Newly elected Mayor Olivia Chow waves to the crowd at council chambers during her Declaration of Office Ceremony, at Toronto City Hall on July 12, 2023. Photo by Tijana Martin /The Canadian Press
The mayor still speaks English with that Chinglish accent from Hong Kong. Everyone likes Olivia.
Honestly, I wouldn't get my hope up. It's not like she's bad or anything, but she is going to fight an uphill battle.
First of all, she is not serving a whole term, but the remainder of the previous mayor, who resigned in disgrace over extra-marital affair. Mind you, the real reason why he was even elected in the first place was that he was milquetoast enough to not really offend anybody and that
he didn't smoke crack cocaine, and was re-elected because his main opponent that election basically entered last minute and had no preparation. What that means is that she has less time to plan and carry out her vision.
Aside from no full-term, she is operating in a completely hostile enviroment. Electorally, Toronto can be divided into two parts: the pre-amalgation City of Toronto and Borough of East York, which usually leans left to centre-left, and inner-suburban belt of Etobicoke, York, North York, and Scarborough, which usually leans centre-right. Since she is a New Democrat (social democracy to vaguely socialist party. Not that her political affiliation was on the ballot, but this is public knowledge), guess which part didn't actually vote for her? In addition to that, there is no left-wing (not even cenre-left) mainstream media in Canada anymore. That means everything she does will be under the microscope, that is assuming it's even done in good faith. For example, the infamous crack-smoking mayor actually held an event where he invited the Chinese consulate staffs and raised the Five-star Red Banner over Nathan Phillips Square (city hall) while playing "March of the Volunteers", for... I don't even know what. Business promotion? Tourism? While there were some eyebrow-raising, nothing bad really happened to him over that, all because he is
right-wing good ol' Canadian boy who is down to earth. Imagine Olivia Chow doing the same thing. There would be all sort of sh*t like "CCP Agent" or "traitor" or "go back to China" or "ch*nk" flying around, not that she's actually pro-China, mind you. Even if she is, the optics would be totally dogsh*t were she to try something similar.
The most important thing, and the primary reason why I am not having high hope for her term, is that the current provincial government is completely hostile to Toronto. Remember the crack-smoking mayor? He has a brother, who is now the premier of
Toronto Ontario, and he has a vendetta agaitst Toronto (specifically the city council). Now, the Supreme Court of Canada has reminded us that "cities are creatures of Provinces", which means a provincial goverrnment can do a lot of arbitrary things to a city without recourse, such as altering the rules for municipal election right before it actually began, or taking random stuff away from a city, etc. etc.. All it really requires is an act of
provincial legislative assembly, and the city, and its populace, can do nothing about it.
Taken to its logical conclusion, it means our esteemed premier of
Toronto Ontario can actually actually ignore the mayor and the city council completely. He could say something like:
Folks, the downtown elites have gone out of control. Crimes are happening in broad daylight. Small business owners in Toronto are begging me for help, but the thug-hugging city council is blocking police from doing their job. And in their open war on cars, they are ripping up roads used by ordinary, hard-working Torontonians getting to and from their workplaces, and replace them with bike lanes that only the downtown elites uses.
The city council is completely out-of-touch with ordinary Torontonians, and we must stop it before it is too late. To save Toronto from the City Council, I have tabled a bill that will repeal City of Toronto Act, and place Toronto under provincial control.
Folks, with your support, we will make Toronto great again!
and with his majority in the legislative assembly, he can actually ram the said bill through. And there won't be a mayor of Toronto anymore. Of course, the federal government can always override the province... in theory (disallowance). In practice, it's probably not happening because that power hasn't been used in a long time. Depending on the prime minister, some may not have the will to use it.
Of course, that is an extreme example
and that's probably not the way Doug Ford actually speaks, but it illustrates that what people imagines Canadian democracy works and how it actually works are completely different things, and they bear a tenuous relationship with each other. After all, constitutionally, there are only the provinces and the
confederation, anything else is optional extra.
So yeah, no high hope.
Olivia Chow has been pilloried as soft on crime, soft on drugs, soft on refugees, and as a tax and spend socialist. She was already being blamed for the supposed increased in crime by her supposed strongest opponent in the Mayoral race which was Police Chief Stupid Saunders. His people was going house to house essentially painting Olivia Chow as the embodiment of what's plaguing the city of Toronto. Good luck to her and I hope she does a good job in her capacity as Mayor. John Tory (who resigned as Mayor due to his grandfatherly fling blaming it on Covid-19) spend a decade or so as Mayor of Toronto and he was from a conservative wing of the political spectrum, plus he was also coming from the business world having been the former CEO of Rogers Media (one of the biggest media corp in Canada) and I am not sure what's his actual legacy for the city. Other people on this forum that's living in Toronto can answer that since my view on the guy is somewhat mixed.
Yeah, pretty much. Her "sin" is that she is an NDPer in a city filled with "f*ck you, I got mine" type, in a province that has a lot of "own the libs" type outside of the cities.
I thought mayor Tory was bad.
Tory only wanted the power. Never seem like he gave a crap about doing a good job.
Property taxes never stopped going up under his megalomaniac rein.
He was not a conservative. He was just plain power hungry, and would do anything to grab that power.
I mean, one thing that got him re-elected in the first place (aside from incumbency advantage, Keesmaat running a last-minute, shoddily prepared campaign, and F*ith G*ldy stealing the headlines) was that he kept the property tax rise below the rate of inflation. I believe he ran on that point in his campaign. The whole crack cocaine saga really distorted what is considered acceptable performance in Toronto.
I vaguely remembered a political stunt pulled by the left-leaning city councillors in the budget debate, where they line-itemed all the potential increase in public service and its impact on the property tax rate (some hilariously small number), and proposed each and every one of those services individually, so that Tory and the right-leaning councillors will be on the record for voting against those services. Nobody really cared at the end, but hey, my dude kept the property tax down or something. Don't worry about services being cut, or that the TTC is literally falling apart from years of neglect, it's not real /s.
