As a complete outsider, the only vibe I get from him is the “rules don’t apply to me” vibe. But I suppose that could just be the evil liberal media smearing him with baseless charges - though I’d note that he didn’t deny reading while driving, just thought it was okay because he’s so busy.
The CanaDoper Café (2012 edition of The great, ongoing Canadian current events and politics thread.)
Bunch of Toronto kids from school were screaming for his head the millisecond he was elected. I can’t say I’m surprised with how this has turned out; I just think it’s, well…lame.
I ASSUME every municipal politician is sleazy at best, and in league with the mob at worst. This just seems like a wimpy political scandal that he exacerbated by giving city council the middle finger.
Well, there’s two reasons:
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His opponents were… unimpressive.
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Backlash against the previous Mayor.
#2 takes a little explaining, I think. Toronto is big. Really very extremely big, and bigger than it used to be; it is a forced merger of six previously semi-independent municipalities.
There is, consequently, a significant political, economic, and cultural difference between the downtown core - the part that was called “Toronto” before - which is dense, urban, service-industry-based and heavily transit-dependent, and the outlying parts of the city like Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough, which are more spread out, have industry, and are generally a bit more “suburban” (to clarify, though, they’re now all part of the city; I’m not talking about truly separate suburban cities like Mississauga.)
The perception of the previous mayor, David Miller, was that he seemed to be the mayor of the downtown core and didn’t much care what happened to the rest of the city, which of course is the great majority of people who live in Toronto. Indeed, you hardly ever SAW the guy anywhere in the city he couldn’t bike to from City Hall. This isn’t an uncommon fixation, to be honest; I know good, decent, educated people who live downtown who still do not know Scarborough, North York and Etobicoke are part of Toronto. (I have heard more than one person ask why Ford was even allowed to be mayor of Toronto when he lives in Etobicoke, and who were truly shocked when I told them that was the same city.) His administration was also garnering a reputation for being fiscally irresponsible and inexplicably unwilling to do anything about spiralling salaries; the final straw was in the infamous garbage strike, where Miller seemed to take the side of the union. Whatever your thoughts on labour relations, that wasn’t his job (and he did nothing about a rash of union workers assaulting members of the public.) Miller wasn’t all bad, don’t get me wrong, but all the things that were bad about him were really peaking in 2010; his downtown-centric tunnel vision, lack of frugality, weird obsession with preventing development of the downtown airport, constant blaming of the city’s budget problems on other governments, so on and so forth.
So when Ford ran you had a perfect storm; not only was Ford “not David Miller,” but he also did what almost all winning politicians do; he articulated an affirmative reason to vote for him. The whole gravy train thing was in parts simplistic and silly, but it was a platform. His opponents - a politician who had to leave provincia politics because he was incompetent, and an unimpressive city councillor - had no clear platform, really, that they were able to get across to the public. So the public, especially outside the downtown core, cottoned to a message that to them was more than “Stop the Gravy Train.” It sounded to them like a guy who was actually going to be a mayor of all Toronto, and not just the part south of Eglinton and between the DVP and the 427.
Then he turned out to be, well, a big oaf.
Hey, what about that part that was somewhat east of Avenue Road and somewhat west of Bayview that extended up to the lip of Hogg’s Hollow? North Toronto always gets forgotten, grumble, grumble. (Asks the guy who grew up near Lawrence and Yonge. :))
Seriously, the information I got from old friends in TO was that Ford was the lesser of all evils in the last election. How true that was, I don’t know; but that’s what they were saying.
It should also be noted that his opponents split the vote between them (Rob Ford 353,408 votes, Smitherman + Pantalone 355,271). Smitherman was begging Pantalone to drop out all the way up to election day.
Yes, those poor, neglected millionaires in Lawrence Park are really suffering. 
(“In 2010, Canadian Business magazine named it the wealthiest postal code in Canada by household net worth, averaged at $3.88 million.”)
Pity that Carney is moving on.
Well, the life of a Carney is all about moving on: traveling from one town to the next and never really putting down any roots. I’m not surprised really.
[rim shot]
So, Calgary is (finally) building a ring road all around the perimeter of the city. The roadblock we have run into is having the Tsuu T’ina Nation reservation on the western side of the city, and so far they have rejected every deal that has been offered to put the road through their territory*. Now they have a new chief, and his stated position is that the only road that will go through the reserve will be a toll road. What do you guys think of this?
*The problem is that the only good option is through the reservation - to the east is ecologically sensitive wetlands, and to the west is a long, long way to go.
Go around. Blocking roads on First Nation territory is a very common protest tactic.
Back in the 90s, we built a bypass alongside Campbell River mostly through a reserve. As a result, the reserve acquired a Canadian Tire, a Superstore, Zellers, Walmart, Staples and a Home Depot that services all of us especially the north Vancouver Island native population for tax fee purchases.
Win win.
Saskatoon’s ring road started construction in the 1960s and it still doesn’t go all the way around the city. So you can just start building the undisputed pieces and leave the rest for future generations to worry about!
Shit, I hadn’t thought of that. I think the green weenies are just going to have to bite the bullet and accept that the highway is going to go through the wetland, and that’s just the way it has to be.
We have the road half done and working on the third quarter - the disputed piece has been disputed as long as I’ve been in Calgary (22 years now) at least. I think the city needs to put this to rest and make another plan, and the NIMBYs and green weenies are just going to have to live with it.
THAT, gave me a laugh! Now all I’m going to hear every time I see Mark Carney is a David Wilcox soundtrack…
Looking at the ring road plan on the GoA website makes me wonder if it’s not too little, too late. The city has pretty much engulfed all that empty space, and hence higher speeds, that makes a ring road useful. Winnipeg’s perimeter hwy is slowly being consumed as well and once you start adding all those on and off ramps to the 'burbs it’ll be down to 70 or 80 kph before you can bat an eye.
Thanks, Rickjay for the GTO political lesson. I knew there was friction when they annexed Mississauga and the others, but I wasn’t aware of how much. I figure it’ll be only a matter of time before Vancouver does the same.
Not Mississauga; that remains a separate city. The amalgamation joined the inner ring of suburban cities (Etobicoke, York, North York, East York, and Scarborough) to the old original City of Toronto. In the process it eliminated the Metropolitan government, which was a regional government under another name.
Mississauga, Brampton, Vaughn, Markham, and Pickering are the next ring of suburban cities, in the regions of Peel, York, and Durham.
Here’s an idea for a Calgary ring road:
Draw up two professional plans;
One will show a road going through the reserve with exits going to commercial areas that contain partnerships between first nations and businesses. Give examples of successful partnerships like in Campbell River.
The other plan will show a road circling around the reserve with exits all going OUTSIDE of the reserve, to commercial areas with many businesses. Show not one single exit to the reserve, which will now look like an island with no connection to anything. The additional cost of this plan will mean that creating any extra exits to the reserve will be impossible.
Let the folks there make up their own minds about which way they see their future going. Do they want to work with the community and make everyone’s lives better, or do they want to be an isolated island of poverty that sits in the middle of a working community?
Heh - the reservation is planning a huge addition to the casino on the reservation, and they have an expectation that the city will provide the infrastructure necessary to handle increased traffic. This is literally a two-way street.
When they draw up the plans for the option “B” that bypasses the entire reserve, they should also show a single lane gravel road going to the casino.
That seems fair.