Tory’s not glamorous, he’s just normal
The moment polls closed in Ontario’s municipal elections Monday, CBC turned its online coverage to a woman denouncing Premier Doug Ford for chopping the size of Toronto city council.
It was unfair, she raged. It was undemocratic. It was savage. It was brutal. It was also over with, and the election had gone ahead without evidence of any permanent damage to democracy, but what would the CBC be if it couldn’t open the show with a diatribe against that horrible man who had somehow become premier?
OK, so then over to the actual results. At Jennifer Keesmaat’s headquarters they were already preparing for disappointment. Keesmaat wouldn’t be the next mayor of Toronto — not this year anyway. She’d entered late, she’d started slow, she’d made some mistakes. She was a rookie after all — it was her first political campaign after serving as the city’s chief planner.
She got a lot of attention though. John Tory may be decent, competent and reliable, but exciting he’s not.
Election nights might be the most time Tory’s wife gets to spend with her Energizer Bunny husband, who’s out at dawn and home late, seems to spend every weekend turning up at an endless parade of events, big and small, pressing the flesh and sharing his bottomless enthusiasm for the amazing wonderfulness of the city he calls home.
But likability and a decent record don’t thrill the people whose job it is to record and report events at city hall. They want excitement. Newness. Stuff that won’t make their editors yawn. For two or three lively years they had just that. Rob Ford was everything they could hope for: colourful, unpredictable, doomed. They were all over him, watching him fail, bemoaning his excesses, wondering why things couldn’t just be normal for a while. They got their wish: John Tory is entirely normal. And they quickly got bored: would a little drama be too much to ask for?
It’s a curious thing; we regularly bemoan the posturing and preening that is such a part of politics, the big talk and headline hunting, but when someone comes along who plods along trying to get things done, we moan and complain and yearn for colour and pizzazz.
Keesmaat filled that void. She had “bold ideas.” She offered “progressive proposals.” She had “vision.” She was a bright, vibrant woman running against a grey-haired former corporate executive who’s on his third or fourth career. She would cut speed limits on residential streets to reduce fatalities. She’d tear down one end of the Gardiner Expressway, because it was old and ugly and was taking up valuable land. She’d jump immediately into building the Downtown Relief Line the transit system so desperately needs. She’d start building 100,000 homes to alleviate the affordability crisis, and she’d impose a surcharge on the priciest homes (thus ensuring all three levels of government — federal, provincial and municipal — had had their kick at “the rich.”)
What she didn’t have was much of a plan to bring it about. She especially didn’t have the money, or a credible blueprint to raise it. That’s not necessarily fatal when you’re running as a left-ofcentre candidate in Toronto, where New Democrats swept downtown ridings in the recent provincial vote and where concerns about budgets are often treated with undisguised disdain. But Tory wasn’t shy about reminding audiences it was all pie in the sky until it was paid for and suggesting that Keesmaat’s ultimate proposal — getting other levels of government to give the city more money — was a wonderful fantasy that wasn’t likely to happen.
Did anyone really think Doug Ford, accused by many of slashing the size of council out of pure spite, would suddenly shower untold millions on a city he claims is a model of “dysfunctional government and … political gridlock?” The one that hounded his brother and removed his powers, handing them to the deputy mayor, Norm Kelly (who, coincidentally, lost his seat on the new, smaller council Monday).
Despite all the attention Keesmaat drew, it took just 23 minutes for CBC to declare Tory the winner. He had taken a lot of heat for refusing a one-on-one debate with the former planner, realizing it would elevate her to a higher status than other opponents and calculating that he was under no obligation to offer her more attention than she was already getting. It was a judicious move: when she conceded defeat she was drawing just 23 per cent to his 63 per cent. He might not be a thrill a minute, but voters evidently figured it was Tory’s stolid pragmatism that was more likely to produce results.
When his victory was announced, Tory — squeezed into the corner of a hotel couch, surrounded by a mob of family and friends — gave his wife a quick peck and quit staring at his phone long enough to watch results on TV.
“I don’t think John Tory enjoys anything as much as he enjoys being mayor of Toronto,” someone on a TV panel said.
He has four more years to enjoy it. Glamour will have to wait its turn.
WHEN JENNIFER KEESMAAT CONCEDED DEFEAT SHE WAS DRAWING JUST 23 PER CENT TO HIS 63 PER CENT. HE MIGHT NOT BE A THRILL A MINUTE, BUT VOTERS EVIDENTLY FIGURED IT WAS TORY’S STOLID PRAGMATISM THAT WAS MORE LIKELY TO PRODUCE RESULTS. — KELLY McPARLAND