Toronto Mayoral Race: Here's looking at Joe

NOW Magazine // News // Here’s looking at Joe

Excerpts from the link above:

We’re certainly no strangers to dramatic election turnarounds. In the
2003 mayor’s race, Barbara Hall fell from first to worst, and a lefty
with a vision stole the vote despite starting September with
single-digit polling numbers. 

That would be David Miller, and
mainstream media portrayals to the contrary, Miller has helmed one of
the greatest periods of municipal change in this city’s history, a
legacy that only one candidate, Pantalone, seeks to protect and expand.

As
Smitherman, Rocco Rossi and Sarah Thomson all shamelessly try to sound
more and more like Ford with irrational anti-tax, slash-and-burn
promises, only Pantalone consistently puts forward progressive and
proven positions.

It’s too early to hand this race to any
politician. Make them earn it. Pantalone has run a quiet race, too
quiet, but he’s turning up the volume, and if you’re proud of much of
what’s been done in Toronto in the last seven years, you’ll like what
you hear. Pantalone is a veteran, but his ideas remain new and
inventive, and he has the experience to actually get them accomplished.

Can
we really take candidates who demand tax cuts and freezes seriously at
the same time as they trade in pie-in-the-sky subway fantasies? The last
time a subway was attempted in Toronto – the Eglinton West Line –
Ford’s cousins, the Harris Tories, actually spent millions of dollars to
fill in the tunnel. Ford worries about waste at the same time
justifying the hundreds of millions of dollars it would take to rip up
Transit City. Smitherman, too, would mess with the well-honed plan by
adding pricey subways and unproven private financing.  

While
other candidates trade in insults and accusations, Toronto’s at-risk
neighbourhoods remain cut off from the core and the jobs that live
there. The ready-to-roll Transit City light rail solution is the
quickest and cheapest way to correct this volatile and unjust situation.

It’s
time to take a good look at Pantalone’s positions and not stuff our
hopes down into some dark memory hole. This city has been well served by
dreamers, from David Crombie to Miller, so let’s honour that legacy by
not reining in our aspirations, certainly not at this still early stage
of the race.

And in a city that prides itself on its
multiculturalism, are we really ready to dismiss a smart man whose
thoughtful words are spoken in a voice that announces that, yes, like so
many of Toronto’s citizens, he comes from somewhere else? 

It’s
incredible that rich kid Ford can be depicted as an Everyman when
Pantalone and his parents arrived in this city in poverty to emerge as
yet another in the millions of success stories Toronto is so proud to
tell.

So don’t be bullied because of fears of a possible Ford nightmare. Consider voting for someone you can be proud of. 

This
is a city of miracles, a progressive, inclusive town that the rest of
the world is in awe of. It will take less than a miracle to keep us on
this ascendant path; it just requires that we as voters do not narrow
the race too soon.

You still have plenty of choices before
election day October 25, so take a look at the little man with big ideas
before rushing to judgment.