It was a performance that one could have easily mistaken for a Saturday Night Live skit. Except this one was no joke.
While Hamas apologists screamed and bellowed around her, Toronto mayor Olivia Chow endeavoured to deliver one of her typical namby-pamby speeches at her skating party on Nathan Phillips Square.
“I am so excited to be here for my first skating party to mark the new year,” she said, as one of the professional protesters walked behind her carrying a Palestinian flag.
“We are here at the iconic Nathan Phillips Square which is marking its 60th anniversary,” Chow continued, trying desperately to read from her prepared script.
But she was quickly interrupted and distracted by shouts of “Ceasefire Now,” a call for Israel to lay down its arms against Hamas.
Instead of having the police usher them away, she turned to the interlopers and said, “I agree…You see my message about ceasefire, right…so why don’t you let me continue?”
She tried to deliver her hopey-changey message of how she as an immigrant came to this country where she “belongs,” but the angry protesters got louder, not giving a damn what she said.
As the chaos ensued behind her, Chow said with that ridiculous smile on her face: “Today you see democracy in action…I’ll just keep on talking.”
And she did, not reading the room (or plaza).
When she finished, she insisted on walking over to a series of protesters to try to convince them she was in support of a ceasefire.
“I’m trying to have a dialogue,” she told the media.
The edited footage from the friendly media — City, CP24 and Global in particular — doesn’t show Chow as weak and inept as she was.
That is part of the problem.
But the real problem is that Chow is every bit as incompetent as I suspected she’d be.
Her outdated utopian socialist ideology and her need to be loved by everyone are making her a laughingstock.
She has bungled the handling of these terrorist sympathizers from the get-go by ignoring their steadily escalating verbal violence and their takeover of major streets and intersections in Toronto.
She remained silent when they targeted Jewish businesses, when they took over major intersections to scream, shout and pray, when they hassled shoppers at the downtown Eaton Centre and when they took their shameful protests to the Avenue Rd. overpass at Hwy 401 (right in the midst of a Jewish community) over the last few weekends.
The Hamas sympathizers and the assorted professional protesters have been allowed to terrorize the city with impunity.
It was only a matter of time before they besieged and harassed her.
It is clear Chow did not have a plan in place to deal with what occurred Sunday because she appears to honestly think that everything can be solved and that the protesters will dissipate if she has a “dialogue” with them.
She doesn’t appear to have a plan at all, choosing to continue on with her tone deaf announcements while the chaos ensues around her.
This is not the Year 2000 when she and her late husband Jack Layton had control over the professional protesters who supported their various causes.
I saw how they used them back then.
This is 2024 and the people with whom she is trying to have a “dialogue” don’t care what she says, have a propensity for intimidation, and many have brought their outrageous lack of values and decency to Canada with them.
The media may continue to make excuses for her but Toronto residents are tired of being “held hostage” by terror apologists.
The Jewish community is not being protected. Neither are those who attended Sunday’s skating party.
She needs to take a side but she won’t because she’s too weak and out of touch with reality to do so.
Her weakness and incompetence is turning a city that already needed a strong dose of tough love into an out-of-control hellhole.
I wish I could say her behavior Sunday was all terribly funny and laugh it off.
But it is becoming a nightmare from which we may never wake up.
