Not taking the 401 – a rant about Rob Ford
All of a sudden I’m glad that the move I wanted to make when I was four years old didn’t happen. At that time, for political and economic reasons, many of the friends I’d made and several relatives moved to Toronto. I had visited relatives who had recently moved there and thought this was some kind of magical place, somewhere far, far away that took a long time to get to. Another land and a better one in my tiny perspective. There were signs everywhere, like I’d never seen before. Signs on benches, signs on trees, signs on top of other signs!
My wish didn’t come true then and as a result I took on my hometown of Montreal as my city. Don’t get me wrong, Toronto is an important, bustling metropolis that wouldn’t be half the city it is today if not for Bill 101 and the Parti-Quebecois chasing Anglophones and businesses out. Former Montreal institutions are now Toronto, institutions with no trace whatever left in Montreal. It’s also true that Montreal, as a city, has NEVER really been good to me, so I guess I put Toronto up on some kind of pedestal.
Now they’ve recently elected a new mayor. His speeches make him sound like he’s mentally unbalanced and while I loosely agree with some of his policies, he doesn’t plan the other half of restitutions. Yes, I agree that bicycles should not ride on streets or sidewalks, but instead on dedicated bicycle paths and bicycle lanes where the cyclist can access wherever they need to go both safely and directly. Yes, I get frustrated with immigrants stealing up all the low end jobs, leaving me unemployed. But they still should have the same rights as me and the same prospects as well.
I should state right off the bat, though, that while the media has portrayed him as a rather loose canon, I don’t know the guy! For all I know, he could be the sweetest guy who actually cares about his city and the people that populate it. I don’t really think so, but media tends to put a spin on things. Also, I wonder, was he running in a joke-party? One that had no intention of being elected, with such wacky ideas as replacing everybody, cutting off and privatizing all services and therefore “drastically” reducing taxes while giving himself seven-figure raises?
Apparently he’s a multimillionaire businessman, who thrives in the cutthroat piratical world of big business. As a multimillionaire, he tends only to see people like himself and assumes that the majority of Torontonians are, like himself, very wealthy and willing to pay exorbitant prices for things like garbage pickup.
He’d have the homeless lynched and likely have their organs harvested. This is becoming a rather distopic science-fiction novel. He finds homeless shelters to be embarrassing, but his solution is ridiculous. Furthermore, Montreal has more than enough homeless bums panhandling and accosting me on every street corner as it is, I don’t need Toronto’s imports!
