Monthly Archives: April 2011

The Real Swing Factor In Trinity-Spadina

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[Yesterday our email inbox contained a message that so nailed how we were feeling about the federal campaign going on in our riding that, with the author’s permission, we wanted to share it with all of you. Plus, it gave us the day off to head out and enjoy our lovely spring weather.]

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I am exasperated!

Today I read yet another article about how the Liberals and the NDP both need to court the centre-right condo vote in order to win Trinity-Spadina. But the “conservative condo vote” has been mentioned for almost a decade as a swing factor, only to disappear when the votes are counted. It is a cliché and it is wrong.

The real swing voters in Trinity-Spadina are independent progressives.

The NDP does not own the progressive vote in Trinity-Spadina, and cannot take it for granted. Many progressives grimaced as the NDP dithered over the long gun registry, or adopted the Tory anti-tax talking points on the Green Shift, or called for cheaper fossil fuels, or sided with conservative unionists who fear environmentalism costs jobs. These progressives really like Olivia Chow, but they also worry that the NDP is perhaps less a party of urbanists and environmentalists, and more that of culturally-conservative rural unionists who think Toronto pinkos can go to hell.

These swing progressives are the people who voted for Adam Vaughan over the NDP-endorsed Helen Kennedy municipally in Ward 20 (Jack Layton had reportedly threatened to “bury” Vaughan if he ran against Kennedy – nice!). These are also the people who voted for Karen Sun over Jack Layton’s son in Ward 19 last year. These alone represent about 12,000 T-S votes, or one-fifth of the voting electorate. These are the people who will decide the results in Trinity-Spadina, not the “conservative condo vote.”

And yet the condo cliché remains. Here’s the Toronto Star talking to Sean McCormick, an inexperienced Fordesque fiscal conservative who had been bizarrely endorsed by the federal Liberal T-S riding association in last fall’s municipal election for Ward 19 councillor. Not only did McCormick place third, even with the supposedly-mighty conservative condo vote, he was so incompetent that he defaulted on his campaign financials, the only front-running council candidate in the City to do so. (Liberal donors to McCormick’s campaign: according to City bylaw, this default means you are no longer eligible for the City’s 75% donation rebate). Bad enough that these Liberals endorsed an incompetent candidate, but the real stupidity is that they are chasing after conservative voters in Trinity-Spadina, and not progressives.

Clearly, the T-S Liberal riding association is still gripped by the dead hand of Tony Ianno, who was the Liberal MP from 1993-2006. He is famous around here for the contrast between his ruthless hold on power locally, and his lack of presence in Parliament. In 1988, he pioneered some disgraceful practices in the nomination process, practices that William Johnston said “strike at the legitimacy of the most fundamental process of our democratic system.” In 1996, as the feds were turning over harbour commissions to municipalities elsewhere, Ianno fought to create the Toronto Port Authority and put it under federal control. One of its first acts was to sue the City of Toronto for a billion dollars, and the TPA has been a continuous “fuck you” to the city ever since. In 2003, Ianno also pioneered new ways of getting around his own party’s campaign finance law, by creating a secret trust fund that was described in the Montreal Gazette as “a recipe for corruption.” In 2006, he shut down campus polls at U of T, the same thing Iggy slammed the Tories for doing in Guelph. To top it off, Ianno now faces stock manipulation charges.

After this Liberal stronghold fell to the NDP in 2006, you might have hoped the Trinity-Spadina riding association would seek a fresh face who could win back progressive Liberal voters. Next door, in Parkdale-High Park, the Liberals replaced a similarly defeated, similarly uninspiring Liberal with progressive Gerard Kennedy, who was able to defeat the popular and hard-working NDP MP Peggy Nash and retake the riding (some people say, “what a waste,” but why shouldn’t voters get to choose between good candidates?). You might also have thought the T-S riding association would be especially sensitive to the fact that their former MP was now facing an OSC probe during a recession caused by securities shenanigans.

Instead, just weeks before the 2008 election, the Liberals replaced their irritating former MP with Christine Innes, the MP’s wife. If you’re a registered Liberal but can’t remember when you agreed to this nomination, it is because you were not exactly asked. The couple apparently decided this between themselves. “It’s my time,” said Innes. This reminds me of how Andersen Consulting changed its name to Accenture following the Enron scandal.

The role of a riding association generally does not come up in election coverage. And perhaps the distastefulness of the Ianno/Innes family compact is simply how the sausages are made. Voters are also expected to vote for the party and not the local representative. But who advocates for the community’s priorities in a party’s caucus if not the MP? Who sets the direction of a party in Parliament if not its caucus? And as the TPA issue shows, federal politics can indeed be local. MPs matter.

Christine Innes seems quite nice, and she is not her husband. But she is not a fresh start either, and her riding association’s overtures to hard-right fiscal conservatives should worry Liberal progressives. Is Ms. Innes herself centre-right politically, or does she just think the voters are? Either way, how can progressives trust her?

Why won’t the Liberals nominate a progressive in this progressive riding? Where’s our Gerard Kennedy? Where’s our Martha Hall Findlay?

It’s time to drop the conservative condo cliché, and its time for the Liberal riding association to pull its head out of Tony Ianno’s ass. Independent progressives are the real swing voters in Trinity-Spadina, and we are the ones who should be courted.

— submitted by John Bowker

The Day Conservatism Died

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Does anyone know the exact date when conservatism ceased operations as a productive, positive contributor to society? At what point of time in its supposed illustrious history did it stop offering up ideas and solutions that consisted of more complex notions than could fit perfectly on a placard, bumper sticker or that a two year-old could remember and recite? Was it a sudden jolt like a meteor strike that made the post-Enlightenment air toxic to the more progressives in their movement or did they just gradually rid themselves of reason, rational thought and a belief in the common good?

Was the last true conservative of the Burkian mold in the plane with Buddy Holly that fateful night in February 1959?

We know traditional political conservatism has been under attack in the U.S. since the crushing defeat of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election. It was put on the endangered list under Richard Nixon and the last species spotted during the Reagan Revolution. Our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents’ conservatism went extinct when George W. Bush move into the Oval Office in January 2001.

But here in Canada, conservatism survived a little longer, dying a slower death. Perhaps it was fatally infected with the 1988 Free Trade Deal and our closer integration with the United States. The ‘neo’ in neo-conservatism began to rub off on us. With the rise of western alienation, the Reform Party and Alberta with its U.S. style conservatism as an oil producing, economic force. The progressive in the Progressive Conservative leaked away, lapped up by the Jean Chretien-Paul Martin Liberals, eager to bolster their right flank.

Ontario dipped its toe into the new conservative waters when it embraced Mike Harris’s Common Sense Revolution in the mid-90s, rejecting and ultimately putting a bullet in the head of the red Toryism that had ruled the land for over 40 years until 1985. After 8 years, the province return to its traditional progressive conservative roots when it elected Liberal Dalton McGuinty. The actual Progressive Conservative now exists in name only.

Unlike their neo-conservative soul mates at the federal level who, with the PC-Canadian Alliance/Reform Party amalgamation, jettisoned any last vestige of progressive thought or policy. Finally, it’s Morning in Canada. Government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem. Taxes are bad. Science is bad. Peacekeeping is for pussies. In-depth gathering of data in order to more thoroughly define and guide public policy is an invasion of privacy and must be eliminated. An added bonus if you’re planning to build more prisons and get tougher on crime in the face of evidence pointing to dropping rates of criminal behaviour.

Statistics and facts be damned when we’ve got naked ideology to propel us forward back to the 17-century!

It wasn’t too long ago that kind of political thinking would’ve relegated you to the fringes. Yet now the Conservatives are within serious striking distance of securing a majority victory, able to count on a third of the electorate for steadfast support for what can only be described as an antediluvian outlook. Hell, in the so-called liberal hotbed of Toronto, nearly 50% of the voters rallied behind Rob Ford – the poster child for narrow-minded, anti-government, pithy slogans as policy platforms politicians — as their choice for mayor last fall. We are now in the process of witnessing up close and personal just much how respect we taxpayers should expect from neo-conservative politicians.

Which, judging by the craziness going on to the south of us at the hands of the self-proclaimed Tea Party movement, should be next to nil. The thing is, when conservatives abandoned their core principle as stated by Glen Worthington, “…the essence of conservatism lies not in a body of theory, but in the disposition to maintain those institutions seen as central to the beliefs and practices of society”, the day traditional conservatism died, all bets were off. Neo-conservatives bear no responsibility to anyone aside from themselves. What’s good for them as individuals is good for society. End stop. Edmund Burke and the like deposed by Ayn Rand. Ask not what your country can do for you because it’s going to do fuck all. And certainly don’t ask what you can do for your country as, well, that would just be an imposition, an impingement of my individual freedom and liberty.

And those of us not sharing that particularly libertarian worldview have much blame to shoulder for the current conservative-less situation. By accepting any tenets of the faith, from its creeping anti-governmentalism to the bogus trickle-down economic theory, we lent it credibility and gave it traction. We helped make the lunatic acceptable and now find ourselves having to defend against what is essentially an alternate reality where up is down, black is white and tax cuts generate increased revenue for the public purse.

An alternate reality where the likes of Ezra Levant are considered worthy of having a spot on television to discuss politics. Yes, as a matter of fact, he did compare the CBC to a North Korean state run broadcast. With a straight face!

Watching what I could stomach of yesterday’s launch of Sun TV, two words immediately sprung to mind: cable access. Back when honest to god conservatism was still alive and well, that’s where crackpots like Mr. Levant et al would’ve been relegated if they wanted to air their fetid, malignant views out in public. Or a soapbox in the corner of a park.While it may be difficult to pinpoint exactly how it is traditional conservatism died, I think we can officially call time of death. It was April 18th 2011, 4:30pm EDT.

— sympathetically submitted by Cityslikr

How Do You Solve A Problem Like Sue-Ann?

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I’m not really sure this is worth the effort.

Or at least, my subconscious isn’t convinced which might explain the hours and hours of procrastination I’ve been subjected to, trying to sit down and write this out. Ignore it, my better me tells me, no good can come from harping on it. But my ugly me (who I’m partial to) leans in and badgers me to do this thing. This cannot stand, unchallenged, I’m challenged. Nonsense must be called out. Yeah but… good me whines… Some things are better left ignored. Let them simply rot in their own putrid, bilious juices. My God, you are so fucking naïve, ugly me yells at good me, and so the argument continues as does the procrastination.

Oh, Sue-Ann Levy. How can such a mean-spirited, talentless typist cause me so much consternation? I mean, I don’t even read the Toronto Sun and highly suspect anyone who does aside from gathering their sports news. Yet she and it represent the nasty, squalid side of the Ford Nation. Ignoring her and the paper that employees her services allows for misinformation and character assassination to stand. However, addressing what spills seemingly unedited from her poisoned pen (or whatever passes for the modern equivalent) may only lend credence to it.

Decisions, decisions.

It all started (again) last week when SAL got caught up in the whole Pride-QuAIA situation which she has been very vocal about. To do the brouhaha justice, read all about it in Xtra! where it was covered much more thoroughly by Andrea Houston. The thing you need to know is that in a flurry of Twitter activity, Ms. Levy managed to toss around an anti-Semite accusation (misspelled) and taunted another journalist with a ‘Johnny Jew’ epithet. Many deletions and one apology later, she was then removed from covering the ongoing Pride-QuAIA story for the Sun.

A peaceful silence ensued.

And then came this.

So many things coalesce along with the assorted bacteria and other single-celled beings in the pit of my stomach when I read a Sue-Ann Levy article, none of which makes me feel better as a human being. The least important but most glaringly apparent is the fact she is a terrible, terrible, terrible writer. Is that enough terribles? A terrible, terrible, terrible, monstrously terrible writer. Just terrible. There. That’s better.

To call her a hack is to heap unjustified scorn and derision on true hacks everywhere. Hackery suggests some form of organized, systemic badness. That’s a bar Ms. Levy simply doesn’t possess the creative vertical leap to clear. It’s all a stream-of-consciousness, spewed forth like the expressing of a dog’s anal glands, ideology and vitriol trumping logic, truth and basic construction of thought at every turn. No literate adult should write as poorly as Sue-Ann Levy does. Certainly, no literate adult should write as poorly as Sue-Ann Levy does and get paid for their efforts.

My offended artistic sensibilities aside, the real damage inflicted by Levy’s rant writings.. wrantings?.. is on the political discourse in and around City Hall. Like the radical right wing City Hall pols she so slavishly shills for, SAL now basks in the glow of Mayor Ford’s ascension to power, having been on the outside looking in during the Miller administration. To a one, they claim the exclusion was because the Millerites brooked no dissent although judging from their performance so far in office and in print, one could just as easily conclude that an inability or unwillingness to contribute anything positive to the proceedings might also have been factored in.

It’s Team Ford time now and no one epitomizes the nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah triumphalism better than Sue-Ann Levy. Because they won the election in October, they don’t have to justify themselves. They don’t have to defend or debate their ideas. The only fact that matters is the fact Rob Ford is mayor now. Suck on that, left wing kooks.

So it’s invective name-calling and innuendo from the mayor’s court reporter, Sue-Ann Levy. Reading one of her columns is like eaves-dropping on a teenager’s phone call with a friend. It’s all like, gawd, why doesn’t she just, like, shut up and mind her own business! I was talking to Dougie and she, like, all butted in. (Hint to Ms. Levy? If you really want to conduct a private interview with a councillor? There are these places at City Hall called ‘offices’. Go inside, close the door behind you and have at it.) I mean, did you hear her laugh? All horsey. Maybe we should start feeding her sugar cubes. Tee hee, tee hee.

Perhaps it’s because she herself lacks any principles other than obsequiousness to right wing power, Levy can only impugn the motives of anyone at council she disagrees with. And she disagrees with no one at council more than Adam Vaughan. There is nothing he does to SAL’s eyes that isn’t due to him angling for a run at the mayor’s job in 2014 and his bitter resentment Rob Ford now occupies that place. He has become her new bete noire, David Miller incarnate. It’s surprising that, nearly 6 months in, and she’s yet to come up with a derogatory nickname for him yet. Here’s a tip, Sue-Ann. Vaughan rhymes with yawn. Run with it.

Most disturbingly, Levy shares a dim view of council meetings at City Hall with her right wing bestest friends. “An exercise in sheer madness” she wrote about the debate over the city’s proposed new appointment process of agencies, boards and committees. “Look, I’m all for democracy,” Levy claimed in her article which, loosely translated, means she isn’t really, leading inevitably to this thought finisher, “but it was all just nonsense, grandstanding by a bunch of petulant councillors who can’t get it through their heads they no longer run the show at City Hall.”

In Sue-Ann Levy’s world, democracy is little more than ‘sheer madness’, ‘nonsense’, obstructionism, interfering in the city’s business and a “waste of time and tax dollars”, as duly quoted from the paradigm of democratic thought, Doug Ford.

Which is what makes Sue-Ann Levy more than simply an innocuous albeit annoying wingtard (oops. I meant, wingnut.) As eye-poppingly ludicrous as much of her wrantings are, she has a significant enough platform to amply pollute public discourse. She serves those seeking to push through an agenda with as little democratic input as possible and who believe that winning an election grants 4 years of autocratic rule. By belittling the established democratic process at City Hall, she undercuts democracy itself.

Of course, my good me suggests I may be giving Sue-Ann Levy a little too much credit. Is she really capable of thinking that far through things? She’s probably just writing love notes to those who are paying any attention to her whatsoever. Maybe all David Miller and his allies needed to do was give Sue-Ann the occasional scratch behind the ear and they would’ve had her eating out of their hands. Ooooooo, says ugly me. Listen to good you, getting all catty and stuff. It looks like Sue-Ann Levy brings out the worst in you.

Sue-Ann Levy brings out the worst in all of us.

— dividedly submitted by Cityslikr