Doug Ford, AKA Laughable Bumblefuck II, won the Ontario provincial elections with a cowardly, trumpian campaign that kicked off with a bitter leadership race within his own party, whose top spot was up for grabs because the previous leader was accused of getting young party activists drunk and then having sex with them.
Ford’s internal leadership campaign was even dirtier than the election that followed it, and, as with Trump, Ford’s biggest enemies are the pretenders to the throne in his own party (See also: Theresa May). Ford has no scruples about attacking his own by every means at his disposal (after all, this is the guy whose sister-in-law is suing him for stealing millions of dollars out of her husband’s estate).
The latest move is a unilateral gutting of Toronto’s city council, reducing the number of councillors from 47 to 25, reversing a change made in the last provincial parliament in order to comply with a Supreme Court ruling that everyone’s vote should carry equal weight. Toronto’s densely populated downtown core — which, not incidentally, is made up of voters who would rather drink a jug of warm saliva collected from strangers on the subway than vote for a Conservative — had as many as 97,000 voters per district, while the sparsely populated, Tory-leaning suburbs had as few as 45,000, meaning that the votes of suburbanites in their McMansions carried more than twice the weight of their urban counterparts’ votes.
But although this will continue the decades of Conservative attacks on the City of Toronto (20 years ago, Premier Mike Harris amalgamated Toronto’s left-leaning urban district with the slow-witted, backwards, Conservative suburbs*, guaranteeing that Torontonians would live under occupier governments of suburb-friendly, car-humping dimwits like the Ford brothers), the major impact will be to end or curtail the political careers of leading Conservative politicians who might challenge Ford’s leadership in years to come.
Along with potentially creating council havoc for Toronto Mayor John Tory, who defeated Ford in the 2014 mayoral race, the premier appears to be taking aim at Brown and Del Duca, the frontrunners to win the chair jobs in York and Peel.Brown stepped down as PC leader on Jan. 24 after CTV News broadcast a report alleging sexual impropriety with two women. He has denied any wrongdoing and is now suing CTV, which stands by its story, for $8 million.
Sources said Ford tried to find a high-profile candidate who could stop his predecessor from winning the Peel chair’s job, but was unable to do so.
*Having been raised in one of those suburbs, at the North York/Scarborough border, I know whereof I speak
Ford to slash Toronto city council to 25 councillors from 47, sources say [Robert Benzie/The Star]
(via Naked Capitalism)