Cross-posted from Eye Daily. Dalton McGuinty has been awarded a second majority government. MMP was soundly defeated. The people have spoken! Or have they? Voter turnout for this election was a record low — only 52.6 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot, beating the previous all-time low of 54.7 percent, which occured in 1923. Taking this into consideration (that the Liberals won 42 percent of the popular vote, though only 52 percent of eligible voters voted), and assuming my math is right, the Liberals really took Queen’s Park with the support of about 27 percent of eligible voters. So ...

Cross-posted from Eye Daily. Yesterday, the Toronto Star — which has expressed its full-fledged love for Dalton McGuinty — wrote an editorial stating that the Liberal’s energy policy was overflowing with credibility. Like John Tory, McGuinty and the Star say that shutting down the province's coal plants without increasing our reliance on nuclear energy is just not realistic if we want to “keep the lights on.” Both leaders seem to back up their support for nuclear by laughing off other solutions and instilling the fear of blackouts in the minds of the electorate. McGuinty and Tory have ...

Cross-posted from Eye Daily. Will John Tory be sticking around if his party loses the election October 10? As the Toronto Star reports today, in an interview en Francais for Radio-Canada TV, Tory said that he has no intention of stepping down, adding, “I am the leader today, I'll be the leader tomorrow and I'll be the leader on Oct. 11 and for many months into the future." Sure, it could have been a slip of the tongue, but “many months into the future” doesn’t exactly instill confidence in Tory’s commitment to remain at Queen’s Park as ...

Cross-posted from Eye Daily. Having never elected a representative to Queen’s Park, not to mention Parliament Hill, it’s hard for the Green Party to be taken seriously in Ontario. Aside from their relative lack of experience, the Greens fall victim to the idea that parties who know they won’t win can promise whatever they want (and therefore, we shouldn't take their ideas too seriously). There’s reason to pay attention to what the Greens are promising, though. This election (like many others) has been full of predictable pledges and calculated attacks from the Liberals, the Torys and the NDP. ...

Cross-posted from Eye Daily. By now, most people are sick of hearing about funding for religious schools. The media hasn’t been able to get enough of it, which isn’t surprising, after all, the issue is oh so easy to illustrate. The province abounds with a cast of diverse characters and settings — the schools that sit the girls on one side of the class and the boys on the other, for example, or the Mennonites that will journey from Quebec to take advantage of the "educational freedoms" we may one day have here. And don’t ...

Cross-posted from Eye Daily. Considering that everyone on council knew that everyone was in favour of reopening community centres on Mondays, they sure spent a lot of time discussing the matter before finally voting on the motion. Questions and debate went on from around 10:30 this morning until about 3:30 this afternoon, but of course community centres alone weren’t the only topic of discussion. Mayor David Miller was grilled on whether or not he had the right to ask staff to implement cutbacks without council approval (Councillor Michael Walker has his legal advice, City Manager ...

Cross-posted from Eye Weekly's Ontario Election 2007 blog. This week’s city council meeting, the first since the controversial deferral back in July, promises to be full of fireworks. Here are a few of many motions that councillors plan to bring forward in City Hall’s flying saucer over the next few days. Getting Shiner to sacrifice his seat Adam Vaughan will move a motion that would require city councillors to take a leave of absence while campaigning for federal or provincial office. It will be interesting to see how David Shiner, who represents Ward 24 in Willowdale, will ...

Cross-posted from Eye Weekly's Ontario Election 2007 blog. “There are moments when I get stopped in my tracks,” Nick Saul of The Stop Community Food Centre told Toronto’s Board of Health at their meeting this afternoon. “Everyone has those moments, I suppose, where you have to stop and think about what you’ve just observed.” Saul experienced one of these moments last week when a woman who visited the Centre’s food bank told him that she was going to trade in the vegetables she had just received for toilet paper. “What is going on for people to have to make ...

Cross-posted from Eye Weekly's Ontario Election 2007 blog. Once you hear about the horrible state of public housing in Toronto, it’s hard not to wonder why candidates aren’t fighting over who has the best solution to deal with this enormous, embarrassing, deplorable problem. On Saturday, the Toronto Star published a double-page spread on the issue, which offers a much more comprehensive overview of the backlog in repairs than I was able to offer in my column a couple weeks ago. From the article: Many of the buildings those people live in were already old, with major repairs ...

Cross-posted from Eye Weekly's Ontario Election 2007 blog. Every time someone boards public transit in Montreal, the City of Montreal throws in 82 cents. Every time someone takes the TTC in Toronto, the City of Toronto chips in 55 cents. That’s the average amount each trip is subsidized after revenues from fares are accounted for, according to TTC General Manager Gary Webster. Showing how much riders in Toronto are “subsidized” compared to other cities was part of the presentation he made at the TTC’s special meeting last week, the flip side, it seems, of ...