With visions of music festivals dancing in his head the Mayor of Toronto twerked his way to the hot sun of Austin, Texas on a civic mission.  He had one great reason for going that he likely missed even though it was right under his perspiring nose.

I’m talking about the Austin music festival’s attention to making people not cause litter. 

Founded in 1985, the iconic Don’t Mess With Texas anti-litter campaign is a culture within the State.  Images of the Mayor at the Austin festival site illustrated what that kind of cultural shift looks like.  The fairgrounds are immaculate.  Bins are prominent red, white and blue, branded with eye-catching slogans, good signage and a palpable stigma about littering.  Litter reduction needs all these elements.

In many jurisdictions the litter-free festival has become part of the planning mandate.  Compare that to Toronto where the litter aftermath from any big event is typically profuse and disgusting.

I appreciate that the mayor’s dream of a Toronto music festival may have been manufactured with the aid of a few pen scratches on a napkin.  Now, if only we could get him in on a plan that focuses on not littering that napkin.

David Soknacki for Mayor?  The earnest former city councillor and one-time Toronto budget chief is readying himself for prime time as a contestant for mayor in the game show-like election that will be Toronto’s in October 2014.

A garden party at Soknacki’s house on Sunday, Sept. 22 drew guests from well-connected Liberal circles, conservatives, such as Councillor Paul Ainslie and, surprisingly, left-winger Adam Giambrone assembling for Toronto mayoral wannabe Soknacki’s toe-in-the-water reception.

Some guests came and went, unsure of why they were there in the first place.
For the remaining fifty this was a building block event for the prospect of Soknacki as the next mayor.

His long-time buddy MP John McKay was there as were provincial Liberal operatives Do they believe this is the man who can unseat Rob Ford?

Boy Scout Businessman v Quasimodo Mayor: one of the many possible mayoral matches in a Toronto election contest that is still more than a year away.

I can still picture Councillor Doug Ford’s bellowing face in the media ordering Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne to “get her own house in order.”  Now Ford’s brother, Mayor Rob, and his council followers, are content to have $1.4- billion bled from the lean provincial treasury and squandered on a subway to serve, not people, but future development.  To pay for a subway, development has to be high-density.

Look at Mimico Lakeshore where residents are fit to be tied over ever sky-reaching condo clusters that are on the map for their area. Tall buildings aren’t being welcomed at the best of times.

The Sheppard subway dooms neighbouring communities to accept towers in places where they don’t really fit. 

Didn’t Karen Stintz launch her political career fighting tall buildings? Now, by backing Rob Ford’s Subway, she plays handmaiden to the very developers who salivate for high density building approvals.

I live on the proposed Sheppard LRT route.  From 1985 to 1995 I was the communications lead on the joint municipal lobby to get the Sheppard Subway built.  Bob Rae’s NDP government was ready to fork over 75% funding for four new subway lines.  At the eleventh hour the province added the sweetener of offering to finance at zero interest the municipal funding share for the first three years of the deal.  An ensuing decade of neo-Conservatism in Ontario shuttered the program.  Transit system growth in Toronto stalled.

That train has left the station. Here we are today – a provincial offer of $1.4 billion on the table that Stintz, as transit commission chair, says is not enough to build the subway.  She fails to appreciate that most people in Scarborough don’t want and won’t be served by the Sheppard Subway plan as drawn.

 The influential mayoral ally Denzil Minnan-Wong has the absolute right take on this.  As a councillor he, too, was active in North York during the original subway debates.  He knows the current Sheppard Subway plan is dastardly. It disadvantages an entire swath of Scarborough commuters whose clean, fast, high-tech, above ground LRT trains would deliver cleaner air and a nicer streetscape at a better cost, not to mention modestly scaled development that is compatible with existing communities.

A Sheppard Subway at this late juncture delivers the least bang for the buck and is fiscally irresponsible.

“Deputy Mayor” is largely a trumped-up title that means very little to anyone.

Therefore, it was amusing to see Toronto’s Mayor Friday night generating a carnival atmosphere in Scarborough as the backdrop for his announcement of Norm Kelly as deputy mayor.  It was peculiar, too, because the current deputy mayor Doug Holyday is still there, on a leave of absence to run in a provincial by-election.  That city councillors can “seat-warm” – vacate an elected post to seek an upper-tier office – is another story.  (Two sitting councillors are vying to be Etobicoke-Lakeshore’s next MPP.)

Ribbon cuttings, flag raisings and community events tend to flow the deputy mayor’s way.  He or she is on the mayor’s rubber chicken dinner circuit, rubbing shoulders, pumping fists, shaking hands, reading out proclamations and prepared texts.

Tiny Township, Havelock, South Stormont, Amherstburg, Georgina, Deseronto, Perth, Melancthon, Adjala and Midland have deputy mayors, along with places such as Toronto.  This is a small number compared to those who don’t.

There’s a difference between a deputy mayor and an Acting Mayor.  Usually a city will have a system of monthly rotation for councillors to serve as Acting Mayor when the real mayor is out-of-town, unwilling, ill, (or in rehab).  This is a fair and responsible way to divide the responsibilities that a mayor cannot do. 

A Deputy Mayor serves for the life of the term of office, or at the mayor’s pleasure. In Toronto, deputy mayoralties need to be questioned.

The chosen councillor becomes pointedly beholden to the mayor. If he wants to hold on to the high-profile perquisite, he must agree with the mayor, vote with the mayor and promote the mayor’s agenda even though a majority of his constituents did not vote for the mayor.

Nothing against Norm Kelly, he’s practically a barnacle on the political bandwagon he’s been around so long. My issue is this business of Toronto having an appointed figurehead, not elected citywide, doing the work a mayor ought to be doing and shutting out other members of council.  That doesn’t breed a collegial environment. You don’t have to live in Toronto to know that the place is politically dysfunctional, if not downright toxic.

As Tom Mills, of Sun Media, points out perceptively in his Sault Star column on this in February. “A deputy mayor allied with the mayor might intensify battles.”

Read Tom’s article, “The Deputy Mayor Question”, here.  

Did I tell you the one about the city logo?  The line drawing of city hall was a no-go logo for me after my printer put it on the election signs for my first campaign as a candidate for Toronto City Council.  

My sign printer was a sitting councillor, Howard Moscoe, and the company he represented, Adanac.  His idea to have a picture of city hall graphic instead of words 'Elect' and 'Councillor' was really quite brilliant.  He didn’t tell me he was lifting the design from the city’s Millennium logo.  This was in 1999.  It was a summer by-election in Scarborough wards 43 and 44.

Before I even received my sign order from the printer, I received a call from the city clerk’s office saying they had had a complaint about them.  No, they would not release the name of the complainant, but they wanted to see samples of my materials.  Soon after, I was told to scrap my signs and literature ($11,000) and cease and desist using the little logo.  I took time out of campaigning to go to City Hall to be served with a formal letter signed by Clerk Novina Wong and copied to six different senior staffers.

The letter said if I won the by-election, the city would attribute the outcome to my use of the logo and would be forced to hold a new by-election.  The letter left no guessing.  The city would come after me in court for the cost of a new by-election, the Clerk stated.

“For your information the cost of holding a by-election is between $165,000 and $200,000.” 

This was in reaction to a minor and totally innocent trademark infringement issue.   There was no law against putting the city hall logo on an election sign at that time.  The city’s sign by-law was changed later that year to add what I still dub “the Sheila Clause”, prohibiting the use of the city logo on candidates’ election materials.

Never understood until now why I kept that letter.  I can wave it around  and make the point that Rob Ford should pay for his own mayoral by-election, if the city must have one.  For his information, the cost of a new by-election is in the range of $7 million.

What's fair for the goose ... ?

In Toronto’s urban history I was the first person to take Rob Ford to the city’s integrity commissioner and win in 2005.  Ford had mailed out business samples and used his city business card to promote his printing services.  The ruling concluded that Ford had breached the city’s code of conduct, had used the city logo for private purposes.  It recommended council impose no penalty on him as his error was ruled to be “inadvertent.”

I laughed when I read Ford’s rebuttal to my complaint, although I was sorry that his sister was shot in the face on his deadline day for dealing with it.  Naturally that unfortunate incident of criminality created a delay in hearing Ford’s integrity case.  But his letter stated his belief that my complaint was part of a left wing conspiracy and that he had done nothing wrong.

Flash forward seven years.  Breaking the rules and being admonished by then-commissioner David Mullan hasn’t hurt Ford one bit.  As Mayor of Toronto now he has stumble bummed his way into a conflict situation, refusing early on to do what was required to resolve it.  I tell you, that man is hooked on rule breaking.  Some might call it disrespect.  Ford’s track record is there for all to see: brushes with integrity commissioners (not just one, but two) and the city ombudsman, trips to court on various matters, deposed senior city officials, insults hurled.

Rarely am I bewildered, but this whole scramble to save Ford’s bacon has me staring into space shaking my head. 

I proved him to be wrong in ’05. Here he’s still mucking about in 2012.   Only one conclusion can be drawn.  The code of penalties and enforcement governing the conduct of people elected to city council needs to be stronger.

The same rules that ensnared our hare of a mayor have entangled this writer in the past.   Little sympathy for Mayor Rob Ford’s plight do I feel, and this is from someone who has encountered legal challenges wrought from the unforgiving clauses of Ontario’s municipal election laws. 

My transgression?  I was one day late filing a second financial statement after losing as a candidate for council in a 1999 by-election.  Had I not penned my case, found a judge to hear me and made my presentation to the court within seven days, I would have been banned from running for municipal office for seven years.  

Diane Alexopoulous, who sought office in Toronto in November 2006 and came close to winning, didn’t do what I did.  Rather than go through the legal process, she didn’t respond to her letter from the elections branch of the city clerk’s office and forfeited her right to try for public office again for seven years.  How many others have similarly faced this law full tackle, like I did, or with a defensive fumble like Diane?  This was a woman who earned 46.1 per cent of the vote and came within 20 votes of toppling an incumbent titan.

Regular folks affected by election legislation don’t have politicians like Ontario Conservative Leader Tim Hudak and his federal cousins demanding an urgent review of the law governing politicians, wannabes and try-hards.  Golly, I thought Conservatives were the Law & Order party.  What does it mean? That all candidates are treated equally under the law unless they're a big Tory named Ford?  Is the next Tory campaign slogan going to be, “Give the big guy a break. The law is an ass.”

The entire Ford Family will be thrilled that I’m not a court justice.  When I fought for my rights in court, the law was the law no matter who you were.  It was tough, but evenhanded. 

My penalty for Ford would be banishment for seven years.

I wouldn’t let that rabbit run away from what he’s done.