You can spend a lifetime wanting what will never be. Last week there was a story in a Toronto paper about finding the best candidate, saying the city needs a mayor everybody can get behind. That will never happen.
It is important to remember that in the last municipal election in Toronto, Rob Ford was not the frontrunner early in the year. It was not until well into the campaign that his promise to get rid of the gravy train started to resonate. The only problem was that when elected, he found that there was no gravy train. He also found that bombast and a media following do not replace leadership. Ford had nothing for the voters.
As a councillor, Ford used a personal approach that worked with the voters in his ward. He was never re-elected in the ward because of his accomplishments but because of that relationship. The only problem is that as mayor of a city the size of Toronto, that kind of personal approach is impossible.
Even here in Babel with a population of about 135,000, the present mayor could hardly run for re-election with the approach he used so successfully in his first run for mayor. By your second go-around, your failures start to catch up with you. The best hope is for no competition. More politicians have been re-elected by weak competition than by accomplishments.
Toronto is much more complex. And to try to get elected in a city of that size without the open participation of political parties makes the situation close to impossible. Anyone who thinks that party organizations are not involved behind the scenes also believes in fairy tales. If, for example, Olivia Chow was foolish enough to leave federal politics for a run at the Toronto mayoralty, she would have a solid phalanx of New Democrat workers behind her. She would also find out what Liberal George Smitherman learned: Being strong in the centre city and Scarborough does not mean you can win in Etobicoke and North York.
Surprisingly Toronto today has the same problem as Babel. It is just a matter of scale. Both cities are lacking a sense of what they are and what they can be. A city is not just a place to live; it is an extension of you as a citizen. Today, both are insecure. Politics is not trusted. Hope is tenuous. Aspirations lack succour. People feel used. Where is the leadership of a future? What is that future? It all starts where we live.
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Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry
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