A Lot People Are Asking The Same Question

At least those who actually turned out and did not vote for Miller and the rest of the leftists.

The same old, same old

Why does Toronto keep re-electing ineffective incumbents to council?

By CHRISTINA BLIZZARD

Good morning, weary voters. And welcome back to the People's Republic of Toronto.

Yep, here we are, along with that bastion of enlightenment -- Cuba -- the last outpost of socialism in an otherwise relatively enlightened Western world.

How else to explain the lemming like instinct that drives voters in some wards in this city to throw themselves over a steep cliff and re-elect the likes of Howard Moscoe?

What hope can we have for creative ideas and dynamic development in this city when we re-elect, time and again, a rude, hidebound, ideologically driven bully such as Moscoe? No doubt he will insist on being tsar of the TTC once again. He did such a good job last time, remember. Who can forget the wildcat transit strike? Or how former General Manager Rick Ducharme quit -- citing interference from politicians?

And what do we do? We send the clown responsible for all that back to City Hall. He had his knuckles rapped by the city's integrity commissioner for trying to bring in a hefty pay raise through the back door -- and get gets re-elected?

Oh, goodie. Four more years of transit chaos. They say you get the government you deserve. I just don't know what the rest of this once great city ever did to deserve Moscoe.

Then there are the other knee-jerk wards where you could run a Pekinese under NDP colours -- and he or she would get elected. I'm thinking of Pam McConnell in Ward 28 and Paula Fletcher in Ward 30.

Then there were races like Ward 14, where NDP Mayor David Miller anointed Gord Perks, to be his NDP yes-man. About the only place where voters showed any sense was Ward 20, where TV personality Adam Vaughan managed to defeat the previous incumbent Olivia Chow's assistant Helen Kennedy. (Let's just hope Vaughan's huge ego and his abrasive personality don't have us all wondering just what voters have wrought.)

A THOUGHTFUL MAN

Heck, even the star power of high profile former mayor John Sewell wasn't enough to defeat New Democrat Joe Mihevc in Ward 21. I don't always agree with Sewell's politics, but one thing is certain. He is a thoughtful, clever man. And Sewell's honesty as a politician is something we desperately need at City Hall right now.

What can we take from all this? First, don't forget we are stuck with this crew for four years -- not three, as was previously the case. That was a nifty perk that Premier Dalton McGuinty and his Liberals quietly slid over to municipal politicians earlier this year.

By the end of that term, they'll be making more than $100,000 -- which is more than MPPs make. That proves the argument for paying politicians more to get better candidates simply doesn't hold water. The rate at which incumbents were re-elected last night proves you simply reward mediocrity. You get exactly the same lacklustre politicians -- but you have to pay them more.

The return of all those bloc-voting New Democrats raises the issue of whether other parties shouldn't run a slate in the next municipal election. Especially with a council as large and unwieldy as Toronto's, it makes sense to have other councillors run on party lines. I'm not foolish enough to believe that there aren't politicians of all stripes already on council. But they don't vote as a group as does the NDP.

They don't necessarily have to run as Liberals or Tories. They could form one party of the combined centre-right to combat the knee-jerk voting of the left.

This city used to be dynamic. Things got done. The streets were clean. Traffic kept moving. Things weren't perfect, sure. But it seems to me that the entertainment district was a place for just that -- for fun. It wasn't a synonym for a place people go on weekends and die in hail of bullets.

But as long as council is dominated by a tunnel-visioned cabal who decide issues on dogma rather than reason, we might as well accept the fact that we're going to be a second rate city for a long time to come.