Toronto Mayor Rob Ford tossed from office

With any luck at all, the alleged crack accusation, if proved, will be the end of Ford.

 

A bit of smoke here, but very Twitteresque reporting. Pics that at least show some resemblance to Mayor McGrease or GTFO.

 

The aforementioned Marion Berry was not much better.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Marion_Berry

 

How did Harris pull off amalagation? Did the former suburbs vote for it (which I would find surprising) of were they forced in?

 

DOWNTOWN ELITES111111111111



Toronto has always had an inferior complex about wanting to be a "world class city". At least with Ford it is getting all the worldwide attention it craves.

 

I think it was an act of provincial Parliament that forced them in.

 

Roughly, how many of the wards were former suburbs?

 

I will certainly defer to our GTA (Greater Toronto Area) folks on that one becaue I don't really know. My understanding of alamagamation that it was six distinct cities that were combined, not a bunch of loose suburbs.

Most people in the rest of Canada seem to consider the GTA as Toronto.

 

The reason I ask is that Elinor Ostrom, who is the only woman to win a Nobel Prize in Economics, started her academic career comparing citizen satisfaction between small town and big city police departments and found small town departments always have higher citizen satisfaction. Removing local control is almost always a political third rail and Ford's cries of "downtown elites" would resonate, and probably not unfairly.

Which is not to defend Ford. I am interested because I have worked on a couple of proposed governmental mergers and seen how emotional the proposed consolidations become.

 

In that graphic, looks like Smitherman's crowd is flipping us the bird!

 

Lancey, the pro-Smitherman wards are almost an exact match of the former City of Toronto pre 1997.

The blue wards would be the cities swallowed up; Etobicoke, Scarborough, East York, North York.

 

That's what I thought, too!