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Toronto Municipal Election 2018: Mayor’s Race

Poll-by-poll results should be out soon. I suspect there will be a pretty contiguous "non-John Tory zone" running from roughly Kensington Market to Roncesvalles - i.e. where Olivia Chow won.
 
Something I posted via FB:

My educated speculation about the likelihood of Premier Doug Ford having voted (or quietly worked behind the scenes) for Faith Goldy *might* have been vindicated: in his home poll, #33 in Ward 2, Keesmaat and Goldy *both* got 49 votes and 9.09%--an anomaly, because it's the kind of affluent-class poll (polling station: PM Harper's alma mater Richview Collegiate) where one wouldn't expect Goldy to poll so high, or (tokenly) Keesmaat to poll so low; given overall voting patterns and the poll's demographics, one might casually expect at worst a 5-10 point differential, not a tie. (Oh, and in the Ford's Weston Wood family homestead poll, Keesmaat got 45 votes/11% to Goldy's 38 votes/9%.)
 
For some reason, the "municipal left" does better in the west end. This even was the case with a North Toronto liberal rather than a west end socdem pol holding the progressive banner.
 
The poll at Rosedale United Church went approx 80% for Tory. I guess that’s no surprise since Keesmaat wanted to hike taxes for most properties in that neighbourhood by around 40%.
 
I think people have a distorted perception of where John Tory voters sit on the political spectrum and how well progressive banner-holders resonate with various Old Toronto neighbourhoods.

John Tory is the Riverdale, Leslieville, Cabbagetown, Wychwood, Oakwood, The Beaches, North Toronto demographic. All of those places voted for him in two full election cycles now. Some of them can even be considered as John Tory strongholds.

And I am very tempted to add Liberty Village and City Place to that list of neighbourhoods.
 
I think people have a distorted perception of where John Tory voters sit on the political spectrum and how well progressive banner-holders resonate with various Old Toronto neighbourhoods.

John Tory is the Riverdale, Leslieville, Cabbagetown, Wychwood, Oakwood, The Beaches, North Toronto demographic. All of those places voted for him in two full election cycles now. Some of them can even be considered as John Tory strongholds.

And I am very tempted to add Liberty Village and City Place to that list of neighbourhoods.
From my perspective moderate people are at least ok with John Tory, even if he is slightly right leaning by Toronto standards. The people who claim he is a competent version of Rob Ford I think don't want to admit that they are not in the mainstream of politics.
 
From my perspective moderate people are at least ok with John Tory, even if he is slightly right leaning by Toronto standards. The people who claim he is a competent version of Rob Ford I think don't want to admit that they are not in the mainstream of politics.

A quarter of the vote for Keesmaat/Saron may be low, but it isn't inherently "not in the mainstream". If you were speaking of Saron *alone*, you might have a point; but...

And on that note, you might as well claim that *all* fashionable political opinionating is "not in the mainstream". Even that within so-called mainstream media.
 
https://www.thestar.com/amp/news/to...can-thank-doug-ford-for-that-experts-say.html

Agree or disagree?

From my perspective moderate people are at least ok with John Tory, even if he is slightly right leaning by Toronto standards. The people who claim he is a competent version of Rob Ford I think don't want to admit that they are not in the mainstream of politics.

I consider myself somewhere in the middle and I was happy that Tory got such broad support.
 
A quarter of the vote for Keesmaat/Saron may be low, but it isn't inherently "not in the mainstream". If you were speaking of Saron *alone*, you might have a point; but...

And on that note, you might as well claim that *all* fashionable political opinionating is "not in the mainstream". Even that within so-called mainstream media.

Actually, as I think of it, the truly fatal "not in the mainstream" move Keesmaat made was at the very beginning: hooking herself into the heat-of-the-moment "Province of Toronto" separatist trope. And she never really shook off the one-note impression left by that campaign debut, even if she backed away from that rhetoric on behalf of a more "balanced" platform that wasn't really *too* different from what Tory was offering, gestures like Gardiner teardown notwithstanding...
 
I think Keesmaat might have suffered from a fundamental disconnect between the city-building aspirations she expressed and her unwillingness to talk candidly about how she proposed to pay for them. Her revenue platform was:

1. Raise around $80 million a year by hiking property taxes for around 4000 households by approximately 40%;
2. Promise to hold the Tory inflation ceiling for everybody else’s property taxes;
3. Mention other revenue tools in a non-threating and non-specific way; and
4. Assert that by some magic, we’d get more funding from higher-level governments if she were mayor.

It wasn’t a particularly honest or coherent package. In fact, dare I use the analogy, it looked like it had been sketched on the back of a cocktail napkin.
 
I think Keesmaat might have suffered from a fundamental disconnect between the city-building aspirations she expressed and her unwillingness to talk candidly about how she proposed to pay for them. Her revenue platform was:

1. Raise around $80 million a year by hiking property taxes for around 4000 households by approximately 40%;
2. Promise to hold the Tory inflation ceiling for everybody else’s property taxes;
3. Mention other revenue tools in a non-threating and non-specific way; and
4. Assert that by some magic, we’d get more funding from higher-level governments if she were mayor.

It wasn’t a particularly honest or coherent package. In fact, dare I use the analogy, it looked like it had been sketched on the back of a cocktail napkin.

Let's not kid ourselves - being vague and unwilling to talk candidly about finances never stopped Tory - or anyone else from getting elected in this town (I mean, look at Smarttrack and SSE). I don't think she ever had a chance of being competitive in a race with a bland but relatively controversy-free incumbent mayor. The devil that you know - and he isn't even close to being a devil...

As to Tory, I think he is the contemporary version of Art Eggleton (and I don't mean it as a compliment). Timid, unimaginative, presiding over period of economic expansion and ultimately did nothing much worth of note.

AoD
 
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