Though Election Day itself is nearly a month away, on Oct. 25, advance polls start next week.

People can stroll into city hall or civic centres of the five former municipalities and cast their ballot on Oct. 5, 6, 7, 8, 12 or 13 from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Voting in Toronto’s municipal election starts Tuesday, Oct. 5.

Though Election Day itself is nearly a month away, on Oct. 25, advance polls start next week.

People can stroll into city hall or civic centres of the five former municipalities and cast their ballot on Oct. 5, 6, 7, 8, 12 or 13 from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

On the weekend of Oct. 16 and 17, advance polls will be open in all of the city’s 44 wards.

In each of those polls will be a special Voter Assist Terminal, with a braille key pad, an audio function, a zoom feature, and a rocker paddle for votors with limited motor control.

Those who want to use a VAT on Oct. 25 must contact Toronto Elections by calling 416-338-1111 or visiting toronto.ca/elections/index.htm  by Oct. 18 to make necessary arrangements.

The website also includes a map of advance poll locations, the 2010 Municipal Election Accessibility Plan, voter’s frequently asked questions and a video using American Sign Language to explain the process.

Rob Ford, however, said it’s up to neighbourhoods to say they want rooming houses or don’t.

“I’m going to do what the community wants, I don’t think one hat fits all,” the candidate told a crowd of more than 200 that packed the council chamber Monday, Sept. 27, at the Scarborough Civic Centre.

Licensed rooming houses are legal in the old city of Toronto, York and Etobicoke, but Ford, an Etobicoke councillor, said there have been “serious problems” with rooming houses and many people in his area don’t want them. “Is there a need for them? I’m sure there is,” he added.

The issue is highly charged in Scarborough, where many single-family homes have been turned into rooming houses illegally.

George Smitherman said such housing is for many people a step away from living on the street, and refusing to regulate rooming houses will keep them underground as well as increase the number of homeless people.

“Affordability (of housing) is a big challenge in our city; these are part of the answer to it,” said Smitherman.

Cabbagetown, a Toronto neighbourhood where property values are steadily climbing, has many licensed rooming houses, he added. “I think this tells us that when we work properly, we can find a balance in neighbourhoods.”

Joe Pantalone, another candidate, said Scarborough’s community councillors have addressed the rooming house issue, “and their inclination, though this hasn’t been approved (by the city), is that they should be allowed on the main streets.”

Pantalone added he agrees with that approach.

In fact, Scarborough councillors did not vote to approve a city proposal to allow licensed rooming houses in high-density areas. Many remain steadfastly against the idea, despite the fact that two Scarborough council incumbents, Raymond Cho and Chin Lee, were once rooming house tenants themselves.

The city’s planning committee voted early this year to defer the proposal, which would also allow licensing in North York and East York, until 2011.

Rocco Rossi, another candidate, suggested the current Scarborough ban on rooming houses puts vulnerable tenants further at risk. “Bring it out of the underground; make it legitimate,” said Rossi, who also spoke in favour of reconsidering a new city-wide distance requirement between group homes to “make sure that we’re not disadvantaging groups” he said “care for those who need the most care in our society,” including autistic children and people with disabilities.

Advocates for the disabled objected to the 250-metre distance in the city’s new zoning bylaw, though it was in some cases shorter than in the former area bylaws it replaced.

Sarah Thomson, who has dropped out of the mayoral race the morning after the Scarborough debate (though her name will appear on the ballot), said hidden homelessness in Scarborough – such as “three or four families living in a three-bedroom house” must be acknowledged. She said that pre-zoning neighbourhoods could allow rooming houses in mixed-use buffer zones between commercial and residential areas.

The event, hosted by the Scarborough Civic Action Network (SCAN) which is also organizing debates for council candidates in area wards, provided a rare chance for lesser-known mayoral candidates to be heard.

Howard Gomberg began by saying the top mayoral contenders seem to have lost all vision and creativity – “Please do not vote for me, unless you have to – and I’m afraid you may have to,” he told the audience – before stating his case for legalization of illegal drugs. “We can’t take our vulnerable ones, our sick and confused ones, and turn them into criminals,” Gomberg said.

Candidate Kevin Clarke, who often reminds people he is a former substance abuser, said Torontonians need to feed the hungry, house the homeless and stop police abuse. “You don’t need a white mayor, you need the right mayor,” he added.

Also running for mayor, Colin Magee said he has heard people say voting for the so-called fringe candidates is a waste. “The only vote that is wasted is one that is not cast,” he said.
George Baboula, Diane Devenyi, Michael Flie, Vijay Sarma and Mark State also spoke.

~ Mike Adler

Accuse ‘NDP bloc’ of running city

John Laforet might be right when he says the Toronto Party is “ahead of its time” and represents the city’s future.

The group of council hopefuls formed in 2006, saying the city government was in the grip of a mayor and downtown councillors loyal to the New Democratic Party.

But now, with Rob Ford leading the mayoral race and city politics apparently shifting right on a wave of suburban anger, the Toronto Party and its complaints of higher taxes and declining services seem a lot more mainstream.

At a campaign launch Wednesday, members’ promises to slash councillors’ office budgets, effect “line-by-line” city budget reviews and end the “discriminatory” vehicle registration and land transfer taxes weren’t much different from the rhetoric of other candidates, including some council incumbents.

Moreover, the informal right-wing coalition, which says “trade union monopolies” add costs to Toronto City Hall, isn’t proposing to lay city workers off.
Attrition as employees retire will produce much of the required cuts in labour costs, while other savings can be found without ruffling union feathers, party president Stephen Thiele said in Nathan Phillips Square.

“We’re not looking for a fight, we’re looking for solutions,” he added.

The party – provincial law forbids formal association on a municipal level but members hope to change that – is also proposing a previously-released transportation plan so ambitious it includes not only three new subway lines, but arterial road extensions, off-road bicycle trails, covered highways and extending Highway 400 to the Gardiner Expressway, which would be housed in a new viaduct.
That’s the 20-year plan, however.

The next term of council would start by building a downtown relief subway line and completing the Sheppard Subway from Downsview to the Scarborough Town Centre, asking higher levels of government to help pay the $4-billion cost, said John Laforet, running in Scarborough’s Ward 43.

The group says it will field 12 candidates for council, though one won’t register until Friday.
Laforet said the candidates are split on who to support for mayor, but all would work with whomever the voters choose.

The other Toronto Party members so far are Glenn Vaughan (Ward 4), Edward Zaretsky (Ward 10), Ron Singer (Ward 15), Bob  Nahiddi (Ward 24), Joanne Dickins (Ward 25), Howard Bortenstein (Ward 28), Robert Walker (Ward 31), Sean Gladney (Ward 36), Glenn Middleton (Ward 38) and Danny Chien (Ward 41).

Most appeared at Wednesday’s launch, where Laforet suggested the current council – which the group’s website calls “a carton of unbroken eggs” that must be broken – is still run by incumbent New Democrats.
“There’s a bloc at city hall. And it’s the NDP bloc,” Thiele said.

~ Mike Adler

Trustees on the board Tuesday night (Sept. rejected immediate approval of a motion by Scarbrough Centre Trustee Scott Harrison that would have forced Davis – or any other board chair in future elections – to stop using the title of TDSB chair when they endorse candidates for public office. Instead, the board voted narrowly in favour of referring the matter to its human resources committee for further review, a decision that will shelve the issue until after the Oct. 25 municipal election.

Harrison, who is running for re-election in a rematch against Davis-endorsed candidate David Smith, said Wednesday morning he believes the board’s decision was wrong but he has to accept it.

Harrison’s motion would have also forced Davis to ask the three trustee candidates he’s endorsed so far – in Scarborough, Etobicoke, and Don Valley East – to remove his endorsement from their respective websites or campaign literature as it includes Davis’s title of TDSB chair rather than simply noting he is Etobicoke-Lakeshore trustee.

During presentation of his motion, Harrison said individual trustees have the right to endorse who they see fit. However, he said the difference is the chair of the board is elected annually by all 22 trustees.

“They (board chairs) represent the 21 of us (other trustees) and the children in the system,” said Harrison, suggesting the title should not be used for partisan purposes.

His motion also referred to the duties of the board chair as spelled out in the Province’s Education Act, which notes a school board chair will “act as spokesperson to the public on behalf of the board, unless otherwise determined by the board.”

As board chair, Davis, who is not running in the upcoming election, has endorsed Andy Kyriakos to replace him as trustee in south Etobicoke. Like Davis, Kyriakos has a history with the Liberal Party, having served as an assistant to former MP Herb Gray and MPP Brad Nixon.

Davis has also endorsed incumbent Don Valley East Trustee Michael Coteau, whose website includes endorsements from the area’s current Liberal MP and MPP and former Scarborough East Liberal MPP Mary Anne Chambers. However, the endorsement from Chambers includes her titles as former minister of two departments, not her position as a former riding MPP.

Smith has also received Davis’s endorsement although it is not included on his website.

Davis said Wednesday morning he has planned no other endorsements nor has he been asked for them.

At the board meeting, Davis said he believed his endorsements were a non-issue and a distraction from more pressing files.

“Today’s the first day of school, kids, we’ve got work to do,” said Davis.

York Centre Trustee James Pasternak, who is running to become city councillor of Ward 10, said he believed Harrison’s motion was too vague as it didn’t state whether ex-chairs of the school board would also be prohibited from using their former title in endorsements. He then put forward the motion to refer the issue to a board committee.

Davis requested that it not be referred to the ethics committee as it would give the impression to the public something unethical had taken place. Pasternak responded by amending his motion to refer the issue to the human resources committee.

Only Etobicoke North Trustee John Hastings, a former Progressive Conservative MPP, spoke in favour of Harrison’s motion. Hastings said a board chair or Mayor endorsing candidates was “highly inappropriate” because they are supposed to represent all citizens. He also criticized his colleagues for feigning exasperation at Harrison’s motion as a waste of time.

He recalled the “manufactured outrage” of trustees that greeted the 2007 endorsement of Scarborough Southwest Trustee Gary Crawford by then board chair Sheila Ward and the TDSB’s former director of education. Crawford was running for the Progressive Conservative party in the provincial election at that time. The endorsements were removed following the outcry.

Harrison said such endorsements should have been banned at that time. However, Ward said concern about such endorsements was the same “foolishness” now as it was in 2007.

“Who are we kidding? If you’re the chair of the board, you’re the chair of the board,” said Ward. She said people who care about education know Davis is the chair of the school board.

Another ex-board chair, Etobicoke Centre Trustee John Campbell, who is running to become a councillor in the upcoming election, said he felt it was preferable to simply vote down Harrison’s motion and let the next group of trustees deal with the matter instead of referring the matter to a committee. However, colleague Josh Matlow (St. Paul’s), also running for city council, said as 20 of the 22 trustees are in the midst of election campaigns, they could not be counted on to be impartial at this time and he therefore supported referral to the committee rather than killing the motion.

A lighter moment in the debate occured when new student trustee Zane Schwartz, of Leaside High School, asked the board’s legal counsel whether there is any law or board policy stating that the chair is a non-partisan position.

“There are no partisan politics in the school board,” responded the board’s lawyer, which drew an uproar of laughter from trustees.

~ Tim Foran

Council veteran says he won’t let others ‘screw up’ the city he loves

The world is full of once-great cities,” the candidate told editors at Toronto Community News on Friday, Aug. 13.

A half-century ago, Cleveland, Buffalo and Detroit ranked amongst the wealthiest cities in North America. Look at them now, Pantalone said.

“People made wrong decisions and now they’re in the pits.”

Pantalone, after 29 years as a city politician, sees himself as the sole progressive seeking to build Toronto into “a more fantastic city” as mayor, and his opponents – all of them – as “mini-Mike Harrises” seeking to pinch pennies, contract municipal services out and “shrink what we do.”

“Yeah, we’ll save a few bucks in the property taxes,” he said of this less-costly approach, “but we’ll be messing up the city forever more.”

There’s one exception in Pantalone’s theory: his opponents want to build subways, while Pantalone, councillor for Trinity-Spadina and David Miller’s serving right hand as his deputy mayor, is sold on the province’s Transit City plan for light-rail lines.

The light-rail vehicles, he said, are not the “old clunkers” Torontonians see on streetcar tracks downtown; they are sleek “European-style, high-speed trains” that can cure the city’s biggest problem, a transportation system more clogged now than that of Los Angeles.

Subway extensions, several times more expensive to build and to run than a light rail network, are just “beautiful mirages,” Pantalone said.

Coming from Pantalone, a comparison to Mike Harris is serious. The former Ontario premier has been out of office a decade, yet Pantalone still speaks of the damage his Progressive Conservative government did to Toronto in downloaded costs, which if ever removed, would solve the city’s budget problems, he said.

In fact, the central theme of Pantalone’s campaign so far – one he tends to repeat – is that Toronto does not nearly get its fair share of taxes the provincial and federal government collect here.

The problem is not Toronto’s alone, but part of the “nature of the Canadian federation” formed when the country was mainly rural. That relationship with cities must change, Pantalone said, if cities are to succeed without having to beg investments from higher governments.

“The idea that they’re giving us charity for things they should have an obligation (to provide), is a problem in the mind set that they have.”

Pantalone sees it as his job, “my first priority,” to spur Torontonians into demanding more than what he says has been an eight per cent share of revenues flowing to those governments.

“If they don’t know that, and I as a mayoral candidate, possibly mayor, don’t remind them at every opportunity, then they’re never going to know,” he said.

“And if they don’t know, how are they going to argue for the change that we need?”

Pantalone pledged, if elected, to hire two communications workers just to hammer away at this message.

“If the mayor of Toronto fails (to get more money for the city), then I think the whole community fails,” he added.

George Smitherman, one his rivals for the mayoralty, was the deputy Ontario premier for years. If Smitherman was “unable or unwilling from the inside to rectify this problem,” Pantalone asked, why would people believe he could solve it as mayor?

Maybe, he added, the city would be “better off having a different kind of voice which is not afraid to be critical” of higher governments.

Running third in recent polls, Pantalone wouldn’t budge when asked if he would throw his support to Smitherman at the last minute to keep Rob Ford, last week’s apparent front-runner, from becoming mayor on Oct. 25.

“Are you trying to tell me Mr. Smitherman is better than Mr. Ford?” he asked. “I see little difference between the two of them. It’s more veneer, an issue of style, rather than substance. They basically believe the same thing.”

Pantalone said he’s been doing more to differentiate himself from Miller and step up the pace of his campaign.

“I hate to put it in warlike terms; I’m a pacifist, (but) when you’re engaged in a war, you have to know where to wage the battles and how to wage the battles,” he said. “My rise has been steady and history will tell you being third could easily become first. So watch me, as Pierre Trudeau said.”

The Italian-born son of a sharecropper and a seamstress, Pantalone said none of his opponents have anything close to his experience at city hall.

”If I step aside and these guys screw up my city, the city that’s been so good to me as an immigrant, the city where my kids were born. I’d never forgive myself,” he said.

~ Mike Adler

Candidates lined up in Nathan Phillips Square Wednesday  to denounce Ford’s remarks in a television debate the night before.

The Etobicoke councillor was asked how refugees have contributed to Toronto in the past and how they will contribute in the future. He replied the city “can’t even take care of” the 2.5 million people here already, and added, “I think we’ve got to say enough’s enough.”

Ford met reporters with a smile and blamed the furor on “political games” by his opponents. “I’m sticking to my words,” he said.

“My job is to help the 2.5 million people. We don’t have room to bring in another million people,” Ford added in Nathan Phillips Square.

“You try to get home at night, the traffic congestion is getting worse and worse. There’s homeless people sleeping on the streets. We can’t take care of them.”

The candidate admitted he can’t stop people coming to Toronto, since “this is a federal issue,” but added, “we can’t afford it right now.”

Almost half of all Torontonians are foreign-born, and experts say if Toronto weren’t a top destination for immigrants its population would soon decline because of a low birth rate.

But asked if newcomers will mean growth and new taxes for the city, Ford said no. “It means it will cost more to run the city. It’s going to be chaotic.”

Mayoral candidate Rocco Rossi said Ford “does not get” that immigrants are a source of Toronto’s strength.

“Do the math. Without newcomers we will not grow this city,” said Rossi, adding Ford should retract his remarks or withdraw from the race.

Joe Pantalone, another rival, wondered whether Ford’s remarks were “based on a lack of knowledge of what Toronto’s all about” but said the people of Toronto will not forgive Ford until he apologizes.

“This time he’s taking on all Torontonians,” Pantalone said.

George Smitherman, however, said Ford had gone beyond the point where an apology would help. He “should slink away” in shame, Smitherman said.

“This man is a divider. His values are anti-Toronto values,” charged Smitherman, who argued electing a mayor who “sends a message that you’re not welcome” would be a signal the city is on a path to stagnation.

Sarah Thomson said Ford’s comments “show the true Rob Ford” and “tell a lot of Torontonians what to expect if he becomes mayor.”

Later, backed by sign-holding supporters at a rally he shared with Thomson, Rossi said he believes in welcoming immigrants instead of looking “for a smaller, meaner Toronto.”

Thomson said the city’s next mayor must be free of prejudice, something she suggested Ford showed under pressure.

The question that set off the controversy was asked by a Canadian Tamil Congress volunteer, Mathan Thava, and the result was “completely unexpected,” said Manjula Selvarajah, a spokesperson for the Scarborough-based group.

Thava, who is from Woodbridge, said he started his question by noting “a lot of the immigrants and refugees that arrive in Canada actually end up settling” in the Greater Toronto Area.

“How do you think these refugees have contributed to Toronto in the past and how do you think these refugees will contribute to Toronto in the future?” he asked.

Ford’s statements on newcomers to Toronto didn’t make sense and the Congress wants him to explain them, she said. “Is this his feeling about immigrants to this city, because that would be worrying for us,” said Selvarajah.

“With these people coming to Toronto does come future economic activity.”

Ford repeatedly linked the “one million” figure to Toronto’s Official Plan, though the plan projects only 540,000 more people will live in the city by 2031.

~ Mike Adler

CARP, a group representing older persons, says 70 per cent of Canadian citizens older than 65 “vote regularly,” while general turnout in Toronto’s last municipal election was 39 per cent.

And in 20 years, a quarter of the city’s population will be seniors.

But at a debate CARP held Wednesday, Aug. 11 at Ryerson University to highlight seniors’ issues five mayoral contenders stuck mostly to their usual pitches and steered around questions posed on video by former mayor David Crombie, community advocate Zanana Akande and radio host John Tory.

Candidates talked passionately about seniors who are family: Rocco Rossi said he saw his aging grandparents struggle, so he understands the need for automatic doors.

Sarah Thomson recalled walks with her ailing father, who was trailing an oxygen tank and needed to rest. “We have to remember the little things” when it comes to making Toronto friendlier to seniors, she said.

“We can’t take out the park benches just because there’s people sleeping on them now and then.”

George Smitherman – who arguably has done more than anyone to shape conditions for Toronto seniors because he was Ontario’s health minister for four years – is pledging to have them ride free on the TTC from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., “because we have the capacity and because we know an active senior is a happy senior.”

Joe Pantalone, also the city’s deputy mayor, said he would put a permanent seniors’ advocate at City Hall, build two outdoor parks designed for senior exercise needs and freeze property taxes for senior families if they make less than $50,000 a year.

But Thomson said freezing taxes isn’t enough. Seniors need ways of retrofitting homes so they can stay in them, she said.

Rossi said property taxes forcing seniors from their homes must be reduced, and Pantalone, when asked about elder abuse – which Akande said few public agencies in Toronto seem ready to address – called gentrification that produces fears in seniors of losing their home “a form of abuse.”

Rob Ford said his own 75-year-old mother told him, “I can’t afford to live in this city” because of taxes and wasteful “gravy train” spending at City Hall – the very issues Ford likes to discuss.

That gravy train, which has to stop, but “seniors have to come first,” the Etobicoke councillor added.

Pantalone, however, said Ford, who often questions or opposes grants to community groups at Toronto Council, voted against funds for a Meals on Wheels Program.

Smitherman recalled Ford also voted, in an unsuccessful bid to save $13.4 million, to get rid of snow-clearing on some streets.

“A lot of people said, Rob, we don’t want the little dead-end streets snow-plowed,” Ford responded, saying he was trying to return service to past levels.

Ford said he’d hold town hall meetings in every ward where police would warn seniors how to spot fraudsters, install motion detectors, and take other precautions for safety.

Crombie said older Torontonians need to feel secure about where they’re going to live and want to remain “useful” to society. “They need people to be creative about how they can participate in the well-being of this city,” he said.

At the end of the event, which packed a 300-seat auditorium in mid-afternoon, moderator Susan Eng asked the candidates to sign a pledge that included making Toronto “the model age-friendly city,” naming an “age-friendly champion” on council and setting a standard of universal accessibility in public buildings and spaces.

Greeting people outside the auditorium, Mark State, another mayoral candidate, said he’d establish an independent seniors’ commission, a corporation with a board like Toronto Hydro’s, to handle services for seniors and be their voice on council and in the city.

Standing nearby, Dewitt Lee, also running for mayor, said he’d give “red carpet” service to seniors, directing their calls or City Hall visits to the office of a senior’s advocate so they would not have to stay on the phone or in line for very long.

He also pledged to record the life stories of all interested Toronto seniors and make them publicly available in archives. “The history lessons that are embedded inside the minds of our seniors are being lost,” Lee said.

~ Mike Adler

Mayoral candidate Joe Pantalone unveils his seniors platform

A Toronto that will soon have as many seniors as it does children requires changing the way the city works, Joe Pantalone says.

“As the population is aging, we have to be an age-friendly city,” said the mayoral candidate, who promised Tuesday to hire a seniors’ advocate at City Hall, “to ensure everything we do is seen through that prism.”

During a press conference in Little Italy at which he pointed to his own grey hair, Pantalone also said he’ll freeze seniors’ property taxes for four years, provided they have a family income under $50,000 and live in their own home.

Many of Toronto’s older residents feel under pressure and are fearful about their property taxes going up, said Pantalone, the city’s deputy mayor.

Others feel trapped in their homes because they lack transit options, he said, suggesting seniors will find the light-rail vehicles for the province’s Transit City plan accessible because they have no steps. “They’re ideal for an aging population.”

Pantalone said it was important to make Toronto’s subway stations accessible too, but later added he wasn’t committing to speeding up a schedule that would not guarantee that access until 2024. “It’s an issue of money,” he said.

The candidate did say he would build more affordable housing for seniors as well as two “gym parks” which feature low-impact exercise machines designed for older adults in his first term as mayor. The special parks are very popular in Europe and China, he said.

Pantalone further said making Toronto more age-friendly would require many changes, such as in the size of its road signs.

He promised to end the common practice of allowing utility companies to cut sidewalks and patch them over with asphalt, because such irregular pavement is “really a danger” to seniors.

Elder advocates have long called for Ontario cities to be more friendly to the elderly. In an interview in May, Scarborough-Agincourt MPP Gerry Phillips, Ontario minister responsible for seniors, said he wants to work with municipalities to make this happen.

It often is municipalities that can influence things – such as by providing kneeling buses, or through the design of community centres and parks – closest to seniors, and more must be done locally to meet seniors’ needs, Phillips said.

~ Mike Adler

Mayoral candidate meets with TCN editorial board to discuss his ideas for the city

Whatever you saw him do during 10 years of city council meetings, Rob Ford wants you to know it’s not personal.

“I’m not one of these mean, vindictive types of people. I say ‘good morning’ to everyone I see,” says the Etobicoke North councillor, suggesting when he steps out of “the ring” a council chamber often becomes, he can be “buddy-buddy” with councillors he was arguing with moments before.

“Some people aren’t buddy-buddy, they take it personal,” Ford said this week while meeting with editors of Toronto Community News.

“I don’t. I understand that they have a role to play and I have a role to play.”

But can a man who admits having “cheesed off a lot of councillors” – visiting homes in other wards, he said, when local councillors fail to return their constituents’ calls – and who regularly challenges his colleagues on issues large and small, rally a majority to his side if he becomes mayor?

Though he found himself on the losing side when trying to change city budgets, Ford noted he’s gotten closer to reaching the 23-vote tally guaranteed to win.

“I was getting eight or nine votes before, now all of a sudden I’m getting 17 votes,” he said, adding after this fall’s election, “I feel very confident that I’ll have 25 votes to carry my agenda on any given day.”

Ford claims credit for rallying council behind him on one large issue – Woodbine Live, a billion-dollar “urban lifestyle centre” and new residential neighbourhood set for Etobicoke’s Woodbine Racetrack.

The developers approached him and later, Ford said, he made certain the massive project did not go to Mississauga or Vaughan. “With my business experience, I was the one who landed the deal,” he added.

“I don’t remember any other councillors doing the legwork that I did to get this deal.”

Ford said he’s seeing people, including “hard-working blue-collared workers” who don’t usually vote for conservative candidates, come into his camp, a swing Ford, whose father Doug was a Tory MPP in the Mike Harris government, compared to Harris’s trouncing of New Democrat Bob Rae in 1995.

“I’m visualizing what happened in ’90 to ’95. I think this is the Bob Rae days all over again,” he said.

But Ford said he shouldn’t be labelled a right-winger even if he is a fiscal conservative, maintaining he wasn’t on Mel Lastman’s “team” when the right-leaning Lastman was mayor – “I’ve never been on anyone’s team,” except the taxpayer’s, he said – and as mayor can work with anyone.

“There’s a role you play in opposition, there’s a role you play in leadership,” he added.

Ford, who still works for the label and tag business his father founded in Rexdale, won’t change what he calls his simple, customer-service approach to politics. He works hard – though insisting his father worked even harder – to answer every e-mail and phone call personally, even those from residents outside his ward.

“Obviously, being in the mayor’s chair, (I) won’t be able to do that. But I can guarantee that the civil servants and the councilors will be doing that,” Ford pledged.

“Mrs. Jones out in Scarborough, all she wants is her sidewalk fixed or her pothole fixed. I will take the call, I will go out and see Mrs. Jones in Scarborough and I will get it done. And I’ve been doing it for 10 years.”

When everyday services such as pothole-filling aren’t performed, Ford said he can’t see a reason why, particularly when the city has been adding more employees – too many, he says – to its payroll.

“We don’t need five guys driving around in a truck to cut one branch. I see it all the time,” said Ford, who would hire on workers only at half the rate of attrition and added he’d look at scrapping the city’s Fair Wage policy, which he said costs taxpayers millions.

“Just because you do work for the city (as a contractor), you have to pay (your employees) city rates? I don’t believe you should.”

Ford said he won’t promise voters a zero-per-cent property tax increase, “but I’ll guarantee we’re not going to go higher than the rate of inflation, which is 1.8 or 1.9 when I last checked. People can live with that,” he said, pledging he’ll “look under every single rock” for possible savings.

The candidate also promised to record how every council votes on every issue, simplify the language of motions “for the average person out there to understand,” and to post the results, as well as every dime of city spending, online.

His administration, “will be as transparent as that bottle of water there,” Ford said. “And I will make every councilor and every bureaucrat accountable for what they spend.”

~ Mike Adler

Maher, running for a council seat in Trinity-Spadina (Ward 20), is calling on the city to ban sales of cats and dogs in Toronto pet stores, saying it would “reduce the number of unwanted pets” in the city.

He further charges a pet shop is “not a healthy environment for the (animals) and may result in future behavioural problems.”

Maher will plead his case for a ban – which would take effect a year after a bylaw passes – next Friday, Aug. 13 at Toronto City Council’s licensing and standards committee, which could act on or study the issue.

In a letter to committee chairperson Howard Moscoe, Maher said stopping the store sales would promote responsible pet ownership of puppies and kittens instead of impulse buys “based on their ‘cuteness’ factor.”

The candidate said 11 of the city’s registered pet shops sell dogs and cats. Maher said he visited two stores on the list and asked Toronto Animal Services to investigate conditions there in which dogs were caged.

Stacey Halliday, marketing director for PJ’s Pet Centres, said the Pet Industry Joint Advisory Council is talking with the city to see where Maher got his information and whether the industry can do anything to address his concerns.

But in an interview Friday, Aug. 6 she said his allegations certainly did not reflect visits to her company’s stores, where, Halliday said, staff do everything possible to send people home with information they need and a sense of lifelong responsibility toward the animals they purchased.

“Our pets stay with their owners for a very long time and there’s a reason why,” she said, arguing dogs bought through services such as Craiglist or from a neighbour’s litter down the street are more likely to wind up euthanized or abandoned.

Dr. Kenneth Hill, a veterinarian at the Bloor Mill Veterinary Hospital in Etobicoke, supported Maher’s proposal in a letter, saying he previously worked at “several Toronto region pet stores” and, based on his experience, “staff at pet stores are often poorly trained and not equipped to provide prospective owners with sound advice” on selecting the pet best for their household.

Pet owners then become dissatisfied or unable to cope with the animals, which “are then prone to suffer neglect” or be euthanized, wrote Hill, who said he sees pets with serious health or behavioural problem “disproportionately over-represented” in puppies and kittens bought from pet stores.

~ Mike Adler