As Rocco Rossi reminded us with his surprise announcement last week, the candidates of the 2010 mayoral race, who so preoccupied Toronto’s politics watchers for nearly a year, have moved on to other things. So what have the five former frontrunners been doing since election day? Here, a quick visit with each of them.
The discerning mediavore’s take on the news of the day, from city hall to Power Ball
Where are they now? Catching up with Toronto’s former mayoral candidates
Mayoral campaign debtwatch: Rob Ford camp is $800,000 in the hole; “unity” fundraiser underwhelmed so far
Read the rest of this entry »
After the election was won and done with, we began to learn how much debt the candidates had racked up in their doomed-except-for-Rob Ford race for the mayor’s office. Then came the announcement of a “unity dinner” that was billed as a way for Toronto’s monied crowd (mostly those who know Mike Harris, who is involved in organizing the soirée) to help the candidates retire some of their debt. Just two problems: that unity dinner is having a hard time putting butts in seats, and there’s even more debt than was expected just a few months ago. For Ford alone, the debt is $800,000—that’s $150,000 more than his team guesstimated after election day.
The six things we learned when the mayoral campaign managers met to dish dirt on the election
(Image: Scot Snider from the torontolife.com Flickr pool)
Last Friday morning, the former managers of the final three big contestants in Toronto’s mayoral race all got together and dished the dirt on the long campaign. Representing Rob Ford, George Smitherman and Joe Pantalone were Nick Kouvalis, Bruce Davis and Bret Snider, respectively. (Rocco Rossi’s Bernie Morton was there, too.) There were shocking revelations, totally banal non-revelations, and then there was the stuff that was contradicted only a few hours later. Here, the six best tidbits.
Read the rest of this entry »
“Unity” dinner for mayoral candidates will help relieve campaign debts—especially Rob Ford’s
Mayor change: candidates, including the mayor-elect, are looking to help pay off their campaign debts (Image: Shaun Merritt)
After long election campaigns, there’s almost always the ugly aftermath of debt—specifically, the debts that campaigns rack up because they spent more money than they raised from supporters. Toronto’s mayoral election was no exception. But the city’s leading class (some might even call them “elites”) has an idea that might solve this fiscal problem: a fundraising “unity dinner” to help retire all the candidates’ debts. Two snags: 1) Joe Pantalone and George Smitherman don’t want to be unified with their erstwhile opponents, and 2) the event would overwhelmingly benefit Rob Ford, who is believed to have debts greater than the other candidates’ combined.
Read the rest of this entry »
A fake Twitter account leads into the dark recesses of the Ford campaign
The account header for the fictional Karen Philby
This past weekend, @QueensQuayKaren’s followers on Twitter learned that they were not chasing a cat-loving bookworm, but rather a ghost created in the dark recesses of Rob Ford’s mayoral campaign. The facts about this fictional woman came out in a pair of stories last Friday—one in Maclean’s and the other in the Globe and Mail. Basically, when Dieter Doneit-Henderson started bragging that he had a tape that would bring down Ford, campaign chief Nick Kouvalis told his junior spokesperson Fraser MacDonald to get that tape, no matter what. And that’s where the trouble started.
Read the rest of this entry »
Suburbs versus downtown: who-voted-for-whom election maps confirm what everyone already knew
Toronto election map: the darker the blue, the higher the concentration of Ford voters. Click map for more images. (Image: Patrick Cain)
The City of Toronto released its official vote counts today, and this being 2010, the first thing smart folks did was put together maps of how the various wards voted. The good people at Torontoist beat everyone else to the punch; ex–Toronto Star mappulator Patrick Cain put together some others, as well. The results confirm the basic stereotype of which wards were expected to vote for whom. The great suburban belt around the old city of Toronto voted, in many cases overwhelmingly, for Rob Ford. Meanwhile, the downtown, latte-sipping, bike-lane-and-streetcar-loving core voted, less enthusiastically, for George Smitherman.
Read the rest of this entry »
The Globe tells us how it all went wrong for George Smitherman (or, five lessons for Adam Vaughan on how not to run for mayor)
The Globe and Mail has an in-depth investigation of where everything went wrong for the mayoral campaign of George Smitherman, written by Toronto Life alum John Lorinc. There’s a lot of meat about the who, what and when of the Smitherman camp’s missteps. The piece is required reading for anyone mulling a bid for mayor in 2014 (we’re looking at you, Adam Vaughan). Here, a quick sampling of the five main lessons.
Read the rest of this entry »
Six highlights from the now-infamous “Coach Rob Ford” interview with CBC’s As It Happens
(Image: Shaun Merritt)
By now, every Torontonian with four spare minutes and an Internet connection has heard Rob Ford’s hilariously rude and weird interview with Carol Off on CBC’s As It Happens. Much has already been said about the event—Eye was incredulous, and the Post was incredulous that anyone was incredulous—but we think the interview pretty much speaks for itself. Our favourite moments are listed below, in transcript, but the full interview can be heard by clicking here.
Reaction roundup: what the world is saying about Rob Ford’s win
Read the rest of this entry »
Toronto’s mayoral election has made the news not just in Toronto and Canada, but around the world (we made the big time, or at least the Financial Times, but more on that later). So what is everyone saying? Going from local to global, here’s our roundup of what Ford’s victory means to observers.
Swing to the right: it’s a whole new Toronto as Rob Ford and many right-wingers win offices at city hall
Mayor-Elect Rob Ford (Image: Derek Shapton)
The election spanned 11 months, but counting the ballots took only a few minutes. At 8:08 p.m.—480 seconds after polls closed—CP24 declared that Rob Ford was the newly elected mayor of Toronto. Many pundits and polls predicted a late night and a tight race, but they were all proven wrong: Ford won handily with about 47 per cent of the vote, and Toronto’s rightward tilt was emphasized as a handful of prominent left-wing councillors or challengers went down in defeat. The results for Ford’s challengers more than prove it: George Smitherman nabbed 35.5 per cent; Joe Pantalone, just 12.
Read the rest of this entry »
Mo Problems, Mo Money: Ford’s scandals brought in a ton of cash, but less than Pantalone
(Image: Scott Snider, from the torontolife.com Flickr pool)
Politicians spend a lot of time and money trying to avoid scandals, except, of course, for when they don’t. The latest disclosures from the Rob Ford campaign make us wonder if all that effort was wasted. Turns out that donations to Ford surged after his various scandals hit the papers.
Read the rest of this entry »
“Rob [Ford] could commit murder on the steps of city hall and they would still vote for him”: Doug Ford, campaign manager
Doug Ford, describing the support his brother Rob Ford has in Etobicoke North, was quoted thusly this morning by the Toronto Sun: “Rob could commit murder on the steps of city hall and they would still vote for him.” There are a few problems with this notion, but the biggest—as pointed out by Alex Stoutley—is that city hall doesn’t actually have steps.
Head versus heart: Toronto’s lefties grapple with their choice—Pantalone or not-Ford?
As the campaign enters its final five days, the basic divide doesn’t seem to be changing much: Rob Ford and George Smitherman are basically tied around 40 per cent, with Joe Pantalone in a distant third with about 15 per cent. This leaves the city’s left with a problem they haven’t had in a while: deciding whether to vote their hearts and throw their support to Pantalone, or vote for Smitherman as a way of blocking Ford’s ascent.
Despite his very recent adaptation of the progressive label, Smitherman hasn’t made it easy for lefties to sign up. There was his long campaign against the Miller legacy in the early part of the campaign, the way he adopted some of Ford’s ideas (for example, his awfully similar financial plan), and his willingness to discuss privatizing certain parts of the TTC. All of this makes many lefties nervous.
Read the rest of this entry »
Final TV debate of the mayor’s race features even more shouting than normal
Last night, the three front-running candidates for the mayor’s office—Rob Ford, George Smitherman and Joe Pantalone—sat down at the Masonic Temple for their final debate before Monday’s election. At this point, both Smitherman and Ford are clearly hoping for a knockout that would end the stalemate in the polls and shove one of them clearly into the lead. Did either of them get their wish?
Read the rest of this entry »
Follow Toronto Life on Twitter, Facebook and via RSS