[taal]

I have faith in Tory and view this decision as follows;

If he shows to be progressive and takes a more center line stand on most issues, those of us on the left side of things, will give him credit, and accept this even with his current appointments.

Those on the ... err ... ford nation side of things ... regardless of what he does to help them, can be easily swayed by media pushing the fact his inner council was heavily influenced by left, and that's a very dirty word for them.


Here's where I'm going to make a generalization (but I'll stand by it) ... those on the Ford Nation side of things are by far and large less inelegant and education then those who are not ... and this is why I make the argument above, they're much more swayed by silly sensational media headlines.

To sum it up, this is very much a 2018 decision ... and if that's all it was, I'm OK with it ..

 

[hper]

I am sure many people did not like David Miller's picks when they were announced. People have to wait and see how things play out before they start criticizing on damn Day 1!

Everybody in the city who pays remote attention has the hockey cards. They know the basic stats of these players. The assistant captain is a dick with an established animosity towards one of his prime postings (WT). The budget chief is a cipher. The ref is…well…Frances Nunziata. And then there's David "I got this sweet midtown pad for next to nothing" Shiner. Sorry, the die is cast. The central city is bereft of effective representation for another 4 years. DMW will act on his spiteful agenda. Tory will run budget while Crawford blithely shakes his happy tail. Nunziata will continue to be glib and gormless.

Yes, day one indeed. Amalgamation still sucks.

 

[Videodrome]

Ok, Frances Nunziata is following me on Twitter. She is only following 59 people right now...

 

[Electrify]

Don't forget that he asked Chow Soknacki to be part of his transition team. The way I see it, he is trying to ensure both left and right have a voice. I saw a lot of people upset about that as well.

As an urban planning prof once told me, the job is to make sure that everyone is equally unhappy.

 

[Silence&Motion]

To all those Tory supporters,

Your hero has just appointed Denzil Minnan-Wong - a councilor who opposes waterfront revitalization - to the board which oversees Waterfront Toronto. I hope you're all feeling good about yourselves. Ford opposed Waterfront Toronto as well, but at least he was too inept to actually do anything about it.

 

[Torontovibe]

I am not happy at all with how this is going.

Tory has a history of making bad judgements, so I'm not surprised about his choices. In fact, I predicted it. For a guy who said he was going to work on uniting a divided city, he did exactly the opposite. He chose to freeze out all the downtown councillors in favour of all the self-serving, Rob Ford ass kissers. He chose people who backed Ford's destructive ideas (like tearing apart Waterfront Toronto and putting up a shopping mall in the Portlands) and that pretty much tells you where Tory is going. He is looking ahead to the next election and making decisions based on his own self-serving needs and not Toronto's future. (He's trying to win over Ford Nation) Like I've said before, Tory is Rob Ford in better cloths and a bit more professional. And like Ford's first day in office, with the Cherry Follies, I do not like the way this is starting off. This is not the way to show Toronto that you want to unite a city.

I predict this will be the start of many bad decisions to come.


Frances Nunziata & Denzil Minnan-Wong? Come on, are you kidding me? Watch Youtube videos of Nunziata at work and tell me she knows how to do the job of speaker. She was a complete mess. Then you have DMW pandering to Ford Nation with the pink umbrellas, after they were already built. What was the point of that stupidity? He was just playing political games, pandering to Ford Nation. These are the absolute worst choices Tory could have possibly made. This just sets the stage for Tory to push through his conservative agenda, which I think will hurt the city and starve it of the funds it needs to grow. His transit plans will also be a disaster but probably won't actually get built anyway.

Yep, I'm pissed.

 

[VTB]

He had no business giving DMW, the troll, the Waterfront board position. I really think it's a sign of a hard-right Ford-esque agenda, than a Bloomberg-esque urban business-oriented ideas guy that would have been the hope for Tory.

Unfortunately that is just the tip of the iceberg.

From Ed Keenan's article in the Star:

"Minnan-Wong is going to sit on the boards, in Tory’s place, of both Invest Toronto and Build Toronto, as some kind of apparent development czar. He’s going to sit in Tory’s place on the board of Waterfront Toronto, an agency against which he’s pursued a bizarre and spiteful vendetta for years. He’ll head up the civic appointments committee, which will choose the people who run everything from libraries to community centres to the parking authority. He’ll head up the striking committee that selects members of council committees, and head up the labour relations committee that negotiates with the city’s unions."

This is where DMW can do real damage. I'd really like to hear Tory's thinking on giving one man, let alone someone like DMW, such concentration of power.

 

[JGHali]

I am not happy at all with how this is going.

Tory has a history of making bad judgements, so I'm not surprised about his choices. In fact, I predicted it. For a guy who said he was going to work on uniting a divided city, he did exactly the opposite. He chose to freeze out all the downtown councillors in favour of all the self-serving, Rob Ford ass kissers. He chose people who backed Ford's destructive ideas (like tearing apart Waterfront Toronto and putting up a shopping mall in the Portlands) and that pretty much tells you where Tory is going. He is looking ahead to the next election and making decisions based on his own self-serving needs and not Toronto's future. (He's trying to win over Ford Nation) Like I've said before, Tory is Rob Ford in better cloths and a bit more professional. And like Ford's first day in office, with the Cherry Follies, I do not like the way this is starting off. This is not the way to show Toronto that you want to unite a city.

I predict this will be the start of many bad decisions to come.


Frances Nunziata & Denzil Minnan-Wong? Come on, are you kidding me? Watch Youtube videos of Nunziata at work and tell me she knows how to do the job of speaker. She was a complete mess. Then you have DMW pandering to Ford Nation with the pink umbrellas, after they were already built. What was the point of that stupidity? He was just playing political games, pandering to Ford Nation. These are the absolute worst choices Tory could have possibly made. This just sets the stage for Tory to push through his conservative agenda, which I think will hurt the city and starve it of the funds it needs to grow. His transit plans will also be a disaster but probably won't actually get built anyway.

Yep, I'm pissed.

This.

Short of making Rob Ford himself deputy mayor, with Mammo as budget chief, this is probably the WORST executive and appointments list Tory could have made. I feel completely justified in my criticisms of him during the campaign, and I rather have my doubts that his significant number of then-supporters downtown and in the core generally think getting frozen out of appointments is a reasonable thing.

Anyway, if anything further convinces me that he'll not only be mediocre but genuinely bad as mayor, this does.

 

[SJD_Toronto]

With all these negative comments about Mayor Tory's choices, please people, reveal who you would have picked for all these high profile positions.

 

[ShonTron]

With all these negative comments about Mayor Tory's choices, please people, reveal who you would have picked for all these high profile positions.

I'll bite.

1. John Filion. A moderate, centrist councillor who was early to endorse Tory but found himself snubbed. He should have been made a committee chair.
2. Kristyn Wong-Tam, a downtown councillor who's not as left as many people think. She should have got the Waterfront Toronto board position.
3. Norm Kelly should have been recommended Speaker. He brought the city together as Deputy Mayor and impressed m. Right-wing, yes, but he knows the role.

That moderates the picks without adding any NDPers while freezing out Nunziata.

 

[Silence&Motion]

I also hope all of the downtown/progressive councilors who either explicitly (Vaughan) or implicitly (Wong-Tam) endorsed Tory are happy with themselves. According to Edward Keenan, there were some left-wing councilors who were actually looking to join Tory's team and were rejected. Ironically the only left-wing councilor to actually get a nod (McConnell) was a strong Chow supporter from the beginning. Of course, I'm not sure anyone actually believes that McConnell's poverty initiative will amount to anything at all. As others have said, the real power is in DMW's hands.

BTW: McConnell is basically the Norm Kelly of the left: an easy going veteran politician who's not really going to rock the boat.

 

[adma]

Well, if he turned out to be a Trojan horse for the same old conservative agenda--why not? He's Mayor Troy, after all

 

[adma]

This has now been mentioned a number of times in this thread. Given the politics of Perks or KWT, do people really believe Tory would have them on his Exec?

Perks, no. KWT...she's interesting; ditched her NDP membership, endorsed Vaughan federally over Cressy, declined to go all Chow Chow Chow re the Mayoralty. Maybe representing Rosedale has done to her what it did to Kyle Rae. (It certainly helped her win a whopping reelection majority.)

Don't be surprised if in any future minor shakeups, she *does* make her way into the exec.

 

[christiesplits]

I also hope all of the downtown/progressive councilors who either explicitly (Vaughan) or implicitly (Wong-Tam) endorsed Tory are happy with themselves.

Did Adam Vaughan actually endorse John Tory?

I do agree that progressive downtown voters who held their nose for Tory should be kicking themselves.

 

[JWBF]

Oh right...that really important non-existing position...3rd Backup Deputy Mayor. ha ha ha

John Tory is right on schedule....doing something stupid.

I know he's gonna have his honeymoon period, but I hope by some miracle council smacks down his choice for speaker and humiliates the crap out of him for being so clueless.

Gestures and tokens are important in politics, and time will always tell how well Tory's actions take or not.