What do you want Toronto? With an unapologetic news media and an unrepentant collection of councillors ganging up on him, the best mayor Toronto has had in almost 50 years is hardly feeling much love. The poor guy has been doing the best job he can. He has been hustling hard now for just six months and he has shown that he can handle that mind-numbing job with class and style.
It is hard to believe that Toronto wants Rob Ford back. And it is for sure that they do not want poor Olivia Chow bicycling down to City Hall every day?
Whether the Toronto Star likes it or not, the voters chose Tory. The newspaper will probably have to put up with him for the next three and a half years. They should heed what our old granny used to tell us: If you can’t push, pull. And it you can’t pull, you best get out of the way.
There was a bunch of has-beens who showed up at city hall recently to tell him what to do with the crumbling Gardiner Expressway. You would think that if those people had any understanding of the kind of mess they left for John Tory, they would just shut up.
The facts are that there are no good solutions to the Gardiner. It is a patchwork covered with band-aids that was never finished. It became a dinosaur when the Spadina and Scarborough Expressways were scrapped. Toronto has suffered enough with bad planning and ignorant municipal politicians. It hardly needs more critics. And you can hardly keep scrapping expressways until you build a decent transit system.
We need to remember that Toronto is saddled with a political system designed for a city of maybe 15,000 people. With more than 2.6 million people, the city is impossible to manage. It is absolutely amazing that anything is ever decided.
Toronto’s political system is best described as a 44-passenger school bus packed with unruly, disobedient street urchins. The mayor is just a temporary driver and he is trying to get the little brats to tell him where the school is so that he can get them there. They have their own ideas about where to go. And there is no fuel in the vehicle anyway.
What Toronto really needs is a dictator such as we elect at Queen’s Park or in Ottawa. Neither the Premier nor the Prime Minister really needs those people who were elected with them. They are an unnecessary expense. And it would be a blessing to dispense with those self-serving councillors in Toronto.
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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
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