WhatFinger


Redneck Rob Ford, Tea Party, Carl Paladino, Christine O'Donnell

Toronto bellwether for American midterms?



imageMy colleague, Arthur Weinreb, Canada Free Press (CFP) Associate Editor and columnist, is right on the bulls-eye in writing that “Americans would do well to watch Toronto’s elections”. Torontonians have finally had it with the wasteful pious socialists running Canada’s largest city into the ground just as Americans have had it with big-spending big government in DC.

Support Canada Free Press


Municipal Election Day in Ontario is Oct. 25, just eight days before American midterms, and the Toronto mayoralty (mercifully) is now conservative Councillor Rob Ford’s to lose. Weinreb’s theory is that if Toronto can end up with Ford as mayor, then the US can certainly end up with a Senator Christine O’Donnell and a Governor Carl Paladino. It’s been decades since socialist sour Toronto had a small `c’ conservative mayor and now “RedNeck Rob” (what the lib/left call him) is heading down the pike some 28 points ahead of closest opponent former Ontario Liberal Cabinet Minister MPP George Smitherman. The first thing I said when Weinreb called me in Nova Scotia to say that some 38 Ontario conservatives--including three former provincial Tory Cabinet ministers, two senators and a regional vice president of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party--had signed a letter endorsing Liberal Smitherman was: “How American!” Just like their American counterparts, the Canadian right (what little exists), continue to eat their young. The victory of Christine O’Donnell proved that no one gets past the sentry of the self-proclaimed Republican elite. For Rob Ford, howls of protest louder than the socialists are being raised by his “fellow” conservatives. Lawyer Ralph Lean, the Canadian equivalent of Karl Rove, was one of the co-signers of the Smitherman endorsement letter. At least he’s not and has never been a politician, but only a campaign strategist. To my way of thinking, the 38 conservatives, including cabinet ministers and senators are still politicians--complete with the arrogance of trying to exert their influence on voters even though long out of office, not to mention even voters' memories. Not only do politicians get to tell the unwashed masses what to eat, what to drive, how to heat their homes, they believe they have a life-time right to advise folk how to vote. Conservatism in both Canada and the U.S. has reached the sorry status of requiring stamps of approval from long-in-the-tooth ex-cabinet ministers and talking-head political analysts like Karl Rove over the border, whose main problem is not being conservative themselves. When people are hurting financially, the last thing they need is politicians who have ruined them dictating for whom they should vote. In some cases, latter-day conservatives are living up to the Liberal charge of their being the stay-out-of-our-big-tent elite. With Ford elected, there would be voter hope for change at the provincial level where Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty (Smitherman’s boss-man) is taxing his constituents out of house and home. “There should be a Tea Party in Toronto,” says Weinreb. Don’t think one exists in Toronto proper, but if Toronto Tea Party is up and running, CFP is here waiting to carry its message from its front page.


View Comments

Judi McLeod -- Bio and Archives -- Judi McLeod, Founder, Owner and Editor of Canada Free Press, is an award-winning journalist with more than 30 years’ experience in the print and online media. A former Toronto Sun columnist, she also worked for the Kingston Whig Standard. Her work has appeared throughout the ‘Net, including on Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.

Sponsored