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Rob Ford's Toronto

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Adam Vaughan is a great guy and he should start making more trips to the inner suburbs (like up here in Scarborough) and familiarize himself with more of the issues.
 
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Ramako said:
I'm not a fan of how he tried to run all the frats out of the Annex. Other than that, he's done a good job.
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Torontovibe said:
How exactly did he do that? PLease explain because I am not familiar with that.
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I was pretty involved in the frat thing (on the frat side), and Ramako's view is consistent with the narrative portrayed by the frat folks, which, in turn, is similar to the narrative about Vaughan's so-called efforts to run the clubs out of the club district (which, coincidentally, I was pretty heavily involved in on the club side). Neither of those narratives is true, but as we have seen countless times, the truth doesn't matter in politics so much as perception. BTW, I think in both cases (frats + clubs) the opposition to Vaughan has only served to solidify the pro-Vaughan attitudes of the vast majority of Vaughan's actual constituents in his ward. I recall one particular meeting at city hall where the frats packed the committee room with supporters and wouldn't settle down until Stintz took over as chair. I swear Vaughan could barely disguise a smile as frat boys and sorority girls took turns trying to explain, indirectly and without any sense of irony, why they should be exempt from a wide array of laws and should be allowed to run illegal booze cans out of their basements.

How those narratives play out in the wider city may be a different story. I would wager that many suburbanites don't mind hedonism and lawlessness as long as it's kept from intruding on their culs-de-sacs.
 
GraphicMatt said:
At this point, I'd bet against a Vaughan run. I think it'll be Carroll. She's far better connected.

Though lately I've been tempted to just go all out for Kristyn Wong-Tam.
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Carroll is my #1 choice. I think KWT needs another term or two before being ready. A reasonable conservative like John Parker would be my choice if I had to pick a right-winger.
 
Juan_Lennon416 said:
She should have spent more time reorganizing the order of TC projects and thinking of other transit ideas to deal with issues like this one:

http://www.thestar.com/news/cityhal...y-work-will-cause-years-of-traffic-chaos?bn=1
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Seriously? It's the TTC Chair's fault the Gardiner's falling down? Don't make me laugh.

As for AG -- he's just trolling. He loves the 'sticking it to the left wing on this board' meme so much he does it whenever he can, regardless of the facts.

FWIW, I'd say Vaughn is highly vulnerable on his pro-business flank due to his high profile opposition to the island airport. A decent Ford campaign manager could make hay with that issue, as soon as the figured out the right sloganeering.

Most pro-Fordites are discounting what another 2 years of Ford will do to his support. Even 'low information voters' can only take so many times of hearing from their cousin in Calgary laughing about our mayor before they start to question their support. Given his 'gaffe every six weeks' cycle, he's due for some kind of stupidity sometime either in Stampede Week or around Caribana (I'm already assuming he continues to get bad news out of Pride -- although he could easily do something else to bugger up Canada Day for himself. (Defend the rights of teenagers to shoot bottle rockets at each other the day before one finally kills someone, e.g.)
 
Filip said:
Listening to her on council for one, then being the sole councillor to vote against the labour deal struck by Ford.

She's essentially the left wing version of Ford. Nothing to be proud of, guys.
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I don't know enough about her to really assess her politics, but she -- and NO ONE on the left of this council -- is as insane as Ford. You can admire his views, cheer his labour deals, whatever. But you need to realize that he's an introverted bully who does not like public speaking in a job that demands -- 24/7 -- that he be an extrovert, a conciliator, and rally his troops through speeches. The fact that he campaigned hard for his pain judges him insane. IMHO.
 
Juan_Lennon416 said:
Adam Vaughan is a great guy and he should start making more trips to the inner suburbs (like up here in Scarborough) and familiarize himself with more of the issues.
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Why does a downtown councillor have to do that yet a surburban councillor does not and can also pit downtown against surburban with a bunch of lies to appea to the lowest common denominator of those that live in he suburbs
 
Why does a downtown councillor have to do that yet a surburban councillor does not and can also pit downtown against surburban with a bunch of lies to appea to the lowest common denominator of those that live in he suburbs
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The suburban population (Etobicoke + North York + Scarborough) is the majority.
 
Almost two weeks on from Fencegate, the widely rumoured Star bombshell scoop to which verious folks have been referring is nowhere to be foumd. Are any in-the-know forumers aware of when this might drop?
 
The weirdest mayoralty ever—the inside story of Rob Ford’s city hall

The previously locked Toronto Life article is now publicly available. Take a look at it- it's pretty fascinating.

http://www.torontolife.com/daily/in...2/05/15/rob-ford-the-weirdest-mayoralty-ever/

Regarding the Portlands:

On the last Tuesday in August, many councillors tuned in to the CBC’s Metro Morning with a mixture of shock and disbelief. In the studio, Doug Ford was waxing rhapsodic about the notion of a mega-mall project, complete with a Ferris wheel and a monorail, on that benighted stretch of the eastern waterfront known as the Port Lands. As gasps rippled through the municipal body politic, Pam McConnell, one of two councillors whose wards cover the area, was shaken by more than Ford’s scheme to plunk down a glitzy retail Disneyland on that 1,000-acre plot of prime lakefront real estate. Earlier, Ford had labelled Waterfront Toronto, the 10-year-old tri-government agency charged with developing the waterfront, a “boondoggle.” Now McConnell wondered what was behind those comments.

On the CBC, Ford had alluded to a presentation where detailed plans for the project had been unveiled and “everyone’s jaw just dropped.” As McConnell and fellow area councillor Paula Fletcher soon discovered, that “visioning” exercise took place at an August 16 in-camera board meeting of the Toronto Port Lands Company, a city agency David Miller had stripped of its development mandate, turning it into a waterfront property manager. As they also discovered, Doug Ford had a connection to the TPLC’s president, Michael Kraljevic, a former real estate executive. They had played on the same high school football team, though Ford insists he hadn’t spoken to the man in 25 years. “Rob and I specifically ran against backroom deals,” he says. “I can assure you, no one influences Rob and me.”

A paper trail revealed that the mega-mall scheme had been in the works since shortly after Rob Ford took office. In February 2011, Kraljevic wrote to Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment, questioning its environmental assessments of the Port Lands. In May, a lobbyist for an Australian mall developer, the Westfield Group, had met with Doug Ford and the mayor’s new chief of staff to discuss the possibility of a shopping centre on the site. By the time the August 16 TPLC board meeting rolled around, two high-priced architects, Eric Kuhne and Mark Sterling, were presenting elaborate drawings for a Westfield-backed mall—drawings that included an ice palace in the Hearn generating station, an industrial white elephant on which Ford’s campaign donor Mario Cortellucci and his partners held a long-term lease. Astonishingly, TPLC had paid the architects $55,000—a sole-source contract of the very kind Rob Ford had once railed against as a councillor.

Still, it wasn’t until a week later that it became obvious a bureaucratic coup was in the works. An August 22 report from the city manager recommended, out of the blue, that Kraljevic’s TPLC replace Waterfront Toronto as the lead agency in developing the Port Lands. “All of us kind of had this wake-up call,” Fletcher remembers. “It was like, ‘Whoa!’ ”

When the mayor’s executive committee promptly endorsed the report, the full import of the putsch was clear. It would pave the way to auctioning off some of the city’s most valuable undeveloped real estate—almost all of it contaminated post-industrial land awaiting soil remediation and basic services—at fire-sale rates.

Already, Doug Ford’s boondoggle comments had provoked panicked calls from one of the waterfront’s biggest developers, Texas-based Hines, demanding to know if their deal was off. But when Pam McConnell told the mayor’s brother he had shaken investors’ confidence—perhaps even threatened a multi-million-dollar development—he seemed uncomprehending. “He said, ‘Send them my way and I’ll make a deal with them,’ ” McConnell recalls. “I said, ‘Councillor, that’s the problem: we’ve already got a deal with them.’ ”
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