On October 25th 2010, Councillor Rob Ford was overwhelmingly elected Mayor of Toronto. I say overwhelmingly because in our quaint Canadian electoral system, 47% is a strong majority - a resounding thunder of the people speaking, sweeping aside the puny 53% minority who didn't vote for the landslide victor. If you are at all confused by this, keep in mind that Canada inherited its political system from the British - a right proper people who are only too happy to cede to the will of the masses, so long as doing so doesn't interfere with established traditions of privilege and entitlement.
Observing the proceedings from a safe distance of some 10,000 km, one thing really struck me about this particular orgy of municipal "democracy". For some strange reason, I kind of wanted Ford to win.
To be clear, Rob Ford will not be a good mayor of my beloved hometown. He won't be an OK mayor, or even a not-very-good one. He will be a terrible mayor whom, if allowed to implement any of his publicly-stated agenda (which was rather thin on details) will probably undo any and all good that was done by his once-popular-now-reviled predecessor David Miller. I say if he is allowed to implement it, because I'm not convinced Council (or reality for that matter) will make it easy for Ford to initiate the policy agenda that he seems to think will cure what ails City Hall at the stroke of a pen. At least this is what I'm hoping.
Ford is the worst kind of politician. He is a blustery ignoramus who would be right at home at a gun-toting Tea Party rally where participants spew venom at the supposed "elites" who dare to think that their education, experience, and intelligence somehow qualify them to have a hand in making society's most important collective decisions. "Screw you college boy! I've got me some common sense!" Ford's had a DUI conviction, and is regularly heard spewing profanities in public. To prove that he's the common man, he gave his first interview as mayor-elect to CBC radio while coaching peewee football - ignoring his interviewer, barking out calls to the kids in his charge, and abruptly hanging up on the publicly funded broadcaster. To be fair, these things in themselves don't necessarily make him a bad politician or mayor. An asshole perhaps, but not an unfit leader.
The mantra of Ford's campaign was all about stopping the "gravy train" at City Hall. Ford has a major fixation with the spending of Toronto's elected officials, and throughout his campaign City Hall's administrative budget was perhaps the number one issue he spoke about. Toronto has 44 city councillors, and faces a 2010 budget shortfall of roughly $400 million. If the entire scope of the problem is a gravy train at City Hall, then that is indeed a lot of gravy. But if we take a small leap of faith and assume that each councillor isn't personally wasting $10 million annually then Ford is going to have to come up with something substantive.
Instead of offering solutions however, Ford offers platitudes. He rails about poor "customer service" at City Hall (I suppose we have now officially revoked our claim to citizenship in favor of consumership). Employing the tired populist cliché, he vows to get the government out of taxpayers' pockets by repealing the unpopular vehicle registration tax. How that missing $40 million or so is going to be replaced, he doesn't mention. Another right wing populist gem is Ford's vow to hire more police officers - this despite the fact that policing is already the single largest item in the municipal budget. Throw in some promises to build more subways AND end Toronto's "war on cars"(whatever that is), and there had better be some mighty large waistlines at City Hall if Ford is going to trim enough fat from council to balance the books.
(I'd like to point out that I resisted the urge to make a fat joke about Rob Ford there, because, you know, he's a pretty big guy with a pretty big waistline. But now that I've made mention of it, I suppose I may as well have just put the fat joke in...)
Anyways, this type of populist bullshit is generally quite effective during election time, but useless when it comes down to actually, you know, governing. (For real life examples, see the Bush II presidency or the Mike Harris Ontario premiership. Or the shit show that could be the 2012 Palin presidency.) I get the sense that there are a whole bunch of rational conservatives out there (I really think there are some rational conservatives) that cringe when they hear this garbage from the Rob Fords and Sarah Palins of the world. Even the generally conservative Globe and Mail has expressed reservations about Ford, with Marcus Gee calling Ford "the wrong kind of right".
Appealing to common sense is an attractive option for any politician, and with populists it is pretty much the exclusive angle of attack. Blurting out asinine statements such as "it's just common sense" or "2+2=4" is actually extremely effective because without saying anything of substance whatsoever, the politician is aligning him/herself with what appear to be obvious solutions to complex problems. "Yeah, 2+2 IS 4!! That guy makes sense!"
Well yeah, 2+2 does equal 4, but that doesn't really tell us anything about how a person would deal with zoning laws in Ward 23. The fact that a politician is doing math equations that my 3-year-old nephew can do shouldn't really make people feel any more comfortable about him or her taking office, yet somehow it does. By spewing these silly platitudes, politicians are basically aligning themselves with ideas and concepts that are universally accepted as true and accessible to even the dimmest of citizens. You will notice that you never hear people spitefully yelling "read my lips! a2+b2=c2!" The underlying message of the whole 2+2 thing is that the populist's opponent somehow disagrees with this universally understood concept - this common sense - and wants to bring some fancy-pants elitist ideas to solve a simple problem that even Joe the plumber can figure out. It's complete garbage, but for a period of time, it does indeed work.
Bottom line, Rob Ford played the common man very well. Probably because he is just that - a common man. And he is going to suck as mayor of Toronto.
What was I talking about again? Oh yeah. I'm happy Ford won.
Obviously, I'm not happy about the fact that Rob Ford is going to destroy the city where I spent my formative years, the city where my heart still resides after a nearly five-year absence. But I am happy that his main rival didn't win. That is after all what liberal democracy is about isn't it - hoping that the guy you hate slightly less than the other guy wins. That other guy's name is George Smitherman. And I am at least happy that for once in his life, ol' George failed at the game of electoral politics.
George Smitherman and I go way back. And not in the sense that I've been following his career for so long that I feel like I know him. I actually know him - or at least for a period of a month over a decade ago I got to know George. In 1999, George Smitherman and I were opponents vying to represent the riding of Toronto Centre - Rosedale in the Ontario provincial election. As the Liberal Party candidate, George would go on to win and represent the riding as a member of the opposition. As an Independent 21-year-old candidate, I would garner 236 votes - good enough for 0.52% of the popular vote - to finish 7th out of nine candidates (a result I am rather proud of). In 2003 George would win again, (I had retired from politics at this point) and this time his party would ride the wave of political backlash against conservative Mike Harris's "common sense revolution" to form the provincial government. Upon forming government, Liberal premier Dalton McGuinty named Smitherman Minister of Health and Long-term Care - arguably the most important cabinet post in provincial politics. He would later serve as deputy premier and Minister of Energy and Infrastructure. Most importantly, Smitherman filled the role of McGuinty's right hand man and attack dog.
All in all, Smitherman had a pretty successful career in provincial politics, and one might expect that a political fast mover like Smitherman might set his sights on federal politics. But Smitherman made an unusual decision. He chose to take a big risk for what would be at best a lateral move. A shift down to municipal politics, running for mayor of Toronto.
I can't pretend to know what was going through George's mind at the time. There was talk of him getting out of provincial politics to avoid fallout from the eHealth scandal, but my guess is that with no obvious successor to outgoing mayor David Miller, and with no apparent plans for McGuinty to vacate the premier's chair, Smitherman saw an opportunity to raise his political profile in a cakewalk to the mayor's chair in the nation's largest city. I must confess that when I heard of Smitherman's intention to run for mayor a year ago, I assumed he'd win it as well. He was after all the Minister of Health. And he was the first openly gay MPP and cabinet minister in the province's history. This in one of the world's gayest (is that a word?) cities. His was indeed a high profile, and it seemed he couldn't miss.
But now the chips are counted. Rob Ford is mayor, and having vacated his legislative seat in order to contest the mayoral election, George is out of a job, combing the desert of political oblivion for ways to get back into the game.
If there is one thing I know about George Smitherman, it is this. He is dedicating every moment to getting back into the game. Because for George, politics is a game, but it is the only game that matters in life.
It's a brutal and nasty sport, and I have witnessed George's tactics first hand. This past municipal election was deja vous all over again. George lives and breathes the game. I despise the game of politics. Not because I'm a shrinking violet - in fact in my brief political career I like to think I fought bare-knuckled, which got me into a couple of awkward post-debate showdowns with Smitty's team. But I strongly dislike politics without purpose, politics as a personal means to an end. And to somebody as devoid of principle as George Smitherman, politics can be nothing but.
The Chicken Incident
This past summer when the election campaign was just getting into top gear, I got a message from my old pal and campaign manager, the great Mike A'Hern. His exact words were: "Mikey, read the paper today and saw something that made me smile." He attached this link.
Wow, I could swear I've seen that chicken before. Not just a chicken like that (I think St. Hubert used to have a similar mascot). I mean THAT chicken. The exact same one! Has George had that thing mothballed in his garage for the past 11 years?! Opening that link, I had what the Japanese would call a 懐かしい (natsukashii - can be translated as "wow, that takes me back") moment. That article and the accompanying photo did indeed take me back to a day in May of 1999.The place was the church at the corner of Dundas and Sherbourne. When I first moved to Toronto from the suburbs, I lived in the low-income apartments next to the church - on Sherbourne between Dundas and Shuter. The church generally served as a community centre for the neighborhood's teeming homeless population. If you know Toronto, you know that this is not a nice area. I had no idea of this when I moved downtown for the first time, but I quickly discovered that it was a dangerous place. But during the 8 months that I lived there, the neighborhood grew on me, and once the gangsters' menacing looks turned to knowing glances that bad guys only give to people they know are from the area and not much of a threat, I developed a real fondness for the place.
This particular occasion went down a couple of years after I had moved out of the area. Even then. the area wasn't by any means alien to me, and I should have been in my element. But I was nervous. Real nervous.
A couple of days earlier I had filed my candidacy papers and attended an all candidates meeting with the returning officer. All of the "real" candidates had been surprised that I bothered to attend this meeting where the election ground rules were laid out and the schedule of all-candidates debates was circulated. A late entry into the campaign, I was ill-prepared for a debate but damned if I was going to miss the opportunity. So I showed up with nary a plan to face a rather large turnout of disaffected citizens.
Mikey was my only supporter in the audience, and my performance that night was I dare say rather dismal. I was running on a platform that decried the entitlement of the established parties, and if there was one message I wanted to get across in these debates it was that people shouldn't settle for voting for someone they don't like just because that person has a chance to beat the person they dislike even more. I had a hard time getting this message across - my clammy hands and inexperience got in the way.
Smitherman on the other hand had no problem getting his message across. In complete contrast to the message that I was trying to send, George's strategy was to embrace the entitlement of his established party status and play on inner-city fears that the service-slashing conservatives would be re-elected if people didn't vote "strategically" - meaning abandoning their candidate of choice and voting for him, since according to him he had the only realistic chance of beating the Harris machine.
The conservative candidate took an entirely different tactic. Durhane Wong-Rieger had opted to simply not show up, knowing that her votes were going come from the wealthy Rosedale region of the riding - not from the projects at Dundas and Sherbourne. Smitherman pounced on her absence and had one of his lackeys dress up in a (the) chicken costume with a name tag bearing the conservative candidate's name.
Now, I suppose such a stunt is par for the course in politics, and in itself it's not exactly unforgivable. But the chicken decided to sit in Wong-Rieger's empty seat for a prolonged period of time, and that pissed me off. You see, I had spent several hours at the corner of Yonge and Bloor canvassing passers by trying to get my obligatory 25 nomination signatures. I eventually got about 50 just to be sure, but fuck, I'd worked my ass off to get a seat on the panel and I was pissed that this Smitherman clown thought he was entitled to TWO seats on the panel. This could not stand!
So, I said nothing.
I shook. I damn near peed my pants. And I said nothing. After the debate, Mike and I assessed the damage and while I don't recall exactly what we said, I think the crux of it was that I needed to have more balls. So the next day on the way to what might have been another aimless debate, as I sat on the streetcar I suddenly decided to write an opening statement.
* In case you aren't familiar with how these things generally work, we each got a 2 minute opening statement and a 2 minute closing statement. Generally any other speaking time depended upon whether somebody in the audience directly asked you a question. Sometimes, everybody on the panel would get a chance to respond to every question. Needless to say, I got to speak a lot more when the debates followed the latter format.
On that streetcar, I realized that (1) I was pissed at the gall of this Smitherman guy; and (2) I didn't want to embarrass myself two nights in a row. So, I wrote and delivered an opening statement about how it was unacceptable what Smitty had done - taking two chairs for himself and his chicken as if he was above the process that everybody else was following. The speech was well-received. By everybody but George's team that is. After the debate they cornered me in a not-unagressive manner and accused me of working for John Sewell (another Independent candidate, but a former mayor of Toronto who was seen by many to be a tough opponent for Smitherman given Sewell's status as a prominent lefty in Toronto politics). How it would have helped Sewell to recruit and unknown kid to take 236 independent votes away from him is beyond me. What I took from that encounter was that Smitty was a bully. He wasn't afraid to drop the gloves - not just during debates, but in the hallways out of sight as well.
Strategic Voting
In a simple plurality electoral system such as the first-past-the-post system used in many former British colonies, it serves larger parties very well to court supporters of smaller parties by pointing out that the system is stacked against their party of choice. These people essentially have two choices: throw their votes away by voting for the person or party whom they would actually like to represent them; or accept the lesser of two evils - cast their ballot for the big party that they find less repugnant. Strategic voting is just one glaring example of the absolute bankruptcy of the Canadian political system. And this carefully manipulated hole in the facade of Canadian democracy has been enthusiastically embraced by George Smitherman throughout his career.
Ontario's political climate in 1999 was tense. Premier Mike Harris's "common sense revolution" introduced a politics of hostility to the province, with the government essentially at war with the entire public sector. Major cuts were made to the health care sector. A large number of nurses were laid off and eventually re-hired once it became undeniable what devastation their absence had inflicted on the province's hospitals. Many others in the health care sector also lost their jobs. My mother, the head of two departments in a large hospital, was one of the casualties. Major cuts were also made to education. Extra-curricular activities were eliminated, a year of high school was deemed redundant and done away with, university tuitions skyrocketed (lucky me, Harris took office when I was 18). And teachers were publicly scapegoated - labeled as overpaid, lazy, and coddled. Mass walkouts organized by the teachers' unions took place, with the government threatening retaliation. The boroughs of metropolitan Toronto were forced to amalgamate into a "megacity" despite 80% opposition to the move in a referendum. (The effects of this amalgamation are strongly felt today, as local voices are drowned out in a sea of 3 million people, and the old borough of Toronto is saddled with a mayor its people resoundingly rejected, but whose popular support in the suburbs brought him to power.)
The best words to describe the climate of the 1999 election were hostility, and fear.
Harris's "common sense revolution" and its underlying hostility was felt far and wide. It was felt in Walkerton, where cuts to oversight programs were the likely reason 7 people died from drinking tainted water. (To be fair, this occurred in 2000, but also to be fair, it surprised no one given the depth of the cuts.) It was felt in Ipperwash, where a native protester was killed by police in an incident that was investigated to determine if Harris himself had actually ordered the police action. It was felt in every school and hospital in the province. And it was felt in downtown Toronto, home to some of the most vulnerable people in the province who bore the brunt of Harris's assault on social services.
It was against this backdrop that the election took place. The people in Toronto-Centre and Rosedale (well, less so in well-to-do Rosedale) were angry. But even more so, they were scared. Scared of four more years of Mike Harris cutting their welfare payments, de-listing health services, and criminalizing poverty.
George Smitherman had a solution. Don't vote for John Sewell, the Independent former mayor of Toronto who dedicated his political life to activism on behalf of society's least powerful. Don't vote for Helen Breslauer, the New Democrat whose party had become a political laggard. Don't vote for the Green Party, the Freedom Party, the Family Coalition Party, or the Natural Law Party. And don't vote for that Ryner kid either.
No, George wanted everyone to vote for him. Seems natural enough for a politician, and I admit that asking people not to vote for him might have been a silly move. But what stuck in my craw was the reason he wanted people to vote for him. It wasn't because the Liberal Party was offering anything particularly attractive to voters. In fact, while Sewell, Breslauer, and myself (when called upon) discussed ways to improve the city and the province, Smitherman avoided specifics and issues, opting instead to reinforce the fear of a Harris victory and the prevailing notion that his party was the only one that could conceivably defeat the Conservatives. "You don't have to like me, you just have to hate me less that that other person."
Rather than offering people hope or policies that they could get behind, Smitherman reinforced the divisive, polemical politics of the time. The only justification he offered people for voting for him was the fact that he held a privileged position in a privileged party that had the deck stacked in its favour vis-a-vis the other candidates. And this is precisely the type of thing I was running against.
Fast-forward to 2010, and Smitherman was blowing the horn of strategic voting once again. This time another frightening conservative was looming over the political horizon, and having failed to convince the people of Toronto to vote for him as their mayor based on what he brought to the table, ol' Smitty gave the rallying cry for all supporters of trailing candidates to abandon their man or woman and unite behind George to vote against Rob Ford. Fearing a Ford victory, some candidates did dutifully bow out and pledge their support for Smitherman, but it wasn't enough. Ford trounced him. Perhaps if former David Miller deputy Joe Pantalone had also withdrawn to support Smitherman, things might have been different. But I'm glad he didn't. Fuck this strategic voting crap. It is the bastion of the privileged and the unlikeable. And George Smitherman is both of these things.
The 519 and the Quote of the Week
The final debate before the election was without question the biggest. It was held at the 519 Wellesley community centre in the heart of Toronto's gay and lesbian community at Church and Wellesley. I have no idea exactly how many people turned out, but it was several hundred. The audience was very gay, and very much against the conservatives. Unusual for a local debate, several media outlets were on hand to cover the event. It was the night before the election.
George was in his element here. An openly gay resident and local business owner in the area, he had a lot of supporters in the crowd. John Sewell, the former mayor with a history of supporting LGBT communities, had a number of supporters as well. Durhane Wong-Reiger the Conservative? Mmmmm.... not so much. But at least she showed up to this one. Bill Whatcott of the Family Coalition Party was definitely the least popular person in the hall. When he stood up to give his opening statement, the entire crowd (seriously - everybody) stood up and turned their back to him. The atmosphere was amazing, and I was excited as hell.
My excitement soon waned as the rules of engagement began to sink in. Each candidate would get the standard opening and closing statements. For the sake of time, people in the audience could only direct their questions to two candidates. Given the stakes on this final night, I was unlikely to be included on anyone's list of two.
And for the first couple of hours, I wasn't. I sat on the stage behind my microphone silently twiddling my thumbs. Clearly bored by my inactivity, my Dad and his partner who had driven in to watch my performance gave up and went home. After drinking far too much complimentary water for lack of anything better to do, I got up to go to the bathroom. The microphones were stationary mikes, not clip-ons, so there was no Frank Drebin moment of my whistling in the bathroom being heard throughout that hall. Unfortunately.
But my absence did have an effect on somebody, a man who chose that particular moment to ask me a question. I was just re-entering the hall when a big commotion arose and everyone stared at me in the doorway. What happened? Had I unknowingly actually had a Naked Gun moment? In fact I had not. Quite the contrary - someone actually wanted to ask me a question and everybody was wondering where I had gone.
The question was a heart-wrenching one. A middle-aged man wanted to know why I thought he was gay. Tears in his eyes, this man was clearly struggling to come to terms with his identity in a society that treats the very essence of his being as deviance. He posed the question to Wong-Reiger - a trained psychologist - and myself. Why he chose me, I don't know.
Durhane took what I thought was the wrong approach. She went into an explanation of some psychological studies on the matter. I took a different tack, basically asking why it should matter, why he should have to explain to anybody whether his sexuality was genetically programmed or learned. I wish I had been more eloquent, but I hadn't really been prepared for something on that level. I wish I had spoken of how nobody else is forced to explain who they are, how his torment was the product of the hatred and ignorance of others - views that he should not feel obligated to respond to. Instead my answer was short. It was however well-received by a predominantly gay and lesbian audience who seemed to know what I was getting at. NOW magazine positively recounted the moment the next day.
But that wasn't the only thing NOW wrote about involving me in the June 3rd 1999 issue. Something else they wrote was probably the highlight of the whole campaign for me.
After answering the middle-aged man's question, I resumed my prior position as a bump on a log. No more questions came my way, and I was feeling a bit discouraged. So too was the candidate next to me, the guy from the Natural Law party - the party whose platform is centred around yogic flying and balancing energy forces. As the leader of NL (and hence, as he mentioned at the beginning of the debate, the only candidate on the panel that could wake up Premier on Friday morning) he must have had other duties to attend to. He left early, opting to forego his closing statement.
When closing statements came, I had lost steam. I really didn't know what I was going to say in what was to be my last opportunity to speak publicly before the polls opened. As I stood up to talk, I noticed that something was amiss. I was holding a water bottle in my hand, but there was a bottle of water directly in front of me on the table. This bottle in my hand - this bottle I had just taken a swig from - wasn't mine! I looked to my left, to the vacated seat of the Natural Law Party guy, and to my horror, saw that there was no water bottle on the table in front of his empty chair.
Tap the microphone. "Um, I may have to be brief. I just realized that I've been drinking the Natural Law guy's water, and I don't know what it's going to do to me..."
Laughter erupts. The entire audience - every single person in attendance fully believes that the NL party's platform is the product of prolific consumption of hallucinogens - is falling out of their chairs. The laughter was so loud and so prolonged that I eventually lost my composure and started laughing at my own joke. With that one off-the-cuff comment, my despair turned back to excitement. I gave a completely ad-libbed speech about the dangers of a second term of Mike Harris, and about the folly of voting for someone you don't truly support out of fear that someone even worse will win. I don't really remember exactly what I said, but I felt really good about going out that way.
The next day was election day. In the morning I stopped by Helen Breslauer's office to wish her the best of luck. (I was quite fond of Helen.) One of her staffers greeted me, saying something to the effect of "Hey, quote of the week man." I didn't know what the hell he was talking about. "Go pick up a NOW " he said to me.
So I did. And there it was on page three. My crack about the Natural Law Party, at a local debate in one of the city's 22 ridings, was the quote of the week. On election day, when there were probably more important things to be covering. That is what I call a highlight.
Final thoughts
Despite having to deal on an almost daily basis with a person I found immensely unlikeable, I have to say that the '99 election experience wasn't so bad. I got to know John Sewell - a man I really look up to - a little bit. I experienced the strange combination of hostility and camaraderie that exists between a group of candidates who are all vying for the same job, but also sharing in the same hectic experience - working the microphones, trudging from debate to debate, constantly in contact with the campaign HQ (Mikey's living room and Mocha Joe's coffee shop in my case).
On election night when the results came in, I took a time out from the campaign party at Mick-E-Finn's and dutifully called George Smitherman to offer my congratulations. Basking in victory (he won the riding, his party lost the election), George was suddenly congenial. He even offered me a job (likely stuffing envelopes or something asinine). I declined. After I hung up my brick of a cell phone, I called John Sewell at his post-election party. He was upbeat and philosophical about the loss. He insisted that his numbers had put him neck-and-neck with George just days before the election. But, he reasoned, that's politics. All class. He also offered to help me in the employment department. I regret not taking him up on it.
In turn, I called all of the candidates to give my congratulations and condolences. I even called Bil Whatcott, the Family Coalition Party candidate whose politics I despise, but whose balls impressed me. Anyone who will walk into the 519 Wellesley and rail about the "disease" of homosexuality has got to have a pair. Finally, I called the Natural Law candidate.
He didn't take my call.
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