Amalgamation enthusiasts across Canada may wish to read this.
How the great Ford divide could come to a city near you
For the rest of Canada, it means the schadenfreude moment it’s been enjoying at Toronto’s expense is not yet over.
Rob Ford won on a wave of suburban voter discontent, and those voters are still angry—as are people just like them, in cities across Canada
October 21, 2014
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/how-the-great-ford-divide-could-come-to-a-city-near-you/
"That city is still there, but with its forced amalgamation of municipalities in 1998, the provincial goverment has bolted it to a semicircle of communities—Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough—that once defined Canada’s suburban middle class. The idea was to formalize Toronto as the economically integrated “megacity” outsiders imagined it to be."
"The fault lines had started to appear in past mayoral elections, but it took Rob Ford’s candidacy to fully reveal the schism. Suburban voters were galvanized in 2010 by the unabashed anti-elitism in his messaging. (Who but a fat cat, after all, would ride the “gravy train”?) Their activation overturned long-held assumptions about who turns out for municipal elections. More than half the residents in districts that voted Ford were first-generation immigrants; less than 30 per cent had gone to university and their average household incomes were 25 per cent lower than those in areas that swung to Ford’s closest opponent, George Smitherman. In the once-autonomous suburbs, Ford received more than double Smitherman’s vote take.
“Imagine a Rob Ford without the personal problems who makes the same promises, saying the same things again and again,” says Renan Levine, a political science professor at University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus. “That campaign strategy will be emulated by other ambitious politicians.” Horak goes a step further. “The Ford phenomenon shows us the extent to which Toronto and, I’d say, other Canadian cities are internally divided,” he says. “You can’t just wish it away, or even restructure it away. In any new structure you set up, a new Rob Ford is going to emerge.”
