Tag Archives: Rocco Achampong

Vision Quest I

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This one’s mine.

My colleagues here at All Fired Up in the Big Smoke are too compromised. Too caught up in the race. Too waist deep into the mindset of strategic voting and settling for A.B.F.

I am an old hippie. It’s not a label I shun. In fact, I embrace it.

As an old hippie, I retain a mighty mistrust of institutions, especially those ones that influence us greatly but seem impervious to our presence. Those we can only ignore as our last line of defense against them. The media is one such entity. For our purposes here, the media is the Man.

From the very beginning of this municipal campaign, we were presented a 6 candidate menu. Six candidates and six candidates only. Three sitting councillors. One former deputy premier of Ontario. Two neophytes, picked from the ether of political backrooms and media social circles. A couple of the councillors switched up and another dropped out, leaving us with a choice of five. All neatly wrapped and parceled out for our viewing/listening pleasure/displeasure.

When the people called out, hey, there’s an empty chair at the table, half-hearted measures were taken on occasion to fill it. With a 2nd Rocco, possessor of similar skills to the other five and a comparably uninspiring set of ideas. He proved ineffectual (no less so than Sarah Thomson but she remains) and soon fizzled out.

So there are 5.

Anything more would just be messy, we are told. Unruly. Counter-productive. These are your five choices. These are the ones you will see on your TV and read about in the newspapers. Choose.

I have another idea.

HiMY SYeD, the Peoples’ Mayor. He was featured here back in June, just after he’d popped in for cup of coffee on stage at the Better Ballots debate. “We’ve Had Enough Cowboys in City Hall, Now It’s Time for an Indian!” A hell of a punch line and we could leave it at that except for the fact that Mr. SYeD has proven to be much more than a gag candidate.

Following him since then or, at least trying to, as the man seems to be everywhere at once, it’s clear that he is a candidate worthy of careful consideration. A ferocious Tweeter, his constant updates reveal an individual at home with workings of the municipal government. It is in this writer’s humble opinion that HiMY SYeD is more knowledgeable about how City Hall operates than any of the other candidates save for, perhaps, Joe Pantalone. While council was still in session, he’d be there at meetings, deputations, community councils, all while campaigning. At the debates, he’d give real times answers to the questions that were posed as if he had been invited to participate.

He never has been which remains something of a nagging mystery. Invites have been extended and then retracted with no explanation attached. No one wants him involved it’s clear, from the candidates to debate organizers, begging the question why.

My take on it is simple. For all the talk of change we’re hearing during this election, it’s all nothing more than cosmetic change. No, that’s not quite right. Some of the proposed changes are quite radical in fact. But none meant to make the lives of Torontonians any better. The changes being offered up by Mssrs. Ford, Smitherman, Rossi and Ms. Thomson all amount to nothing other than telling the people of this city to expect less. That’s what comes from tax and spending cuts and hiring freezes.

Change for HiMY SYeD’s is a whole lot different than that. To try and understand his approach to change, one needs to look at the politics of Jaime Lerner. A 3 term mayor of Curitiba, Brazil’s 7th largest city, he is credited with helping turn around what was a typical South American urban environment, dirty, crime-ridden and intensely segregated along a gaping economic divide. By using the immediate, easy accessible tools at his disposal, Lerner transformed Curitiba into a prime example of greener, more sustainable, equitable and more livable city.

Despite what 80% of our front running candidates are bellowing at us, compared to the problems and difficulties cities in the developing world face, ours are mild and we have far more resources to deal with them. Hence, Mr. SYeD’s calm and considered approach to change. Or what he calls, transformation. “Change is no longer enough,” according to Mr. SYeD.

Vision 2020 offers a glimpse into Mr. SYeD’s thinking about change/transformation. Calling it “an integrated 10 year strategy of hope in Toronto” (some of which voters might recognize as recent additions to a few of the leading  mayoral candidates’ platforms and announcements), it consists of 3 simple ideas. Mobility. Sustainability. Identity.

From those come specific ideas. A move to complete streets which is not a War on Cars but rather an acknowledgement that in a healthy city, private vehicles can no longer have primacy on the roads. Designate neighbourhoods that develop and implement sustained and green technology for the city to use. SaTuRN. Sustainable Architectural Technological Urban Research Neighbourhood District. Bring about an elected comptroller for the city to deal with our finances. According to Mr. SYeD, Toronto doesn’t have a spending problem. It has a borrowing problem. In terms of increasing citizen involvement with the city, Vision 2020 proposes neighbourhood councils to be elected annually and with a real say in what happens in their neighbourhoods.

HiMY SYeD wants to bring about what he calls, “Transformational Regime”. What’s that, you ask? I’ll let him explain it.

A Transformational Regime built upon the foundations of three faculties:

1) Strategic Alliance — A stable, highly committed group of political, economic, and social interests that share a common strategic purpose. We have it already: The Toronto City Summit Alliance.

2) Local Practices of Urbanism — The planning processes, technical solutions, designs, and business models that shape the way Toronto is built, serviced and used so as to achieve our defined strategic purpose.

3) Strategic Institutions — A dedicated institutional apparatus responsive to the alliance, for developing, testing, and diffusing our new practices of urbanism.

These three faculties form a practice “regime” with the stability and power to transform urban form, regional markets, and local culture to establish a New Urbanism in Toronto.

The key is putting more power into the hands of the people rather than the top down, institutional change the leading candidates are vowing to inflict on us. Thus, HiMY SYeD, the Peoples’ Mayor. A pie in the sky dreamer? No. I’d call it dreaming little to bring about big changes.

More to the point, HiMY SYeD has proven himself to be a viable candidate who deserves to be heard. Those of us in the city looking for real change deserve to hear him, to see him up on stage with those who’ve been designated as our only choices. Denying him access only heightens suspicion that real change is being denied us.

So start to holler and demand that space be made for you to hear HiMY SYeD. Go to ArtsVote and vote for him to be the 6th candidate at their debate on September 29th. He deserves it. We deserve it.

Last word to Mr. SYeD:

Vision 2020 – Another Toronto is Possible. A Twenty Year Urban Strategy embracing Mobility, Sustainability, Identity — Where Everyone feels and says, “We Belong”.

“We Belong, Here.”

— assertively submitted by Acaphlegmic

Left Out In The Cold

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I write this as quietly as possible, typing noiselessly at the keyboard as my colleague, Cityslikr, has finally collapsed into an aggrieved slumber/stupor/blackout onto a nearby couch after a tumultuous 48 hours. Not sure what drug it was that finally did the trick. Whatever it was, just hoping it doesn’t prove lethal. We’re regularly employing the breath-on-the-mirror method to see that he’s alive although wouldn’t have the slightest clue what to do if he isn’t. We’re not even sure he’s given either of us the password to this site.

It all started (cue flashback squigglies) Wednesday night at the MaRS mayoral debate. Cityslikr had finally convinced me to attend one with him, assuring me that from here on in there could be substance to them, some meat on the bones. “This here dog just might start to hunt,” he said, affecting a southern drawl that usually means he’s got nothing left to say but can’t stop talking immediately.

If nothing else, I thought, I’d get to take a peek inside the MaRS building on College Street that brings a smile to my face every time I pass it.

Things started to unravel almost as soon as we sat down. Cityslikr couldn’t get any cell reception and therefore unable to tap into the Twitter account. “A blessing in disguise?” I suggested. Now he might actually listen to what was going on up on stage rather than sitting, coiled and ready to rip off snappy rejoinders. This was met with a chilly silence.

I was instructed to take notes as my Twitter-less companion found himself too jittery to even hold a pen. Good God, man! You can’t be that indentured to the new technology, can you? Get ahold of yourself! (Grabs him by the lapels and slaps him several times across the face. A few more times than necessary.)

At least, that’s how it played out in my mind as I waited for the debate to commence. Which it did, eventually, with the Board of Trade’s Carol Wilding moderating and handful of media types parked beside her to ask questions of the 5 candidates. Yep. The 5 candidates. It seems the organizers of Toronto Debates 2010 (along with the Board of Trade, Toronto City Summit Alliance, United Way, Toronto Community Foundation, Toronto Star and 680 News) have decided to dispense with the niceties of inviting any of the 33 or so other mayoral candidates including Rocco Achampong who’d been making the occasional appearances at other debates going on around town. Setting aside suspicions that the good folks behind Toronto Debates 2010 were simply trying to limit the scope of the debate, we decided their reasoning was more along the lines of making it easier to manage things with just five candidates on stage. Ain’t that right, Stephen LeDrew.

Judging by how civil the proceedings were it would be difficult to argue with that thinking. No shoutfest. No ugly personal exchanges. Just straight up answers given to questions that weren’t asked.

To be fair, the candidates may have been thrown off their game a bit as the tone of the debate was a more positive one than I’d been told to expect. The moderator and questioners weren’t operating from the premise of everything in the city having gone to shit and what were the candidates going to do about it. It was more to do with building upon or developing existing aspects that could be doing better in order to encourage prosperity equality and promote economic growth. More or less.

Because let’s face it. The whole developed world has just endured a shit storm of an economic downturn and the recovery is still very tenuous. So yeah, things aren’t great but they could’ve been a whole lot worse.

Councillor Pantalone embraced the tenor best and caught our attention right off the bat with his reference to the ‘myth of the broken city’. What was that you say, Joe? Do go on. Pantalone was fighting mad, telling the audience that the city was nowhere near in as bad a shape as his opponents claimed. A debt? Sure. What government wasn’t carrying a debt right now? I think he might be the first of the candidates in this race to even mention the word ‘recession’. Yes, Toronto’s debt sounds large ($3 billion) but was it? I don’t know. But let’s have the conversation instead of just repeating the number over and over again.

The timing was right for Pantalone to start battling back and staking out his ground centre-left. All his opponents were tripping over themselves to get to the furthest right with their talk of freezing taxes, cutting council numbers, selling assets, outsourcing city services. And the leader of this pack, Rob Ford, had just laid one large stinky turd of a transit plan that was so bad that even his paper of record, the Toronto Sun, dismissed it out of hand. Come on, Joe. Your time to shine.

But slowly, regular Joe re-assumed control, doling out half measures; qualified successes of the past 7 years and highlighting missteps. Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around? The one issue where Pantalone had no doubts? That he was a consensus builder unlike the others up on stage with him. He’s proven he can work with anyone. David Miller. Mel Lastman. Alan Tonks. Left. Right. Centre. NDP. Conservative. Liberal. By the time he was wrapping up with his final statement, old Joe was back, flying in the face of the anti-incumbency movement afoot, warning the audience that the mayor of Toronto is no place to experiment with unknowns. Go with what you know. And you know Joe Pantalone.

As usual, the performance wasn’t bad but it could’ve/should’ve been so much better. At least it was a start, we thought as we left the auditorium, Cityslikr desperately trying to find a signal somewhere, anywhere. Better late than never.

And then came the next day. Sitting together at a table in a Chinese restaurant on Spadina, waiting to hear Joe’s big announcement. MP Olivia Chow had already endorsed Joe. That certainly couldn’t be it. We’d already been unsurprised by Jack Layton’s endorsement of the Pantalone campaign a week or so ago. But wait, they weren’t finished. What’s that he just said, Cityslikr asked me.

“He said, if elected mayor, he’d freeze property taxes for 40 000 lower income senior citizens.”

“What?”

“Yeah. A tax freeze.”

“That can’t be right. Are you sure?”

“Yep. Wait. He just said something else.”

“What? What did he say now?”

“Huh.”

“What? What?!”

“I’m pretty sure Joe Pantalone just said as mayor, he’d cut the vehicle registration tax for seniors as the first step to phasing it out altogether over the course of the next 4 years.”

“What? A tax cut??”

And the rest, as they say is history, bringing us to our current situation, Cityslikr asleep on the couch after a Don Draper two day bender minus the girls. He stumbled disconsolately from the restaurant, pocketing dumplings and spring rolls as he went, mumbling words like ‘betrayal’, ‘Judas’ and something about his upper thigh burning from the hot oil oozing from the spring rolls. Fortunately he’d left before Pantalone tried justifying himself to the Globe and Mail’s Kelly Grant who’d politely inquired about the sudden about face on the vehicle registration tax.

As Deputy Mayor, Pantalone had fought hard for the VRT. It was a modest use of the new taxation powers granted in the City of Toronto Act and now, just a couple years in and he was calling it a ‘mistake’ with no ‘moral authority’ since the people of Toronto ‘unanimously’ hated it. How’s that for consensus building? Hoping aboard the anti-gravy train and riding it to join the throng at the right end of the political spectrum. Neoliberalville, where all taxes are bad and have no moral authority within the city limits.

Not everyone here at All Fired Up in the Big Smoke have turned their backs on you, Joe, like you did us. You’re just lucky we’re not all as quick to indignation as our unconscious leader, snoring over there on the couch is. We do feel like you’re taking our votes for granted as if we have no where else to turn. That’s hardly the firestarter you’re campaign desperately needs at the moment.

You have, though, most definitely lost one supporter who was willing to follow you into battle against the forces of darkness. If only you’d picked that fight instead of settling for the mushy middle that the loudmouth Rob Ford keeps moving further in his direction. And if that strategy doesn’t work for you, don’t be blaming the likes of our Cityslikr for abandoning you. You left him first.

And to you over there, my troubled, bereft friend, pleasant dreams. You are still breathing, aren’t you?

— hawk watchingly submitted by Urban Sophisticat

No More More Of The Same

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Earlier this week as the mayoral candidates prepared for another series of debates, some questions popped up about the inclusion of 6th placer, Rocco Achampong. Why now? Why not months ago? Nobody ever listened to what former candidate Giorgio Mammoliti said about anything else when he was campaigning. So how come they took him up on including Achampong in the debates?

The most salient argument against including newcomers to the proceedings at this relatively late stage of the game is that now is the time to start winnowing down not opening up. We need to focus in on the front running campaigns, one of which will produce Toronto’s next mayor. To throw the doors open will simply muddy the waters, cause voter disarray and make post-Labour Day clarity and decision making near impossible.

My response to that would be, have the candidates earned such a free pass? Months and months into this, with countless debates already under their belts and exclusive media access, and no one’s yet broken through. So what’s just more of the same going to accomplish?

Of course, that’s not entirely true. Rob Ford has more than broken through. He is the one candidate that has run what must be considered a near flawless campaign so far. How else to explain his turning a mindlessly pea-brained platform that can be re-uttered by even the densest voter – Stop The Gravy Train! – into a 1st place standing? Ford should be the joke of this race and yet the only one to even so much as land a punch on him is, well, Ford himself.

Take this past week for example. Ford bumbled, stumbled and fumbled through 3 debates, two of which, to be fair, were not his strong suit, city heritage and the environment. But what’s the news grabbing the headlines over the weekend? George Smitherman telling a Rocco Rossi campaign staffer to either fuck or screw off after they tried handing him some pamphlet apparently critical of his candidacy.

(To give George some props on this issue, I’ve encountered the Rossi Red Army at a number of debates. Their aggressive chair saving and Pavlovian cheering at their candidate’s increasingly loud, shrill empty rhetoric have made me inclined to want to tell a few of them to fuck off on occasion as well. So that’s a point for Smitherman in my books.)

If anything, this suggests that the mayoral debates need some new blood not a closing of ranks. Achampong has not embarrassed himself even if he hasn’t distinguished himself either. Part of the problem as I see it is that he’s singing from the same fiscal conservative, social liberal songbook as Smitherman, Rossi and Thomson. So it’s difficult to differentiate his views from the rest of the pack. Still, he’s proving that there are other credible candidates out there we should be hearing from.

My first choice would be HiMY SYeD. (Don’t worry, potential debate moderators. The name’s much easier to pronounce than it looks. Simpler than ‘Achampong’ which seems to be giving everyone verbal fits.) Following SYeD out on the hustings largely through his almost superhuman Twitter output, he appears to have more knowledge and ideas about civic governance than any of the leading candidates outside of Joe Pantalone. Let’s see how he fares up under the debate spotlights. He’s earned it.

That’s seven. How be we make it an even number? I’d nominate George Babula or Sonny Yeung. Give them a crack at the big time. Hell, let’s see what Keith Cole is up too as the campaign kicks into high gear. He acquitted himself well at the Better Ballots debate back in June. No reason he wouldn’t again if given another shot.

While much noise is being made over this final summer long weekend about how people’s attention will start to hone in on the municipal campaign as it heads toward the October 25th conclusion, I’m not sure how delivering them the same dog-and-pony show will accomplish anything other than having more people feeling as discouraged and disenchanted as those who’ve been following from the beginning. To borrow an inane phrase Rocco Rossi’s been touting over and over again, isn’t the definition of insanity doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result? What this campaign doesn’t need is more of the same. It needs a shake-up that can only come with bringing in new voices and new ideas.

— still hopeful(ly) submitted by Cityslikr