[xtypo_dropcap]S[/xtypo_dropcap]ome might call it an election, but a more fitting title might be Survivor Toronto. With over 100 debates and possibly the longest campaign in Canadian history, the race has been nothing short of gruelling.
Candidates have been campaigning nonstop for months, often facing off against each other in three debates a day before going on to fundraisers and community events in the evening.
Although over 50 brave souls put their foot in the ring, only a handful got more than passing recognition. Of the five who emerged as front-runners, only three remain, and of those three, most observers predict it will come down to one of two: Toronto City Councillor and businessman Rob Ford, or former provincial MPP and Minister of Health and Deputy Premier George Smitherman.
The Epoch Times decided to spend a weekend following the front-runners around to see how things were shaping up as election day looms.
Joe Pantalone
Former deputy mayor and four-time city councillor Joe Pantalone is the long shot. He’s not just the underdog, he’s the runt, but his short stature is matched with jovial demeanour that makes him, arguably, the most likeable of the contenders.
Pantalone comes across as good-natured and harmless, some might say the Mr. Congeniality of the election, though ruling him out altogether would be a mistake. While the most recent Angus Reid poll has Ford and Smitherman neck and neck with 41 and 40 percent of the vote respectively, Pantalone is still in the game, though just barely, with 16 percent.
But watching him campaign along west end of Bloor with outgoing Mayor David Miller, who endorsed his former deputy late in the race, Pantalone looks secondary.
Miller is confident and relaxed with a familiarity that comes from living in the neighbourhood and knowing locals every step along the way.
While it is Pantalone who is running for mayor, it is Miller who gets most of the attention, as people one after another approach him to thank him for a job well done or suggest he should have run. Pantalone often ends up outdistancing the outgoing mayor, waiting up ahead and passing out flyers while Miller ends up in yet another detailed conversation.
Pantalone is warm and friendly, but his earnestness doesn’t carry the gravity of Miller’s confidence.
“He’s a city builder,” Miller tells friends as he introduces Pantalone to store owners he knows. “He’s the only progressive candidate.”
Pantalone says the same thing about himself, but Miller says it with authority.
Which is, in many ways, what makes Pantalone a great candidate. In a council of 44, there is little doubt he would have the easiest transition into the mayoral seat. He has, as he frequently says, been apprenticing for the job.
More importantly though, in a council of 44 where cooperation is essential to getting anything done, Pantalone’s amicability is perhaps the most important quality he brings to the seat. While Smitherman made his name as a bruiser in the Ontario legislature, and Ford speaks with a bluntness that offends as many as it endears, Pantalone is easy to get along with.
“We have a city to build,” says Pantalone as he passes out flyers and introduces himself to possible voters. He might be down in the polls, but in a race where others have fallen away, he certainly isn’t out.
Rob Ford
Rob Ford trudges through the crowd at the Tangore Centre during a Bengali festival as if pushed forward by some invisible force. Handing out business cards with his real cell number on it, shaking hands and saying hi, he wipes his forehead constantly. Sweat accumulates and he wipes it again. He is tired.
You can almost see the mantra going through his head: “Keep walking, hand out cards.”
“108 debates,” he says to me. “Sometimes we go to three debates in a day.”
Ford is the surprise of this campaign, a contender few expected to challenge the implacable lead Smitherman once had. For a while he held a double-digit lead, though that is now gone. A young fellow who puts “Elect Rob Ford” fridge magnets on anything metal passes Ford a Barq’s root beer with a bendy straw for a quick drink before he shuffles through the crowd into the main hall.
Ford once said in a televised debate that his weight was his biggest weakness. After months battling it out, spending his days in an RV that drives him from event to event, the truth of that statement is evident. This campaign requires more than a poignant political message and charisma; if you want to make it through Survivor Toronto, you need to endure.
And endure he does. Ford moves forward, implacable. Slow but steady, shaking hands, introducing himself, handing out the cards. He is like the ox in the field, plodding forward, dragging the plough that will turn the soil. And if any candidate has stirred things up in this campaign, it has been him.
With a string of guffaws that would have ruined a lesser candidate, news emerged during the election that Ford was busted for pot possession and driving under the influence in Miami.
But it is his mistakes that have sometimes given Ford and edge. He seems to say what he thinks without considering about how it could be misconstrued, like a comment that “Oriental people work like dogs,” which his critics tried to frame as an ethnic slur though he meant it as a compliment.
It is those kinds of slips that make Ford an easy guy to identify with, the everyman in a competition that favours the elite.
Ford doesn’t pitch his platform when he gets on stage, saying it wouldn’t be appropriate. Today, the last day of Durga Puja, a Hindu religious festival, is about celebration and community, he says. Instead, Ford tells the crowd, most of whom were born in India, how the election works and that they should get out to vote. Then, as he often does, he apologizes for ducking out early because he has to run to another event.
George Smitherman
George Smitherman is running behind. Literally. Waiting on the corner of Woodbine and Queen, I chat with Sarah Thomson while waiting for Smitherman to emerge from his RV where he is doing a media interview. We talk about her decision to drop out of the mayor race and back George, even bringing her campaign staffers with her. She goes full time, her rep later tells me.
Thomson says she got to know Smitherman over the course of the debates and came to like him and his platform. She leaves with the volunteers to start canvassing the homes on this busy street and I keep waiting. After 15 minutes or so, Smitherman emerges: purple track jacket and purple canvass shoes.
I try to chat with him but he doesn’t seem interested.
Maybe he doesn’t like me, I thought, because the first time we met, I was sitting in while he got grilled by a Chinese television reporter about his trip to China. That was at about the same time he lost his lead in the polls to Ford and the reporter was hammering him about whether he was going to soften his stance on human rights in China after taking a free trip there on the regime’s dime.
He said he wasn’t going to change a thing.
As I trail behind Smitherman, chatting with his media rep, he starts to run. And then we all start to run.
I follow behind as Smitherman catches up with his crew, who have moved ahead of him to knock on doors and get people ready to meet the man who might be mayor. It’s a smooth operation, but hard to gauge its effectiveness. Within 30 minutes Smitherman will be done, back in the RV to do another burst of canvassing on another busy street.
We don’t get to talk much, he is there to meet voters and get them to put up a purple lawn sign.
“Caffeine,” he tells me, when I ask what keeps a guy running from house to house during a marathon nine-month election campaign. He knocks on a few doors himself and talks to maybe a dozen people before heading off.
Smitherman is another candidate who has survived controversy. Ontario’s health ministry was the centre of a billion-dollar spending scandal by successive governments when it emerged that an effort to put health records into electronic format involved overpaying consultants and handing out single source contracts.
Smitherman’s successor resigned over the controversy though he came in late in the eHealth effort.
Smitherman has momentum on his side, again literally. He ran a marathon that morning and got an endorsement the next day from Liberal golden boy Justin Trudeau. Whether or not he gets to win, he certainly knows how to run the race.
Toronto heads to the polls on Monday, Oct. 25, to elect its new mayor.
