making choices

Significantly more voters than usual turned-out yesterday to choose Rob Ford to be Toronto's next mayor. As third-place candidate Joe Pantalone responded, "in a democracy, the voters always get it right" so it would be excessively vain of me to say they have made a huge mistake.

I don't want to see a chorus of cries that Ford is not a legitimate mayor because he failed to get 50%+1 of the vote. That was the sort of silliness foes of Geo W Bush argued for 8 years and it got them no-where. The rules provide for the candidate with the most votes to be declared winner. This is not one of those countries where there are run-off elections until someone has a numerical majority. Rob Ford will be the mayor and he will muster the votes to get his often controversial ideas approved by Toronto city council, or he will not. Don't expect a sudden outbreak of harmony on councillors' row at city hall, however, is my opinion.

The result yesterday is a huge disappointment for progressive voters and those who believe you don't have to tear the city apart to make it better. I would be among the first to proclaim outgoing mayor David Miller the city's worst chief magistrate in my memory (which goes back to Nathan Phillips), worse even than the silly gadfly John Sewell, but I also see dark days if Ford persists. No more funding for water-front rehabilitation, de-railed construction of modern and responsive public transit, abandoned cultural support, lengthy strikes and work stoppages - these will not make for a better city. Ford vows that he will send out crews of city workers to clean-up all the litter, scrub away all the graffiti and fix all the pot-holes. Those would be the same city workers whose jobs he wants to eliminate as their services are contracted-out and privatized. Ford vows no more wildcat strikes. It is hard to imagine anyone more naive.

Hard to imagine anyone more naive, unless, it's the politicians and voters who refused to see this was coming and to unite strategically to prevent it.

George Smitherman and Joe Pantalone received 385,314 votes; Rob Ford received 383,501 or 1,813 fewer. Then there were the votes for more than 40 other vanity-candidates who, like Pantalone, never had a chance of winning. I believe I can say with confidence that the majority of those votes would not have gone to Ford.

Solutions to the problem? While I would like to see Canadians adopt the practice of run-off elections until someone has a majority, rather than just a plurality, I don't see that happening anytime soon. I favour mandatory voting, also, as in Australia.

But the best solution, the one that doesn't require new laws and practices, is for candidates like Joe Pantalone, and voters, to learn that elections are strategic contests and you need to play by the rules if you are to win and have a chance of achieving your objectives. Pantalone is not so stupid that he didn't know he never had a chance of winning in 2010; not from the moment he registered as a candidate until the votes were counted last night. His supporters knew he had zero chance of winning but they encouraged him to stay in the contest.

Pantalone's refusal to recognize reality and the rules of the game of politics is the main reason Rob Ford is Toronto's mayor-elect. Pantalone's supporters, who kept him in the race for so long are to blame equally. They cannot use naivety or ignorance as an excuse. For the next four years, whenever the mayor does something truly outrageous, they should be reminded that he is mayor because they made the wrong choice. They had a choice and their choice is one they will have to live with, however painful that may be.