Our friends at Torontoist may have coined the best term for post–provincial election analysis:a post-boretem.By all accounts, this election wasn’t terribly exciting stuff.(Voter turnout is sufficient proof of that.) But there are a few other reasons things turned out the way they did last night—reasons Tim Hudak couldn’t make gains in Toronto,or Dalton McGuinty managed to stay in office despite his opponents having ample ammunition to turn the tide against him. With that in mind, we look at five theories offered up today by the Toronto press corps on what transpired last night—from the Rob Ford factorto broken-down campaign buses—after the jump.
Tim Hudak is riding in the back of an RV, a big, bouncy RV wrapped in an enormous picture of his smiling face, and he’s coming to see you. He’s really happy. So happy that he’s tweeting about it on his BlackBerry. “Outstanding,” he types, and, “On my way…” Now he’s peering out the front window, over the driver’s shoulder, toward one of the event venues where he’s going to meet you. “Shit, has this thing started?” He doesn’t want to be late. He wants to look you in the eyes and tell you what he thinks, and he wants to listen to you, too. The whole big meet-and-greet ball of wax: he loves it. This is who he is. “It gets in your blood, right?” he asks. Although that’s not actually a question. Putting “right?” at the end of certain things he says is just Tim Hudak’s way. “You are who you are, right?” he says. “I’m Tim Hudak.”
Two city councillors have an idea to increase city revenues and—oh, wait, forget it.Councillors Josh Matlow and Doug Holyday both made calls for the city to consider adding tolls to Toronto roads.The Toronto Sunreports that Matlow said his idea could be an answer to the mayor’s repeated call for someone—anyone—to propose something other than service cuts as a way to balance the city’s books.But Rob Ford said that tolls hurt the economy and cause congestion (surprise, surprise).Both motions were defeated.Read the entire story [Toronto Sun] »
Given the amount of chatter generated by Dalton McGuinty’serratic hand gestures last night, it would seem that the provincial election leader’s debate was the uninspiring affair that most suggested it would be.Aside from a few exciting moments and a couple of strange ones (like Andrea Horwath’s locker room anecdote), the debate was predictable enough to get any viewer properly buzzed—and we don’t mean on the political intrigue. Of course, even if uneventful, the debate could still play an important role in the final stretch of the campaign. With that in mind, we give you our summation of the ink that’s been spilled on the subject, after the jump.
The reasons to abandon the overcrowded, overpriced, not-so-livable city are beginning to outnumber the reasons to stay. More and more of us are tempted by the 905 and beyond. Screw Jane Jacobs. We’re outta here By Philip Preville | Photography by Stephanie Noritz
Brian Porter and Carrie Low thought they’d hatched the perfect plan to avoid the eight-lane gridlock they faced every week on their drive to the family cottage in the Kawarthas. Porter, a soft-spoken 41-year-old Toronto firefighter, would arrange his work schedule to be home on Friday. He’d pack the car at noon and pick up his daughters, Lily and Amelia, from daycare shortly after lunch. Then, rather than head from their home in the Beach to pick up Low downtown, he’d drive to a strategic pit stop in Oshawa. Low, a slim 41-year-old redhead, works as a lawyer with RBC in the financial district, her days and nights packed, respectively, with meetings and paperwork. Her role in the escape plan was to get off work early and catch the GO train to Oshawa Station. Often, she’d end up working a pressure-packed day until 5 p.m. anyway, leaving Porter and the girls waiting at the station for hours. In the end they never gained that much time—it could still be a challenge to get to the cottage before nightfall. But at least they’d avoided the worst hours on the DVP and the 401.
By Kelly Pullen | Photography by Daniel Ehrenworth
Six months ago, Ontarians had barely heard of Tim Hudak. Now he’s roaring toward victory. How do you plan to overcome his lead in the polls?
If we were to knock on a hundred doors and ask people what their top concern is, they’re not going to say the polls. They’re interested in good schools, great health care and the economy. Those have been our priorities for eight years, and we’re going to keep strengthening them.
Some would say that your legacy will be defined more by the eHealth scandal and the G20 policing fiasco.
I expect people will take the really good things and the less-than-stellar things into account, as they should.
Voters have swung to the right federally and municipally. Do you think that trend is feeding Hudak’s momentum?
The political firmament has been reorganized in some ways. But I can only be who I am, and our government can only do what it does, and that’s to continue to be informed by the values of Ontarians. You know, my dad was the MPP for Ottawa South before me. He was shovelling snow off the back deck and had a heart attack and died at age 63. When he was alive I said, “I’m never going into politics—who needs this?” But it has been incredibly rewarding to shape the future.
It’s a touch tougher to accuse the provincial Liberals of being a bunch of elitists and a touch easier to accuse them of being boring after news broke yesterday that Dalton McGuinty’s chief of staff Chris Morley ordered Liberal MPPs, candidates and staff to “decline any invitations” to TIFF events. In an internal email, Morley told Grits that the campaign should be the party’s single focus and, since “accepting invitations to TIFF plays no role in that,”candidates should forget about dropping in on screenings. The Toronto Star suggested the ban might be intended to preemptively squash any attempt from other parties to label the Liberals as elitists—but we can’t but wonder why McGuinty and co. would want to miss out on sharing in the publicity surrounding the 10-day festival, which injects $170 million into the provincial economy and generates 2,300 jobs. Read the entire story [Toronto Star] »
It’s expensive to buy property here (Image: Katrin Shumakov)
The sense of foreboding that’s lurking around Toronto’s real estate market can be distilled down to one relatively simple phenomenon: a lot of observers are concerned that prices have moved way out of equilibrium and that there’s an unavoidable correction on the horizon (economist speak for a big drop in home prices). That sense of foreboding became even more acute earlier this week with news that Toronto is the second most expensive city for homeowners in Canada (as always, Torontonians nervous about their home investments can take comfort in the fact that Vancouver is even more out of whack).
With repeat warnings that Toronto, like Vancouver, Montreal, Calgary and other Canadian cities, may (emphasis on may) be trapped in a housing bubble, signs of a softening real estate market in other cities can be something of a canary in the coal mine. So when word came out yesterday that the Vancouver housing market—one of the strongest in the country—dipped last month, we took note.
One thing that could spark a big sell-off in Toronto’s real estate market is a sharp rise in interest rates, as homeowners that were previously on the fence about selling try to cash in before the market softens. So, naturally, anyone looking to sell (or, for that matter, buy cheap) would like to get as much advance notice as possible that an interest-rate hike is coming. Well, economist Stephen Gordon issued such a warning yesterday, suggesting that the interest rate is set to increase much sooner than most observers thought.
(Image: Gluekit; D-Sisive by Melanie Moore; Shad by Christine Lim; Drake by Christian Lapid/CP Images; Airplane Boys by Justin Create)
At 3:46 a.m. on December 12, 2010, a post titled “Introducing The Weeknd” appeared on the blog of Toronto’s most famous rapper, Drake. Two songs—“What You Need” and “The Morning”—revealed a new R&B singer to the world and kick-started a rabid following. The Weeknd’s free nine-song release House of Balloons garnered 200,000 downloads in its first three weeks, and his videos have been watched on YouTube hundreds of thousands of times. It’s been a rapid rise, like that of his mentor, Drake, whose 2010 full-length debut Thank Me Later went platinum in the U.S. just over a month after its release. This is Toronto’s hip-hop moment, and the city’s steadfast identity as safe, stable and middle-class—once the basis of its lack of rap credibility—is the reason.
Not that we want to be accused of looking for clouds behind every silver lining (and yes, just today CIBC reported that Toronto’s economy is leading the country), but we’re still a little concerned about the Toronto Star’s weekend story on home prices. Economists interviewed by the Star agree that next year is going to be a bad one for home prices—it’s just a question of how bad.
One morning in late January, 1998, the Bank of Montreal CEO Matthew Barrett and Royal Bank chief John Cleghorn paid a visit to the editorial board of The Globe and Mail. They were there to sell us—a small group that included reporters, columnists, editors and me, then the Globe’s editorial page editor—on the new, borderless future for financial services, of which the proposed merger of their two banks was but the first step. They didn’t have to sell very hard.
All of us in the boardroom knew what was to come. As sure as the Railway Lands across the street would soon be filled with condo towers, so the map of global banking was about to be redrawn. Deregulation was picking up speed. Borders were going to be erased. Rules, such as the one preventing foreign ownership of Canadian chartered banks, would be rewritten. A handful of giant transnational banks would soon be headed for our shores. “We want to try to survive in the next century,” Cleghorn told us. RBC and BMO couldn’t afford to be “standing on the sidelines, watching the parade go by,” added Barrett. We all know how the story ended: then–finance minister Paul Martin didn’t let anyone join the parade, including intended partners CIBC and TD, a decision that infuriated the banks, but one they’d thank him for when the financial crisis hit.
Jim Flaherty is a pugnacious little jerk. Short in stature, he has the cruel eyes of a fighter, and the bent nose to go with it. Torontonians never warmed to him as a Harris-era minister at Queen’s Park, and many were unpleasantly surprised when, in 2006, he was elected to Ottawa and became Stephen Harper’s finance minister. Then he weasled his way into our good graces.
It’s interesting—in the “kind of weird” sense of the term—that an academic debate hosted by the University of Toronto garners the attention that it does. Nonetheless, the Munk Debates have somehow managed to make a splash on the international scene (which is exactly the sort of splash Toronto cares about). Whether the subject is the environment or atheism, the foreign press corps takes note, and the next debate should be no different, as Henry Kissinger and Fareed Zakaria square off against Niall Ferguson and David Daokui Li over whether the 21st century will belong to China. Given the stodgy, prim and proper environs, those in attendance will probably be painfully polite—but we’re still holding out hope for some fireworks. A small wish list after the jump.
1. Someone brings up Rising Sun
It may be a distant memory now, but back in the early 1990s, plenty of smart people thought that Japan would supplant the U.S. as the world’s biggest superpower. One real-estate bubble—and resultant economic collapse—later, and Japan’s economy has spent nearly 20 years underperforming. It makes the entire genre of Japan’s-coming-to-eat-our-lunch fiction look rather silly.
2. Someone brings up Wilfrid Laurier
If the supposed best and brightest couldn’t predict the future two decades ago, they probably shouldn’t attempt a century’s worth of guessing. Seriously: predicting how the 21st century is going to pan out in 2011 is about as hubristic as saying, in 1904, that Canada would “fill the 20th century.”
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Six months ago, Ontarians had barely heard of Tim Hudak. Now he’s roaring toward victory. How do you plan to overcome his lead in the polls?
