Mayoral Race 2010 | torontolife.com

The comprehensive index of every blog post, magazine story and restaurant review that appears on Torontolife.com

All stories relating to mayoral race 2010

Ford and friends want a municipal by-election in Downsview. Get ready for a “referendum” on the mayor’s term so far

Maria Augimeri and Gus Cusimano

Last week, the Ontario Superior Court ruled that Maria Augimeri’s narrow Ward 9 victory (89 votes!) in last October’s municipal election was invalid because of irregularities in the voter list. City staff are saying they’ll appeal the case, but if the court’s decision stands Toronto could be heading for a by-election in North York that would be a showdown between a Rob Ford critic and a Rob Ford supporter—in this case, we’re assuming Gus Cusimano will be running again. To make the situation even more juicy, the man credited for getting Ford elected—erstwhile electoral mastermind Nick Kouvalis—has offered to run Cusiamo’s campaign, should the by-election go ahead.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Informer

Mayor May Not

February 7, 2011 | 2:22 pm

1 Comment

Where are they now? Catching up with Toronto’s former mayoral candidates

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 Informer

From the Print Edition

February 3, 2011 | 8:53 am

12 Comments

The woman behind the mayor: who is Renata Ford?

For a political wife, Renata Ford is an enigma—neither humanizing homemaker nor independent careerist. So who is she?

(Image: André Carrilho)

Renata Ford is the invisible wife. Most Torontonians caught their first glimpse of her on election night: a smiling, slender blonde, wearing a jacket constructed of leathery gold leaves and standing one step back from her triumphant husband. Immediately afterward, she disappeared from public view. Today Renata remains an enigma, the first mayoral spouse about whom almost nothing is known, including her age, background and occupation.

In Canada, the media generally regard political spouses as off limits. They are, after all, unelected and unpaid. Nowadays, as women out-earn their husbands, head up political parties and dominate graduate-school enrolment, there is less of an obligation or even an expectation for a political wife to play a public spousal role. David Miller’s wife, Jill Arthur, declined, but at least we knew she was a lawyer at the Ontario Court of Appeal.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Informer

Mayor May Not

January 21, 2011 | 4:56 pm

4 Comments

Mayoral campaign debtwatch: Rob Ford camp is $800,000 in the hole; “unity” fundraiser underwhelmed so far

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Informer

Yours to Recover

January 7, 2011 | 10:54 am

2 Comments

Sarah Thomson lands on her feet, may be gearing up to run for Parkdale seat as a McGuinty Liberal

Sarah Thomson (left) may take on NDP powerhouse Cheri Di Novo (Images: Tsar Kasim)

Hey, remember Sarah Thomson? The come-from-nowhere candidate for mayor who made us all fall in love with subways, but failed to catch on and eventually dropped out to endorse George Smitherman? With a public profile only slightly higher than the other also-rans from the mayoral race, she’s been easy to miss until now. She’d been dropping copious hints that she intended to stay in the public eye and run for another public office. Now, according to the Toronto Star, it looks like she’s found it. Thomson will be running for Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal Party in Parkdale–High Park.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Informer

The Old Normal

December 23, 2010 | 3:31 pm

2 Comments

2010 Lexicon: 11 new words that entered our vocabulary this past year

1. true belieber \troo bih-leeb-er\ n. (2010): Self-designative term adopted by mega-fans of Canadian entertainer Justin Bieber. Males identifiable by side-swept haircuts, high tops and hoodies. Females known for fierce loyalty and pathological bouts of hysteria. Natural habitat: Twitter. (See also: Bieber Fever)

2. Giambroner \jam-brohn-er\ n. (2010): Any scandal of a sexual nature that involves a couch. Named after former mayoral candidate Adam Giambrone, whose campaign for mayor of Toronto was thwarted after it was discovered that he had been engaging in horizontal activity on his office sofa with a woman who was not his live-in girlfriend. (See also: Clintonastrophe)

Read the rest of this entry »

The Informer

Mediaocracy

December 23, 2010 | 1:03 pm

1 Comment

“Man Sues Toronto Santa Claus Parade” and other Grinchy headlines from this season of peace and joy

Santa gets served: the 2010 Santa Claus Parade in Toronto (Image: Loozrboy)

Sometimes the holidays bring us closer together and teach us the true meaning of giving and togetherness. Other times, they bring out the part of us that just wants to scream and scream until our family goes away. But most of the time, our holiday freakouts are kept relatively private, and we don’t inflict our bad vibes on others—except for today, when we read the following three stories in rapid succession.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Informer

Mayor May Not

November 8, 2010 | 12:25 pm

1 Comment

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 »

The Informer

Mayor May Not

November 4, 2010 | 11:59 am

2 Comments

“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 »

The Informer

Mayor May Not

November 1, 2010 | 5:02 pm

2 Comments

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 »

The Informer

Election Whoas

October 29, 2010 | 12:05 pm

2 Comments

Amalgamation: Mike Harris’s gift that keeps on giving to Toronto conservatives

Red: voted predominantly for Smitherman. Blue: voted predominantly for Ford. Black: pre-amalgamation border of Toronto (Image: Patrick Cain)

One of the things really hit home by those maps that came out yesterday is that, as far as Toronto goes, the battle over amalgamation is still fresh in some people’s minds. When Mike Harris’s government combined the old cities that now make up Toronto, it was over the objections of the widespread “No Megacity” movement and the expressed will of the people in a referendum. Harris, of course, was never the kind of guy to let a little thing like that get in his way, so here we are, 12 years on, with the voters of the downtown core sharing a government with Etobicoke and North York. The division between the two is still as stark as ever (see map, left).

Read the rest of this entry »

The Informer

Mayor May Not

October 28, 2010 | 5:22 pm

Comments

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 Informer

Mayor May Not

October 28, 2010 | 4:46 pm

1 Comment

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 »

The Informer

Mayor May Not

October 28, 2010 | 11:13 am

15 Comments

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Informer

Election Whoas

October 27, 2010 | 4:22 pm

Comments

The Sun fluffs Ford’s numbers

There’s been quite a bit made of the fact that, with his easy victory in a high-turnout election, Rob Ford has received more votes than any other single politician in Canadian history. The Toronto Sun ran exactly that story this morning, quoting a University of Toronto academic. “‘Nobody in the history of Canada has ever gotten as many votes in any election as Rob Ford,’ said University of Toronto Professor Nelson Wiseman.”

There’s just one problem here: this isn’t true.

Read the rest of this entry »

All stories relating to mayoral race 2010

Contests

Links and Offers

Most shared stories today

The latest from across the St. Joseph Media network