Rarely do I see any progressive movement from my City of Toronto municipal government. Rob Ford, elected mayor during the last election, had promised to clean up city hall, but all we have seen so far has been further politiking and delays in large infrastructure, such as the Sheppard subway. Yesterday Ford proposed a motion to stop the $0.05 charge on plastic bags from retailers, but council turned the proposal around and banned all plastic bags, effective Jan 01 2013. Quick and efficient, yes, and I approve, but what happened to due process?
Successful Rob Ford Mayoral campaign: simple, effective, and grassroots
Democracy works by allowing anyone to campaign for a political position, and the person who gets the most votes, gets the position. Apart from a couple of years living in China, this is all I have known. Here in Toronto we have a new mayor who campaigned on the platform of cost and waste reduction. Roughly a third of all councilors were swept out, replaced by fresh faces and ideas. We have “polls” that predict the outcome of the election before election day. These polls are akin to taking the pulse of a patient, an indicator of events to come. Using scientific and statistical analysis one would think that these polls would be quite accurate, but in the case of Toronto’s mayorality race, the polls were very wrong, by a large margin. It turns out that the offline community, those that do not have internet access or those that spend very little time online, threw the polls off, so much so as to question the benefits of polling all together.
