{"id":58599,"date":"2018-03-12T07:00:18","date_gmt":"2018-03-12T11:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/?p=58599"},"modified":"2018-03-12T07:14:24","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T11:14:24","slug":"lorinc-toronto-needs-real-race-mayor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2018\/03\/12\/lorinc-toronto-needs-real-race-mayor\/","title":{"rendered":"LORINC: Toronto needs a real race for mayor"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Doug Ford\u2019s strange weekend victory in the Ontario Progressive Conservative leadership race serves to clarify much of the muddiness that\u2019s swirled around both the major election contests due this year.<\/p>\n

Provincially, voters will now have a very crisp choice between Ford\u2019s brand of plutocratic populism and the barely distinguishable progressive alternatives offered up by Kathleen Wynne and Andrea Howarth. The latter is more personally popular, but the premier has been governing for much of her term like an NDPer, and no doubt intends to campaign as such.<\/p>\n

Municipally, Ford\u2019s victory, of course, means his name won\u2019t be on the mayoral ballot. But will any others beside Mayor John Tory?<\/p>\n

I certainly hope so, and I suspect many Toronto voters do, too.<\/p>\n

In my view, Ford\u2019s win means it\u2019s time for the centre-left in Toronto municipal politics to put up or shut up. There\u2019s a horse race to be run, but only if one of the mayor\u2019s critics has the gumption and, frankly, the character, to provide disillusioned voters with an alternative.<\/p>\n

The failings in his record are well known: insisting against a vast mountain of evidence that the one-stop Scarborough subway is the best way to spend $4 billion in transit dollars; rejecting out-going City manager Peter Wallace\u2019s advice on stabilizing municipal finances with less volatile revenue streams; spending $1 billion to rebuild a highway no one uses; and playing political games with the lives of shelter users in the middle of a record cold snap. In recent weeks, Tory has been called to account<\/a> for a contradictory transportation strategy that seems to encourage speed even in the face of a spike of pedestrian fatalities and calls for a Vision Zero approach.<\/p>\n

While his record does include positives on the city-building front (e.g., the King Street pilot, the Bloor Street bike lane, and a new tactic for financing Toronto Community Housing\u2019s repair backlog), there\u2019s much to criticize, and council\u2019s left has not been shy lately when it comes to calling out Tory on his lack of leadership on a range of policy files.<\/p>\n

\u201cYears of policy work down the drain,\u201d tweeted<\/a> Trinity-Spadina\u2019s Mike Layton earlier this month about the non-theoretical risk of increased flooding in the wake of the executive committee\u2019s May, 2017, decision to ice any discussion about stormwater charges on homeowners<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Toronto Centre\u2019s Kristyn Wong-Tam \u2014 whose name comes up regularly in discussions about potential challengers \u2014 tweeted on Saturday night that there is \u201csuddenly a lot of room for a truly progressive candidate,\u201d but then promptly ducked<\/a>, offering up a list of other potential challengers, among them sitting councillors like Josh Matlow and Mike Layton, and an assortment of high visibility critics, including Desmond Cole, Jennifer Keesmaat, and Cathy Crowe.<\/p>\n

At some point, someone\u2019s going to have to break free from this daisy chain.<\/p>\n

Beyond the intra-mural dynamics, Ford\u2019s victory also re-calibrates the municipal-provincial dynamic. In the past several months, Tory has been looking to position himself in the political centre, likely because he assumed, as did many others, that pre-scandal Patrick Brown \u2014 a colourless and implausible leader \u2014 was unlikely to win in June with a platform that wasn\u2019t especially conservative.<\/p>\n

My long-standing hypothesis about Tory\u2019s approach to inter-governmental relations is that he\u2019ll shimmy in the direction of whoever is in the premier\u2019s office. Why? Not just because his executive has as many Liberals as Tories. It\u2019s also because he doesn\u2019t have the temperament for the sort of confrontational, populist politics that this complex relationship occasionally demands. Unlike Mel Lastman, who had to call out Mike Harris\u2019 Tories for duplicity, or David Miller, who did the same with Dalton McGuinty\u2019s Liberals, Tory prefers not to shout from the lectern in the mayor\u2019s protocol lounge, believing, instead, in the elitist fantasy that backroom compromise is always possible between reasonable people.<\/p>\n

With Ford in the leader\u2019s job, everyone should ignore the boilerplate mayoral blather about looking out for Toronto\u2019s interests and watch, instead, for signs that Tory may begin trying to figure out how to be a bit more hedgy with the Wynne Liberals and more affectionate towards his former adversary.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also important for Toronto voters to contemplate how a Tory-Ford pairing functions if the provincial Tories succeed in ousting Wynne in June.<\/p>\n

Tory and Wynne have been able to get along because they represent similar constituencies with convergent interests. The Ford-Tory relationship, I\u2019m guessing, will be a transactional nightmare, not least because Doug comes to that relationships with both bragging rights and a revenge motive.<\/p>\n

Indeed, if one itemizes the pricey asks that the City of Toronto has on the desks of various Liberal cabinet ministers, it\u2019s pretty clear that a Premier Ford would have enough leverage to carry him through most of Tory\u2019s second term.<\/p>\n

In particular, it hardly strains credulity to imagine that a Premier Ford will gut both Metrolinx and the Toronto Transit Commission, both Liberal-heavy organizations (at the governance level). Is Tory the guy who will fight that fight, if it comes? Or is he more interested in making sure that whatever\u2019s left of SmartTrack, his electoral legacy projects, gets completed?<\/p>\n

Point is, this fall\u2019s mayoral race will be about all the usual things, but voters may also be forced to ask themselves how the city will advance its interests over the next four years. If Wynne wins, or if there\u2019s a Liberal minority propped up by the NDP, the relationship calculus doesn\u2019t change. If Ford prevails, however, this story takes on a radically different cast \u2013 one that the centre-left on council should end up wearing if it opts, for reasons of expediency, to sit on the sidelines, criticizing idly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Doug Ford\u2019s strange weekend victory in the Ontario Progressive Conservative leadership race serves to clarify much of the muddiness that\u2019s swirled around both the major election contests due this year. Provincially, voters will now have a very crisp choice between Ford\u2019s brand of plutocratic populism and the barely distinguishable progressive alternatives offered up by KathleenContinue reading “LORINC: Toronto needs a real race for mayor”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4051,"featured_media":58606,"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":[],"class_list":["post-58599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nLORINC: Toronto needs a real race for mayor - 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\/2018\/03\/12\/lorinc-toronto-needs-real-race-mayor\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"LORINC: Toronto needs a real race for mayor - Spacing Toronto\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Doug Ford\u2019s strange weekend victory in the Ontario Progressive Conservative leadership race serves to clarify much of the muddiness that\u2019s swirled around both the major election contests due this year. 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