Ontario municipal elections, 2018 (Oct 22)

[adma]

If you want a measure of how Faith Goldy might do, consider how Lauren Southern got 0.9% for the Libertarians in Langley-Aldergrove in 2015.  It's not like she's a Tooker Gomberg of the far right or anything...

[adma]

If you want a measure of how Faith Goldy might do, consider how Lauren Southern got 0.9% for the Libertarians in Langley-Aldergrove in 2015.  It's not like she's a Tooker Gomberg of the far right or anything...

I suspect most of Lauren Southern's votes were dissatisfied conservatives as she was running under the Libertarian banner and she wasn't a household name then so lots of her votes probably didn't realize she was a white supremacist.  Libertarians did reasonably well in the ridings they ran federally, but poorly in the last Ontario election which is interesting (I thought they would have picked up more anti-Ford PC types who couldn't stomach going Liberal or NDP).  Federally I suspect most Libertarian voters were dissatisfied conservatives who wanted Harper gone, but couldn't bring themselves to vote for Trudeau or Mulcair.  The Libertarians also did surprisingly well in the ridings they ran in, in the BC election and there I suspect mostly either former BC Conservatives or dissatisfied BC Liberals.

As for white supremacists running, it seems Toronto has a long tradition of this and every election at least one runs, but usually they don't get very many votes thankfully.

Actually, you're making a mountain out of a molehill here; I pointed that out as a perfectly generic Libertarian result, rather than as anything exceptional in one way or another--if it seems "high", it's probably a bit as a "none of the above" proxy (she was the only non-four-major-party option in Langley-Aldergrove), and maybe a bit of a token kookie Vancouver/Fraser Valley suburbanite/exurbanite maverick/vote-spoilage element.  But 0.9% is still pretty marginal.  (And re provincially in Ontario: you have to remember that the nature of the Ford-led PCs made them likelier to *steal* Libertarian support--or that of other marginal right-of-centre forces like Freedom, Trillium, etc--than contribute to it.)

In fact, if you want an example where a Libertarian candidate made hay out of race-baiting, Tamara Johnson parlayed First Nations-bashing into a Ontario-best 3.33% in Thunder Bay-Superior North in 2014--and in fact, she went on to be a provincial PC candidate in 2018 until her FN-bashing ways led to her removal.

[adma]

I'm not even convinced there will be savings given that there will be a need to hire double the staff per Councillor just to maintain the current level of service.
"...getting rid of 19 councillors and their office budgets, including travel expenses, equals less than $5 a year for every city of Toronto resident 15 or older. That did not account for the costs of adding additional staff for most of the 25 councillor offices."
https://www.thestar.com/news/city_hall/2018/08/06/what-do-toronto-city-councillors-do-more-like-what-dont-they-do.html

this might/probably will cots the city MORE money to have 25 Councillors and an appropriate staff.

Amalgamation was supposed to save money - it didn't.

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Yup.  Much easier for Ford's developer buddies to get their way.

Though it's arguably a different class of "developer buddies"--more like big-box and casino hucksters than high-minded starchitecture merchants.

What we should *really* watch out for is the resucitation of issues that ought to have been dead and buried 30 or 40 or more years ago: urban expressways, getting rid of streetcars, kicking the Toronto Island residents out of their homes, etc...

[adma]

Unfortunately, too, in the present right-populist climate, Ford & Co. would probably brand the Abacus numbers as "fake news", "biased", etc etc...

[adma]

- Crisanti must have his own personal following, more sizable then we thought.

Well, he has his former ward, and Mikey has *his* former ward (and less of it than before due to redistribution).  Also remember that Crisanti has maturity and experience, and Mikey was basically a "kid" parachuted in on surname coattails alone...

[adma]

Today's poll dump from Mainstreet

Etobicoke Centre:
John Campbell (incumbent): 41%
Stephen Holyday (incumbent, son of former Tory MPP): 39%
(Erica Kelly, who ran for the NDP in June is at 3% )

Angelo Carlevale, whose campaign launch Premier Ford attended and whose sign he sports on his front lawn (!): 13%.

For a Premier who purports to represent "the people", he sure doesn't have home-turf ballot-box endorsement pull.

[adma]

Fillion's a moderate-left maverick.  I think I read about Lai having a socon streak, so I'd assign her rightward, or right-mod at best.

[adma]

I would also put Minnan Wong under moderate Tory ally. He ran as a PC candidate, but was deputy mayor and a very strong critic of both the Ford Brothers not a supporter of them.

*Not* moderate.  *Definitely* on Tory's right flank.

Otherwise, there'd only be 2 or 3 or so who'd be "beyond moderate".