Canadian Politics Taking Ugly Tone of American Electioneering

Want to be mayor of Canada’s largest city? Hope you don’t have a past, because it’ll come out and that’ll be it – no mayor’s office for you.

Or at least that’s what’s going on in Toronto, Canada, where candidates are fighting an ugly battle for a municipal election this coming October.

Today, long-time Toronto councillor Rob Ford held a press conference to spill the beans on his impaired driving and having an illegal substance charge. While he was in the United States over a decade ago, he got pulled over and was charged for failing to take a breathalyser and for having a joint in his pocket.

The drug charge was dropped, but he admits to doing community service for the DUI charge.

So what? Are we seriously going to deny a man a job because of something stupid he did in his youth? Don’t we all make stupid decisions at some point in our youth? I sure know I did. That’s all just part of growing up.

But leave it to Toronto’s media – and this is even playing on national and some international wires – to play this story up as if it were the be all and end all for deciding who should run Canada’s largest city.

Not that I’m all too happy with the selection – in my not so humble opinion, none of the candidates has convinced me that they deserve the big lofty office, huge mayoral salary, and prestige of being in charge of the country’s economic engine.

I’m sure all the candidates running are really great people, but if the best they can come up with is trumping up ghosts from their competitor’s past, they really don’t know what the needs and wants of the people are, and shouldn’t be running the show.

Actually, this whole story stinks of American political campaigns, where campaign managers do whatever it takes to make their competition look outright evil.

We Canadians are supposed to be better than that, peaceful, overly polite. Yes we need to debate the issues, but those issue stretch far deeper than the colourful past of a handful of players.

Too bad the wanna-be mayors of Toronto, Canada just don’t get that.

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City Employee Endangers and Embarrasses the Residents

A city employee responsible for the lives of hundreds has been caught drunk on the job. The city employee – a bus driver.

A bus driver? Responsible for hundreds of lives? Bus drivers can carry about 50 people on the average city bus, and when you consider all they do all day is drive up and down their route, picking up and dropping off passengers, even if they just drive up and down their route once, they could have already transported a 100 people.

Though the real issue here that the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) employee – the public transit service in the city of Toronto, Canada – was drunk on the job, or at least had enough alcohol in her system that police seized her license.

Last Friday a passenger on the bus called 9-1-1 complaining that the driver was all over the road. Police stopped the bus in the city’s east-end and had the driver take a breathalyzer – she blew between .05 and .08. That’s not high enough for an impaired driving charge, but is enough to warrant a 72-hour driving suspension due to her blood alcohol level.

The 40-year-old driver is currently on suspension without pay pending investigations by both the TTC and her union.

Drinking and driving is not acceptable under any circumstances for anyone period. But when a city employee who interacts with and is responsible for the lives of numerous public lives is caught drunk on the job, it is far worse.

Not only did this bus driver potentially endanger the lives of her passengers, she put the lives of other drivers, their passengers, and pedestrians on the sidewalks around her vehicle at grave risk.

A city bus isn’t a Tonka Toy – have you ever seen one in an accident?

When a bus collides with a car usually the car is crushed like a tin can, while there is barely a scratch on the bus – even at low speeds. Buses are massive solid metal rolling structures. Driving one takes special training, and requires a special license in most metropolitan areas around the globe.

Although buses tend to be slow moving vehicles, if one gets out of control, it could wreak havoc – killing innocent people on the sidewalk, on the bus, or in other vehicles.

Not to mention that a city’s bus drivers are often the first and only contact visitors to a city have with city employees – having one driving drunk all over the road certainly doesn’t give Canada’s largest city the best public image.

The TTC should have – if they don’t already – a zero tolerance policy for being under the influence of non-prescribed drugs or alcohol while working. Anyone found to be working a regularly scheduled shift while drunk or drugged should be immediately fired, without hesitation.

Anything less is irresponsible for the safety and well being of the public, and the image of the city.

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