One of the ingrained features of the Canadian national character seems to be a habitual respect for established authority.
asserted
One → seem → authority
Historically, this has had its upsides, as evidenced by the relative mildness of our political culture (compared with, e.g., that of the United States or France) and stability of our social order over time.
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this → have → time
The downside is that it can result in complacency and excuse-making when it comes to inadequate political leadership.
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it → result → leadership
This is how the country ended up with Justin Trudeau as prime minister for a solid decade, something no one can entirely explain these days.
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one → end → decade
Olivia Chow (who shares some of former PM’s penchant for costumes) has been mayor of Toronto for less than a third of that time, though she has benefitted from some of the same tendencies.
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she → share → tendencies
Yet even her supporters have had difficulty marshalling a positive case for her beyond the fact that she’s the incumbent.
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she → have → fact
Such praise invariably takes the form of bromides about her openness or her positivity, as though voters were grade-school teachers assessing their young charges.
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voters → take → charges
There is, then, a glaring discrepancy between the political and economic significance of Canada’s largest city (and North America’s fourth-largest) on the one hand, and the expectations voters have of its executive leader on the other.
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voters → be → other
This sort of thing can’t but produce a certain cognitive dissonance in the neutral observer.
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sort → produce → observer
Three years into her term, Chow continues to rely on prepared remarks and has proved unable to respond extemporaneously to basic questions about her positions across multiple debates leading up to the election.
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Chow → continue → election
This tendency extends beyond her public persona to substantive matters of policy.
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tendency → extend → policy
Few Toronto residents with memories longer than that of a goldfish could fail to notice the decline in basic public services.
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residents → fail → services
More troubling is the remarkable rise in general disorder, ranging from rampant and open drug use to matters of public safety — about which the mayor has remained strangely diffident.
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mayor → range → which
There are two reasons why the positive case for Chow’s mayoralty is difficult to make.
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case → be → mayoralty
The first is that she does not evince the kind of technical competence or grasp of policy details that would attract support on practical grounds.
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that → evince → grounds
The second is that the political machinery that supports her, and for that matter her own office, is more ideologically extreme than is consonant with either her public image or the majority of the electorate.
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that → support → electorate
Thus her failure to do much about harassment at synagogues and other Jewish institutions — a formerly unheard-of but now routine phenomenon — evinces a basic absence of leadership, and it may also indicate a wider political outlook that handles such disturbances leniently, particularly when they are perpetrated by ideologically sympathetic movements.
More broadly, and in contrast to the city’s image as a centre of capital and industry, the mayor’s office has pursued policies that favour extracting wealth over generating it.
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that → evince → it
To be clear, the danger here is not that Toronto will somehow be transformed into Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge or anything like that.
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Toronto → transform → that
The danger is simply that favoured but basically unrepresentative organizations continue to siphon off valuable resources for their niche agendas, and so the city becomes a generally uglier and less pleasant place to be, even as ordinary Torontonians remain weirdly oblivious to this reality.
The city’s governance ends up falling into this gap, between the radicalism of Chow’s political base and the modesty of her platform.
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governance → continue → platform
The latter evidently hails from a different timeline, one in which first-order concerns about things like public order and the availability of housing and a flourishing economy have been satisfactorily resolved.
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concerns → hail → housing
This, in turn, has led her supporters (and friendlier elements of the media) to demand a certain strange rigour in discussions about this election, subjecting Chow’s main challenger to all manner of critique that she is spared, despite the fact that greater critical weight should really be placed on the person who has led the city for the past few years.
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who → lead → years
All this, I suspect, is — even beyond the ordinary rough-and-tumble of electoral politics — why so much emphasis has been placed on scrutinizing her rival and issuing dire warnings about privatization instead defending her performance as mayor.
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emphasis → suspect → mayor
Levelling that same scrutiny at the incumbent would raise questions.
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Levelling → level → questions
The central one being: What is the positive case for retaining such an undistinguished figure in the executive position of what some advocates never tire of insisting is a “world-class city”?
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advocates → retain → what
And to that, one might add another: Why don’t we expect better?
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we → add → better
The Aporia
