::monday, november the tenth, two thousand and three

THE ARMCHAIR GARBAGEMAN DECLARES HIS CHOICES for city councillor (Ward 30 - Chris Phibbs) and for mayor, where he explains his choice with sentiments I'm sure many people share:

- Rick McGinnis - 11:05am - link

DAVID JANES OF RANTING AND ROARING PREDICTS A NARROW MILLER VICTORY, but paints a dark picture of the main plank issue in Miller's platform:

- Rick McGinnis - 10:59am - link

I'M GOING TO ABANDON MY PUTATIVELY "OBJECTIVE" TONE as the compere of this blog - a tone that has irritated Marc Weisblott, I know, but won the admiration of the National Post - and come out on election day with my choices for mayor and councillor, and the rationale behind them. One was essentially made months, if not a year or two ago, the other would be plain enough to anyone who walked by the house where I live, and chanced to look up at our bedroom window.

When incumbent Chris Korwin-Kuczinski pulled out of the race at very near the last moment, what looked like yet another dispirited, inevitable contest for Ward 14 suddenly got interesting. K-K - who, rumour has it, decided to step down to take a plum patronage appointment - has endorsed Ed Zielinski, a rather predictable extension of K-K's tactic of courting of the Roncesvalles Polish vote. What remains to be seen is how many ballots that will carry in the first municipal election of the 21st century. In fact, this might be the election that sees the end of wooing ethnic constituencies as a surefire vote magnet. If I'm right, and it's a viable trend, it'll be the start of a seismic shift that will shift the foundations of next year's federal election, and the fortunes of the Liberal party, who have assiduously courted "ethnic" votes for a generation or more. It's a trend I'd like to see, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

The front runner, according to popular wisdom, is Sylvia Watson, a municipal lawyer and former city solicitor who has the backing of David Miller and John Sewell. Her signs are everywhere, usually side by side with Miller's, but I'm frankly dismayed at her endorsement by the "progressive" camp. Watson, it's widely known, is the candidate of the bachelorette owners, an unloved interest group in the poorer areas of the riding near King and Queen street. Miller's endorsement of someone so apparently entwined with landlord interests, and so obviously a member of the unelected City Hall bureacracy that he's promised to fumigate, seems a suspicious lapse in judgement.

She's also a non-resident, who only admits to owning property in the riding, which is a double disqualification. Watson and Zielinski have left behind most of the rest of the race, including Walt Jarsky - a more clearly "progressive" candidate, but sadly the choice of craven idealists at this point - and Steven Aspiotis, an accountant whose well-funded campaign has barely made a mark a block or two away from the Queen and Lansdowne intersection where he has his offices.

I have to mention Ed Veri, a dark horse whose campaign literature has been notable for its undeniable sincerity, and a desperate need for proofreading. His five-point plan includes the promise "To keep you informed about any major development are to happen. In the ward." A list of goals on the back of one flyer is admirably honest about the inevitable failure of good intentions: "Freeze or try to freeze taxes ... How do all partys feel about contracting out ... And to meet with the public or try to once a month." He states that "A city like Toronto can and should have the six basics:"

Since Ed, if elected, would be pleasantly surprised to arrive at City Hall and find all of these things long established, I imagine he'd have plenty of time to try and have those monthly meetings.

My choice for councillor, advertised by the first candidate's sign I've ever displayed in my enfranchised life, is Neil Webster - until last year the funeral director at Ross Craig Funeral Home, down Queen Street between the Blockbuster and the Dollarama. I was undecided until I learned that Neil, a Parkdale resident for 28 years, was running. He's a Tory whose campaign manager is a well-known NDP supporter; a founder of the Parkdale-High Park Rotary Club and the Redwood Shelter for Victims of Family Violence, and the only candidate in the riding to support the Front Street Extension, probably the only halfway workable solution for Parkdale's brutal traffic congestion, the product of a railway line that cuts diagonally through the south of the riding, forcing dogleg intersections and one-way streets along its path.

It's an unpopular stance to take - he joins the unanimous opposition to the Island Airport expansion, however - and I admire him for it. His platform is a cross-pollination of Miller and Tory, calling for increased police presence as well as support for social services, a curb on rooming houses and better bike lanes. He'd have an uphill battle at City Hall no matter who was mayor, but he fits the bill for Ward 14 better than any other candidate on offer.

Later today: my choice for mayor.

- Rick McGinnis - 5:05am - link

DAVID ARTEMIW HAS MADE HIS CHOICE FOR MAYOR, after a good long think:

- Rick McGinnis - 4:01am - link

NICHOLAS PACKWOOD OF GHOST OF A FLEA declares his choice for councillor: Jeff Brown in Ward 19. He remains uncertain, though, about where he'll mark the ballot for mayor, at least at the moment I write this:

- Rick McGinnis - 3:56am - link

WARREN KINSELLA PULLS BACK THE CURTAIN on some of the machinery behind the David Miller campaign, and reprints a mass e-mail to Miller workers on where to go to phone canvas on election day: OPSEU and CUPE's main offices. Now, this is hardly a revelation for Miller supporters or Tory-aligned detractors, but if you needed proof of Miller's union connections, here they are: vote accordingly.

(Keep in mind, though, that Bob Rae had exactly the same support, which evaporated into an acid cloud near the end of his tenure in office, when he dared suggest voluntary pay freezes for public employees. Miller, like Rae, is calling in favours in a crunch; how those favours are repayed is anyone's guess right now.)

- Rick McGinnis - 3:50am - link

BRETT LAMB'S GRAPHIC TAKE on the island airport issue, in response to the late-breaking Air Canada Jazz revelations of last week:

- Rick McGinnis - 3:43am - link

(ADAM SOBOLAK OF OMNITECTURAL FORUM CONTRIBUTES some last thoughts on the race, hours before the polls open and the headlong rush into democracy begins. Well, perhaps not headlong. Urgent. Okay, impatient. Well, sort of distracted, then. Oh, hell, just vote, dammit.)

1) MIRED IN THE VANILLA FUDGE: THE BARBARA HALL MELTDOWN - Well, it's a shock to see it actually pan out in the polls as it did. But something struck me as very strange the first weekend after the official election-sign "start date" of October 16, when I first had the chance to really go beyond my neighbourhood/work turf for leisurely sign-spotting. At that point, the "official" polls still showed Barbara Hall at or near the top; yet when I drove around the immediate W Toronto/S Etobicoke area, I was seeing Miller signs on lawns, and Tory signs, a couple of token Nunziata - yet, where was the Hall?!?

Other than emblazoning the far-from-invisible west-end Hall campaign office at Bloor & Royal York, they were almost nowhere. Either the Hall team had some peculiar delayed-action sign strategy going on; or else something was terribly, terribly, catastrophically wrong in her camp.

Or maybe, I thought, because this was David Miller's home geography; hence he claimed the vast bulk of the centre-left vote here for himself - yet the farther afield I ventured that weekend, north, east, even into Hall's own Rosedale/Cabbagetown home turf, I was faced with a shocking paucity of Hall signage, anywhere, least of all on front lawns.

It was already clear. Her lead was not only "soft"; it was illusory. A mirage. Not only was Hall being outflanked by her supposed second-third-place competitors, she was being pummelled by them. Already it was looking like a two-man race, and she wasn't in the picture, at all.

But I tried to convince myself otherwise; because for a supposed frontrunner, this was absolutely surreal. Here she was as the "one to beat"; yet her sign presence was more like single-digit provincial NDP cannon fodder. But signs don't tell the whole story...do they?

Yet things scarcely changed for Hall. Her Starburst-fruit-chew-coloured livery continued to be more of a fixture in medians and at street intersections than on front lawns.

What are we seeing now? It's what I sensed in those first days of electoral signage. I could have told you all along--heck, I could have told myself all along, yet the eternal benefit of the doubt within me refused to believe it...

But re Brett Lamb on the 90s Hall mayoralty, I still wouldn't be so harsh - at least because at that particular moment (after the failed Jack Layton mayoralty bid, and in the middle of the NDP's late-Rae/post-Audrey nadir), it probably could only have been a mushy Barbara Hall sort who'd have pulled that left-mayoral feat off in 1994; and also, in hindsight, Toronto-at-large might not have been "ready" for a harder-core anti-megacity campaign, let alone a "postmodern" megacity campaign a la Miller, in 1997. (If it were either Sewell or Layton instead of Hall vs Lastman, I suspect Lastman would have won even bigger.) Credit goes to Hall for, at a critical moment in city history, "loosening up" a hitherto skeptical left-leaning/left-amenable demo; without her team's advance work, Miller wouldn't be in the effortless position he's in today...

2) FURTHER ON THE AIRPORT/ANTI-AIRPORT FALLACY--I've already noted the sort of "heritage philistinism" that affects both extremes on the Island Airport question; that is, it blots out the fact that the it's a fascinating place with a fascinating history, and to simply disfigure it on behalf of "improved" facilities or obliterate it wholesale on behalf of parkland is myopic. And indeed, David Miller seems to acknowledge it; he's on record as being not opposed to the airport's mere existence per se (which I take as more than just a pat excuse for Robert Kennedy Jr's using the joint).

Let's take this a little further, won't we? Y'know all the rhetoric about Toronto having sold its shoreline out to ugly awful industry when it could have had something grand and magnificent like Chicago's Grant Park, Lake Shore Drive etc? Well, those of us who've known Harbourfront throughout its 30-year-history would probably agree that it was by far most exciting - urbanistically, culturally, etc - way back in the 1970s, when it was nothing more than a Ninjalicious-wet-dream line of "obsolete" industrial facilities in various states of disuse and/or reuse, with funny asphalt paths snaking their way through and plinths telling the history along the way, with all the excitement of a city getting in touch with and making the most of its most godforsaken nooks and crannies - truly a magical, extemporaneous creation from the post-hippie anything-goes urbanistic golden age of David Crombie and Jane Jacobs.

And it was nothing more than Toronto's creative immediate-contingency solution to a controversial parkland "gift" from the Feds - maybe a lesson in how we could more recently have approached (and could, under Miller, still approach) the Megacity imposition? The boldest lemonade from a lemon? Sadly, the 70s Harbourfront experiment, next to which more recent schemes like the Distillery District appear contrived and self-conscious, is not only unsung (although the ghost remains in York Quay's cultural facilities), but all-but-decimated by condo/parkland gentrification - proof that maybe the closer we get to Chicago-style waterfront "beauty", the worse off we are.

And consider the Island Airport in its present state, as an "extension" of that Harbourfront which we all discovered and loved in the 1970s; indeed as almost the last unmolested and un-sealed-off remnant of that particular accidental-urbanism je ne sais quoi. Replace it by more blaaaand parkland a la Tommy Thompson? Are you kidding?

On the other hand, proof that the proponents of airport expansion "don't get it", either, is in the fact that the proposed bridge is an undistinguished bascule - at the very least, they could have recruited a Calatrava to trojan-horse a theoretically opponent-silencing "signature bridge" through, but noooo, they didn't have the foresight...

3) MILLERITES FOR TORY: No, I'm not recommending a switch of allegiances. On the other hand, in the event that the pundits are proven wrong and John Tory wins, I reiterate to those of you who're constructive in spirit: don't moan about this being oooh, a disaster, Toronto's ruined, etc, etc. STOP CRYING IN YOUR OATMEAL. And look: the ultimate potential Millerite for Tory may be none other than a losing David Miller on election night, should that be the case. An intelligent political operator, rallyer, concession-maker sees beyond the mayoral superficialities. Besides, as John Tory appeared to be, until recent weeks, within the same "mushy moderate" camp as Miller and Hall, here's a chance to hold him at his word. Don't moan about him, because that's like rolling over and playing dead--instead, "Millerize" him, and his council. And do it in such a way that he'll "appreciate it" - if you don't, then your worst nightmares will come true. (Think of what used to happen and sometimes still happens in the parochial political cultures of the outer municipalities, simply because they were terra incognita to urbanites - in the field of heritage, I only need to mention the laughable Thomas Kinkade-ization/destruction of Etobicoke's Old Mill.)

4) COUNCIL: Little's been mentioned in the blog on individual council races, perhaps in part because waaaay too much can be said (and perhaps could still be said by way of result-crunching postmortem, if Rick McG allows the blog some, er, post-coital afterglow for us to absorb it all in). And besides, the subtlety of ward-by-ward is lost on most Miller-besotted Trampoliners, 95% who probably couldn't tell a Sherene Shaw from a Bas Balkisoon from a Gloria Lindsay Luby.

I could be wrong, but my sense is that, perhaps as reflected glory from the high-stakes mayoral race, this could get exciting, maybe with almost half the wards (and not just the open seats) getting new councillors. In recent history, the most exciting "ward-by-ward" years have resulted at least in part from electoral reorganization: 1988 (when the methods of electing Metro and City representatives changed), and 1997 (the first megaelection, where you found slews of incumbents and credible pretenders fighting for two seats per mega-ward). And 1988 was the last year with above-average "throw the bums out" leverage (esp. in Toronto and Etobicoke); in 1991 it was mostly confined to the scandal-plagued York council, while 1994 rather flukily confined it to the mayoralties (3 defeated incumbents; 2 first-time electees; and only Mayor Mel as a re-elected incumbent).

Exciting as 1997 was, it was mainly a matter of musical-chairs culling; and a further reduction in seats led to another stage of culling in 2000. But it was a significant foreshadowing of this year's Miller-vs-Tory dynamic that in 2000's most significant incumbent-on-incumbent races, the left-leaning incumbent (Miller, Mihevc, Johnson) won. (Exceptions were Luby over Giansante - who, rematched this year, could both fall to one Stephen Thiele--and, perhaps, Kelly over Tzekas, although the latter race was affected more by Tzekas' personal behaviour issues.)

This year, it's possible that the two open Davenport wards will shift leftward; yet Miller's own ward as well as Irene Jones' might move to the right - and there's many, many more like this or the other. In my (and Rick McG's) ward, an open seat, it's a microcosm of the 5-but-really-2-way-race for Mayor; while the papers might want to spin a free-for-all, in reality the only candidates with a "presence" beyond store windows are Ed Zielinski on the de facto centre-right (endorsed by predecessor Chris Korwin-Kuczynski, a Hall supporter who's lately followed the Tory wind) and Sylvia Watson on the de facto centre-left (endorsed by Miller, Sewell, et al).

But, bla bla; to prognosticate about the wards is treacherous, but to analyse after the fact (especially with some sign-blitz pre-familiarity) is where the real fun is. In the meantime, I've always contended that it's in the middle of electoral sign blitzes when urbanity (and rurality, for that matter) really sparks to addictive, otherworldly life - to paraphrase Marinetti, a plethora of election signs dotting the Ontario landscape is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. And all the more beautiful for what it ever-unpredictably leads up to. See y'all on Tuesday.

- Adam Sobolak - 02:07am - link