It’s Friday. Time for another opportunity to Meet A Mayoral Candidate!

Up this week: … errrrrr…

We’ve hit a bit of a snag, to tell you the truth. By our latest count, there are 34 candidates registered to run for the office of mayor in 2010. Take away the 5 front runners who hardly need more public exposure from us and that leaves 29. To date, we’ve profiled 18 of those 29 here (plus a couple more who have subsequently withdrawn which we are taking absolutely no blame for), winding up with a total of 11 mayoral candidates yet to be profiled.

As Sonny Yeung — himself running for mayor and the object of our very first profile way back when — pointed out to us in our comments section a week ago, there were only 12 more Fridays before election day (now 11) and wondered if we’d be able to profile all the candidates before then. Certainly, if there’s a rush of any further candidates to register before the September 10^th deadline, things might get a little tight. So why are we wasting valuable time and space today not profiling anyone?

Well, there’s the snag, the snafu. The remaining 11 candidates are proving to be a little elusive when it comes to fleshing out their candidacy. Their names appear on the City of Toronto website and other places that keep track of such things but discovering much more about them has not been easy. Thinking about that, it struck us that, well, if you’re running for public office, if you’ve slapped down your cash to get your name on the ballot, should the onus really be on us, the voting public, to have to dig deep to uncover why you’re running, what you stand for, your positions on important issues? We’re willing to read or watch anything you’ve got out there but should we really have to issue an A.P.B. in order to track candidates down?

Now we hear you thinking, hey, your journalists. Journalists do a little digging. They gather information. They walk the beat… They have a beat?

That’s the thing. We here at All Fired Up in the Big Smoke aren’t journalists. We never claimed to be, not even a little bit. Don’t call us citizen journalists, we won’t respond to such new-fangled vernacular.

What we are, what we endeavour to be is simply better informed citizens. To cease operating in the dark and to become enlightened. It’d be almost a spiritual quest if we thought for a moment that any of us actually possessed a soul.

Our desire to make something of ourselves, however, sometimes runs smack dab into a more firmly entrenched, lifelong trait: laziness. Think of us here as over-the-hillish infielders. Our positioning is mostly right but our range is for shit. If you want us to make the play, you’ve got to hit the ball right at us. The days of spectacular diving plays are a thing of the past.

We want to do our part in helping candidates get their faces and messages out there. But we do think that if you want to be seen and heard, you have to try and meet us halfway. Help us see and hear you. Make it easy to be seen and heard.

Does that make us elitists? Even in this day and age of highfalutin technology, there are some without access to even the most basic of computer technology. That should not disqualify them from running for public office. In an ideal world, sure. But here we are in 2010 and the ceaseless march of time clacks on. If we can’t reach you via the interwebs, then we can’t reach you. We’ll shoulder the blame for that.

So… what now then? Sonny Yeung’s generously given us a couple leads on how to track down a few of his more elusive opponents. (How’s that for magnanimous?) But the laziness within wages battle with our inquisitiveness. A part of us wonders if maybe our time (and hopefully yours) would be better spent featuring people and issues that are screaming out to be heard as opposed to those skulking in anonymity, taunting us, daring us to discover them. If you want to be the mayor of this city, you’re going to have to come out and tell us why. Twenty-three candidates have already done so. We don’t think we should have to beg you to join them.

— dutifully submitted by Cityslikr