
Not sure who to vote for in the Toronto Mayoral Election on October 27?Who can blame you, guy?! There are three whole candidates competing at a serious level, each of whom has at least one major policy point which may impact your life. To give you a sense of who’s offering what, here’s a handy, totally unbiased, election scorecard. It includes the main,
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DOUG FORD Like his brother, Doug Ford sees himself as the inheritor to some totally spurious Ontario political legacy—a kind of blue collar Camelot—because his dad was a backbench MPP for the Harris government and ran a semi-successful sticker company. Unlike his brother, Doug Ford doesn’t even seem to like people at all. He lies as if it’s a metabolic function. There’s never been a more unconvincing smile in the history of Canadian politics. “Folks.”Standout policies: A powerful business man and adhesive paper impresario, Doug Ford’s big thing is “putting taxpayer’s first.” He regards citizens as clients transacting business with Toronto, instead of human beings living here who view the city as something other than a line item impacting our own bottom-line. He wants to run the city like a business, even though reports suggest he is shitty at running his own business. He wants to cut the number of city councilors, which would be a good idea if he, and his maybe-to-be-reelected-as-councilor brother, were among those cuts.Sloganeering: DoFo’s new big thing is asking, “What’s the story Mr. Tory?” as a way of implying that front-runner John Tory has some hidden agenda. And also because “story” rhymes with “Tory.” Here are some more words that rhyme with Tory: gory, Corey, allegory, Montessori… Character: The main thing Doug Ford has going for him is that he’s the Ford who’s not Rob Ford. Or Kathy Ford. Or that cowboy-hat-wearing other brother Ford, who looks sort of like Neil Young if Neil Young was allergic to bees and then got stung by thousands of bees.
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JOHN TORYJohn Tory denies that white privilege exists, but it’s kind of hard to blame him for this. It’s like that joke about a fish being asked, “How’s the water?” and then responding, “What’s water?” John Tory is a beige wash of compromise, neither progressive enough to satisfy progressive types, nor bull-headed and overweight enough to satisfy Ford Nation types. The best that can be said for John Tory, as my girlfriend put it when she happened upon him at Dundas West Fest this summer—where he was walking around, without an entourage, looking charmingly confused and ill-at-ease among the hungover throng—is that he’s clean.Standout policies: The lynchpin of Tory’s platform is his transit plan, called SmartTrack. It’s so instrumental to his campaign that it even appears on his yard signs. The message seems clear: voting for John Tory is voting for SmartTrack. In an admittedly desperate Hail Mary play, rival candidate Olivia Chow recently tried to debunk SmartTrack’s feasibility by scribbling it on the back of a napkin during debate. Others have been more exhaustive, poking substantial holes in the plan. So the question is essentially reducible to this: if John Tory is SmartTrack, and SmartTrack is a poor, impractical plan (more like…DumbTrack), then isn’t voting for John Tory stupid?
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Character: Spoiling your ballot is a hot, new voting alternative endorsed by morons who think that they’re “sending a message” to governments that no candidates speak to them, as if there would ever be a mayoral candidate whose platform would be coming over whenever you wanted to allow you to own him at Halo, while providing all the weed and Red Stripe. Standout policies: Literally none. It’s like wiping your ass with the ballot. Except at least if you wiped your ass with the ballot, you’d have a clean asshole to show for it. Sloganeering: Again, nothing. But “spoil your ballot!” is basically short-hand for “I am an apathetic piece of trash who thinks I’m smarter than everyone ‘cause I got a 71% in OAC Calculus, and I do now, or have at one point, owned a TAKE ME TO YOUR DEALER black-light poster.”Chances: If you spoil your ballot, the chances that you are a total loser approach 100 percent.@johnsemley3000