So it's election day in Toronto (and all Ontario municipalities), an event that nobody outside of Toronto (and not even that many inside Toronto) would have cared about if not for our cracked out far right hypocritical blowhard mayor Rob Ford. The man himself is not actually running for re-election as mayor because he was diagnosed with cancer. However, he is running for his old City Council seat (which he will definitely win, unfortunately). His brother Doug - who is slightly cleverer and has more self discipline but is also more evil - has taken Rob's spot on the ballot. The other two main candidates are John Tory and Olivia Chow.
Chow (left), Ford (centre), and Tory (right) seen at the final debate of an exhausting campaign that has included more than 65 debates.
How did Toronto politics become dominated by the Fords? Well, I'm still not entirely sure but read below for my best attempt to explain the unexplainable.
The background to all of this is Ontario politics in the 1990s. As part of a conservative attack on public services and local democracy, the far right Ontario government of Mike Harris forcibly amalgamated the region known as Metro Toronto (six independent cities) into a new City of Toronto in order to download responsibility for much of the welfare state and public services on to municipal shoulders. This was done despite the results of referendum showing all six former cities rejected the idea.
Now we get to the second part of this, which is about transit and gridlock. As part of the right wing cuts of the 1990s, Toronto's transit services were damaged. In recent years both provincial and municipal government realized that the cuts had gone too far and new investments in transit were promised. Things might have gone well but trying to make the best of the new arrangements ended creating a massive suburban backlash. Progressive mayor David Miller had implemented a Vehicle Registration Tax and a Land Transfer Tax to try to partially make up for the loss of provincial money. Ontario for it's part had agreed to fund David Miller's plan to build a light rail system throughout the city. From the perspective of transit users and people living in places where using light rail would be convenient, this was great. However, the new Toronto is much more suburban. David Miller gave them new taxes to pay for driving or selling their home, and was proposing to (they believed) take away road space from cars for light rail. On top of this, there was a long garbage strike which was the straw that broke the camel's back.
Miller chose not to run for a third term, and despite nobody believing it was possible, Rob Ford won the votes of alienated suburbanites on a tax slashing message, denouncing the "downtown elites," promising to end the "gravy train," and that only underground transit (subways, subways, subways!) would be built. Since the city barely had enough for the light rail, cutting taxes essentially meant killing all transit expansion, but Ford's voters were either deluded or didn't care. They also wanted to punish public sector workers. I should mention that most of these suburbs are not wealthy. In fact Ford has appealed to class resentments in a way that I wish I could explain properly. They believed that Ford was their champion against the inner city elites even as he proposed making their services worse and more expensive while giving bigger tax breaks to the wealthy.
Ford's racism, sexism, and homophobia were known to people who were paying attention - he had been on city council for decades, but he was best known for casting the single no vote on every single public spending commitment the city ever made. And he has continued that tradition as mayor, and has tried to cut everything but the police budget. I say "tried" because Ontario cities have a "weak mayor" system where the mayor is but one vote on council. The 2006 City of Toronto Act had given the mayor some additional powers, but once the crack thing came out City Council voted to strip Ford of his powers. Even before that though, Council had been somewhat effective at resisting Ford's agenda. His substance abuse problems were not known, although people were becoming suspicious of how hard it was to track his whereabouts.
Now we get to the present. The three main contenders in today's election are front runner John Tory - a "Red Tory" (meaning a moderate conservative with some progressive sympathies), Olivia Chow - social democrat, respected activist, former city councillor and MP, and wife to the late NDP leader Jack Layton, and Doug Ford - former drug dealer, arrogant right wing bully who has been trying to get a home for autistic kids in his neighbourhood shut down, and is continuing with his brother's wildly unrealistic promises to put a subway under every house while cutting taxes. I wish I could say he has no chance, but he is actually in second place in the polls. Here are the predictions from 308, which is the Canadian equivalent of 538:
While John Tory will likely win and would not be a catastrophe I would very much hope that Olivia Chow could somehow pull off some major upset because her platform is the only one to offer much of progressive agenda on affordable housing, daycare, and her transit platform is much more realistic and will help more people sooner. On the other hand, if the polls are wrong in the other direction we could end up with four more years of Ford's destructive politics, open hostility, bullying, and dysfunction.
Polls close at 8:00 p.m.
UPDATE: John Tory has won for better or worse. The data crunchers got this one very close, but I suppose they had a lot of polling today to work with.