And that’s a wrap.
Toronto mayor John Tory is out the door as of Friday.
The mayor known as Mr. Dithers finally made good on his promise to resign late Wednesday evening after the 2023 budget passed with barely a whimper.
This was in stark contrast to a morning marred by protests, disrupted proceedings and a decision by the past-her-best-before-date speaker Councillor Frances Nunziata to lock the public out of the council chamber.
Last Friday evening Toronto’s 68-year-old mayor announced his intention to resign “to reflect on his mistakes” after carrying on a three-year affair with a member of his staff.
That woman is said to have left the mayor’s office in 2021 and is now working at MLSE, of which Rogers holds a 37% stake.
(Despite calls to do so, Tory has repeatedly refused to step down from his seat on the Rogers Trust despite the perceived conflict of interest.)
For five days, Toronto was subjected to the very circus Tory promised to avoid when he took the reins in 2014 following the chaotic Rob Ford era.
It was vintage John Tory.
After his unemotional speech, he made it clear he wasn’t vacating the mayor’s office quite so quickly.
He claimed he needed to stick around until Wednesday to ensure his budget as strong mayor got through.
Since the budget no more had his handprint than those of past years (crafted months before by city bureaucrats), it was just a stall tactic.
It quickly became clear he wanted to put his finger to the wind one more time to see if he had the support to stay.
Certainly he did from those who stood to lose the most with Tory’s resignation. The lobbyists, the developers, his highly paid staffers and his council lapdogs, activists and Old Boys – some of whom weighed in very loudly on social media and in the media that he should stay.
A Forum poll was commissioned to ask 1,000 Torontonians whether he should go or stay. No word on whether taxpayers covered the tab.
No doubt he was surprised to learn that the results were almost evenly divided and 11% said they didn’t know.
In other words there was no overwhelming appetite for him to remain on as mayor.
With the budget passed and perhaps with the stark realization that he didn’t have the support he thought he did, Tory issued his resignation letter to the clerk late Wednesday night.
While people will look back and perhaps suggest he did the right thing by finally stepping down, he dithered to the end.
It shouldn’t have been this way. Pure hubris and the lust for strong mayor powers led him to run for a third term after promising the public and his family he wouldn’t and while still carrying on with his former staffer.
His perennially poor judgment has now cost the city months — if not up to a year — of instability and the hefty price tag (in the millions) of a by-election.
I can guarantee you, knowing Toronto’s political elite as I do, there will be little focus on the business of the day over the next few months and much on who’s running and what they’re saying each hour of the day.
It may mean a leftist will sweep to power and many such sharks have been circling in the past few days, several of them retreads or those who aspire well beyond their competence category.
Certainly members of the legacy media were already listing his successor, several of the candidates suitably woke. To be frank, Tory moved so far to the left with his policies and constant virtue signaling, residents may not know the difference.
Truly, the city needs someone with financial acumen and the balls to clean up the mess left behind by Tory. But it remains to be seen if there’s anyone waiting in the wings to take on the challenge.
On a positive note, I hope that this race will engage voters far more than the one last October when Tory managed the media coverage and limited being put on the hot seat to a mere two debates (even, I suspect, playing a role in choosing the inexperienced candidates who would debate him.)
None of the city’s important issues were debated – the escalating crime, a ballooning budget and a debt dangerously close to the 15% debt ceiling level, the city’s drug addiction problem and the harm caused by harm reduction sites, the decrepit look of downtown and the impact of Vision Zero, which has been pushed by bureaucrats with no vision.
I can only hope that Toronto voters do their part and wake up to the reality of what Toronto has become and pay attention to those who have a plan to fix it.
Hard choices need to be made to repair the damage and politicians can’t keep throwing money at issues thinking that will solve the problem.
The city has been destroyed over the past eight years by a mayor who took his marching orders from the activists, the “defund the police” crowd, the greedy developers, the lobbyists and the Old Boy network.
It’s time to tell them they no longer run this town. Toronto residents do.
