Rob Ford set such a low bar… /sigh
Make it a public utility.
Bell is such a fucked up company of jackass liars.
In the USA (don’t know about other countries) the critical long-distance infrastructure that the big telcos use to generate profits was built with tax dollars and government-mandated fees. It was given to the telcos with the understanding that they would maintain and improve it because that would be a profitable and reasonable thing for them to do, and this in turn would simplify government and more efficiently allocate funding from users and generate employment and income for citizens. If rational economic actors were in charge of the telcos, rather than sociopaths or idiots, this would be a great example of how privatization can work for the benefit of everyone.
But of course, the so-called rational economic actor doesn’t necessarily really exist, and the telcos have repeatedly failed to do the most reasonable things for their own best interests and the best interests of the society that supports them, so a good government is likely to have to regulate them to hell and gone, doing things like forcing the sharing of lines to promote competition, &etc.
Toronto really has a problem with mayors, doesn’t it…?
I think that’s the case here in the UK; British Telecom was privatised from the General Post Office, but I’m not sure whether that’s too long ago to be meaningful - does the modern network still use pre-1981 infrastructure?
I don’t know about the UK, but I worked on updating Bell’s infrastructure maps about a decade ago. They still had paper-wrapped lines in some areas, put up in the thirties.
Sounds about right.
Some of the walls in my house still have knob and tube. 1925. 
And how old are Toronto sewers?
We really don’t do much for infrastructure updating at all do we?
Wouldn’t that mean it has a problem with its electorate?
John Tory’s mayoralty meant that progressives and moderates held their noses and voted for him to ensure Ford Nation didn’t get another four years to crack-den up the joint. Nothing more. He’s terrible, but the alternative was worse.
(Obviously) I appreciate the new guy’s less worse (hard to use the word better) than Ford, but if the progs and mods didn’t field their own then isn’t it still an electorate problem? It’s not like the recent election took them by surprise.
Pot kettle black of course - we’re no better at it over here in the UK 
Its less an electorate issue than we needed someone that could beat RoFo, for sure. And Tory did that. But we’ll always be screwed because we’ll always have amalgamation and the boroughs all hate Toronto, and vice versa. We’re dead locked. Forever it seems…
If the only choices presented on the unauditable voting machines are Kang and Kodos, I don’t think you can necessarily blame the electorate.
The problem was that the “moderates” wanted Tory, and progressives wanted Olivia Chow, but we knew if the vote was split like that, there was a very real possibility that Doug Ford would win.
I’m not disagreeing, but really: it was all down to terror.
Man, I miss David Miller. He was our Red Ken 
He’s really called Tory?
Nominative Determinism?
Well this plan has worked out just great here in the US.
John Tory is a rich guy who is out of touch with reality. But he’s pretty top notch for people in that category. He’s shown a tendency to actually listen to other people and sometimes change his opinion. No defense of this pure stupidity. Just saying that as stupid capitalists go, you could definitely pick a worse one, and he is definitely at least the second best mayor the amalgamated city of Toronto has had (of four, one of whom was Rob Ford).
I liked Mel. He was a trainwreck, but I liked him. 
(Full disclosure I grew up in North York, back when it was a city of its own, so I am biased.)
I think it’s pretty easy to agree that Mel Lastman would probably have gone down in history as an embarrassment had Rob Ford not out-embarrassmented him by far. As it is, it’s easy to look back on Lastman and say, “What a swell guy.”
C’mon, SARS? That was a great time! “who is the World Health Organization?” ah, great times!
