A new standard of civility at City Hall

It means that Rob Ford got to act out a childhood fantasy. I’m sure they all went to the pub afterwards and talked about the good ol’ days when men were men and the NHL didn’t require players to wear helmets. And everytink like dat.

More seriously, though: it is too bad that Ford is doing things like this, but it will do him more harm than good. With this presentation, he’s alienated a lot of people. As he keeps going, he’ll only alienate more.

Don Cherry doesn’t even live in Toronto which you would think is a requirement in attending a mayoral invocation. The fact this is posted here is only giving Rob Ford more attention maybe if we all ignore him he will disappear.

It will take a whole lot of ignoring to make Rob Ford disappear

Gord, this is good for the Vancouver Real Estate Market since I won’t be surprised if more than a few Torontonians decide to move to Vancouver….as long as we don’t go too far in the other direction…in which case a few Vancouverites may well move to Calgary, which at the moment seems to be getting the most balanced and fiscally effective municipal government

A dangerous combination of arrogance and ignorance and a sad day for both Toronto and Canada. Toronto appears to have elected a mayor who is unprepared and perhaps ignorant of the urgent need to make his city resilient in the face of peak oil and climate change. I write this because he’s championing sprawling suburbs and the car and has inferred that bikes don’t belong on the city’s main streets. I must admit to not knowing if he has any policies for solutions such as developing much needed local food and renewable energy systems. I’m not holding my breath.
This is also bad news for Canada and Canadian cities trying to address these challenges because it takes our biggest city out of a leadership role. Former mayor David Miller clearly understands them and was working to address them with his Transit City and Tower Renewal plans.
Finally, the ignorance on this front also seems to be alive and well in our local media. I know you previously discussed this in context of the Hornby bike lane Mr. Price but it is spreading. Last night I noticed that a Vancouver Sun sports reporter has taken to bashing the “lunacy” of our mayor and council, describing some of our left-leaning citizens as “kooks”, and knocking cyclists, pedestrians and police.
Here’s a taste:
“Cherry, wearing a hot pink blazer as a message for the “pinkos” who’ve been mocking him for his low-brow taste in candidates, invited even more scorn for his ranting and raving about “pinko rags” and “left-wing kooks” and “bike riders” — and all I could think of, reading the magnificent firestorm of Twitter vitriol it stirred up on both sides, was: “Boy, if it’s left-wing kooks and bike riders Grapes is mad at, he would run out of words before he ran out of targets in Vancouver.”
First of all, he wouldn’t go near our City Hall without stopping for a surgical mask and latex gloves first, in case whatever lunacy the inhabitants are carrying is contagious. He might take part in a swearing-AT ceremony for Gregor Robertson, but that’d be about as close as he’d get to Hizzoner the Happy Planet Man.
And bike riders? Don’t get him started. Give Grapes half an hour behind the wheel of a car in downtown Vancouver, and he’d have enough material for his next 12 episodes of Coach’s Corner, which increasingly is an extension of Cherry’s moral and political beliefs — men’s men and armed forces, good guys and bad guys — and not so much about hockey, anyway.
If he didn’t run down a few cyclists, he’d surely spend the half-hour honking the horn at pedestrians who have no idea what that orange hand means on the traffic signal, and he’d have a few choice words to say about the police — though it would pain him to criticize anyone in a uniform — whose next jaywalking ticket will be the first ever handed out in our fair city.” http://communities.canada.com/vancouversun/blogs/colesnotes/default.aspx.
Civil city. Not so much any more.