{"id":3303,"date":"2008-06-25T16:45:33","date_gmt":"2008-06-25T20:45:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacingtoronto.ca\/2008\/06\/25\/ballot-questions\/"},"modified":"2013-01-21T15:06:21","modified_gmt":"2013-01-21T20:06:21","slug":"ballot-questions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2008\/06\/25\/ballot-questions\/","title":{"rendered":"Ballot questions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm1.static.flickr.com\/43\/81724458_2cbe096dfd.jpg?v=0\" style=\"width: 500px; height: 333px\" height=\"333\" width=\"500\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The mayoral aspirations of Minister George Smitherman and, to a lesser extent, Michael Pinball Clemons, have been the subject of dozens of column inches lately. But neither seem like viable candidates to me.<\/p>\n<p>Minister Smitherman, recently named Minister of Everything &#8212; err Energy and Infrasructure, has categorically denied he has any interest in moving back to 100 Queen West in several media reports. But in spite of Furious George&#8217;s denials, an informal Lastman-era campaign apparatus has apparently been scoping out the political landscape on the former Barbara Hall chief of staff&#8217;s behalf for some time.<\/p>\n<p>But in the event that Minister Smitherman changed his mind and decided to run, I can&#8217;t figure out what he would use as a wedge issue during a campaign against Mayor Miller. New taxes? The McGuinty government gave city hall those powers. Business taxes? The McGuinty government has a slow as molasses plan to eliminate the business education tax while Mayor Miller has offered relief to the commercial property tax base and even more relief to small businesses. Public transit? The McGuinty government hasn&#8217;t restored the historically successful funding formula cut by the Mike Harris regime and is funding the Miller-championed Transit City plan. Housing? Premier McGuinty promised thousands of new units and painfully few have come to fruition while Miller has tabled a plan to repair the existing social housing stock that was downloaded on the City. Planning and development? Premier McGuinty hasn&#8217;t done much of anything to tame the OMB. Property taxes? The McGuinty government didn&#8217;t do anything meaningful on assessment reform, and it&#8217;s the runaway increases in hypothetical value that people hate more than a 3% or 4% increase in property taxes.<\/p>\n<p>My list could go on but the point is that while the McGuinty government, in which Minister Smitherman serves as Deputy Premier, has been better to Toronto than the Harris\/Eves government by any measure, running a mayoralty campaign on its Toronto-based achievements wouldn&#8217;t guarantee any measure of success when going up against a progressive incumbent like Mayor Miller. Plus, Minister Smitherman can&#8217;t even tap into the suburban alienation mentality since he represents Toronto Centre-Rosedale (and remember: Mayor Miller won <strike>43<\/strike> 42 of 44 wards last time around, his only losses were the ward represented by Jane Pitfield and the one attached to her ward).<\/p>\n<p>As for Pinball Clemons, he&#8217;s sure to be a losing candidate in this town. First, a former football player who continues to choose to live in Oakville will not be welcomed with open arms in Toronto, no matter how infectious his smile. Second, I&#8217;m told backroom types have video footage of the running-back-turned-sports-executive campaigning with Mike Harris in the 90s. Enough said.<\/p>\n<p>At this point, I just don&#8217;t see a compelling opponent on the horizon. Those who have the potential to put up an interesting fight (say a Karen Stintz) don&#8217;t have the campaign machine behind them to be anything more than Jane Pitfield, while those who are getting serious consideration from the old Lastman backroom aren&#8217;t particularly viable candidates.<\/p>\n<p>Though that said, the burning question in my mind is, if Minister Smitherman runs, what would happen to the Miller Administration in the 11 months that separate the opening of nominations and Election Day? Mayor Miller has included several Liberals in his progressive bloc, including a few on Executive Committee. What will those councillors do?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Notwithstanding clause<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Notwithstanding my comment about Councillor Stintz&#8217;s campaign machine, her former executive assistant, Dan Bordonali has joined former Lastman-era Don Valley East councillor Paul Sutherland at Sutherland&#8217;s new lobby practice Sutherland &amp; Associates. In the recent past, Sutherland had worked for Hill &amp; Knowlton, a larger public relations firm with a municipal lobby practice, where Bordonali went to work as soon as he departed city hall. Around the same time that Bordonali left city hall, Councillor Stintz hired HK to provide her with $1,590 of media training (according to Councillor Rob Ford&#8217;s council expense database). Taken together, it was assumed by many that Councillor Stintz was going to be backed by people within HK. The reason for Sutherland and Bordonali going out on their own could be that they believe in Councillor Stintz&#8217;s candidacy more than HK did and are willing to put their professional butts on the line for it. But if they had to go outside HK to do this work (and that&#8217;s purely speculation), that would signal just how little institutional support Councillor Stintz is getting.<\/p>\n<p><em>Photograph by <a href=\"http:\/\/flickr.com\/photos\/loneprimate\/\">Lone Primate<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The mayoral aspirations of Minister George Smitherman and, to a lesser extent, Michael Pinball Clemons, have been the subject of dozens of column inches lately. But neither seem like viable candidates to me. Minister Smitherman, recently named Minister of Everything &#8212; err Energy and Infrasructure, has categorically denied he has any interest in moving back<a href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2008\/06\/25\/ballot-questions\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"sr-only\">&#8220;Ballot questions&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4037,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[31,44],"class_list":["post-3303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-election","tag-queens-park"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Ballot questions - Spacing Toronto<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2008\/06\/25\/ballot-questions\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Ballot questions - Spacing Toronto\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The mayoral aspirations of Minister George Smitherman and, to a lesser extent, Michael Pinball Clemons, have been the subject of dozens of column inches lately. But neither seem like viable candidates to me. 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