I’m about to posit a theory about the places where Cory lives. First Toronto, then San Fran, now London. Disaster seems to follow him around.
I was going to suggest when he gets tired of paying into Cameron’s pension fund, that he move to my part of the world, but I’m reconsidering this idea…
Toronto is mostly surviving. There’s been a degradation of services for poorer people and a lot of stalled and messed up transportation plans, but I doubt Ford will have much of a legacy long-term. In a way it’s probably better that the would-be Ford family dynasty has been (touch wood) snuffed out at the municipal level, before Doug made his MPP bid.
I’m thinking maybe the people of Toronto are looking south of the border and thinking that maybe this guy isn’t so bad compared to what we have down here…
Approval might mean that they approve of how entertaining this is all becoming.
I’m told that it’s next to impossible to get seats during home games of the Maple Leafs.
Torontonians love-hate the disgusting-tasting Buckley’s Cough Syrup. French Canadians, instead, turn to their long-trusted and, of course, delicious-tasting Sirop Lambert.
Now, Rob Ford’s electors increasingly support him.
Toronto: a city of masochists.
I think there are two components to this. The first is just a dead cat bounce.
The second is that his supporters just don’t want to admit that they were wrong about him. For instance, I’ve seen a number of people blame trying to blame the Toronto police for this, as if it were a setup. As the days go by, more and more of them will pull themselves out of denial and his approval rating will fall.
Sounds like they need their own Tea Party. “George Bush who? Never heard of him.”
Maybe the crack thing is just his gimmick and blogs like boing boing are spreading the word for Ford and giving him free publicity.
The old city of Toronto – a political boundary that was abolished by Conservative premier Mike Harris in 1998 – still hates Ford; he barely registers there. But the city’s surrounding suburban sprawl is has a large cohort of foolish people who are only too delighted to cram their lying, drunken, stoned, incompetent top choice down the city’s throat.
Not that I’m a friend of Ford, but the idea that he isn’t supported by Torontoites isn’t really true. You can’t argue that he was voted in by non-Torontoites because those former suburbs where he is more popular is Toronto now – Toronto isn’t just the downtown area – claiming otherwise would be like claiming that the “real” New York City is just Manhattan and places like Brooklyn and Queens don’t count and that voters there can inflict mayors on Manhattan. They can’t run their “choice down the city’s throat” if they are just as much a part of the city (in fact by numbers more so) as the downtown residents.
As fellow druggie William S. Burroughs might have said “They just ‘Don’t see the Ford!’”
But in NYC they still have a borough system where things that have no economies of scale such barking dog issues and garbage collection are handled at the local level and area-wide issues are handled at the “Metro” level. Toronto’s farcical and illegal amalgamation (opposed by over 75% of the voters) left it the only major city in North America, and probably the world, where every single issue goes to the one monolithic level of government. The same people who have to deal all day with noise complaints about local bars are the same people who are expected to deal with multi-billion dollar transit systems.
As a result: people like Ford, who actually was a pretty good ombudsman for his homies in the little village of Etobicoke, are promoted way past their level of competency; all of the council meetings are about local issues with a few minutes at the end about regional multi-billion dollar organisations like the cops and the transit at the end; and wildly differing areas have every single little local issue micro managed against their wishes by whatever other tribe happens to have captured the flag this round. This last is especially galling. If the car-centric burbs are annoyed by cyclists then the downtown core, where bikes are the only remaining way to get around the gridlock, loses it’s bicycle lanes. Where there actually used to be local democracy and choice of where to spend your money (say twice-a-week garbage collection vs. parks) there now is none - unlike places like New York.
“Toronto is all one thing” is a canard believed only by ignorant country rubes and their (in so many ways) provincial government: which cynically rammed this amalgamation down our throats in order to saddle the major urban area of this country with an unworkable, hobbled joke of a governmental system.
BTW - the voting for mayor was completely along the lines of the old, radically different boroughs: Wards voting for Ford Fancy word games aside where you redefine words like “Toronto” to mean what you, and not Cory, want them to mean aside the urban area of the region did have Ford rammed down our throats by the citizens of the Subsidised Sprawl surrounding it. In a system such as NYC has and which we had before he would have had little influence over our day-to-day lives.
Sure, if you knock it down to a binary “Ford got a plurality or Smitherman got a plurality” by ward, you get the old city vs the 'burbs. However, if you look at the actual numbers, 1 in every 3 to 4 people who live in the old city of Toronto still voted for that moron. I think that pushing the whole “amalgamation ruined everything” argument is shrill, whiny and counterproductive.
I for one completely support Rob Ford. What he does in his personal life is his business. He’s cut a lot of waste and has contributed to putting the leftards back in their place while he’s cutting the fools that were gutting the city and driving it into another Detroit.
You just wait until your perfect little life hits some bumps. I’m sure you’d expect full sympathy then when it’s you with the problems.
I’m by no means the most sarcastic person on boingboing but I did fully appreciate your comment.
As a dyed-in-the-wool Ford despiser, I too found the tone of Cory’s article somewhat offensive. It rings quite strongly of “those peasants aren’t fit to rule themselves”, which is already far too common a sentiment on the right and should be discouraged wherever found on the left.
I agree that Toronto’s electoral system is deeply flawed. In fact all Canadians would benefit from more representational electoral systems. But I take umbrage to your referring to people living outside of downtown Toronto as “ignorant country rubes” because they represent a different set of interests. Such misplaced anger is a perfect illustration of why neocons like Ford and his supporters refuse to sympathize with disenfranchised progressives in the first place, widening the partisan rift and leaving Toronto burdened with a drug-addled embarrassment of a mayor.
Is Toronto’s government really that dissimilar to that of other large cities like Montreal, Calgary, or Edmonton? Are you really going to argue that residents of these cities have geographically-homogenous desires?
Couldn’t you also argue that Cory is engaging in fancy word games to define Toronto as what he wants it to mean, and not what it popularly means? I mean, does anyone out there think of really think of Vancouver as having only 600,000 people (as compared to Calgary’s 1.1 million)? Because if we stick to Cory’s traditional-municipal-boundary system, that is what we get. Or does anyone think that Edmonton is twice the size of Atlanta, and larger than San Francisco? Or that Winnipeg is larger than Denver and Boston?
I think Rob is way past little bumps and well into finishing 7 gram rocks territory 
Yeah, Cory’s the nasty one.
Maybe it’ll snow in Toronto soon and Mayor Ford can call in the army to dig it out like the last right-wing mayor did.
