With the City of Toronto in decline and the school board indoctrinating students with race-based and gender ideologies, voters should be mad as hell and ripe for change.
But I predict the voter turnout will be low – based on the attendance at advanced polls – and there won’t be the kind of sea change we saw on October 15 in Vancouver.
For certain, Toronto won’t be getting a mayor who takes public safety seriously like the newly elected Vancouver mayor Ken Sim.
Mayor John Tory, who is seeking his third term despite promising only to sit for two terms, has been adamant about not bringing back public safety measures like some form of carding.
Despite the shocking increase in gun crimes in Toronto and repeated violence on the TTC, not one word about public safety was mentioned by Tory or the media during the campaign.
It’s as if the increase in violence doesn’t exist.
In fact, the two debates that were held ignored the entire issue, as has most of the media (except for the Toronto Sun). The only mayoralty candidate – retired cop Blake Acton – who has repeatedly raised concerns about violence and the need for a return to carding, was decidedly shut out of the debates and by most of the legacy media.
Tory has run a campaign thin on details except for the need for his experience to bring Toronto back from the economic downturn due to Covid. He has been busy making sure he’s seen around Toronto mostly at bakeries and restaurants with selected councillor candidates, most of them incumbents, carefully selected lapdogs (Jon Burnside and Grant Gonzalves are two examples) and has-beens who will likely give him the support he needs to continue to get his policies through.
During the past eight years those policies – hotel shelters, safe injection sites, bike lanes everywhere, punitive traffic measures and massive condo development – have led to the depressing deterioration of Toronto.
His other main challenger, besides Acton, is Gil Penalosa, formerly of Bogota, Columbia who has promoted his experience developing parks and sustainable transportation (beyond the car). His appeal has been limited to the car-hating left who have embraced his proposals to cancel the Gardiner East and turn the Island airport into a park.
The NDP have also been working overtime on social media and door-to-door to push a slate of one-issue activists for the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) — specifically those who are primarily concerned with race-based issues.
NDP MPP Marit Stiles and newly elected MPP Kristyn Wong-Tam have been busy shilling for Alexis Dawson and Debbie King for school trustee and Ausma Malik and Alejandra Bravo for councillor.
In regards to Malik’s past, in 2014 I revealed her appearance at virulent anti-Israel protests – along with several anti-Semites in the labour movement – where she contended that Israel had conducted “state-sanctioned murder” for defending itself against Hezbollah rockets.
At the time Toronto councillor Mike Layton dismissed the criticism as Islamophobic. He is also supporting Malik.
The hugely positive change with this year’s school board elections relates to the number of parents who are speaking up and speaking out, at long last.
Peter Wallace, who is running in Kawartha Lakes, created an informative and thorough website for trustee candidates who are interested in centrist, non-woke policies that focus on academics and not indoctrination. It’s called www.blueprintforcanada.ca.
GTA parent Matt Director and a small group of frustrated parents put together www.VoteagainstWoke.ca — a website with recommendations of trustee candidates who are not interested in ramming gender and critical race theory ideologies down students’ throats.
Not surprisingly their efforts to expose what’s going on in schools have been attacked by the radical left as “transphobic, homophobic and racist.”
There has been much hand wringing by activists and the legacy media, likely because school board elections have never received this kind of attention.
Hopefully parents will pay attention and opt not to vote by rote as has been done in elections gone by.
Toronto may be beyond saving under another Tory government but schoolkids are too precious to ignore.
