Toronto: Welcome to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

Panicked city councillors express contempt for democracy

As the October 25 date for Toronto's mayoral election draws closer, so does the prospect of Rob Ford becoming the city's mayor.

The most recent polls have Rob Ford holding the support of 32% of Torontonians. Former frontrunner -- and Liberal candidate all-but-officially -- George Smitherman is running second with 21%.

Many members of Toronto's City Council are rather alarmed that Ford may well be the next mayor. Some of them are all but planning a revolt.

“I hope that the citizens of Toronto wake up," said soon-to-be-former City Councillor Kyle Rae. "I can’t believe Toronto is prepared to do it.”

Rae insists that Ford has no record of accomplishments for the City of Toronto.

“All he has done is attack and vilify other members’ work, he has got nothing he can point to,” Rae insisted.

“Most thinking people in Toronto would be so embarrassed by him being mayor that there would be an obligation on council to do something,” he concluded. "In my opinion, if Mayor Ford is elected, city council will have a caucus meeting and they will choose their own mayor and he will be the mayor in name.”

It's worth noting that Kyle Rae is the individual who threw a $12,000 goodbye party at taxpayers' expense. This in a city where Ford is being ordered to payback $3000 in charitable donations solicited with stationery bearing the letterhead of his Council office.

It's also worth noting that Ford is the one who blew the whistle on Rae.

But it seems that the fiscal priorities of Toronto City Council are an absolute joke: $12,000 parties for themselves, while Councillors whose politics they disapprove of are ordered to repay $3,000 in charitable donations.

Other comments offered by Councillors at this Council's final meeting also smack of elitists who think they know better than the citizens of Toronto.

Others have chosen to take a negative view of politics -- focusing more on what he wants the citizens of Toronto to vote against, rather than what they might be voting for.

“The ballot question has been framed, ‘Rob Ford? Yes or no,’” said City Councillor Adam Vaughan. “It’s just a question of where the no vote moves now.”

But all this apparently seems to be the attitude of Toronto City Council -- where individuals who declare themselves to represent the "thinking people" of Toronto claim the privilege of governing the city however they see fit, and what individuals think voters are voting against is more important than what they may have voted for.

They believe it to be a dictatorship of the proletariat in Toronto -- and Toronto City Council seems to have decided that they are the proletariat.

What's the Matter With Heather Mallick?

Panic clearly building at Toronto Star

When Heather Mallick agreed to write for the Toronto Star, the editorial board of that newspaper must have had one thing to say to her:

"Welcome home, Heather. Welcome home."

It would only be a matter of time before the Star would gleefully provide a willing forum for Mallick's famed political invective -- the one that eventually earned her a very short leash at the CBC.

Then, it was a disgusting hit-piece on US Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

In that tirade, she compared Palin to a pornstar, denigrated her family, and in the depths of feverish lunacy, suggested that Palin isn't even actually a woman.

It's in the spirit of such invective that Mallick has approached the ongoing election campaign to decide who will be the next mayor of Toronto. With polls suggesting that conservative candidate Rob Ford has pulled ahead of his competition, the Toronto Star has gone into full-blown panic mode.

It isn't a pretty sight.

In a column entitled "Rob Ford as Mayor? Are We Nuts?" Mallick doesn't provide any real logical reason why anyone in Toronto shouldn't want Ford as their mayor. Instead, she tries to needle long-simmering feelings of resentment against, of all things, gym teachers into a full anti-conservative boil:

"I have a degree of sympathy for Ford. We all knew him in high school. He was our gym teacher, the kind who laughed when the slender shy boys got their hair entangled in the trampoline netting."

Mallick being Mallick, that naturally isn't the full extent of the mud directed in Ford's direction. Mallick also pens the following:

"-He is what he is and, unlike most people, makes no attempt to conceal it. What I doubt is that he is like you. Have the police been called to your home to resolve a dispute with your loved one? Do you have a mug shot?

-Voters allegedly like candidates with whom they could happily sit down and have a beer, as was said about Bush. But you couldn’t drink with Bush. He was an alcoholic who no longer drank. And you wouldn’t drink with Ford because he gets angry rather than amiable as, in just one instance, some people in a neighbouring box at the Air Canada Centre discovered in 2006."

Mallick doesn't elaborate very far on either one of these two issues. There may well be good reason for this. Judging from this article by Linda Diebel -- who seems to have been pulled off her national affairs beat to help bolster the paper's anti-Ford efforts -- the official editorial line at the Toronto Star currently seems to be that they'll happily spread innuendo about Ford, but not make any concrete accusations:

"And that thing with his wife?

'Nothing happened. My wife got mad at me. She made an allegation that wasn’t true and the charges never even got to court ... I’ve never laid a hand on a woman in my life. Rule No. 1 in the Ford family: You never touch a woman.'

Other incidents seem muddier.

Did he tell a couple at the Air Canada Centre that the wife should 'go to Iran and get raped and shot?' He says he didn’t, but doesn’t clarify. In a letter to city hall, they claimed he did. He apologized.

'That was just stupidity. I feel terrible about it. My wife and I had a little bit too much to drink ... I made a mistake that will never happen again.'"

In fact, it eems to be one individual -- city councillor Kyle Rae -- who is publicly pusihing the "buffoon" angle.

Which is actually rather ironic. After all, it's Mallick herself who has earned herself a reputation as a very public buffoon. And it's in vein of realizations like this that the following pair of passages become actually rather comical:

"I am wary of the political truism that voters prefer candidates who resemble them. If a candidate resembles me, he’s a bookworm racked with emotion. I wouldn’t vote for me. Run away!

...Why should a politician’s notional resemblance to you recommend his candidacy? If you suspect that people find you buffoonish and a bit of a bully, would voting for your clone make it better to be you?"

Ironically, it's Mallick's reputation that establishes her as a buffoon and a bully. Even according to the reputation she'd like to think she has, the emotions Mallick is "racked" with have so often proven to be extremely ugly ones.

All of this is, of course, the public face of the Toronto Star's anti-Ford efforts.

Behind the scenes the Star has been editing Wiklpedia entries about the candidate and then attempting to disavow any responsibility.

So the question remains: what's the matter with Heather Mallick? A lot of things.

But those things also tend to be wrong with the Toronto Star. There's a reason why she seems so at home there.