Fear of Ford strikes Toronto, sort of

Toronto is electing a new mayor on October 25^th, and a lot of people in the city are hysterical over the possibility that Rob Ford, a controversial councillor from North Etobicoke, one of the city’s more suburban wards, is going to be the next mayor. The people who like the tow-headed, bull-necked Ford are mostly suburbanites, and they want him to smash the city’s downtown-centric administration, bash the unions, and cut spending generally. Ford, whose political views are well north of right-wing, wants to do all of those things, but he has other plans, too. He wants to get rid of bicycle lanes, privatize culture, and after he’s got a few drinks in him, kick fags and pretty well anyone else who disagrees with him. His got a DUI and an assault charge on his docket, and his idea of cultural activity, and I’m not kidding about this, is playing or coaching football. If you think I’m exaggerating, there’s at least fifty videos on YouTube of him that’ll convince you I’m playing him soft.

Predictably, there’s been a Stop-Rob-Ford movement amongst the other mayoralty candidates, but political tunnel-vision amongst the ambitious being what it is, only the one serious female candidate, Sarah Thompson, dropped out, and there’s a good chance, given the constituency splits between Rocco Rossi, former Liberal cabinet minister George Smitherman, and lefty Joe Pantalone, that Ford will get elected.

Meanwhile, the issues that have made Ford a serious candidate when he isn’t even a serious human being has barely been looked at. It involves the outgoing mayor David Miller, and both his administration of the city and his vision for it. Miller is a decent person, a social democrat, and privately, I’m told, a profoundly nice man. But he acted as if Toronto north of the 401 didn’t exist, and that it barely existed north of Eglinton Avenue. His tenure was filled with “vision plans” and “festival concepts” for different aspects of the city—nearly all downtown, on the waterfront or for getting suburbanites into the downtown—but at ground level, where people actually live their daily lives, he was woefully indecisive and ineffective. Things just didn’t get done while he was mayor, the neighbourhoods haven’t been protected, and the quality of life has deteriorated.

Among his “vision plans” that particularly grated on me was his green plan for the city, which called for a 100 percent increase in the tree canopy—while a set of moronic and costly tree-planting practices along with a water bylaw structure that made it too costly to water existing boulevard trees was visibly reducing the survival rate of the existing canopy.

Then there was the garbage collection fiasco. Several years ago the city imposed a rate-based bin system of garbage collection, a smart idea stupidly and insensitively put in place. The city brochure announcing it asked us to place our bins in our driveways on collection day, correctly positioned for mechanical pickup—a fine thing if you live in Rosedale where everyone has a driveway. But if you’re in the inner city, virtually no one has either a driveway or anyplace to put the large bins. They’ve ended up on people’s porches and in their gardens, and they’re a massive eyesore and an inconvenience.

The rules attached to pickup are even more annoying. If the bin is too heavy, the princesses who operate the garbage trucks won’t pick them up, if anything falls out of them during loading it’s left in the street, and if you have more than the bin will hold, well, tough luck. There’s more garbage being dumped in the alleys than ever before, and it’s hard to find anyone in the inner city—Miller’s constituency—that isn’t pissed about all of it. Quite simply, the use of bins in the inner city was a mistake, and should have been made optional.

But it’s Miller’s inability to control his labour component that has been his biggest failure, and I’m not just talking about wage and contract demands, which he’s buckled to again and again, most damagingly after a particularly nasty midsummer strike last summer that ended with many of the inner city parks stacked high with garbage. It’s the attitude of entitlement that has emerged throughout the city’s bureaucracy and service departments, and the feeling city staff and workers too often give you that they’re doing you a favour, not providing services that you pay for, and hey, stand back while they go for coffee or adjust their tiaras.  It’s no accident that Ford’s most popular platform plank is that he promises to kick union asses, and if he does get in, nearly everyone, including a large percentage of those who voted Miller in, will happily let Ford do what he wants to.

A surprising number of wiser heads are quietly in favour of doing nothing to prevent Ford’s election, despite his thick-headed abrasiveness. Part of it is that the other candidates aren’t providing any attractive alternatives. George Smitherman is nearly as likely to head-butt people as Ford, Rocco Rossi is a Liberal party bagman who ran adds with a Mafia theme and otherwise seems to lack discretion, and Joe Pantalone is trying to run on Miller’s way of talking about things and not doing them, and otherwise seems to have nothing going for him except looking better dressed and more suave in photo-ops than he does in real life.  These people are hoping, I think, that if Ford does get in, he’ll run out of energy and support after reigning in the unions and eradicating a few bike lanes, and that with a deadlocked council, he’ll go back to coaching his football team and yelling obscenities at Leaf’s games.  He couldn’t embarrass Toronto more than Mel Lastman did, could he?

1000 words October 5, 2010

The Silly Season comes to Toronto in January

January in Toronto is normally a pretty grim month, made grimmer because the entire population of North Bay descends on the Big Smoke for the parade of stock reduction sales going on at every retail outlet. The weather is cold, sensible locals are thinking about how much nicer it is the Caribbean, and the politicians are at their grinding worst, calculating which programs can be cut without cutting strips off their own asses.

Not this year. The only Caribbean country most people can remember the name of is Haiti, and nobody is thinking straight about that (as illustrated here ). Meanwhile, a horde of local politicians are butting up at the smoke pump in preparation for a run at becoming Toronto’s next mayor, and the city is filled with posturing federal MPs with nothing to do but strut their righteousness indignation over Stephen Harper’s proroguing of Parliament. The Premier, Dalton McGuinty, announced a $7 billion deal with Samsung that is supposed to put us on the front lines of green power production, seemingly not having noticed that every other country in the U.N. with a GNP greater than $7 billion has a similar deal in place, and every single-issue activist in Ward 19, where my cousin Luigi lives, is thinking of running for city council now that veteran Joe Pantalone has unwisely vacated his seat to run for Mayor.

In the middle of this, there’s been an outbreak of pedestrian squashings in the city—14 people dead so far, and television news crews homing in on every new pedestrian/auto interface in the hope that they can get a scoop on the next addition to the total. Meanwhile, every nitwit in the city has both a theory about the cause and a program proposal to stop the carnage: everything from banning pedestrian use of I-phones to banning jaywalking to tethering the elderly to their walkers. The silly season has arrived seven months early.

The silliest of the sillies, as far as I can see, is the lineup for the next Toronto mayor. The current front runner is said to be George Smitherperson, the joint candidate for the Gay community and the Hells Angels. Smitherperson is widely believed to have once been one of Dalton McGuinty’s cabinet intimates, whatever that means. If he wins, he’ll be the first openly gay mayor of a major Canadian city since Winnipeg’s Glen Murray, who just happens to be running for Smitherperson’s vacated legislative seat, no doubt wanting to become intimate with Dalton, too.

A few years ago I met Smitherperson in, ah, person. I saw this skin-headed guy skating around the arena where I was teaching my niece to skate, trying to pick up, I guess, votes. At one point, he boarded me, and introduced himself. “Hi,” he said. “I’m George Smitherman.”  “Good for you,” I said. “You any relation to Steve Smitherman, the guy who plays for the Cincinnati Reds?”

Smitherperson’s main opponent seems to be Rocco Rossi, the former national director of the Liberal Party of Canada, a post at which he taught Michael Ignatieff how to stick his thumbs up, appear to be constructed entirely out of spruce, to grimace awkwardly whenever a camera is present, and to stay on message even when no coherent message exists. Rossi’s other claim to fame was as John Tory’s campaign director for Tory’s failed 2003 municipal election. Given his campaign platform, which is to sell off the profitable city-owned electrical utility, Toronto Hydro; to kick municipal staff whenever possible, and to save the city $13,000 by cutting his own salary 10 percent, one wonders if it was his suggestion that John Tory campaign as Provincial Conservative leader in the last Provincial election on a platform of making private school tuition tax deductible.

To Rossi’s right, is George “Giorgi” Mammoliti, who has the support of his mother and the remaining four members of Markham’s lately-amalgamated Beer and Porn Institute and Rob Ford fan clubs. Mammoliti wants to put all the hookers into a ghetto so his friends will know how to find them, legalize gambling, and give the Toronto Transit Commission assets to the corporate sector.

On the left side of the political slate is, well, leftists fighting amongst themselves and shooting themselves in the foot. First, veteran Ward 19 councillor Joe Pantalone declared his candidacy, thus giving voters on the left side of the spectrum at least some alternative to Smitherperson. Now, there’s post-teen Adam Giambrone from Ward 18, who was an up-and-coming councillor before his tenure as Chair of the Toronto Transit Commission slue-footed him into a cascade of public relations disasters. Giambroni then uploaded an embarrassing dance-and-make-a-fool-of-yourself video onto YouTube, then declared that he wants to be mayor, too, thus ensuring that the city will be deprived of two left-of-centre councillors, and that Smitherperson will be the next mayor of Toronto.

I suppose one has to write off this piece of classic left-wing self-immolation as the product of some sort Council hallway pissing match between Pantalone and the wet-behind-the-ears Giambrone, but Christ, isn’t there someone in the NDP with enough clout to read the riot act to these guys?  Pantalone is an experienced councillor with a decent track record. He should have the left behind him to take his shot at the job that turned David Miller into an anorexic, while Giambroni is a kid who ought to be biding his time for a couple of terms while he builds his constituency and can walk into the Council chambers without a towel over his shoulders.

The outcome as it now stands is going to be Mel Lastman with a mean streak and better gay pride parade funding for the next few years. What else poor Toronto will get, I shudder to think about.

February 1, 2010 950 words