Toronto's Election: Big City, Small Choices

The Globe and Mail picks the best of a bad bunch, Etobicoke is a red state, and other thoughts on Toronto's fast-approaching municipal vote.

With the Toronto mayoral election only three days away, the Globe and Mail gives a less-than-ringing endorsement to George Smitherman, a man who the editors say has “failed to articulate a vision or a strategy of his own,” is “vague,” and little more than "an office-seeker with a taste for managing, but not for transformation.” That’s unfortunate, because according to the editors the city is overtaxed, underfunded, controlled by overpaid bureaucrats and unappeasable unions, and it desperately needs to be transformed. But the only other options are “retail politician” Rob Ford and a guy who doesn’t think the city’s in trouble, so “Smitherman’s ability to get things done makes him the better candidate.” Enjoy the next four years, Toronto!

Support for Ford is concentrated in working-class neighbourhoods and Smitherman is backed by regions populated by the liberal creative-class, prompting the Globe’s Richard Florida to argue that the city’s “economic and political geography takes the shape of a ‘T’ that divides the city on an east-west axis as well as a north-south one” and marks the kind of “angry red-blue divide that is such a hallmark of American politics.” The city’s “recent economic success has, in effect, split it right down its middle,” and “Torontonians must face up to the fact there’s no longer one Toronto.” That’s right, the rest of Canada’s worst nightmare has come true: there’s more than one Toronto.

The Toronto Star’s Chantal Hébert writes that the recent campaigns in Calgary and Toronto that so captured the voters’ attention are proof that the “widespread apathy that so many politicians tend to lament is circumstantial rather than ingrained and it is essentially a by-product of their own campaign shortcomings.” Federal politicians spend most of their energy on the 60 per cent of Canadians who do vote rather “tilling the fallow fields of the politically disengaged,” to the extent that “apathy is actually a key element of the current federal Conservative strategy. Its core objective has been to keep the party’s existing base more mobilized than the electorate in general.” It works, but it’s not great for democracy.