Tag Archives: PRIDE

Mayor Ford? Mayor Ford? Yoo-hoo! Mayor Ford?

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I write this with an almost disinterested perplexity. Really? Do I have to? Really??

That the mayor of Toronto should, at the very least, attend the flag raising kick off to Pride week just a short drive walk from his City Hall office is beyond question to all but the most confirmed of homophobes. After a similarly uneasy Mel Lastman set aside his qualms and jumped feet first into the festivities, the die was cast. Some acknowledgement of the event had become part of a mayor’s job description.

The matter’s settled. End stop. Continued discussion of Mayor Ford’s rebuff is now officially boring and not much of a story anymore. He’s got issues, let’s just say. What other explanation could there be at this point?

But what perplexes me, frankly, is the manner in which the mayor once again went about excusing himself. And remember, we’re not talking about the parade here and its conflict with a family gathering up at the cottage. A non-holiday Monday gathering to read out the city’s proclamation touting tolerance, diversity, blah, blah, blah. At noon. Right when the mayor usually starts his work day.

He’s busy, we’re told.

Now, anyone who’s been following along with Mayor Ford’s performance recently knows that’s simply a blatant lie. It’s incomprehensible that he couldn’t find the time to squeeze in 15 minutes to do his duty, make an appearance, read what’s in front of him and get the hell out of there before he got any of teh gay on him. As an excuse, it was as lame as it was lazy.

A couple months back, the mayor’s former press secretary and now Toronto Sun columnist something, Adrienne Batra, suggested (while advising him to at least attend yesterday’s flag raising event it should be noted), it wasn’t a case of Mayor Ford being homophobic as it was him not wanting to ‘tick off’ or alienate his political base. Somehow to her mind that makes it more understandable? What happened to that straight shooting, tell it like it is, just one of us guys the mayor said he was? That just sounds like the unprincipled type of politician the mayor used to rail about.

It’s also amazingly passive, not wanting to alienate anybody. What happened to that unruly, renegade, maverick Councillor Rob Ford that 47% of voting Torontonians supported back in 2010? That guy would’ve avoided like the AIDS plague anything to do with Pride and told us right up front why. The city shouldn’t be in the business of supporting any sort of lifestyle choice or something along those lines. Anything.

He wouldn’t be afraid of alienating his base. He’d be activating it with dog whistles and coded language, using the opportunity to burnish the Ford brand of small-minded neo-conservatism. What happened to that guy?

MIA. AWOL. Hiding behind some make-believe itinerary and, in a scene that’s becoming more and more routine, winding up increasingly isolated on the wrong side of an issue. A healthy majority of council was present yesterday including some of the mayor’s closest allies. (Wait. Maybe ‘closet allies’ worked better.) Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday. Speaker Frances Nunziata. Councillors Gary Crawford, Frank Di Giorgio and Cesar Palacio.

The mayor has simply stopped trying and leaves his more ardent defenders with little to stand up for him with aside from the usual meaningless tripe. Family first! (*sigh* We’re not talking about the parade.) Where does it say a mayor has to do anything about Pride? (*sigh* That’s like me, writing a Toronto municipal politics blog, saying who says I have to talk about the mayor?) It just comes with the territory.

Mayor Ford has become so detached from the proceedings at City Hall that not only is he blatantly shirking his responsibilities but he can’t even bother to come up with adequate excuses in an attempt to cover his tracks. The Mayor of Nothing, doing nothing and nothing doing as to why. If you ask me, it is the most curious of re-election routes.

— wide openly submitted by Cityslikr

When’s The News Not Fit To Print?

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OK, so somebody’s going to have to bring me up to speed on this. With no journalistic background and even less of one in ethics, I’m a little unclear as to why Mayor Ford being filmed fast food shopping isn’t newsworthy? If a news organization thinks it’s important that they have reporters dutifully show up every Monday to record his weight, why isn’t it part of the story if he’s seen visiting the dead colonel?

Who decides what’s out of bounds or not news?

We here at All Fired Up in the Big Smoke have, for some time now, made little reference to the mayor’s weight. During the 2010 campaign we tried rationalizing the use of pithy turns of phrases like ‘fat fuck’ as referring to an attitude, a state of mind and not a physical attribute even though it was. Conceding the point that we were treading choppy waters with that, and knowing that we wouldn’t hurl such an epithet at anyone in person no matter how much we might dislike them, we ceased and desisted.

I’m not sure we even ever referenced Cut the Waste Waist, his crass political stunt concocted, I imagine, in an attempt to distract us from the mayor’s 2012 troubles. Ignore it and maybe it’ll go away, was our thinking.

But as the budget chief — himself quietly going about the business of shedding pounds — likes to say, you can’t suck and blow at the same time. If the Fords are looking to generate some goodwill by their weight loss campaign, burnish the mayor’s image as just another little guy struggling with a battle of the bulge, they can’t dictate the terms of coverage. In our drive to ignore this whole issue, we’ve regularly fought the urge to write a post labelling Cut The Waist Waste as the worst PR idea since the fictional boss, Mr. Carlson, of the fictional radio station, WKRP in Cincinnati, decided to give out free turkeys at Thanksgiving by throwing live ones out of a helicopter. “As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”

So much downside. Why risk it, we thought to ourselves.

And so the mayor endures further public scrutiny and embarrassment, any private misstep quite possibly caught on camera and broadcast for the world to see. His brother-councillor, Doug, the seeming architect of the gimmick, jumps to the mayor’s defence, decrying the very media intrusiveness he was looking for in the first place (“I couldn’t take a candy out of a candy dish at one of the buildings on Bay St. before somebody called the media by the time I got downstairs and said they saw me taking candy”), while making sure everyone knows he, at least, is on track to meet his weight loss target. “Anyways, at the end of the day I’m hitting my target. Fifty pounds. That’s it. Rob? It might be a little tougher.” How tough? “(He’ll do it even) if I’ve got to get a piece of duct tape and stick it across his mouth, put a little hole in there for a straw,” said Doug Ford.

How’s that for having the mayor’s back?

What was once an unbelievable turn of events, a political tidal wave, soon devalued into a farce and has now bottomed out into a sad fucking spectacle.

It’s no longer a question of whether or not Rob Ford is fit to be mayor of Toronto, the answer to that should be painfully obvious, but whether or not he even really wants to be mayor. There are perks to be sure. His view and words, regardless of merit, have to be taken seriously and not just simply laughed off as they were when he was a councillor. He gets to meet dignitaries like Don Cherry and sports teams.

But what happened to the days when you could just slip out for some chicken and nobody gave a shit? Or miss council meetings and most people were relieved rather than upset about it? And the Pride Parade! Why won’t everybody just stop asking me about the Pride Parade?!

Because you’re the mayor of Toronto, sir, and it’s 2012.

If things had broken the way he wanted, Rob Ford would now be a sports broadcaster, moving into that career after retiring from professional football. He’d be doing something he actually enjoys. Instead, he’s stuck being a mayor. Why? It’s impossible to tell. All we know is that nobody’s happy about it including, it would seem, Mayor Ford himself.

Maybe it all just seemed like a really good idea at the time, taking a run at the top job. If he won, he’d clean up the mess he was convinced City Hall had become and make a real difference. How hard would that be? What could possibly go wrong?

I think that’s why his trip to KFC during a very public weight loss challenge is in fact news. That he thought it wouldn’t be. That he thought there would be no implications, no consequences to those actions. So what? So I cheated on my diet a little. What’s the big deal?

The big deal is, the mayor and his brother made a big deal of trying to lose weight, tried to play politics with it, use it to their advantage. What could possibly go wrong? The fact that they didn’t think through what could possibly go wrong speaks volumes about their decision making process. There seems to be an inability to consider the implications of their actions. Of course, people would start watching what they ate. Of course, someone would snap a picture if they saw the mayor eating fast food, his brother eating candy.

To think otherwise, to be surprised that it happened and offended that somehow it’s ‘news’, well, is news itself. It means that the mayor of Toronto and his closest advisor, Councillor Doug, operate purely on a rash, reckless level. Hey! Here’s a good idea. Let’s run with it. There’s no sober second thought. No long term contemplation. No reflection. This just feels right. Let’s do it.

That’s news Toronto needs to know.

— hungrily submitted by Cityslikr

Being At Home In The City

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Unexpectedly but appropriately enough, there was talk this past Canada Day of hunting. Appropriate because this is a country founded, at least in part, by hunting. Hunting, trapping, fishing. All that coureur de bois stuff. Unexpected, since I know nothing about hunting and other assorted hands-on methods of putting food on the table.

I say this without a trace of boastful pride, having just never learned about or participated in such sports. There was that one time I reeled in a large mouth bass and the only gun I have ever fired was of the pellet variety. So I was very interested over the weekend to discover how exactly a gun works, how gauges are determined, etc., etc.

What struck me most about these conversations, though, was how in touch with their surroundings the folks were who spent their time hunting and fishing. At home in their environment, knowing everything there was to know about every hill they climbed, every point they positioned themselves at while tracking their quarry. Much of our conversation took place on a boat as we meandered over a lake where various points of interest and local history were revealed.

It all got me to thinking and wondering if those of us big city dwellers could ever attain such equanimity with where we live. Is the urban idea still too alien to us, what with our hundreds of thousands of years living directly off the land, huddled in small groups against the elements, putting on our best, bravest and most stoic frontiersmen face? Towns are where we went to conduct our mercantile business, stock up on supplies and get our debauched groove on if the need arose. No decent person was meant to live in town.

Until just recently, the notion of urbanism has been viewed as a necessary evil at best, with great suspicion at worst. One might argue that even the post-World War II stampede out to the suburbs was a negative reaction to city life. Big houses with big yards that you escaped to. No one lived in a city by choice but by necessity.

So how can someone develop a positive affinity toward such a place? Can we ever be truly at home in our urban homes? We were born and evolved in the great outdoors and that is our natural habitat. Anywhere else is simply a compromise. Settlers, you’ve settled.

Of course, that flies in the face of the last six thousand years of history, much of it made in the cauldron of urban centres. The city-states of Ancient Greece. Rome. The birth and flourishing of the European Renaissance in Venice and Florence. East meeting West in Byzantium-Constantinople-Istanbul. London. Paris. New York. Shanghai. Beijing. Mumbai. Rio de Janiero and São Paulo. Civilization as we know it is the creature of cities.

So we should be comfortable in that habitat. Not all of us. This isn’t intended as an either-or argument. But for an increasing majority of people worldwide, cities are where we live, where we work, where we play. Cities are our homes. Instead of fighting that idea, we need to embrace it and figure out the best ways to make our home, well, livable. Dare I say, desirable? For everyone who chooses to put down stakes here and not just those who can afford it.

All of which may be at the core of the struggles currently being waged in these parts. On one side are forces who still view cities and their teeming masses, density and diversity with great suspicion. Something to be tamed and brought to heel. Yes, I’m thinking about Toronto’s current mayor and his cadre of anti-urban reactionaries. Witness Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti’s self-righteous crusade to end the city’s Pride funding. You’re free to be gay. Just not on my dime. His blinkered obsession reveals many things but chief among them is his uneasiness with those living their lives differently than he does his. The Attack of the Anti-Urban Urbanites, let’s call it.

The thing is, those differences are the very essence of which not only makes cities great places to live but vibrant centres of constantly evolving civilization. And for those of us standing in opposition to the backward, destructive thinking, fighting a rear-guard fight over battles we thought were already won, that is what we have to remember. We’re not just defending our home or way of life or our preferences. We’re marching to the beat of history here. We’re defending civilization itself against an attempted onslaught from those unprepared to let go of a past that is no longer applicable and whose continued hold should only be viewed as detrimental to our future well-being.

Canada may once have been a nation of hewers of wood and drawers of water. Many here are happily still descendants of such stock. But at this juncture in history Canada has become a full on urban nation. We have to accept that fact. Those who don’t are simply standing in the way, struggling against the tide. It is a losing battle on their part. They just don’t know it yet. We do.

— on guardedly submitted by Cityslikr