Election
November 20th, 2009
Arts Vote recently launched their 2010 campaign to identify and support Arts and Culture friendly Mayoral candidates …
October 17th, 2009
“Where’s John Tory?” might sound like a dumb question given that the man hosts a radio show five times each week but the prospective mayoral candidate hasn’t popped up in any significant way since the day David Miller announced his retirement. Don’t think that’s an accident, and if you’ve heard those rumours that the former Rogers CEO isn’t running, don’t fall for that misdirection play either. This game of hide-and-seek is meant to keep politicos and the media talking about whether or not Tory is running instead of the more substantive questions about his candidacy.
The Tory campaign strategy, being led from all accounts by Liberal war room vets Warren Kinsella and Bob Richardson (who were also strategists on Tory’s 2003 campaign team), has been to lay low for as long as possible, knowing that their candidate would start as the front runner with about 30% support. Having watched Barbara Hall go from shoo-in to also-ran in the 2003 race, the Tory campaign wants to avoid for as long as possible being the primary target of all other contenders in 2010.
That strategy, which kept Tory’s name in every discussion without him having to say a word, was working out as expected until George Smitherman decided that he was serious about vying for the job.
September 26th, 2009
In a media scrum yesterday after David Miller announced he would not seek a third term as Toronto’s mayor, Adam Vaughan talked about the “kick me” sign politicians agree to wear while in office in the context of why calling it quits after seven years is an honourable decision. To take that analogy a bit further, whether out of human decency or a social contract of sorts, the press corps at City Hall kicks often but almost always above the metaphorical belt line. However, in her column today, Sue-Ann Levy went straight for the family jewels by calling Miller a coward for telling the city he wanted to spend more time with his wife and children.
Though anyone who has watched Levy and Miller spar during media and social events knows the two genuinely dislike one another, the same could be said of Miller and Denzil Minnan-Wong. Yet even Minnan-Wong acted with grace in acknowledging the familial sacrifices that Miller has made for Toronto.
Agree or disagree with Miller on substantive issues, Levy couldn’t have been less classy than she was in calling Miller a coward for voicing his desire to spend more time with his family after six years in the mayor’s office and 15 consecutive years in politics. However, the gross hypocrisy in this is that Levy was quoted in the National Post about the toll politics can take on family following her recent foray into politics, even when, in her case, there are no children involved and her political career had lasted all of seven weeks.
September 17th, 2009
Norway recently had a federal election. The newspaper Dagbladet produced an interesting infographic to show how people voted: it took the Oslo subway map and colour-coded the lines …
June 15th, 2009
In The Globe and Mail’s online debate/column Friday about voting rights for immigrants, Marcus Gee denounced David Miller’s bid to extend the franchise as a “thoroughly awful†idea, but allowed that he didn’t think the mayor was acting out of cynical political calculation.
Gee’s getting it backwards: the proposal, subject to provincial approval, certainly smells like pre-election positioning on the mayor’s part: after all, new immigrants are a natural constituency for a possibly vulnerable left-of-centre politician. Miller has gone to some lengths to cultivate suburban newcomers in his two previous campaigns and will have to do so again in order to be re-elected next year. What’s more, the province’s ultimate ruling is almost immaterial: the mayor likely scores political points with new Canadians (i.e., those who have recently obtained their citizenship) simply by waving this flag.
Politics aside, the concept itself is a good one. Extending the franchise certainly won’t exacerbate what author Yann Martel and others immigration critics have dubbed the ‘Hotel Canada’ phenomenon. Comparisons to Europe and the U.S., as always, are dubious because Canadians, especially those living in big cities, are less inclined to view immigration as a corrosive social problem. Nor will such changes create costly new entitlements because our local governments — unlike those in the U.S and Europe — don’t provide social services that are unavailable to non-citizens.
On the contrary, the municipal franchise is a kind of appetizer: by allowing landed immigrants to vote in local elections, they’ll become more motivated to seek out the complete rights and responsibilities of Canadian citizenship.
Yet the problem with the city’s proposal is that it serves as a distraction from a far more tenacious failing of local democracy, which is the chronic non-participation of tenants and low-income residents [PDF]. Half of Torontonians rent, and the turnout rate among this segment of urban society has been dismal for years.
June 4th, 2009
If you’re hoping Mayor David Miller will lose the 2010 mayoral election, polling firm Environics has bad news for you. Torontonians are mostly satisfied with their municipal government.
According to a poll …
May 4th, 2009
Spacing publisher Matthew Blackett is travelling through Iceland, Denmark, Sweden and Germany and will occasionally post his observations about all things urban landscape(ish).
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REYKJAVIK, ICELAND – The first stop on my three-week Scandinavian jaunt took me through far-off Reykjavik, Iceland. The trip was fortuitous — for me, at least — since Iceland’s economy tanked in November 2008 when the financial crisis reached its zenith. The country is well-known for being insanely expensive to foreigners as most every product, outside of energy production and fish, has to be imported. The joke is only the rich can afford to be vegetarians in this country. But with the economy in dire straights, the exchange rate is very favourable and tourist dollars are in high demand. Essentially, the exchange rate between the Icelandic kroner and Canadian dollar are about equal (5kr 100k=$1). Icelandair had a spring seat sale that offered free stop-overs in Reykjavik, so I jumped at the opportunity.
Iceland’s economy was strictly controlled by the government until the late 1980s when it opened up to private investment. I find this state-oversight slightly ironic as Iceland is considered to have one of the first functioning parliaments dating back over 1,000 years. Iceland was booming until recently, when it was revealed the national banks were moving around cash that they didn’t have (something like 10 times the country’s GDP). The World Bank and Norway came to Iceland’s rescue but it left the country’s residents more grumpy than normal during the dark winter months.
photo by Daniel Scarnecchia
A prolonged popular protest in January forced the conservative government to resign, a breif caretaker government was sworn in, and an election was eventually triggered. The protests, though attended in large numbers by the younger generation, were also spearheaded by rural fishermen and the middle-age working class. The conservative coalition, which had easily dominated the political landscape for nearly 20 years, was defeated by the centre-left coalition of social democrats, environmentalists and a new party called the Citizen’s Movement, created only nine weeks before the election.
This marked another lucky break for me: as an elections junkie, I was in Iceland for their historic vote. One of the best aspects of Reykjavik is the ubiquitousness of wifi, which allowed me to follow the results as they rolled in and I wandered from drinking hole to drinking hole. In one of the bars, I provided updates to the DJ who announced the results with regularity. The conservatives only garnered 30% of the vote, with the centre-left coalition taking 55% and the support of the Citizens’ Movement who drew almost 8% of the vote. Iceland also elected their own kind of Barack Obama politician: the new prime minister, Johanna Sigurdardottir, is the world’s first openly gay leader.
Now, the economy and a national election may seem to have little to do with the urban landscape or public spaces. But I can certainly connect them. Let me try.
March 7th, 2009
After the first ballot at the NDP leadership convention, Michael Prue was dropped from the ballot after getting only 11.5% of the vote.
While his 4th-place finish wasn’t necessarily a surprise, the number of votes he received …
March 7th, 2009
We’re (myself and Matt Blackett) at the Ontario NDP leadership convention in Hamilton, looking to see what the NDP candidates have to say about the issues affecting cities in Ontario, and Toronto in particular.
Six of the ten NDP MPPs at Queen’s …
February 19th, 2009
Last night I did an interview with Councillor Shelley Carroll for the next issue of Spacing. But Carroll is one of the great gabbers at City Hall so once we’d finished the interview I was given …
