Accordion City is often called Canada’s analogue to New York. While that’s true in many ways, the differences between the cities becomes starkly apparent when it comes to their mayors. New York has Michael Bloomberg (pictured above; be sure to check out the recent piece on him in The Atlantic) and we have…Rob Ford.
On matters less hypothetical, Ford can still be found wanting, whether you compare New York’s ambitious Applied Sciences Initiative to Toronto’s “Hey, Let’s put in a casino!” idea or Bloomberg’s regular use of public transit to the commandeering of two public transit buses for the football team Ford coaches, which in turn had to dump their passengers during a rainy rush hour. Bloomberg understands urban living, Ford is so anti-urban (as very well pointed out in Richard Florida’s recent op-ed in Toronto Life) that he can’t even answer the simple question “What do you love about Toronto?”
By the way, if you’re wondering what his answer was, here it is:
This is a great city. We’ve cleaned it up. There’s less graffiti than there was, obviously, a year ago. It’s a cleaner city than it was a year ago. And we’ve made this a safer city. We made it a cleaner city. Jobs are coming into the city now. So, you know what, this has been a very, very prosperous year. We had a zero per cent tax increase for the first time in 11 years last year, gave people some breathing room. I cut the $60 car tax—that’s $70 million in savings. That’s a large amount of money, when people said it couldn’t be done…
It’s the difference between the mayor of New York City and the mayor of SimCity.
And as Torontonians, it’s our fault. Those of us who voted for him — I’m not one of them — may have put him in there, but we’re all responsible for holding his feet to the fire and each one of us is responsible for his or her contribution to what makes Toronto great. Richard Florida hit the nail on the head in an email to John Lorinc:
Many Torontonians including our business leadership claim to want Toronto to be a great global city like London or New York. But they say nothing about the casino, nothing about the mayor. They just want it to somehow “happen”. I cannot understand the failure of the business community to speak out. The mayor is ruinous to them – he and his policies hinder and hamper their ability to attract talent. How do they not see this? Why don’t they speak out? Why do they acquiesce?
I hope that this issue is a topic of discussion at tonight’s TechCrunch meetup.
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it does mystify me why organizations, BIAs, citizen's groups, etc aren't coming up to the mic and declaring they do not support this mayor.
We're at the halfway point in his (hopefully last) mandate and I'm all about "let's just get the next two years over with", and try to run this city without granting the mayor any efficacy. He blew the first two years, and since we can't impeach him, let's marginalize him. Make him truly useless. Just get it over with so we can move on.