Yes, Babel-on-the-Bay promised not to talk about the Toronto mayoralty until September. So, we lied. When your hobby is politics, you do pick up some political traits. What we did not expect over the summer is the constant attempts to smear John Tory by Olivia Chow’s attack dogs. They should take a day off occasionally. Especially when Tory reintroduces the best solution to Toronto’s downtown subway overcrowding.
Maybe it would be too much of a novelty for a politician to admit that an opponent has a good suggestion. The voters might not be able to comprehend that. So a good solution gets dumped on by people who seem to have no understanding of what is involved.
What mayoralty candidate John Tory showed Torontonians was a low-cost use of existing rail lines to relieve the subway congestion into downtown. That is hardly a new idea. The Ontario Liberals are already promising to electrify those lines to enable the city to have more stops and better service for commuters across the city. Electric trains on already built rights-of-way will be fast, efficient and less expensive than any other solution.
If you have ever wondered why Chicago, also built along a lakefront and with a similar size population, is much more prosperous than Toronto just look at its transportation system. The old rail rights-of-way into that city became what they now call the ‘Els.’ In the downtown Loop, those electrified trains literally loop around the old downtown bringing hundreds of thousands of Chicago workers and visitors downtown every day. Some people think those elevated trains are ugly. Maybe they are; they work.
And maybe that is the reason we respect John Tory. He works. It is not his political stripe that matters in the mayor’s job. He gets behind the good ideas and pushes them. That makes for a good mayor. It is mutual respect that can make a mayor’s job easier. Councillors and the mayor have to work together. Confrontation is no way to run a city.
It is also why the Olivia Chow campaign continues to disappoint. While it is being run by a Conservative, it feels too much like your typical us-against-the-world NDP campaign. They just attack.
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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry
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