Canadian Cincinnatus

An Interesting Insight Provided by Jian Ghomeshi

For those readers not from Canada, Jian Ghomeshi was until recently the darling of the CBC thanks to his successful radio show, Q. The CBC doesn't stand for the Communist Broadcasting Corporation, but rather the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, a quasi-government entity that receives about a billion tax payer dollars a year even though it run adds like crazy and brings us high brow programming like Jeopardy on CBC TV.

The recent crisis that has sent every liberal pundit to their fainting couches is that it turns out their darling likes hitting women during sex, whether they ask for it or not. His defense is that they asked for it, which several of his accusers (up to nine now) say is not true, that they were sucker punched and worse.

I didn't really care about this sad and tawdry tale, even when it emerged that the level of left-wing hypocrisy scaled epic heights. Apparently back in his York University days, Ghomeshi won an election to become student president by vowing to put women's rights and respect for women first. He certainly isn't the first politician to promise one thing while secretly doing the opposite. When it was revealed that the CBC had received harassment complaints over a year ago and swept them under the rug, that didn't surprise me either. They would never have let Rob Ford get away with grabbing someone's butt, but Ghomeshi was outwardly one of them.

But what really got me interested in this affair is when a commenter on the National Post recommended looking at the photos of the launch party for Ghomeshi's book entitled, 1982. Let's see who's who at a downtown Toronto book launch: Justin Trudeau, Olivia Chow, Kelly Cutrone who runs the PR firm People's Revolution (I'll give you one guess as to which way she leans politically)

You can see pretty much the same photos on the Globe and Mail's sight here, but when I first googled it I also saw images that included Margaret Atwood and Rick Mercer, another CBC stalwart. My guess is that anybody who was anybody ON THE LEFT was at that party. I'm guessing that invitations for Rob Ford, Tim Hudak and Stephen Harper got lost in the mail. Okay, sarcasm aside, what I've learned thanks to Jian Ghomeshi is what a closed little social clique they have going on at the CBC.

Which makes you wonder: how objectively are they reporting the news when they're all busy attending the same barbecues and book launches with liberal leaders and aspiring socialist mayors? Of course they're not. We all know the CBC has a distinctly left-wing slant to every article. The photos of Jian Ghomeshi's book launch party just confirm the bias that is so obvious in the news cycle.

I'm sure that Justin Trudeau and pretty much everyone else at that party of preeners wishes they could have those photos scrubbed from the internet, because it makes them look gullible to have been fooled. But they shouldn't feel bad about not knowing the CBC was harboring a violent and abusive man. They should, however, consider stepping outside their comfort zone and going to Rob Ford's annaul BBQ next year. People on the right can be fun at a party too, and maybe they can break out of the downtown group think. Ghomeshi proved what the intelligentsia don't like to admit: just because you're left in your politics, doesn't mean you're a good person.

Mike Downtown

The two most important people in Toronto’s mayoral election are not on the ballot

There is an interesting dynamic at play in Toronto’s mayoral race, and it has manifested itself in a recent poll. Rob Ford’s brother Doug has now pulled neck-and-neck with the frontrunner, John Tory.

The two important people not in the race? Former Mayor David Miller and current Mayor Rob Ford. Why are they the most important people even though they are not running for office? Because many voters are basing their decision on getting (or avoiding) the next David Miller or next Rob Ford.

To people not from Toronto, Rob Ford needs no introduction. He excites all the right people in all the wrong ways, the same way that Sarah Palin does. By right people, I mean the white, liberal intelligentsia, who mostly live downtown. They Hate Rob Ford. While their ideal candidate in this election is, or would be, Olivia Chow - an extreme-left former Toronto City councillor who represented a downtown ward - their number one goal is not re-electing Rob Ford. But now that Rob Ford has stepped down because of cancer, this translates into not electing his brother Doug. Because Olivia is stuck in the 20% range, they are flocking to front-runner John Tory as their second choice. My sometime guest-blogger, Mike Downtown, tells me of a number of urban trendies in his circle of acquaintance who plan on holding their nose and voting for Tory.

On the other hand, the people in the suburbs don’t fear the next Rob Ford so much as they fear the next David Miller. While he didn’t make a spectacle of himself on the Jimmy Kimmel Show, Miller did incalculable damage to Toronto, specifically with tax hikes, insane traffic-snarling projects like the St Clair Streetcar Right-of-Way, and a complete screw-up of Toronto’s garbage collection system. To my American readers, the best American analog of David Miller is New York Mayor Bill de Blasio: he looks like a CEO, he talks like a CEO, but he’s really a Marxist.

When I first heard that Olivia Chow wanted to be mayor, I confess I was scared. I knew of her hard-left past of course, but I also was afraid that Torontonians of Chinese background might want to elect Toronto’s first Chinese mayor. In the last election, they - Toronto’s largest ethnic group by far - backed Rob Ford. (In Toronto, ethnic groups and immigrants live in the suburbs and tend to be center-right, at least municipally.) But it turns out, I didn’t have to worry. I wasn’t the only one afraid of the next David Miller. Seven years of Miller was enough and most people think Olivia Chow wants to be the next David Miller.

When Chow looked like a credible threat, mainstream voters flocked to Tory. To my American readers, the best analogue of John Tory is Mitt Romney, minus the business acumen: a bland, centrist cipher, who wants to be a political leader but lacks the touch. But now that Chow has tanked, many Fordanatics feel free to flock back to Rob Ford’s torch bearer, his brother. This is the reason, I think, for the recent uptick in Doug Ford’s support.

This is what I mean by interesting dynamic. There are three main candidates: Olivia Chow, John Tory, and Doug Ford. John Tory leads but excites no-one. In contrast, Olivia Chow and Doug Ford’s supporters are hard-core. Tory’s ranks are largely made up of people repelled by one of the other candidates, or more precisely, who one of the other candidates stands in for. As a result, Tory’s support is a mile wide but an inch deep, and this race is still in a profound state of flux. 

Brad Duguid’s endorsement of John Tory means that Toronto’s left has given up on Olivia Chow

Yesterday, Ontario Liberal cabinet minister Brad Duguid endorsed former Ontario Progressive Conservative leader John Tory for mayor of Toronto. This can only be because the left-wing candidate in the Toronto mayoral race, Olivia Chow, has fallen to third place. Right now, it is a two-way race between John Tory and Mayor Rob Ford.

Clearly, Olivia Chow is the candidate the Toronto left would like to see running City Hall, but after the debacle of David Miller (Toronto’s Bill De Blasio), Torontonians are not clearly in a mood for another extremist in the mayor’s office. Nevertheless, as Toronto’s left sees it, Job One is not electing Olivia Chow, but making sure the Great Satan, Rob Ford, is not re-elected.

As the article linked to above points out, Ford and Tory are neck-and-neck, with Chow a distant third. Time for some strategic voting by Toronto’s respectable class.

John Tory’s non-position on the expansion of Toronto’s Island Airport

With regard to Porter Airlines’ bid to expand  Billy Bishop Airport to accommodate jet traffic, Mayor Rob Ford is enthusiastically in favour, extreme left-wing mayoral candidate Olivia Chow is resolutely against it, and ‘Red Tory’ mayoral candidate John Tory is, well… I’ll let him tell you in his own words:

“Mayor Ford and NDP candidate Chow will fall back to their ideological positions of "yes" or "no." But the fact is council cannot proceed with a decision until the critical questions highlighted in the report are answered. 

If somebody brought me a proposal with this many unresolved matters when I was running a business or a charity, it would have been a very brief meeting - I call on the executive committee to be brief.  Executive Committee should not vote, but rather put this important vote off until more information is in hand.”

Got that?

Hamlet for Mayor: vote John Tory!

John Tory’s focus-tested BS

During last Thursday’s mayoral debate, Toronto mayoral candidate John Tory declared that he doesn’t believe in “turning left or turning right.” Rather he believes in “moving forward.”

Who speaks like this? What does this even mean? Specifically, how does moving neither left nor right, but only going forward, have for the practical questions of the day such as: contracting out of garbage collection, property taxes, the expansion of the Island Airport, or the debate about the Scarborough subway vs. LRT?

I can’t say, but only because I think there is no answer. It is a phrase devoid of meaning that has been crafted by advertising consultants, and poll-tested to invoke a warm and fuzzy feeling in the low information voter. Unfortunately for the focus-grouped politician, because it is completely insubstantial, it is also open to ridicule. It is also indefensible when challenged. An American example was George H W Bush’s, “a thousand points of light”, ridiculed (justly) by Neil Young in his song, “Rockin’ In the Free World.”

You know, if you are a political candidate and you are presented with a slogan by your campaign, it is a good test to ask yourself, do ordinary people talk like this? If not, don’t talk like it either.

This is one of Rob Ford’s secrets as a master communicator (and yes, he is a master communicator). He doesn’t spew out bafflegab like this. He talks like an ordinary person using plain language everybody can relate to. This is one of the keys to his popularity, and what allows him to survive scandals the size of tactical nuclear wars. It is also what allows him to differentiate himself from phony slicksters like failed Ontario Progressive Conservative Party leader John Tory.

 

A great campaign strategist aligns with a dumb politician

The strategist is Nick Kouvalis, the incompetent politician is John Tory. According to the Toronto Sun:

“The man behind Mayor Rob Ford's winning 2010 campaign is poised to work against him this year.

Nick Kouvalis will be working for John Tory's mayoralty campaign if the radio host and former Ontario Progressive Conservative leader decides to run, a source told the Sun.”

Two years ago, I attended a seminar at the Manning Networking Conference on political strategy led by Kouvalis, Tom Long (Mike Harris’s architect) and Guy Giorno (Stephen Harper’s former Chief of Staff). I left that session riding a mile high. I thought: so there are campaign strategists out there on our side who actual do Get It. They’re not all a bunch of pathetic, lame-o Red Tory appeasers.

“Kouvalis helped Ford sweep into the mayor's office in 2010 and served as his chief of staff for the first few months of his term.”

Rob Ford’s 2010 campaign was one of the most perfectly run political campaigns I have ever witnessed. It was the Six-Day War of politics. Prior to 2010, whenever strategists intoned that message discipline was one of the most important factors in campaigning, that the only way to get your message across to the people is to repeat it endlessly and refrain from getting sidetracked on peripheral matters, I said yeah, yeah, but I didn’t really Get It. Rob Ford’s “stop the gravy train” message changed that. It permeated every aspect of Toronto’s culture. Even the most thoroughly apolitical were well versed in it. I said, oh, so that’s what you guys meant. 

“Reached for comment on Wednesday, Kouvalis would only confirm that he believes Tory - who lost the 2003 mayor's race to David Miller - can win the 2014 election.

‘John Tory can win this election because he is fiscally conservative, can get support for his plans and get the votes through council,’ Kouvalis said.” 

Kouvalis is a very smart guy, one of best in politics. But he is dead wrong here. In 2003 I also thought Tory was a competent politician. But his bumbling, disastrous reign as head of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party forever dispelled me of that notion, and it should have done the same for Kouvalis and any other sentient being. I could write articles about Tory’s bumbling (and I have: here and here), but suffice it to say, John Tory’s performance was so breathtakingly incompetent, on so many different levels, that he forever disqualified himself in my eyes as a viable candidate for any office. I think he is possibly the most incompetent conservative politician that I know of (though John Boehner is currently making a good run for that title).

By propping up a useless candidate with a brilliant campaign manager, all Kouvalis will succeed in doing is to convert an also-ran joke into a spoiler. Thanks to this misalignment of the stars, Olivia Chow may be able to sneak into office from the left.

And then, the residents of Toronto had better start praying.

How Rob Ford Can Win the Next Election in Toronto

The Toronto Star is breathless in their excitment because Police Chief Bill Blair says that there is a video of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford doing...something. The sharks are circling, smelling blood in the water, but Rob Ford could climb out from under all of this slime with one statement to the press, followed by a lot of honest hard work. What follows is my proposal for a press statement, but keep in mind, I wrote this, not Rob Ford. I have no idea what his habits are or what he's thinking. Here's what I believe he should stand up and say to Toronto:

Folks, I have an addiction problem. It's alcohol. While under the influence of alcohol, I have had black out periods, which some people have used to manipulate and incriminate me in hopes of blackmailing me or selling the story to the media for substantial profit. It saddens me that some of these individuals are young men who initially reached out to me for help.

Many cultures are aware of the dangers of alcohol, and I must admit that I have been blind to the damage it has done to me while I was in denial about my addiction. I have joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and I will attend meetings. Obviously I can't invite the press to these meetings to protect the identity of other members. I will, however, ask AA to designate a representative to keep the media informed about my progress.

I've read that the eigth step of this journay will be to apologize to those I have wronged, and while I have a long way to go before I can reach that eighth step, I would like to take a moment apologize to my family for the times I have not been home while out drinking, and to my staff for the extra work and stress I have caused them. They have all been very supportive.

I will be returning to City Hall on Monday morning because I feel the best way I can fight this addiction is to work, and I especially look forward to the rewarding work of continuing to reduce the taxes paid by the citizens of Toronto.

I would ask the media to not hunt around my backyard or ambush me in my driveway in the future. My home is my refuge from the stress of work, and I need that peace more than ever as I come to terms with this affliction.

This will be a long and difficult road, but I with the support of my friends and family and the good citizens of Toronto, I know I can beat this addiction, and together we can do great things for Toronto.

End statement.

Please note so I don't get sued: I made this statement up. I have no idea how much Rob Ford actually drinks or whether he is an alcoholic.

This statement would, however, answer a lot of questions for voters and would put Rob Ford in a positive light, as a hero struggling with an addiction, one who has suffered unprecedented scrutiny and stress as mayor of Toronto at the hands of the Toronto Star and the CBC. And here's the best part: if he's not an alcoholic, swearing off drinking will be easy. If he is an alcoholic, joining AA will extend his life and make him a happier, healthier person.

Is this a cynical Machiavellian political move? It depends upon how much Ford drinks. Since the Star likes to carefully document every time he appears tipsy at a city event, it certainly wouldn't surprise anyone if he announced that he had a drinking problem.

Of course the sharks at the Star and CBC will still circle, but any further attacks will make them look like intolerant bullies. Left wing councillors who don't offer their support for his efforts at reform will be percieved as mean spirited. In one press statement, all of Rob Ford's opponents in the media and on council will be utterly gutted.

But of course the hard work is that Rob Ford would have to follow through, join AA whether he thinks he's an alcoholic or not, and stay dry. The press conference will be the easiest part.

Mike Downtown