Miller Just Doesn't Have It!

There is more excitement and fun watching a sponge in the kitchen sink than watching or listening to Mayor Miller.....he plays to his constituents who seem to be anti everything or anything that will disturb their tranquility.

Here's how the truly great mayors do it
Nov. 11, 2006. 01:00 AM
ROYSON JAMES

There are 38 candidates for Toronto mayor on Monday's municipal ballot. Not one of them is being pegged as "great."

Does Oakville have a great mayor in Ann Mulvale? Does Vaughan in Michael Di Biase? Or will both be turfed on Monday night?

We want it all in a mayor — visionary and facilitator, thinker and doer, smart and urbane as well as accessible and folksy, as much at home chatting up subway patrons as Bay Street bankers. So if, as expected, David Miller cruises to victory over Jane Pitfield, what would it take to make him — or any of the GTA's mayors — great?

If longevity is the standard, we have Hazel McCallion on our Mississauga doorsteps. Is it courage under fire? Then, see the heroic figure of New York's 9/11 crisis, Rudy Giuliani.

For the street-smart, wheeler-dealer salesman variety, we had our own Bad Boy Mel Lastman.

Is it wheedling money out of senior levels of government, as New York's Fiorello La Guardia was so adept at doing? Or revitalizing a city's decaying core as mayors have done in Indianapolis, New Orleans, Miami and elsewhere?

Maybe it is just being the top enchilada who is able to have business leaders write city-building cheques worth billions of dollars, like they do in Richard M. Daley's Chicago.

Or maybe it is someone with the chutzpah to do seemingly impossible things, the way Jean Drapeau propelled Montreal to host an Olympics and a World's Fair in less than a decade, forever cementing its image as an international city.

Judging by Toronto's many needs, this city could do with a touch of them all.

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