Tag Archives: blogTO

Meet A Mayoral Candidate XXVI

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With another long work week coming to an end, it’s time to Meet (another) Mayoral Candidate! And this one’s for you, Sonny Yeung, our favourite commenting candidate for mayor.

Today: Douglas Campbell!

Just like his old school socialist politics, Mr. Campbell is not that current when it comes to technology either. And since we here at All Fired Up in the Big Smoke aren’t particularly savvy (or just plain ass lazy) when it comes to tracking down our subjects, well, we’re just going to have to deliver you his candidacy purely second hand. Citations will be duly noted. It’s like we’re channeling the spirit of Douglas Campbell through the diligence of others.

Now an octogenarian, Douglas Campbell has been running for public office since 1962, first as an independent candidate in that federal election for the Toronto riding of St. Pauls and subsequently in almost every other race that has come up. He ran for the provincial NDP leadership in 1970 and the federal NDP leadership in 1975. During this same period, Campbell was also running for various positions at the municipal level in Mississauga. He first faced off against Mel Lastman for mayor in the North York election of 1988 before turning back to the federal NDP scene in 1989 with a run to succeed outgoing leader Ed Broadbent. 2010 marks the fourth time he has thrown his hat into the ring for the mayoralty of Toronto where, in 2000 in a second showdown with Lastman, Campbell placed 4th with more than 8500 votes.

The other Douglas Campbell.

Douglas Campbell’s professional resumé is as eclectic as his political career. He’s been a seaman, a coffee house proprietor, a student, a teacher and high school principal and a cabbie. But it’s been a work life imbued by politics. He took part in the Great Lakes Seamen strike of 1946, fighting for reduced working hours. As a U. of T. student in the `60s, he protested involvement in the Vietnam War and took to the streets in the anti-nuclear movement. In 1968 as a high school principal, Mr. Campbell brought sex education into Newfoundland classrooms. There’s no mention how long it remained there. Or Douglas Campbell for that matter.

At this point, it’s probably not necessary to point out that Campbell’s your dyed-in-the-wool outsider’s outsider. A socialist when it was almost fashionable, he remains one to this day despite the label having become a short form to signify a relic, a historic artifact, and used by those who’ve dishonestly repackaged their 18th-century political beliefs into something seemingly new and shiny but just as punishing and equal as it was 300 years ago. I mean, Campbell was part of the movement who thought the Lewis led NDP was too centrist! That is hard core left wing.

“I’m a fighter for the working class. I’d like to see the profits of labour (taxes) go to pay for hospitals and schools. Now the taxes go to the people who put the politicians in power,” Campbell has been quoted saying.

He wants free education for everyone right up through university. “The sooner we get to that level, the sooner we might preserve this planet,” Campbell figures. Having grown up in Toronto during the Dirty 30s “where tens of thousands of [were] unemployed,” Campbell thinks things are just as bad here now. “To see people now lying in the streets is evidence things are getting worse.”

How would a Mayor Douglas Campbell fix the problem of homelessness and inequality? “My only concern is that we should have public ownership of everything,” he informed CP24. “Either we get rid of capitalism or the working class will be resolved to nuclear dust.”

Yeah!! What’s not to like about such a fidelity to an ideology that has so fallen out of favour? It’s like the political version of being a Toronto Maple Leafs fan. At least, his heart is in the right place.

Except for the odd flare up of racial and religious intolerance. In an interview with blogTO earlier this year, Campbell called Harry Truman “that lunatic-Jewish president” for ordering the end of the Canadian Merchant Marines. A Jewish president?! And because Premier McGuinty is Roman Catholic, somehow this means that George Smitherman is “a puppet of the Pope”.

OK. So let’s call him a man of his time and not necessarily discard the message because of the messenger. Maybe out there somewhere is a young person, raised in an environment where socialism, so totally and not entirely justifiably discredited, was never mentioned. They see this post and wonder, what is this thing this old, slightly bigoted man speaks of, socialism? Maybe they’ll discover that it wasn’t nearly as bad a notion as they had been raised to believed. That can’t be all bad.

While not going out and getting the opportunity to ask Douglas Campbell the question we’ve been asking of all the candidates we’ve profiled, we’ll use his own words to answer for him. If the current mayor would like to see his legacy as that of the Transit Mayor, what would a Mayor Douglas Campbell like to see as his legacy?

A Mayor Douglas would “keep up the revolution”.

— dutifully submitted by Cityslikr

The 5.6% Dissolution

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Pondering Toronto’s 2010 mayoral campaign so far, which is something I do with fair regularity given the subject matter on this particular site, I am often left scratching my head as to the approaches and tactics of various candidates. Why are they doing what they’re doing? Who are they trying to reach with that particular line of reasoning or this mode of attack? Is George Smitherman actually gay or is all his talk of having a husband merely a beard to mask the fact the man doesn’t possess a progressive bone in his body?

My latest bafflement arises via deputy mayor Joe Pantalone. Reading through an interview he did earlier this month with blogTO, I was struck by the answer he gave to their question, Why didn’t you do more about these transportation problems as deputy mayor? Councillor Pantalone’s response? In 2008 [the Fraser Institute] analyzed the Province’s tax situation situation and found that out of all the taxes paid in Ontario –put together in one basket, municipal, provincial, and federal — municipalities only got 5.6 percent…

Huh.

Now, I had no luck in locating the analysis Pantalone was referencing but will shoulder all the blame for that as I started breaking out into hives spending that kind of time on the Fraser Institute website. Preston Manning says this, Mike Harris says that. (A Simpson shudder and intense itching begins all over upper torso.) But taking Joe at his word, I began to wonder why he wasn’t making more hay with this point.

Why wasn’t he channeling voter frustration and outrage at the fact that the city is being severely short-changed by both senior levels of government and forced to annually negotiate dire fiscal straits due to massive imbalances in both governance and revenue structures? As a councillor for almost 3 decades now and having worked with all sides of the political spectrum, Joe Pantalone had arrived at this late juncture in his career finally and reluctantly convinced that Toronto (and every other municipality in Ontario) was being knee-capped by Queen’s Park and until true, unconditional reform was undertaken, nothing was going to change that. No amount of fiddling with numbers, privatization or selling of public assets could alter that reality.

Sure, his opponents would go down the beaten path of telling Joe we need to get our house in order before going to the province with cap in hand, begging for bailouts. They already have, haven’t they, Rocco Rossi. But played right, those kinds of statements could be effectively turned against those using them, showing them to be know-nothings, out of touch with the facts. Or worse still, enablers of a dysfunctional governance structure where too much power and money go to those with the least amount of accountability.

Because one doesn’t need the 5.6% analysis from the Fraser Institute to know that there is a systemic unfairness at the core of our political system. Where one level of government has complete and utter control over another with little recourse or redress on offer. Evidence abounds that this arrangement, which goes back to the birth of this nation in the middle of the 19th-century, is beneficial purely uni-directionally. Municipalities bear the brunt of provincial and federal neglect and mismanagement. Until we can get ourselves out from under the weight of that, there is little to be done to fix our current predicament. Anyone who tries telling you different is either uninformed or lying. Maybe both.

And Joe Pantalone should tell them so. He should tell us that. He should point out that in every city budget, Toronto is forced to spend more on provincially mandated programs than it receives in money from the province. That’s the deficit spending at the centre of our present money woes. It’s not out of control spending at City Hall that is responsible for higher property taxes, increased user fees, underfunded public transit and infrastructure projects. No matter how loudly and often Pantalone’s mayoral rivals spew forth that nonsense. No. This city’s increased expenditures are going directly into the gaping maw of Queen’s Park. Not only are our provincial taxes going to feed that beast but so is a chunk of the taxes we’re supposed to be paying to the city for the services they continue to deliver to us.

That’s what Joe Pantalone should be saying every time he opens his mouth or one of his opponents open theirs.

But maybe Joe’s been at it for too long. He’s too much of the consummate insider and can no longer see the forest for the trees. For now, he’s content to simply counterpunch, rope-a-dope in the hopes that the right of centre contingent around him exhausts itself, flailing as it is at the populist figments of their collective imaginations. He is not the warrior we’re looking for to wage the real battle ahead that needs to be waged.

— resignatedly submitted by Urban Sophisticat