Rob Ford's support numbers means something his obsessive opponents haven't figured out

The recent Forum Research poll, taken after Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair disclosed the existence of a video in which Toronto Mayor Rob Ford puffs on a glass pipe, shows some pretty good approval ratings for the embattled civic leader.

Particularly noteworthy is that Ford's highest approval rating, 55%, comes from Scarborough, for which Ford successfully managed to get funding for subway expansion from Kathleen Wynne's heel-dragging Provincial government.

Ford opponents in politics and government have been insisting how unnecessary the Scarborough subway is and how the eastern borough would be so much better served by what would have been a fully-funded Light Rail Transit system. Much of that attitude is illustrated by The Toronto Star's Urban Affairs columnist Christopher Hume, when he bravely, and obviously painfully, ventured out of his elitist downtown enclave to Scarborough recently to assess the surroundings and reiterate his preformed conclusion about Scarborough's transit needs.

Here's the funny thing, though. Why is it that the people who actually live in and know the Scarborough area best are the ones most supportive of Rob Ford?

Therein lies a clue to much of Ford's success, and why the media and his obsessive detractors have such little success is swaying support away from him.

It's because Ford actually listens to his constituents and tries to give them what they ask for, rather than condescendingly and paternalistically deciding what is best for them, whether they want it or not.

Weird, isn't it, that the public will loyally support a politician who listens to and seems to care about them, even though their intellectual betters and moral superiors in the media and politics tell them they shouldn't?

Ford Fest is a success..and The Toronto Star is REALLY pissed off

...So what a glorious few days it has been for this happy burg, the greatest on the planet. Last Friday, Ford Fest attracted a small army of Torontonians who trekked to the farther reaches of Scarborough, sometimes getting lost on the way, to support the great man himself. Thanks to the munificence of Mayor Rob Ford, they enjoyed free hamburgers and beer, fridge magnets and photographs, as well as His Worship’s personal phone number, a good one to call next time they have any questions about potholes, garbage pick-up or crack cocaine.

Why, he even led the adoring hordes in a round of “Subways, subways, subways,” that oft-heard anthem that made the faithful feel warm and fuzzy even as they waited in traffic to get home.

Huge turnout for Ford

Amusingly, the comments on the al Starzeera  article are calling Hume out for being full of crap..

Toronto's elites create a new Easter martyr

In this week following Easter, it is apt to think of a man who has strived to helped his fellow man,  giving his days and nights to talk to the common people. This man, himself in the center of a maelstrom of controversy, is continually beset by those asking him to alleviate their problems, and quietly, without fanfare he has helped many of his fellows. Yet for his efforts, a jealous elite are threatened by this man's appeal to the common people in whose interests the ruling classes pretend to act, while only truly serving themselves.

Yet relentless in their slander and vilification of this servant of the people, the powerful not only fail to diminish him, but have created the image of a martyr standing bravely against the ferocious onslaught.

This martyr is Toronto's mayor, Rob Ford.

In the Editorial boardroom at the Toronto Star, the continual frustration at their inability to make a dent in Rob Ford's support must be competing with embarrassment that the highest elected municipal official in their cosmopolitan city is, in their eyes, a brash, overweight bumpkin. The pile-on is abetted by histrionic invective from the socialist weekly NOW magazine and disgruntled columnists like The Globe and Mail's Marcus Gee. Despite their best efforts, and unrelenting attacks that have gone on virtually daily since the former Etobicoke councillor declared his mayoral candidacy, they have done nothing to diminish his popularity with his core constituency.

They have portrayed Ford as racist and anti-immigrant, but in his home riding, made up mainly of immigrants and minority voters, he regularly polls overwhelming majorities, exceeding 75% of the vote.

What the Star's satraps have blinded themselves to is that rather than tear Ford down, their histrionic mudslinging is actually bolstering Ford's popularity.

At this point, one wonders what the anti-Ford media is up to? To whom are they trying to make their sale? The people who hate Ford don't need daily reminders. They will hate him no matter what. But these histrionic attacks only invigorate Ford's supporters.

Making a typically hyperbolic comparison to Marion Barry, the felonious former mayor of Washington D.C., even the Star's editor Bob Hepburn conceded that their scandal-mongering against Ford is unlikely to have any affect.

But like spoiled infants throwing a tantrum. they are just unable to restrain themselves.

We hates the Ford, my Precious!

Rick Salutin, the old dinosaur of the left The Star acquired after he was unceremoniously dumped by the Globe and Mail, has made himself look like a malicious clown railing against Ford. Salutin, whose appearance is daily becoming more like The Lord of the Ring's Gollum,  before calling the mayor a "drama queen" said the Ford era has "been so much about him, it's hard to remember there's a whole city involved."

Actually, it's Salutin, his colleagues, and employers who are the drama queens who have forgotten the city. They have incessantly been trying to make Ford an issue at the expense of Toronto\s best interests and with complete disregard for journalistic integrity.

What are the issues the Star has been so worked up about? That Ford may have been drinking? That he solicited charitable donations on City letterhead he paid for from his own pocket and from which he derives absolutely no personal fiduciary gain? That he might have smoked a joint when he was on vacation in Florida?  None of the accusations, even if they are true, suggest that Ford has ever done anything improper for enriching himself.

Ford has devoted himself, while facing ridicule and scorn, to doing what is right for Toronto's taxpayers. He has fought hard to keep taxes and costs down for Torontonians, and he has been as successful as anyone could be given the magnitude of the opposition he's faced.

Today, when Ford was the voice fighting back against proposals to raise taxes, which had skyrocketed under his predecessor, David Miller, The Star published a spiteful article focusing on the way the mayor expressed disdain at imposing taxes on Torontonians while neglecting the detrimental affect of the new levies.

When Ford said there is corruption at City Hall, the Star was more interested in trying to vilify the mayor than serve public interests by exposing the corruption.

Something the media elites in Toronto don't realize is that people aren't as stupid as they think they are; nor will they believe everything they are told, just because it comes out of the mainstream news.

There isn't a major city in the world without some level of corruption at the municipal level.  And people know it.

In Toronto, billions are being spent on condo and commercial developments, often over the objection of local residents. A lot of money is being thrown around amid interests that are tied to that development and it may not be coincidental that more than one downtown "left-wing" councilor is living awfully well for someone supposedly making $102,608 per annum.

Ford has said he is willing to act for the will of residents when it comes to development. But rather than pursue potential corruption where it actually may exist, The Star, which makes a tremendous amount of money carrying advertisements for condos, is more interested in pursuing Rob Ford for potential technical errors in his efforts to help underprivileged kids with his school football foundation.

Just because Torontonians have ignored the will of the media elites doesn't mean they are stupid, or nuts as Star columnist Heather Mallick shrieked around the time she wrote a bizarre, disturbed, imagined wretched sexual tryst with Ford. Nor are they "hordes" conjuring up the images of barbarity attempted by the Star's resident condominium aficionado, Christopher Hume.

People aren't as stupid as Toronto's media elites would like. Voters not obsessed with their own insecurity are not afraid to have opinions that aren't sanctioned at One Yonge Street by the Toronto Star.

Ford was elected by a city fed up with social engineers and special interests who wanted to impose their vision at other people's expense, while telling the public they knew what is best.

What Rob Ford represents is the common person saying "we don't need a pompous, self-interested political class to tell us they know more about what's best for us than we do ourselves."

And as much as a sanctimonious political and media elite may hate it,  what they are telling us to think isn't turning people against Ford as much as turning him into a hero.

Toronto - the city where stupid leftists' self-esteem is tied to municipal politics

Does your sense of self-esteem fluctuate depending on whom is your municipal councilor or mayor?

Do you feel better or worse about yourself and your ability to hold your head high depending on whether you have a socialist or a conservative being called "Your Honor" at City Hall?

If the answer is no, then you're obviously not a "progressive" Torontonian.

It's a fascinating phenomenon that only affects one type of political class  I've heard it in conversations, seen it on facebook postings and the National Post's Chris Selley noted in a tweet that the Toronto Star's dunce columnist Christopher Hume is feeling personally humiliated because Rob Ford is the mayor of Toronto.

When the pompous, inept David Miller ruled Toronto for two previous terms and imposed a preposterous agenda while sending taxes skyrocketing, I don't remember a single conservative whining about how they were personally embarrassed. Have I missed something where socialist websites have been offering a discount on those online genealogy packages and a bunch of them have discovered they are related to Rob Ford though their bloodlines?

When David Miller utterly capitulated to civic employees unions after leaving the city with six weeks worth of stinking garbage piled high in the height of the summer, was anyone on the right ashamed to be a Torontonian because of him?  Again, a resounding nyet.

To understand this, one has to know a little about the "progressive" mindset. They are hopelessly insecure and see their entire value as human beings being based on what others think of them. By that extension, being in a city where a boisterous fiscal conservative won the last civic election by an enormous margin over all his rivals must come as a painful personal blow. It must be so shameful for them to have to explain that to their enlightened friends who live in places like Vancouver.

They must hang their heads low when they travel and go to diner parties with friends from other locales.  Sitting at tables with flowing chardonnay and Joan Baez' singing playing on the sound system to remind them of their youth, while their comrades can talk about how much progress they have made, the Toronto progressive must have to cower in shame. It must be incomprehensible for such a gathering to grasp how a modern Canadian city chose to be governed by someone who believes government shouldn't spend more than it can afford.

Clearly this sort of personal affront must have been caused by the progressives not being progressive enough. If only they had raised taxes even further, incurred more civic debt while doling out public funds to  any grievance-monger capable of filling out a form and found new laws to restrict personal liberties, more people would see things their way.

Oh, the sorrow and humiliation. And the worst part is, when they create a performance art interpretive dance piece to express their dismay, it might be a little harder to get that tax-funded arts grant so that a total of 14 people in an audience can experience their plight.

"Ford must go," declares Christopher Hume. bit.ly/TbBMje Replaces former slogan, "Ford won't win." thestar.com/news/gta/toron…
— Chris Selley (@cselley) November 19, 2012

Toronto Star's Christopher Hume gets Heather Mallick to ghostwrite column

At least today's histrionic rant against Rob Ford by al Starzeera's resident mouthpiece for the condo industry sounds like it was written by Mallick.

Time hasn’t forgotten Toronto, but Toronto would like to forget time.   

Under its new mayor, Rob Ford, the city is turning back the clock to the good old days of the chief magistrate’s imagining. Never one to be distracted by reality, Ford believes that we can ignore — no, undo — the changes that have redrawn the face of Toronto during recent years and return to some white-bread suburban utopia that never existed.

No one should underestimate the power of illusion, of course, but just months after Ford took office, the credibility gap between what we know and what he says has been stretched to the breaking point.

In Rob Ford’s Toronto there is no need for public heath nurses. There are no poor people, no gays, no immigrants, no cyclists, no need for housing and nothing the market can’t fix.

That this is nonsense goes without saying. While Ford’s hordes cheer him on in the most unseemly manner, cutting off their collective nose to spite their collective face, they have little to offer aside from insults and jeers. Not believing themselves a part of Toronto, they are content to watch as it is dismantled by the mayor.

Though it has quickly become predictable, the glee with which Ford’s hordes greet his every bêtise still disturbs. The sort of casual civic destructiveness Ford has legitimized in Toronto reminds one of what happened recently in Vancouver. Toronto hasn’t experienced riots — at least not since police went on a rampage during the G20 summit last summer — but both events demonstrate the human capacity for and love of destruction for its own sake.

The rest here

An interesting discussion about the municipal election

The National Post's weekly political panel discussion was very interesting this week.

They discussed changing Toronto's first past the-post-system to a one that ranks choices when to achieve a winner with a majority of support.

But when given thought, this proposal ends up being less-than-fully democratic its mathematical implications and a person with a majority of second choice votes could actually win over someone who had more first choice votes. The only honest way of implementing that type of idea would be to have separate, run-off elections in which candidates were gradually eliminated until one achieves a clear majority.

But on the subject of support and opposition towards front running mayoral candidate Rob Ford, two of the panelists, Anthony Furey and Chris Selley, showed some genuine insight into what is helping to mobilize Ford's support and why his opponents' tactics haven't been able to turn it away:

FUREY: It’s not the content of the anti-Ford articles that ends up working to Ford’s benefit, it’s the attitude. It’s the suggestion that Ford voters are too stupid for their own good and fail to understand how voting for Ford goes contrary to their own interests. Now THAT is anti-democratic. It presupposes what people want out of government based on their salary level, the colour of their skin or something other non-determinate variable. Ford supporters may be completely aware of what will happen should he become mayor and they are voting for him specifically for those results. Few anti-Ford pundits have been able to toss off their self-righteousness long enough to understand this.

SELLEY: Don’t think I can put it much better than that. You read some opinion columns and you’d think Toronto will be nothing but a smoking crater at the end of four years of Rob Ford. (In fact there’s only a small chance Toronto will be a smoking crater in 2014.) People who think that the city is already horribly broken in any number of ways are unlikely to respond well to that. They sense, I think, an implicit message that the status quo is OK. It really isn’t, and that’s what attracted them to Ford in the first place.

Furey and Selley make very good points. It's illustrated in the attitude of people like Councilor Joe Mihevc, a local politician whose comments suggest that Ford's supporters are too stupid to understand the implications of their choice, to say nothing of the histrionics in the media from columnists like Christopher Hume and Heather Mallick, which does a lot more to help elect Ford than defeat him.

Read the full piece here in The National Post

Persichilli: One of the few voices of sanity at al-Starzeera

There's one columnist at al-Starzeera whom I haven't mentioned previously in this blog and I regret that.

Partially, it's because his column only appears once a week on Sundays and the other reason is that his main gig is as political editor of the Italian-Canadian newspaper Corriere Canadese, so I don't think of him so much as being a Star columnist.

But he is and he deserves mention, because he is one of the few editorial anomalies in the organization that gives a forum to the habitually uninformed hysteria of James Travers, Heather Mallick, Haroon Siddiqui, Christopher Hume, Antonia Zerbisias, Linda McQuaig, et cetera.

There are a couple of others, like Martin Regg Cohn, to be sure, but they are the rare exceptions in that organization.

Angelo Persichilli's column are routinely informative, insightful and he actually has the connections in Ottawa and the Liberal Party to be able to report based on credible information rather than wild, paranoid speculation.

Today he wrote a column about what Rob Ford's candidacy represents that has shown a level of insight and maturity that reminded me how out of place he is at The Toronto Star.  I don't agree with Persichilli about his notion of bike lanes being such a representation of the urban/suburban and elitist/public divide. If that were the case than Rocco Rossi wouldn't be the last-place candidate with single digit polling numbers. But basically, Persichilli nails it:

Rob Ford is neither a candidate to fear nor a political phenomenon. He is only an individual who is in the right place at the right time. The Oct. 25 vote is not about Ford, it’s a referendum on outgoing Mayor David Miller and his cronies.

This campaign is about four things: the repudiation of Miller’s vision of Toronto; the revolt of the suburban “colonies”; the frustration of people in the downtown core; and the inability of the other candidates to understand the first three of these factors.

Miller thinks that his Toronto is the real Canada. He’s wrong. Miller’s Toronto it’s only a distillation of this complex country seen through magnifying, distorting glasses. His Toronto is a concentration of Canadian virtues and imperfections, blown up and stuffed together into a few square kilometres around city hall.

There we have the best museums, art galleries and universities, but also a lot of ignorance just a few hundred metres away from those institutions. There are religious icons like St. Michael’s Cathedral, but also in the same street many organizations that are challenging Catholic doctrine. You find the opulent banks at Bay and King, but also food banks around the corner. There are the beautiful houses of the Rosedale enclave, but also a lot of homeless people. There are expensive and fancy cars, but also people who cannot even afford the TTC.

Miller didn’t deal with any of these contradictions. He made them worse by promoting petty projects like bike lanes that were sold as a social revolution, an environmental game-changer. His approach to government has been much like the behaviour of rich socialites who pollute the environment with their SUVs and private planes or sully the lakes in Muskoka with their powerboats and then engage in petty projects such as sending their children to volunteer at the food bank or to some camp in a Third World country for a photo-op to fabricate a social conscience.

Miller’s administration is identified with traffic jams that are fouling the environment; a “special relationship” with the unions and friendly, costly contractors; the garbage strike, which exposed his lack of leadership; waste; tax increases and, most of all, the typical in-your-face attitude of a messiah who thinks he can disregard the opinions of his ignorant subjects.

Read the rest of his column here.

What's a few million to Christopher Hume?

Christopher Hume, one of the coterie of al-Starzeera columnists going off the rails at the prospect of Rob Ford winning the mayoral contest in October, wrote today "does it make sense to get rid of half of council for no other reason than to save $6 million on a $12 billion budget?"

Evidently, Hume should do what he does best and be out lobbying for some big condo to wreck a neighbourhood somewhere and stay away from numbers.  Hume complains,  "Government isn’t business and voters aren’t consumers. Were Toronto run like a corporation, not a democracy, the fallout would make the current angst seem a love-in. Despite what the candidates might say, government does not exist to turn a profit."

It sure doesn't when the likes of Miller, Smitherman and  Pantalone are running it.

Earlier in his column, Hume mocked Ford for saying voters, "can’t relate to billions of dollars, but they can relate to thousands of dollars. They can relate to getting free gas, free food, free hotels, all the stuff people have to pay for and councillors don’t.”

Clearly, Hume doesn't have any idea how much can be done with the $6,000,000.00 in taxpayer savings he's scoffing at. At least he is helping out by unwittingly proving Ford's point.

On the bright side, Hume didn't call half the city of Toronto that supports Ford "newly emboldened hordes"  again.

The best thing about Rob Ford's polling surge - the city's elitist a-holes are tearing their hair out

Which doesn't account for Smitherman and Rossi being bald, they started out the campaign that way.

There is but one place for them to put their hope and it is my candidacy  George "I am the messiah" Smitherman

George Smitherman's hysteria at his free fall from what he thought was going to be a coronation to an almost universal rejection has sent him into crazed, messianic, self-delusional statements like, "This is a bit of an alarm for people over what's happening in their city and to line up behind one vision -- a destructive, reckless one or one that is about city building. There is but one place for them to put their hope and it is my candidacy ... We will fight for our city to the end."

As Blazing Cat Fur noted, the addition of famed Liberal party strategist Warren Kinsella hasn't helped Rocco Rossi's polling numbers, but it has made him look desperate and pathetic with his ill-advised and almost universally condemned proposal to revisit the Spadina Expressway as an underground tunnel.

What I find personally gratifying is the idiotic, sanctimonious, histrionic blathering by The Toronto Star's mouthpiece for the condo developers' lobby, Christopher Hume, who wrote "the rise of Rob Ford should come as no surprise. It is yet another manifestation of the wave of nasty right-wing populism sweeping North America. Its newly emboldened hordes may not know what they need, but they know what they want"

Speaking as one of the horde, Torontonians don't want is to be ignored by their politicians and be told how we should think by self-absorbed socialists. We don't need to be told how our "visionary leaders" know what's best for us, whether or not we agree.

Heather Mallick already accused Toronto of being "nuts" when it looked like the city was on the verge of electing Ford. Now that it seems a near-certainty, she must be having a complete mental breakdown (I wonder to what extent that will even be noticeable). I look forward to reading her next rant on the subject.

Welcome to democracy, comrades. I know you hate it. It must be frustrating for Hume, Mallick, Miller and their ilk to be so convinced of their own intellectual superiority yet remain unable to comprehend how they can't do as good a job of convincing the public as their supposed inferiors.

I could explain it to them in one sentence, but why bother; they'd never believe it.


UPDATE: This condescending email just went out from the Smitherman campaign. With little of his own virtue to offer, "I am the messiah" George is going in for all-out panicked fear-mongering with:

If an election were held tomorrow Rob Ford would be mayor.

That’s what two new public opinion polls out tonight show. They also show that George Smitherman is the only candidate who can stop Rob Ford.

While Joe Pantalone, Sarah Thompson and Rocco Rossi have all made important contributions to this election race, they cannot become Mayor.

George represents the best of Toronto’s values: tolerance and respect, hard work, caring, balance and honesty. Over the next five weeks we must redouble our efforts to present George to the people of Toronto and to give them a clear choice: Rob Ford’s city of division, recklessness and anger, and George’s city of bringing people together, balance and sensible choices.

We need your help to fight for our vision of Toronto. We need you to attend debates and events and to actively cheer George on; we need you to staff the telephones and to knock on doors; and most especially we need you to talk to your friends and co-workers. Now is the time to get active.

In yesterday’s New York Times Michael Bloomberg, New York’s Mayor, said "Anger, is not a government strategy," he added. "It’s not a way to govern." He was speaking about the tide in America, but he could just as easily have been talking about the anger being exploited by Rob Ford in Toronto.