Dear Toronto,
Thank you. After living through two years of corruption scandals, three mayors and endless putdowns by the national media, we Montrealers needed some mayoral misfortune from another town.
So thanks for giving us schaden-Ford, the small pleasure of watching you squirm instead of us.
It’s a relief to see another Canadian city screw up — electing a zero-tolerance-for-drugs mayor who does crack cocaine, but claims he was too drunk to remember being stoned. A law-and-order mayor who patrols city council meetings like a thug, trampling female councillors and taking pictures of opponents to take revenge on later.
It’s all so … un-Toronto — a city most people think of as Toronto the Good, the genteel, the gluten-free, soy latte capital of Canada. So we do appreciate you, Toronto, for pushing us off Page One.
That said, we Montrealers also have some resentment about how this Ford media circus has played out — in that you’ve outshone us again, Toronto.
Our city has done its utmost to make world news. We’ve had a huge, grotesque corruption scandal; we arrested one Montreal mayor, evicted another and our police are rounding up more politicians than criminals.
But all this barely earned a mention in the world press. We even introduced a charter of un-Québécois values, banning all religious symbols but Christian ones — but the best we got was more snide coverage from Maclean’s magazine.
Meanwhile, your guy Ford is an overnight global sensation! In just weeks he’s gone from local yokel to national soap opera star, to an international superstar who’s put your city on the political scandal tour map.
He’s been covered by Al-Jazeera and the South China Morning Post, in Saudi Arabia, Cairo, Mexico and more. He’s starred on the big U.S. shows: CNN Newsroom, The Daily Show, Saturday Night Live — even Britain’s BBC has been streaming Toronto city council meetings live.
The truth is Rob Ford is now the most world-famous Canadian politician in history, far eclipsing Pierre Trudeau. Not one in a thousand Europeans can name our current prime minister, or our former ones — but the whole world knows Rob Ford.
He may just be named Time magazines “Newsmaker of the Year.�
Ford has also transformed Canada’s image overnight from bland to brash. The Economist magazine once called us “the most boring country on earth, after Singapore.� The Manchester Guardian once said “one Canadian is as boring as three Swiss or five Belgians.�
But that’s all changed. A long piece in Britain’s Guardian newspaper Tuesday said Ford has introduced the world to the “renegade� bad boy side of Canada, and changed our reputation from a quiet, polite nation into “Ford Nation.�
What amazes foreigners most is that so many Torontonians still approve of him — 42 per cent in a new poll Friday. There’s a good chance they’ll re-elect him next fall if he doesn’t get jailed, or have new press revelations that he’s a coke dealer, a library vandal or a bike thief.
Much of Toronto wants him as mayor, mostly the suburbs. Montreal’s fault line is largely along federalist vs. separatist lines. However, Toronto’s fault line is between educated bike-riding downtowners and suburban Tim Horton-drinking car drivers who resent the downtown “elite�. They like having Ford in the limelight — where he certainly is.
Josh Freed: Corruption? Pshaw. Craziest mayor on Earth steals limelight
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