Diversity bites back
The secret to a politicial underdog's success
Last Updated: October 30, 2010 2:00am
Now that a few days have passed and the cliches have been exhausted, can we please explain what really happened in Toronto this week?
Yes, I know that those of you reading this pretty much anywhere else in Canada claim you can't stand and don't care about Toronto, but whether you like it or not, the place matters. Biggest city, massive influence and all that.
The truth of the election of the right-wing populist — he's not really a conservative — Rob Ford says far more about the entire nation, indeed about all of North America, than it does about one city in Ontario.
Ford was the ultimate outsider and he beat George Smitherman, who was the consummate insider. Ford may be wealthy, but he coaches football, detests the spending of public money, doesn't grasp, let alone enjoy, politically correct language and was backed by talk radio and the tabloids.
His opponent, on the other hand, adores spending our cash, is the darling of the politically correct and was championed by the Toronto Star, Globe and Mail and, indirectly, by the CBC.
Ford's campaign was handled by his brother, by strategist Nick Kouvalis, and by volunteers who were often political novices, while Smitherman was in the hands of one of the most expensive consulting groups in Canada and had the public endorsement of the Liberal Party machine and even little Justin Trudeau.
Then comes one of the most delicious political ironies in decades. Multiculturalism bit back. The very diversity that the left has claimed to support dared to think, speak and vote for itself and decided that a man of the people was preferable to a man of the people's masters.
Ford not only won, he smashed his opponents and was declared Toronto's mayor within eight minutes of the polls closing.
The chattering classes are claiming this was because the white, angry, male and suburban people voted for him. Some did. But it takes more than that to win.
What these liberal dinosaurs refuse to grasp and are too insecure to accept is ethnic Toronto is conservative. Smitherman is gay and speaks of his husband. Many Muslims, Tamils, West Indians, Africans and others responded with an electoral "not our values."
Then Smitherman's pals tried to paint Ford as a racist. The alleged victims of the man replied that Ford had always been with them when they needed him and while he might say "oriental" instead of "Asian" and make the occasional, albeit positive, generalization, his pragmatic and colour-blind street politics were preferable to the left's racial obsession.
"Stop patronizing us," was this voting answer.
Ordinary people were mobilized and it's deeply significant that the bitterest responses to Ford's triumph came from white, upper-middle-class lefties and not from the great mass of ordinary Torontonians.
The most telling remark all week was from the increasingly desperate and sad Bob Rae. "I don't really know Rob Ford," he said. "We live in different worlds."
Exactly, Bob, exactly.
The lessons are obvious. Canadians want their country back and politicians need to stop apologizing for appealing to traditional values and common-sense economics. The support is out there if you'll only have faith and trust democracy.
Read Michael Coren's blog at canoe.ca/corenscomment