Beware the reign of oligarchs over our Downtown

Frank Touby –

It was like a nut fell off a tree and landed on my soft spot. Or an airliner high above inadvertently emptied one of its on-board potties and a bit of the frozen crap whacked me on the bean.

That’s my reaction to this rotten mayoral election that might perpetuate the oligarchical influence over our city because a guy who should be doing talk-show radio has been tapped by the forces of evil (aka, the Ontario Tories and their fellow travellers, the McGuinty-Wynne Grits) to turn Toronto back over to consultants and thus to their own corporatist masters.

It was Doofus-Mayor David Miller, who institutionalized the influence of sales hacks at city hall by spending $1 million to legitimize them in a registry. That enables them to button-hole bureaucrats and politicians and push their wares.

Now we have a revered member of the oligarchical class, a thoroughly decent man, in the person of John Tory. He has been remarkably adept at public service in so many regards, usually while sitting in a position befitting his high-born status.

There is a difference between holding high position and actually running things from on high.

In the charitable and public service spheres, John Tory is generous with his time and energy. His instincts are good and his empathy for persons who struggle in one realm or another is admirable. He is not haughty.

But when the city’s elites tap him for political office, it’s a different story because they will bend his ears. He has, if that’s possible, even less government experience than the much-reviled Doug Ford, who at least has spent some time on city council, even if he didn’t attend too many council meetings and spent much of his time subbing or apologizing for his whacked-out brother, our less-than-esteemed Mayor Rob Ford.

It was that ever-so-reviled brother Rob, and Doug’s own lack of grace, that brought the move of revulsion by voters who figured Tory was the Ford-stopper. In so many polling places the votes for John Tory were really a vote against Doug Ford.

Ford’s appeal is largely to suburban yokels, beer-hall patrons and readers of one of my former journalism alma maters, Toronto Sun. Along with its serious side of superb sports coverage, a fabulous food editor, Rita DeMontis (who, bless her, introduced me to Paulette) and the institution of Sunshine Girls, the Sun tends to lurch to the loopy right.

It is a crying shame that Paul Godfrey is involved with it because that will bring down the Sun as an institution when it gets divided among the hedge-fund hyenas on Wall Street, along with the excellent National Post that Godfrey also plagues.

Hedge funds are only interested in what they can strip from the bones of a corporation they attack. “Enhance shareholder value,” is the drumbeat. “Screw the workers, screw the readers, screw everyone but we shareholders as we reduce this to its skeleton and suck the bones before tossing them.”

Among the Sun’s outspoken political columnizers is bean-counter Sue-Ann Levy who, though she’s plenty smart, sees tax waste under her bed and calls former David Crombie “a has-been.” Crombie has been unfailingly generous in his private life beyond city hall as a positive community activist, supporter of charities and participant in groups of experts who noodle things for the betterment of our city.

Sue-Ann supported Doug for mayor. Doug no doubt is popular with the beer-hall crowd who form so many of her paper’s readership market and who might, ironically, suffer the most from his austerity regimen.

Paul Godfrey, mostly a North Yorker for the bulk of his career, has been an affliction upon our city for decades, including masterminding the wrongly placed SkyDome which belongs in the suburbs, not tying up traffic and taking premium space in Toronto’s increasingly overstressed heartland: Downtown.

Like Tory, he’s among the elites who are often at the top of things happening in Toronto. The concern is the damage to Downtown that even a well-intentioned white-shoe boy, as Tory surely is, in following trusted elites with  intentions.

Downtown especially is vulnerable to the Manhattanization that sees the core of the Big Apple almost thoroughly reamed of its once thriving mixed-economy population and reduced to the ultra-high-income earners and their baristas.

The only candidate who had a chance of winning and who knows anything about how things work at city hall was, of course, Olivia Chow. She would be an effective and revered mayor if only she or her handlers had played the cards right, which they didn’t in a shocking display of naïvety.

Olivia spent years at city hall on council, has a high intelligence and knows not only the ropes but also the strings and threads that make things happen or not.

She paid her political dues at school board as a trustee and is without a doubt the most qualified of anyone who has signed on as candidate for Mayor of Toronto.

When the election was first announced, she was the front runner. Ensconced in Ottawa as a Member of Parliament, she was surely needed there to help counter the corporatist, increasingly paranoid state run by Stephen Harper who seems intent upon creating a terrorist fear which will profit his nasty regime.

There was plenty of time for Olivia, clearly the frontrunner for mayor, to mosey on down to her home and sign up as a candidate.

Instead, perhaps on horrid advice from one of her team (we don’t know), she jumped right into the fray.

It was the lethal error to her candidacy.

What she should have done was remain in Ottawa, being present and making headlines as Torontonians pleaded with her to consider putting us out of our misery and running for Mayor of Toronto.

Then, on the last day for nominations, when John had worn really thin, Olivia should have done what Doug did and filed her candidacy.

That would have been a brisk, fresh breeze blowing through the election atmosphere and Olivia would have been perceived as the saviour of our esteemed city.

That’s how it should have happened. I do long to learn why it didn’t.