Quote:

“The two front-runners are Doug Ford — Rob’s brother — and John Tory, with Mr. Tory holding a narrow lead in recent polls. They have indulged in the uniquely charmless rhetoric of rich white men calling each other privileged.”

And:

“Mr. Tory is a way back to the old WASP elites with their unspeakably vast sense of entitlement.”

Story here.

That all sounds about right.

Nothing good happened (except gridlock, legislative and vehicular) during the Rob Ford years because the mayor was a drug addicted basket case. Nothing will happen (except dithering and dotage) during the John Tory years – if he wins, it’s between him and Doug Ford, at this point – because he is a charmless, entitled, WASPy, old rich guy who ran because he wanted redemption and he figured he could beat the overweight crack addict and the Chinese socialist.

People get the governments they deserve.

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And the Torontoist is on to him, in a blistering (but belated) editorial:

Let us now turn to John Tory, whose campaign has been a massive disappointment. John Tory’s candidacy was meant to be premised on the idea that he was a man of substance—and, more importantly, of principle. After all, the argument went, John Tory is the man who lost the 2007 election due to his unpopular but principled stance on religious schooling. There are two problems with this. The first, of course, is that it was an astonishingly bad idea—an expensive, misguided solution to a problem that Quebec already dealt with simply by abolishing their own separate school boards, because a secular government should not be paying for religious schools. The second problem is that Tory’s “principled” stance was, in fact, a misguided attempt to drum up political support from religious voters, and when it backfired he was unwilling to look like a flip-flopper by acknowledging that the idea was unpopular both with the right and the left.

Recently Tory has come under fire for claiming that white privilege does not exist. We do not have here the space to enumerate all the ways in which this position is both absurd and false. What we do have space to point out is that John Tory is a rich man’s son who got his first job because Ted Rogers was a family friend and who, after being called to the bar, was made partner at the elite law firm that his grandfather founded and that had the Tory name on its letterhead. [It is disturbing that Tory is willing] to dismiss out of hand the abuses, disadvantages, and prejudices that hundreds of thousands of Torontonians suffer every day.

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Great writing, here, and some actual wisdom delivered in staccato bursts, too. Lala and all you in your forties, read.

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If you are sensible, you could be there, too. Meet Evan Solomon. Meet Andy Heintzman. Meet Clive Thompson. Most importantly, meet Davey Snot and Royal Niblet.

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Reading some of the horrible accounts of the evidence yesterday, this was brought to mind. She (and others) have never apologized for it.

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The evidence, as they say, is compelling.

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Here’s the proof.  A kid named Jeremy Fry at a Celtics game. Boston. Sent the song back up the charts. It ain’t new, apparently, but this is just so awesome.

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