Next month marks the second anniversary of the election of David Miller and the current Toronto City Council. Next January the campaign for the 2006 municipal elections will get underway in earnest.
It is virtually impossible to defeat an incumbent city councillor during a bid for re-election. Voter turnout is small. Many Torontonians, especially renters who pay for many city services indirectly, do not even know who their local councillor is. If a councillor can do a half decent job, help a few of his or her constituents to the extent that they will be appreciative and bother turning up at the polls, their re-election is in the bag. Often times, several names are on the ballot with the incumbent being the only recognizable name. and with no formal party affiliations at City Hall, the desire to get rid of a party regardless of who the elected official is does not arise.
It is practically unheard of for an incumbent mayor to be defeated. More often than not, while there are a long list of colourful mayoralty candidates such as Rosy the Clown, Enza the Supermodel and the late Ben Kerr, incumbent mayors are rarely challenged by a serious contender. But these are unusual times and 2006 could be different.
David Miller ran in the 2003 election on essentially one issue — stopping construction of the bridge to the island. Other than that, to his credit, he promised very little unlike the other 2 "Ms", Paul Martin and Dalton McGuinty who made many election promises that they knew or should have known they couldn’t keep. In addition to the bridge, David Miller brought along his trusty broom and promised to clean up City Hall and make it more open and accessible. Ha!
Pam Coburn, the director of municipal licensing and standards, together with her second in command, Joseph Carnavale, a.k.a her special friend, were both fired this week. Despite the preoccupation of whether or not Coburn had sex with that man, Mr. Carnavale, the two were fired for improper hiring practices; providing friends of Carnavale (whether or not these were special friends, we do not know) with city jobs. The City of Toronto is rife with nepotism and cronyism and it is only a matter of time before we will get the answer to the $64,000 question--just how many Pantelones does it take to run the city?
When it came out that Deputy Mayor Joe Pantelone had numerous relatives that had obtained employment with the city, neither Mayor David Miller nor his trusty broom seemed to think that it was a big deal. David Miller, for all his anti-corruption talk, doesn’t act--he reacts but only if he has to.
Miller also showed little concern about the fact that while Justice Denise Bellamy was at her farm working on her report on the MFP scandal, councillors were still openly accepting freebees such as attendance at Toronto Raptors games from contractors who were looking for work from the city--the same type of conduct that was led to the MFP mess in the first place. While the corruption, cronyism and nepotism that is all around City Hall is not Miller’s fault, he seems to shrug a lot of these practices off as simply the way things are done.
another issue that Miller is vulnerable on is violent crime. His only interest in law and order was to get rid of Chief Julian Fantino and replace him with fellow group hugger, Bill Blair. Until Miller was embarrassed by the media, he had no interest in even going near the Jane/Finch corridor where much of the violence is taking place and where many young black males have lost their lives. Miller is all concerned about building more basketball courts and community centres but is completely uninterested in those who will undoubtedly die in the weeks and months to come.
It is hard to know how Torontonians will react if Miller’s re-election is contested by a serious candidate. If the sponsorship scandal is any indication, corruption at City Hall will not be enough to turf him out although people can relate easier to friends and relatives getting special treatment through jobs than they can to the spending of hundreds of millions of dollars. But if the violent crime continues; especially if there are more innocent 4-year-olds or Louise Russos shot, Miller could be vulnerable in 2006.
Only time will tell.
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