Meet A Mayoral Candidate — XIII

If it’s Friday, it must be time to Meet A Mayoral Candidate!

This week, John Letonja, Your Next Toronto Mayor.

Reading through Mr. Letonja’s platform, the superbly named John Letonja Initiative (doesn’t the Alan Parsons Project spring immediately to mind?), is like picking a page in James Joyce’s Ulysses and trying to make your way through it. It is a stream of consciousness that leaves no stone unturned, no idea unexplored, no thought necessarily connected to the previous one or the one after that. A Coles Notes handbook might be required to truly make heads or tails of all of it.

A truck driver, hobbyist and proudly self-proclaimed fringe candidate, Mr. Letonja would run the city just like a business if elected mayor. But it would be like no business you’ve ever seen. Sort of DIY, with everybody pitching in. To help children keep active, he’d have them plant “money making trees”. He’d exile from the city those convicted of gun related crimes and if they came back, he’d toss them in jail to work on projects for free. In return, they’d receive “a certificate of training so they can find work or they start their own business”. Mr. Letonja would recycle “anything that is not being recycled or taken away by city of Toronto…” to “create additional jobs for Toronto’s unemployed.” Under a John Letonja administration, the citizens of Toronto would become jack-of-all-trades to help build a better city.

Why would we all do this? So we wouldn’t have to pay the level of taxes we do now. Like almost every candidate running in 2010, Mr. Letonja wants to cut taxes, feeling that we are spending too much of our time bending over and getting screwed by politicians. Frankly, Mr. Letonja displays a disturbing, Limbaugh-esque concern with anal penetration; almost Joycean in its detailed obsession with slightly indecorous sexual activity.

But as mayor, John Letonja wouldn’t be all work and no play. He’d legalize what he refers to as “the sweet leaf and hashish”. Apparently, the church fully endorses the idea. Beer would be allowed inside polling booths as long as it was in cans and not bottles although drinking and voting would be that much easier if we could simply vote online which is an idea Mr. Letonja fully backs.

Mr. Letonja would also introduce a new sport just in time for the Pan-Am games in 2015. It’s called Wacky fastball (probably played under the influence of the sweet leaf and hashish) and seems to be a blend of soccer, basketball, ultimate Frisbee and touch football. A player cannot ‘push, hold, punch, kick, trip, or any unlawful act’ against another player. A 5 minute penalty will result in any such infraction. However, a player ‘will not get a penalty for accidentally kicking or reflecting the ball at a player’s nuts or face.’ All the rules to the game can be read near the end of the John Letonja Initiative.

Perhaps rather than looking at John Letonja as a viable mayoralty candidate, he is best viewed as a Dada performance artist. He spouts largely incoherent nonsense but how is that any different from what most of the other leading, ‘serious’ candidates for mayor are giving us? Yet they are deemed to be significant contenders. Clearly this suggests that the race is nothing more than a subjective beauty contest, run by those willing to do the dirty work of the highest bidder.

Yeah. I’m pretty sure that’s what the John Letonja Initiative is trying to tell us. If he’s a joke then they’re all jokes, the race for mayor is a joke.

Keeping with the whole Dada spirit of things, we imagine John Letonja’s response to our question, If the current mayor wants his legacy to be that of the Transit Mayor, what will be the legacy of a Mayor Letonja?, would go something like this… That No One In Toronto Who Accidentally Kicks or Deflects a Ball Into Someone Else’s Face of Nuts Will Be Penalized.

— dutifully submitted by Cityslikr