{"id":9382,"date":"2010-02-08T12:25:03","date_gmt":"2010-02-08T17:25:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacingtoronto.ca\/?p=9382"},"modified":"2013-01-21T13:11:47","modified_gmt":"2013-01-21T18:11:47","slug":"john-lorinc-conservative-yearnings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2010\/02\/08\/john-lorinc-conservative-yearnings\/","title":{"rendered":"JOHN LORINC: Conservative yearnings"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone\" src=\"http:\/\/farm4.static.flickr.com\/3112\/2314073206_569d018175.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"334\" \/><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone\" src=\"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/images\/feature-graphics\/feature-lorinc.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"85\" \/><\/p>\n<p>It couldn&#8217;t come as a surprise to anyone that the city&#8217;s swinging right in this election year, and not without reason, given the increasingly perilous state of Toronto&#8217;s finances (the gory details of which will be getting a lot of airplay over the next week). But there&#8217;s something bizarre about the breast-beating over the alleged dearth of red-meat conservatives in the mayoral race.<\/p>\n<p>Exhibit A: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theglobeandmail.com\/news\/national\/toronto\/rob-ford-please-run-youre-the-right-guy-for-a-lefty-race\/article1458561\/\">Marcus Gee&#8217;s plea in Saturday&#8217;s Globe and Mail<\/a> for Rob Ford to jump into this &#8220;lefty&#8221; campaign. As a journalist, I whole-heartedly agree with him that the spectacle of a Ford candidacy would be enormously entertaining to cover.<\/p>\n<p>But surely there&#8217;s more to this business of holding elections than simply the prospect of nine months of zingers. In our yearning for some blue blood, have we lost sight of that little matter of competence?<\/p>\n<p>At the risk of inviting days of attack on the comment string, I&#8217;d argue that three current and former council conservatives certainly have the skills to run the city: Doug Holyday, Karen Stintz, and David Soknacki, former budget chief and currently chair of Parc Downsview Park. You may not agree with them on many points, but they all have functioning brains and understand the issues.<\/p>\n<p>In lieu of these figures, we have Rocco Rossi, whose pronouncements to date make him look more and more like a conservative in Liberal clothing.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not obvious to me why a guy who wants to sell Toronto Hydro and press the pause button on a multi-billion transit expansion isn&#8217;t considered right enough.<\/p>\n<p>The conservatives mentioned above are somewhat to the right of Rossi, but anyone running for the job must reach beyond their core ideological constituency in order to build a winning campaign.<\/p>\n<p>Ford certainly has the potential to become a lightning rod for ambient voter dissatisfaction, especially in the suburbs. And yes, Marcus, it would be fun to watch him perform his rhetorical belly flops during the mayoral debates.<\/p>\n<p>But I seriously doubt whether Ford could run a Tim Horton&#8217;s drive-thru&#8217;, much less a $9 billion-a-year corporation with 50,000-plus employees. He couldn&#8217;t even remember the name of the company he&#8217;d hired to do the poll allegedly putting him in third place.<\/p>\n<p>His shortcomings are both a matter of style and substance. Ford, as Gee concedes, has conducted himself disgracefully in public and at council, with drunken and\/or belligerent behaviour.<\/p>\n<p>More troublingly, I&#8217;ve never had the sense that he&#8217;s got the intellectual ability to grasp the complexity of the problems facing the city.<\/p>\n<p>A recent case in point: Ford&#8217;s answer to my question last week, about his top transit priority, was to designate the TTC as an essential service to prevent the possibility of more wildcat strikes. In other words, he wants to create a situation that will drive up the TTC&#8217;s cost structure at a time when we need to do precisely the opposite.<\/p>\n<p>Holyday, by contrast, argued vigorously during the summer strike that the city must resist the public&#8217;s calls to designate garbage collection as an essential service, because to do so would only make the operation more expensive (witness the costly arbitrated settlements for police and firefighters). Whatever else you may think about out-sourcing waste management, Holyday&#8217;s arguments are consistent, whereas Ford seems incapable of recognizing the contradictions in his bombast.<\/p>\n<p>Run, Rob, run&#8230;but to another line of work.<\/p>\n<p><em>photo by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/mutereportage\/2314073206\/\">Miles Storey<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It couldn&#8217;t come as a surprise to anyone that the city&#8217;s swinging right in this election year, and not without reason, given the increasingly perilous state of Toronto&#8217;s finances (the gory details of which will be getting a lot of airplay over the next week). But there&#8217;s something bizarre about the breast-beating over the alleged<a href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2010\/02\/08\/john-lorinc-conservative-yearnings\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"sr-only\">&#8220;JOHN LORINC: Conservative yearnings&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4051,"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":[94,14289,14288,3427,949,313,14290,1030,1460,1969,12451,665,227,10726,10961,19,391],"class_list":["post-9382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-2010-election","tag-budget-chief-and-currently-chair","tag-chief-and-currently-chair","tag-david-soknacki","tag-doug-holyday","tag-globe-and-mail","tag-holyday","tag-john-lorinc","tag-journalist","tag-karen-stintz","tag-marcus-gee","tag-miles-storey","tag-rob-ford","tag-rocco-rossi","tag-tim-horton","tag-toronto","tag-usd"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>JOHN LORINC: Conservative yearnings - 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\/2010\/02\/08\/john-lorinc-conservative-yearnings\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"JOHN LORINC: Conservative yearnings - Spacing Toronto\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"It couldn&#8217;t come as a surprise to anyone that the city&#8217;s swinging right in this election year, and not without reason, given the increasingly perilous state of Toronto&#8217;s finances (the gory details of which will be getting a lot of airplay over the next week). 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