Why I Don't Live in Toronto

Well, in addition to this view from outside my parents' front door in suburban Burlington yesterday morning, there is the fact that Rob Ford continues to serve as mayor--if in name only. Following a brief break, Toronto City Council was back in session beginning this Monday, with Speaker Frances Nunziata calling for a return to more civil discourse. The civility lasted all of a minute, with Mayor Ford once again leading the show, calling fellow councillors corrupt, getting into an argument with another about voting procedures, dancing in council chambers, and issuing an impromptu apology to Toronto Star reporter Daniel Dale for insinuating last year that he was a pedophile. Read all the details here.

Last night we went to a holiday concert at my niece Erika's high school in Oshawa. She's in a special performing arts program, and judging by last night's offerings, its vocal and musical programs are very rich. 

Today we're finally going in to the belly of the beast itself, with a planned visit by me and Erika (who's been allowed to skip school because her favourite uncle's in town) to the David Cronenberg show at the TIFF Lightbox, and then an evening performance of the musical Once, currently playing at the Royal Alex.

Home tomorrow, weather and flight schedules permitting.

P.

The Grade on Guns

Following the performative posturing that was yesterday's photo op between Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Toronto Mayor Rob Ford on gun violence in Canadian cities, a salutary intervention by my colleague, David Chariandy, into the recent shootings in Scarborough and those who would seek to dismiss or de-complexify the politics of disenfranchisement and the economics of disadvantage that are always part of the equation of crime and/in racial minority communities. Click here to read more.

Then, too, following upon recent events in Colorado, and especially President Obama's rote platitudes and outright refusal to open up a conversation about gun control in the US, made me think how prescient a recent episode of Aaron Sorkin's amazing new series, The Newsroom, was. In it, the recently re-galvanized prime time anchor, Will McAvoy (played by the brilliant Jeff Daniels), decides to take on the gun lobby and their political and media pundit apologists. He does so by excerpting a series of clips in which people like Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh decry the limits that Obama is surely going to place on Americans' right to bear arms; this is then followed by a scorecard from the Brady Campaign (an initiative begun by the wife of Jim Brady, the White House Press Secretary shot during John Hinkley's assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan) tallying the Obama administration's performance on a number of key issues related to tighter regulation of guns. On all counts, as McAvoy, points out, Obama receives a failing grade.

Michael Bloomberg, a mayor several thousand times smarter (and thinner and richer) than Rob Ford, tried to open up and honest and enlightened debate by suggesting that gun control become a major issue of the upcoming presidential campaign. But Obama refused to bite. I don't get it. Would alienating the gun lobby really lose him that many more votes? And how many more might he gain? I don't know if Sorkin, whose series is so-far pulling its plots from real-world headlines (most recently the Arab Spring), will catch up to or plan to intervene into this fall's presidential campaign. But thank heavens he's back on television and giving us, as with The West Wing, an imagined political discourse we might one day aspire to north and south of the 49th parallel.

P.

The Suburban Vote

Is there any greater argument against metropolitan amalgamation than the election last night of Rob Ford as mayor of Toronto? First Mel Lastman, and now this?!

And I thought Michael Bloomberg buying a third term in New York was a travesty of civic politics.

As Torontonians were going to the polls to cast the majority of their votes for Ford, Naheed Nenshi was being sworn in as the first visible minority (and Muslim) mayor of Calgary. Poor Toronto, we hardly knew you...

P.