Don’t blame Mulcair for loving Toronto
There’s no harm in a little vote-pandering
There’s probably more to be read into the location of Thomas Mulcair’s latest play for votes than the comments he made there.
The NDP leader made a big production in Toronto this week of Olivia Chow’s bid to return to federal politics. Chow, you’ll recall, is the former NDP MP who lost to both John Tory and Doug Ford in the last Toronto mayoral campaign and went on to stake out a lush square of pasture at Ryerson University — that was until the sudden success of the NDP in Alberta and the subsequent shift in the polls made another federal run seem plausible.
Toronto, it seems, is in play — although this particular javelin is aimed at the Liberals rather than the Conservatives (nobody is holding out a lot of hope for Tory candidate Sabrina Zuniga in Canada’s most devoted bleeding dark heart riding of progressivism).
So here’s Mulcair in what will surely be the mostwatched race among the downtown Toronto set. It will be a fight for the leftist soul: Olivia Chow vs. Adam Vaughan. And then Mulcair goes for the Full Pander: Toronto is “Canada’s most important city.”
This is not the first time Mulcair has debased himself so thoroughly to win over such a vote-rich battleground.
“I make no bones about the fact that Toronto is Canada’s most important city. That’s a simple statement for me to make,” Mulcair told a local newspaper back in March. “It’s a simple fact. Toronto is Canada’s most important city. It’s the key driver of our economy: as Toronto goes, so will go the rest of our economy.”
But — Calgary, forgive us — Mulcair makes a valid point. The population of the Greater Toronto Area now tops six million — larger than any of the western provinces. The city alone contributes 20 per cent of the country’s GDP.
We could pick fights here by pointing out the city’s per capita GDP is a bit of a lag- gard, behind Regina, Calgary and Edmonton, respectively. But fine, fine. When Mulcair complains of the unique infrastructure problems Toronto faces he is entirely correct. Yes, all cities in Canada are facing similar kinds of problems, but the sheer size and growth of Toronto have heightened these issues to near-farcical levels.
Unlike other cities — which offer the comparatively blissful option of simply driving to a destination — it’s not feasible to use a car to get around much of Toronto anymore. Commutes have reached an absurd 80 minutes per round trip.
The Toronto Board of Trade — such organizations are usually devoted to slavish boosterism — ranked Toronto last of 19 major cities on that front.
Transit is generally the best option. Yet the cracks are beginning to show here, too.
Add to that your God-awful weather, Toronto. The air clings to your skin in the summer and cuts through your coat in the winter.
So not only is Toronto culturally myopic, it’s also become a comparatively terrible place to live. (And we hear you may be getting stuck with an Olympics, too. Have fun with that.)
The rest of Canada shouldn’t get defensive about Mulcair’s straightforward economic assessment of Toronto’s importance; we should be cheering him on. Don’t resent the equalization, folks: we should be holding aid concerts for the poor souls.
For the sake of the Canadian economy, not everyone can move to Calgary, Vancouver, or Montreal. So there’s an argument in favour of keeping Toronto on an even keel.
In the meantime, no one should hold a little vote-pandering against Mulcair; just as no one should have given Stephen Harper a hard time when, in a fit of 2012 Stampede-fuelled pique, he demonstrated a little innocent hometown pride by calling Calgary “the greatest city in the greatest country in the world.”
Except, of course, they did: “I want to work hard for all Canadian cities ... ‘I’m better than you’ is not the best way to get results,” said Mulcair at the time, when the saying of such things was more convenient.
Come to think of it, if anyone has a right to get uppity about Mulcair’s pro-Toronto diatribe, should it not be his constituents in Montreal?