Mayoral Endorsement I

October 22, 2010

Some 292 days and 270+ posts since the beginning, it has come to this. The final weekend of campaign 2010. They grow up so fast and times passes so quickly.

At the mayoral level, it’s hard not to think of the past almost 10 months as one big, dispiriting cock-up. A year long orgy of slagging and recriminations directed at the very institution a near unanimous number of front running candidates want to lead. Dismal and dreary, I’d call it, enticing only at the level of vitriol generated by the discourse.

None uglier and more bitter and heated than in the office here at All Fired Up in the Big Smoke. Blows have been exchanged. Invective hurled. Precious little meeting of eyes. Unsurprisingly, no consensus is possible at delivering one unified endorsement. (At the mayoral level that is. Still 6 big thumbs up from us for Karen Sun as councillor of Ward 19!)

So, we bring you three endorsements, one a day, Friday-Sunday. Up first, resident hippie, 1968 deifier and Hunter S. Thomspon wanna-be, Acaphelgmic.

My Endorsement For Mayor: Rob Ford!

In the immortal words of the Mahatma Gandhi (or perhaps it was MLK), I say, let’s tee this motherfucker up!

So you actually think Rob Ford is suitable to be mayor of the city of Toronto? A place of over 2.5 million people, representing a wide swath of the world’s populations? You truly believe that a government with over a $9 billion annual operating budget can be managed by pea-brained adages of looking after the pennies and the pounds taking care of themselves? You have no problem handing over the reigns of power to a councillor who readily admits, boasts really, about not reading reports before voting on items? It makes sense to you that slashing the number of councillors in half will somehow bring about a more responsive, approachable form of local governance?

If you’re OK with all that (and so much more lunacy to boot), if you search deep down into your soul and truly come to the conclusion that the kind of change this city needs is a coffer draining, vindictive bureaucracy purging, bring it on then. Give him the keys to the mayor’s office and all the inherent powers that go along with it. Wind him up and let him loose to have at it. Stop the Gravy Train. Respect the Taxpayer. Take Back City Hall!

And when he fails, when he falls, when he crashes and burns spectacularly, all of which he will do, probably sooner than later, because Rob Ford is simply unfit to manage such a complex and difficult task that is being the mayor of Toronto – nothing personal, you understand; anyone with his limited world view and complete lack of curiosity about anything much beyond his BBQ life would be similarly inadequately prepared for the job – when it becomes so glaringly apparent that he is a big-assed bust of an embarrassing mistake of a mayor, and has been marginalized as nothing more than that blustery, red-faced tool we’ll all regret having allowed to have been elected, we can get on with the job of really building the city.

Yes, there will be collateral damage. Repairs will have to be made. Fences mended. Apologies doled out. Probably by the bucketful.

But it will be worth it and let me tell you why.

In the inevitable disastrous wake of a Mayor Rob Ford, his ideological kin will be forced to run for cover. After an initial blush of success when a tax is cut, a union is busted or… whatever else it is that so engulfs his followers with such rage (although that seems to be about the extent of it), the reality will quickly set in, even for those who live their lives operating in the protective, impermeable bubble of right wing, libertarian belief. Governing isn’t just about saying no. A city can’t be run on the basis of simply what’s in it for you and yours. Being a successful mayor means reaching out not slapping away.

Rob Ford’s ineptitude will damage the modern day, small ‘c’ conservative, anti-government cause. Not for the blinkered, unwavering true believers, of course, who will continue to lock their jaws on the stick of dogma regardless of how hard you beat them over the head with a pipe of reason, logic and rationality. They will simply slink away, back into their dank burrows, awaiting for the next opportunity to pop back up and foul the public space with their acrid yapping, yipping and yelping.

The real damage will be done in the eyes of those who are truly justified in their anger toward City Hall. Those left behind and struggling in this city as it slowly pieces itself together from the rubble of an ill-thought out and malignantly intended amalgamation process. Citizens living in neighbourhoods where crime rates are actually too high and their prospects for bettering their lives too low. Citizens left to their own devices, stranded as they are in neighbourhoods without access to functioning public transit. When they realize (and the realization will come quickly) that their anger, frustration and resentment has been hijacked by the likes of Rob Ford and his gang of Etobicokan elitists, the gig will be up.

For a period of time after that, perhaps even with Ford still as mayor, ineffectually blustering and beating his chest and wondering why he ever ventured away from the comfy confines of his daddy’s business… that is, if he did venture away from the family business even as mayor… another solid majority of Torontonians will band together and get down to the task of building a better, more equitable 21st-century city instead of looking back and pining for a mythical town of the 1950s.

We must go forth into the darkness before emerging into the sunlight, my friends.

And for that reason I, Acaphlegmic, endorse Rob Ford for mayor of Toronto.

– feistily submitted by Acaphlegmic

5 Comments | Elections 2010, Municipal Politics, Race 4 Mayor | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
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Vision Quest VI

October 21, 2010

It’s Thursday. So you know what that means. Time for another Vision Quest. Toda—

But wait, you’re all saying, probably. Vision Quest usually happens on Friday. What’s with the Thursday Vision Quest? It’s throwing my equilibrium all off.

Well, the thing is, with just 4 days before election day, we needed to set aside 3 for our mayoral endorsements. So, we decided to push the last of our Vision Quests ahead by a day. Hopefully, this won’t be a constant source of disappointment to those who then keep thinking it’s Friday, only to have the fact that it’s actually just Thursday constantly thrown in their faces.

And to be clear: this in no way should be viewed as an official endorsement. This is not an endorsement. This is not an endorsement. Nope, not an endorsement.

Vision Quest VI (Thursday and final edition): George Smitherman!

Nicknamed Furious George, but for those of us with more leftish hues, what Smitherman should be better known as is, Infuriating George. Smart, thorough and tirelessly hardworking, he should’ve been everyone’s (who wasn’t backing Rob Ford) easy 2nd choice for mayor. Yet, it’s as if he made it deliberately impossible for us to take to him, seemingly intent to alienate and provoke us, almost as if it were part of a… diabolical plan.

The rube in me, who treats everything on the level, no subtext, no ulterior motives, saw the unfolding Smitherman campaign as a bumbling, stumbling mess. Determined almost, to repeat the exact same mistakes as his former boss, Barbara Hall, in the 2003 election, going from frontrunner to a distant 3rd place. He practically disappeared there during the spring and summer months, threatening to become another big name bust.

But then it clicked into place as soon as it was announced that, in fact, Rob Ford had become the candidate to beat. In mid-September, his victory was pronounced as pretty well inevitable, his almost 25 point lead was viewed as insurmountable. A collective OMG!!! arose from the general populace. What are we going to do?! This can’t happen. We need to elect Anybody But Ford!!

Cue the sounds of horses approaching from the distance, the arrival of the cavalry. Fear not, good people of Toronto, your white knight riding to the rescue. George Smitherman is here to drive the evil Rob Ford gang back to the wilds of Etobicoke. Our hero!

Pure brilliance, if a little disturbingly calculating. A truly post-modern campaign that smartly up-ended the big name, early front runner dilemma. Tactics trumping substantive thinking and the need for any sort of comprehensive complete policy platform. In 2010, that may be all that’s necessary to become mayor.

Had Smitherman Our Saviour then arrived and stood up vigorously to the radical, right wing retardedness of Rob Ford, it may’ve been a done deal. Instead, George lurched right, aping much of the Ford anti-City Hall populism and firmly embracing the modus operandi of another former boss of his, Dalton McGuinty, who has built his entire political career on the notion of being only slight less bad than the Mike Harris era Conservative government. Vote for me because I’m not as bad as that guy.

George Smitherman. Just another unprincipled, scheming politician with a hollow core. But hey. At least he’s not as bad as that other guy.

And as the campaign winds down, he then has the balls to try and castigate those who haven’t fallen into line behind him, portraying them as the villains if he comes up short and Rob Ford wins this thing. Holding a gun to the city’s head, his endgame now consists of, vote for me or this guy gets it.

Yeah, that’s the guy I want as my next mayor.

So repellant has Smitherman’s tactics become that I refuse to cut him any slack or give him the benefit of doubt on anything. We were rightly reprimanded by a commenter on our post a couple days ago who pointed out that we misrepresented Smitherman’s rejection of safe injection sites. His position on the issue is much more “nuanced”. Fair enough. But at this point, we cannot grant him anything resembling nuance. We can only see the darkness.

To us George Smitherman is simply a political hit man, dispatched from Queen’s Park to quell a restive and vocally frustrated city that has become noisy in its displeasure with the contemptuous disregard and mismanagement at the hands of its provincial overlords. He doesn’t want to lead Toronto. He wants to keep it in its place. In that, he is no better than Rob Ford.

The company he keeps is Tory blue, through and through, including Harrisites, many of whom wouldn’t be considered friends of Toronto. Ralph Lean, best known in political circles as a David Miller band wagon jumper whose very public break with the mayor last fall helped grease the way to the mayor’s decision not to seek re-election and opened the floodgates of anti-City Hall sentiment that Smitherman slid in on, is a key part of his fund raising arm. And the fact that Barbara Hall has babysat George’s son does little to alleviate our growing mistrust of Smitherman’s intentions.

He wants us to merely settle on him as our next mayor. It could be worse, he tells us. Rob Ford. Yes, he’s right. It could be worse. On the other hand, it might not be. There’s much of the devil you know at work right now. And if George Smitherman can’t win this thing based on his own merits, well, maybe he just doesn’t deserve it. For 10 months or so, all we’ve asked is that he prove to us that he does. Four days before election day, George Smitherman has come up woefully empty on that account.

– angrily submitted by Cityslikr

5 Comments | Elections 2010, Municipal Politics, Province of Toronto, Provincial Politics, Race 4 Mayor | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
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Do The Right But Not The “Right” Thing

October 20, 2010

After watching last night’s final CP24 mayoral debate this morning (man, I wish I had’ve thought of this earlier, zipping right through the commercials and Ben Mulroney segments), allow me to try and introduce, I don’t know, a long, cool drink of water to the increasingly heated proceedings. My colleagues here have, frankly, lost all sense of perspective, driven by rage, stupefaction and impotence to the verge of insanity. They refuse to accept the facts of this campaign heading into the final weekend before Monday’s election day as it has been played out .

It isn’t simply a case of “their” candidate(s) having little-to-no prospect of winning. “Their” candidate(s) never emerged, for a variety of reasons, the least of which… well, don’t even get me started on that, lest I get dragged down into the gutter of intemperate language. Suffice to say, many of us have neither forgotten nor forgiven the arbitrary determination made at some level somewhere of which candidates would be considered “viable” or front runners and which ones wouldn’t.

We have what we have. The hand’s been dealt and we must play it. Our bed’s made, now we must lie in it, perhaps to dream away the upcoming nightmare of the next four years.

Writer Jonathan Goldsbie deftly highlights the demons we, the uncommitted/undecided voters who only know that Rob Ford would be a very, very bad choice, are wrestling with. Voting with our heads may stop that train wreck from occurring but perhaps at a cost to our city that is only negligibly less harmful. Voting with our hearts or ideals, while perhaps leaving us smugly self-righteous, could well inflict a world of pain on Toronto that would take years to repair.

Adding to the frustration and increasing acrimony is the fact that the two front running candidates, one of which we are told will be our next mayor, are left to shamelessly exploit the uncertainty of uncommitted/undecided voters because neither have persuaded a big enough constituency to elect them mayor based on their own merits. If they can’t build a workable consensus with the electorate, how do they hope to do it at City Hall? How doesn’t a divisive campaign not beget a divisive administration?

After the surprise result in this week’s municipal election in Calgary, many of us watched the clip of the mayor-elect, Naheed Nenshi’s TED talk on urban issues. Inevitably, most came away from it thinking, where’s Toronto’s Naheed Nenshi? Rob Ford would watch the talk and not understand a single thing that was being said. “Calgary. Calgary’s in Alberta.” George Smitherman would think he understood much more of the talk than he actually did. “Egghead. I could take him in a 10K race.” Joe Pantalone would understood it all but not know how to articulate it to others. “It’s just like planting and cultivating a garden.”

The awful truth of the matter is, 5 days before the election, there is no Naheed Nenshi running for mayor of Toronto. Allow me, to correct that. Five days before the election, none of the 3 front runners, our only viable alternatives as we’ve been told, is a Naheed Nenshi. Toronto is facing, I won’t say a bleak next 4 years as that simply ignores the checks-and-balances in place that make up what should be considered our semi-strong mayoral system. But it will be an insular 4 years with a noticeable lack of progress towards advancing the needs of a healthy 21st-century city. That alone should cause us consternation, concern and more than a little fretting.

If I’m right about that, then the question we uncommitted/undecided voters need to ask ourselves between now and October 25th is: how do we best mitigate this downturn of expectations and limit the damage in order to be in a better shape, come 2014, to resume a more progressive and positive approach to city building? Assuming, of course, that the inevitable comes to be, and we wind up with an unwelcome and/or heavily compromised choice for our next mayor…

… A question I am not prepared to answer just yet. It’s tough feeling so coerced into hand over our lofty hopes. There’s time still to imagine that every so often, the unexpected can happen. Maybe we too can have our `Dewey Defeats Truman’ iconic moment and find ourselves pleasantly and deliriously surprised, defying pollsters, oddsmaker and conventional wisdom all. Proving that maybe, just maybe, we haven’t become the jaded, cynical pragmatists our leading candidates have bet their electoral fortunes we are.

– torn and frayedly submitted by Urban Sophisticat

1 Comment | CP24, Elections 2010, Municipal Politics, Press coverage, Race 4 Mayor | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
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Toss Us A Bone, George

October 19, 2010

So it seems George Smitherman has unveiled the final act of his storybook – no, wait – Grimm Brothers march to the mayoralty. Rather than an uplifting coda, singing to us all about his plans to make Toronto a better place, he goes subterranean, pointing out the monster waiting under the bed if we don’t vote for him, appealing to our basest trait, fear. The picture perfect, logical conclusion to the most cold-blooded, calculating campaign in recent memory.

The Smitherman ploy? To hammer at the lingering progressive voters who haven’t yet jumped ship over at the Joe Pantalone camp, not with incentives or positive reasons as to why they should switch allegiance to Team Smitherman but because if they don’t… if they don’t… Mayor Rob Ford! Oogliebooglie!! And if that scary, scary scenario comes to pass, well, it’ll be everybody’s fault who didn’t vote for George. George’ll just be some innocent bystander. He told us so.

The man is kicking sand in our faces, people. He’s taunting us, brazenly running on a resolutely right wing platform and telling us that we over here on the left side of the political spectrum have no choice but to vote for him. Why? Because he’s not Rob Ford. That is the very definition of a deal with the devil.

Take Smitherman’s latest poke to the eye of progressives when he dropped by for a quick cup of coffee at last night’s 519 Community Centre debate. When asked if he supported safe injection sites, he rejected them out of hand, suggesting that he “…wasn’t convinced of its merits.” The former Minister of Health for Ontario isn’t convinced of the merits of safe injection sites?! You know who else isn’t convinced of the merits of safe injections sites, George? Rob Ford. And he’s an idiot.

If this were just an aberration or odd tic in Smitherman’s otherwise moderate campaign (and at this point, I’m not looking for anything more radical than moderate), it could be overlooked. Harm reduction is contentious. But it simply further tilts his candidacy further right into Ford Country.

A Pantalone-prone exaggeration? Smitherman’s proposed a one year tax freeze if elected. A tax freeze in the middle of a supposed financial crunch? You know who else loved to freeze taxes? Mel Lastman. He’s proposed to cut about 1300 jobs from City Hall (while increasing police numbers by 50 which would be half the number Rob Ford promises) through attrition while increasing service to the city’s citizens through the magical neo-conservative way of defying common sense. Less workers = more service. His transit plans are fuzzy at best, both bashing Transit City while expropriating most of it with minor tweaks to call it his own. And mysteriously, he’ll pull in a cool $100 mil from the province to chip into the TTC’s operating costs although he’s been castigating Pantalone and the current administration for always going to the province, cap in hand. Oh yeah, and he’s pledged a “time out on construction of new bike lanes on arterial roadways.”

George Smitherman has shown very little progressive tendencies during this campaign but since Rob Ford has shown none that somehow justifies Smitherman asking, no, demanding, our vote. Well, you know what? Fuck you, George. It’s going to take a lot more than scare tactics to pry my vote away.

So instead of meekly handing over our franchise simply because we’re frightened (and call it ‘strategic’), how be we demand at least a little quid pro quo? We don’t have to ask for the complete capitulation from George that he’s asking from us. Just a morsel. A tidbit. Throw us a bone, George, because simply campaigning on being less bad than Rob Ford isn’t going to do it.

How about something like this?

We here at All Fired Up in the Big Smoke vow to at least think about voting for George Smitherman if he pledges to adhere to the recommendations that emerge from the panel he promises to convene if elected, headed by John Sewell, to look into “restoring local decision-making and local democracy.” It ain’t much as we notice that he explicitly doesn’t mention ballot or voting reform and hems everything in by stating any recommendation cannot increase spending at City Hall. But, it’s something we could hold on to; to help rationalize and justify, even a little, to ourselves that by giving over our vote to such a despicable and disagreeable candidate, we weren’t completely selling our souls out of childish fear.

If every progressive voter who hadn’t yet gone over to the dark side demanded just one thing – a proper bike lane rethink, no increase to the police budget, a realistic transit plan – from George and all his minions out there, rustling up the scare, then at least we’d have something, an unwritten pact with the man. And if elected, he began to stray and ignore what he once promised to us, we would have a common cause, uniting us in dedication to chasing him from office in 2014. Progressives who’d sold out and bitter centrists, working together in a sweet sounding coalition called Anybody But George.

– defiantly submitted by Cityslikr

3 Comments | Better Ballots, City Building, Elections 2010, Municipal Politics, Race 4 Mayor | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
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Whither You Progressives

October 18, 2010

Here’s where the numbers don’t add up for me. (Nice cold start. No mucking about with wordy intro.)

In the 2006 municipal election, incumbent mayor David Miller was re-elected with nearly 57% of the vote. According to the latest poll from Nanos, the outgoing mayor’s endorsed candidate, Joe Pantalone, is pulling in 15%. My very unscientific reading of that suggests over 40% of a supposed left of centre, progressive voting bloc has dissipated somewhere into the ether. Where to, is what I’m wondering.

It’s hard to imagine that even with all that alleged anger manifesting itself post-09 civic workers’ strike, there’d be such a stampede across the political spectrum toward the decidedly un-progressive Rob Ford. George Smitherman has run a very right of centre campaign, tossing out the occasional lefty crumb to keep up liberal appearances. So where are those 40% of David Miller voters?

Granted, not everyone who ever voted for David Miller would consider themself progressive or left of centre. In 06 there was the power of incumbency and, arguably, a weakness of opponent. In 03 Miller was deemed the agent of change who would undo the disrepair wrought on City Hall by the Lastman gang. Change seems to be a major player again in this campaign. Regardless of ideology, the electorate has moved to candidates they think will bring about the biggest change for the city.

Still, it’s hard to reconcile the Pantalone 15%. As we have stated on more than one occasion here, Mr. Pantalone is not a strong campaigner. So, that must be factored into the equation. He’s simply been unable to rally the troops under his candidacy’s flag. But with no other viable left of centre candidate (at least in the mainstream media – and thus, a majority of voters’ eyes) on offer, 15% seems like a very, very low number.

Yes, there is the Ford factor. Many who would naturally tend Pantalone-sque are so violently appalled at the prospects of the Etobicoke councillor becoming mayor that they have abandoned their natural base in order to stop that from happening. The Deputy Mayor simply never polled high enough to be considered the candidate to defeat Ford. That simply takes us back to the question, why?

What’s taking place here in ward 19 may offer up a possible answer.

Two progressive candidates are fighting it out for the council seat that opened up, appropriately enough, when Joe Pantalone decided to run for mayor. Michael Layton has been endorsed by the former councillor and is back by the legendary local NDP machine including his father’s wife, Olivia Chow, the M.P. for the area. Karen Sun is an independent voice who has spent the last decade working on a series of municipal level matters both at City Hall and outside, ranging from environmental to governance issues.

The division between these two candidates, I think, represents the ongoing transformation of progressive thought, and may help explain Joe Pantalone’s anemic showing in the campaign so far.

Mike Layton epitomizes the old school, left wing coalition of urban elitism, the “ethnic vote” (for lack of a better term), unions and Tommy Douglas-like grassroots populism. The “ethnic vote”, I would suggest, is fairly disparate at this point that doesn’t vote en masse for a single candidate. Ditto, the union vote. Populism has become largely right-wing recently. And us elites can only be counted on not to vote too far right. That’s a tough group to stitch together in hopes of gaining a plurality. A little of each may not be enough to secure a victory.

Especially if you’re vying with a candidate who is offering up a similarly progressive but far more urban oriented platform. For a candidate growing up with a father and stepmom both city councillors, Layton the Younger displays remarkably little affinity for local, urban specific issues. Check out his Community Experience under the About link on his website. A camp councillor?!

In comparison Karen Sun represents the face of urban progressivism. Her work has been focused almost exclusively at the municipal level. This is vitally important since we as a nation are becoming increasingly urbanized. With over 3/4s of us now living in what are considered urban environments, it is becoming more critical for us to elect those well versed on those issues to represent us. Progressive values have become increasingly linked to urban values.

Bringing us back to the flagging Pantalone support. While he can rightfully boast of a number of progressive initiatives he’s helmed or supported, his endorsement of Michael Layton displayed a proclivity for stale thinking. Whether he believed Layton was the best candidate on offer for ward 19 or if it was just a case of mutual back-scratching with the NDP powers-that-be, Pantalone showed himself to be out of step with where much of the progressive, left of centre is at the moment. He may be the most left leaning voice still in the mayoral election (that is within the realm of the remaining 3 front runners. Perhaps if the wider voting public had been allowed to see more of Himy Syed, the city would be in the throes of the same deliberation we here in ward 19 are currently in the midst of between Layton and Sun) but Pantalone simply is not in step with the wider progressive movement.

Thus, leaving much of the left limply unenthusiastic and prone to drifting reluctantly to where they think they’re needed most.

– unsupportively submitted by Cityslikr

5 Comments | City Council, Elections 2010, Municipal Politics, Philosophical Musings, Race 4 Mayor | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
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