Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Toronto Vote 2003
Am writing on the day after, on my way to my C# class. Boy, you can certainly tell the political leanings of the newspapers by looking at the headlines.

• Sun: “Left Hook”
• Toronto Star: “Miller Wins in Toronto”
• National Post: “Miller Wins in Tight Race” (or something similar)
• Metro: “Miller Time in Toronto”
• 24Hours “Carey On”

Okay, 24 Hours is pretty hopeless at the moment when it comes to local news - the lead story has something to do with Mariah Carey. Exactly what I could care less, which is why so far 24 Hours hasn’t done much for me so far the few times I have picked it up.

I find the National Post headline funny considering that the pundits were all positing a very narrow margin for the win between Miller and Tory, pegging it at less than 10,000 votes or so. The actual vote margin between the two was larger at almost 35,000 votes - much larger than the pundits had thought. So “tight race” seems to be a bit off the mark.

<rant>Yesterday I picked up a copy of the Sun somebody had left on the lunch table at a sub place I went to yesterday. I read their take on Miller on page 4 - ugh, journalism, if you can call it that, at its worse. The usual “tax and spend” epithets were tossed at Miller, and somewhere in their he was likened to a “clone of Bob Rae”, and in bed with the unions, all the while praising Tory to the hilt and making him look completely clean - the fact that he has never held public office before, and was former CEO of Rogers - the cable company everybody loves to hate - never came up. And next to this was a column where Miller was said to be courting the gay vote. Well of course he is - what candidate wouldn’t? Miller apparently has a good record with this community, but the way The Sun slithered this article alongside the wretched opinion piece made it seem like siding with Miller was somehow “siding” with gays. Transparently yellow journalism. Ugh. Guess that’s why I never normally read The Sun...</rant>

We went out en masse to vote at the local polling station. It was significant for Erika if only because this was the very first election she voted in since she officially became a Canadian citizen a couple of weeks ago. We took the kids with us and they played tag around the Mennonite church hall where we could cast our vote. Was impressed by the automated reading machines which took our results on a piece of paper and were fed into a fax-like device.

Afterwards a curious Vanessa was interested in what all this was about. Sandra Bussin’s campaign headquarters was across the street, so we all went over there so that she could find out more about the process. Bussin wasn’t there, but a couple of her assistants kindly took the time out to tell Vanessa what the local democratic process was, and why it mattered. Both kids were also given a cookie and Vanessa came away satisfied with the results, proudly carrying away some campaign gear she was handed by Bussin’s people.

The fax-like machine I fed my voting page into must have accounted for the speedy rate at which the results were known. I tuned into CBC Radio 1 at 8pm and by 8:16pm they confidently predicted Miller to be the new mayor.