{"id":71684,"date":"2026-05-20T08:00:01","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T12:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/?p=71684"},"modified":"2026-05-20T09:49:35","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T13:49:35","slug":"lorinc-mayoral-candidates-need-to-take-on-king-doug","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2026\/05\/20\/lorinc-mayoral-candidates-need-to-take-on-king-doug\/","title":{"rendered":"LORINC: Mayoral candidates need to take on King Doug"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

The granite-hard conventional wisdom about the looming U.S. mid-term congressional elections is that they’ll be a giant referendum on Donald Trump’s insane presidency, with the potential for swinging the House of Representatives and maybe even the Senate.<\/p>\n

In a hundred different ways, the looming municipal elections \u2014 both here and elsewhere in the province \u2014 must be seen as our<\/em> version of the mid-terms: an opportunity for voters to use their outside voices to respond to the increasingly unhinged ways in which the Ford government is laying waste to public infrastructure and any semblance of municipal autonomy.<\/p>\n

From where I sit, the mayoral candidate who decides to strategically side-step the usual platitudes of local electioneering and instead take direct aim at King Doug will be rewarded with not just a victory, but also a political platform to push back on the Tories’ future excesses. The candidate who opts to defend, either explicitly or tacitly, Ford’s record will be telegraphing voters that (s)he will be prepared to capitulate when Queen’s Park plans its next drive-by.<\/p>\n

It will be a choice, both for Torontonians and the candidates themselves.<\/p>\n

Even the most checked-out voters know some of what’s on the list: from the previous terms: Ontario Place, the Science Centre, the Greenbelt, 407, cuts to the size of council. From the current term, the attempted island airport takeover, the absurd jet fantasy, the endless concessions to condo developers, the knee-capping of school board governance, Metrolinx’s incompetence, etc.<\/p>\n

Then, a couple of very recent examples: the provisions of Bill 98<\/a>, which erase years of climate-oriented planning and building code reforms, including the Toronto Green Standard, while allowing the province to commandeer vast swaths of local transit agency decision-making authority (routes, fares, transfers, etc.).<\/p>\n

This omnibus law, a.k.a. the “Building Homes and Improving Transportation Infrastructure Act,” allows the province to “apportion” revenues among operators, including from the TTC to other GTA agencies \u2014 a robbing Peter to pay Paul scheme if there ever was one.<\/p>\n

There are, however, both more and less effective ways of bringing this set of messages to voters. Case in point, a member’s motion<\/a>, moved in late March by Don Valley West’s Rachel Chernos-Lin and Etobicoke Lakeshore’s Amber Morley. It calls on council to express its “support” for local school board trustees and then “request” Queen’s Park \u2014 which is slashing trustees’ seats and responsibilities<\/a> while taking over boards \u2014 to “initiate a robust, province-wide consultation on school board governance models before considering any decision that would alter the governance role of trustees.” The motion got flipped over to executive committee.<\/p>\n

This is all nice and well, but utterly ineffective, as the submissive wording indicates. There are plenty of ex-trustees on council, including Chernos-Lin (a former Toronto District School Board chair), Mayor Olivia Chow, budget chair Shelley Carroll, deputy mayor Ausma Malik, Toronto St. Paul’s Josh Matlow, Toronto Danforth’s Paula Fletcher, and Scarborough South-West’s Parthi Kandavel.<\/p>\n

Every single one of these politicians understands, in theory, the importance of the school trustee’s position, and I, for one, would like them to be yelling a lot louder about the Ford government’s decision to slash the board’s ranks by half. Calling for a “robust province-wide consultation” hardly signals faith in the office. Better to dance with the one that brung ya.<\/p>\n

I feel certain the island airport will soak up a decent amount of rhetorical space in this race, as it should, but the mayoral candidates should be reminding voters at every turn that this headline-grabbing move is part of a larger program that is shockingly imperial in both tone and substance. Ford is taking over chunks of the city, rescinding long-established operational and legislative powers, neutering local government institutions, rewarding cronies, and on and on.<\/p>\n

We can all pretend that this coming election will be about congestion and property taxes and whether or not certain neighbourhoods are especially vulnerable to car thefts and home invasion. Brad Bradford will blame Olivia Chow for all the usual stuff, and Chow, in turn, will tout her achievements, such as accelerating the construction on Lakeshore to co-op housing.<\/p>\n

Yet unlike any municipal election in recent or even not-so-recent memory, this contest is about the Shrek in the room, and the Ford government’s blinkered efforts to undermine the political and regulatory authority of the jurisdictions unlucky enough to live under his thumb.<\/p>\n

I’m reminded of the way Mike Harris spent the first three years of his premiership upending just about everything in local government, with measures that ran the gamut from slashing transit funding to downloading social service costs to amalgamation to school board upheaval. Three decades on, the municipal and school board sectors are still extricating themselves from some of those quote-unquote reforms \u2014 reforms, I should add, that paved the way for the massive defeat of the Harris\/Ernie Eves government in 2003.<\/p>\n

The city and the school boards definitely didn’t win all those battles, but at least they fought. Ask Carroll and Fletcher and Chow: they were there, and they pushed back.<\/p>\n

Unlike city council’s current supine stance.<\/p>\n

To come full circle here, the real opponent in this fall’s election is Ford and his cabal at Queen’s Park. Victory, I’ll predict, will go to whomever finds a way to tell both voters and the Tories to expect a scrappier form of governance from 100 Queen West.<\/p>\n

This shouldn’t be, and can’t be, a business-as-usual race.<\/p>\n

photo by Miles Brathwaite (cc)<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The granite-hard conventional wisdom about the looming U.S. mid-term congressional elections is that they’ll be a giant referendum on Donald Trump’s insane presidency, with the potential for swinging the House of Representatives and maybe even the Senate. In a hundred different ways, the looming municipal elections \u2014 both here and elsewhere in the province \u2014Continue reading “LORINC: Mayoral candidates need to take on King Doug”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4051,"featured_media":71691,"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-71684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nLORINC: Mayoral candidates need to take on King Doug - 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\/2026\/05\/20\/lorinc-mayoral-candidates-need-to-take-on-king-doug\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"LORINC: Mayoral candidates need to take on King Doug - Spacing Toronto\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The granite-hard conventional wisdom about the looming U.S. mid-term congressional elections is that they’ll be a giant referendum on Donald Trump’s insane presidency, with the potential for swinging the House of Representatives and maybe even the Senate. 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