consultant, political strategist and broadcaster. He hosts a weekly 2-hour talk show on CFRB NEWSTALK1010 in Toronto and was a key player in the election of the late Rob Ford as mayor of Toronto, and Patrick Brown as leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario. He is the author of “Mayor Rob Ford: Uncontrollable – How I tried to help the world’s most notorious mayor.” Towhey remains a frequent contributor and political analyst who appears regularly on CTV, CP24, TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin and in Huffington Post, the National Post, the Toronto Star, the Toronto Sun and other media outlets.

Towhey was born in Kamloops, British Columbia. He briefly attended the University of Victoria until joining the Canadian Army as an officer, serving with the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry for 13 years.

He left the military in 1996. He was a spokesperson for Canada Trust before starting his own crisis communication firm in 1998. His clients included the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, McCain Foods, the Government of Canada, Ontario, and the United Nations. After returning to Canada from two years consulting in Afghanistan and Pakistan for the UN and World Bank Group, Towhey was hired by Toronto City Councillor Rob Ford to help on his mayoral campaign.

When Ford was elected in October 2010, Towhey was appointed his Director of Strategy & Policy, a role in which he was widely referred to by city councillors as the mayor’s “Rasputin.” In August 2012, he was promoted to Chief of Staff until he was fired by Ford on May 23, 2013 for reportedly telling Ford to go to rehab for his drug addiction. When CFRB cancelled Ford’s Sunday afternoon radio program in November 2013, they hired Towhey as his permanent replacement in that time slot.

In October 2015, Skyhorse Publishing published Mayor Rob Ford: Uncontrollable co-written by Towhey and Globe and Mail journalist Johanna Schneller. The book was briefly a best seller in Canada.

Towhey has two sons and holds an MBA from the Richard Ivey School of Business at Western University and is a Certified Management Consultant.

Towhey became known for his sense of humor on Twitter when he tweeted “Finished May issue of Toronto Life, now plan to spend rest of night just hanging out, being evil” after reading a Toronto Life cover story that contained an unflattering portrait of him. Later, shortly after being fired on May 23, 2013 he retweeted a photo from a Toronto Sun photographer of him in his car leaving city hall, saying “Very happy now that I remembered to wash my car yesterday.”