Here’s looking at Joe

NowToronto.com:

Check out Pantalone – it’s too early to consider uncomfortable compromise

While the municipal election race already seems like it’s been on forever, the remaining 32 days to the vote is only a little shorter than an entire federal election campaign, so it’s too early to be thinking in terms of best-of-a-bad-lot compromises.

This is still vision time, still time to dream of electing a great mayor for a great city.

Punchline-turned-poll-topper Rob Ford has over-defined the race so far, and the conversation has devolved into who has the best chance of stopping the disaster that would be a Ford mayoralty rather than who has the best ideas.

In fact, Ford’s unlikely rise to the top of polls shows just how volatile and in play this election is. Months ago, this was then-front-running Liberal George Smitherman’s race to lose, while Ford was stuck mid-pack with the other candidates.

Well, supposedly unstoppable Smitherman may have found a way to lose, and Ford’s invective-fuelled charge has put him out in front, proof that in politics as in sports, you actually have to play the game before declaring a winner. Folks, the game is still on, and anyone can win.

The latest poll results show no single candidate as an obvious Ford-killer, despite all the hand-wringing efforts of Smitherman’s team to convince us otherwise. While Smitherman continues his free fall, council veteran Joe Pantalone is the only candidate, along with Ford, to see his numbers climb, bringing him within a hair’s breadth of Smitherman.

Yet panicky progressives, fuelled by Toronto Star hysteria, are already talking about holding their noses and voting for this hit-and-miss politician who did so little for Toronto while occupying one of the top elected spots in Ontario as Dalton McGuinty’s second-in-command. What part of Smitherman’s right-lurching campaign has earned him the default support of progressive Torontonians at this point?

We’re certainly no strangers to dramatic election turnarounds. In the 2003 mayor’s race, Barbara Hall fell from first to worst, and a lefty with a vision stole the vote despite starting September with single-digit polling numbers.

That would be David Miller, and mainstream media portrayals to the contrary, Miller has helmed one of the greatest periods of municipal change in this city’s history, a legacy that only one candidate, Pantalone, seeks to protect and expand.

As Smitherman, Rocco Rossi and Sarah Thomson all shamelessly try to sound more and more like Ford with irrational anti-tax, slash-and-burn promises, only Pantalone consistently puts forward progressive and proven positions.

It’s too early to hand this race to any politician. Make them earn it. Pantalone has run a quiet race, too quiet, but he’s turning up the volume, and if you’re proud of much of what’s been done in Toronto in the last seven years, you’ll like what you hear. Pantalone is a veteran, but his ideas remain new and inventive, and he has the experience to actually get them accomplished.

Can we really take candidates who demand tax cuts and freezes seriously at the same time as they trade in pie-in-the-sky subway fantasies? The last time a subway was attempted in Toronto – the Eglinton West Line – Ford’s cousins, the Harris Tories, actually spent millions of dollars to fill in the tunnel. Ford worries about waste at the same time justifying the hundreds of millions of dollars it would take to rip up Transit City. Smitherman, too, would mess with the well-honed plan by adding pricey subways and unproven private financing.

While other candidates trade in insults and accusations, Toronto’s at-risk neighbourhoods remain cut off from the core and the jobs that live there. The ready-to-roll Transit City light rail solution is the quickest and cheapest way to correct this volatile and unjust situation.

It’s time to take a good look at Pantalone’s positions and not stuff our hopes down into some dark memory hole. This city has been well served by dreamers, from David Crombie to Miller, so let’s honour that legacy by not reining in our aspirations, certainly not at this still early stage of the race.

And in a city that prides itself on its multiculturalism, are we really ready to dismiss a smart man whose thoughtful words are spoken in a voice that announces that, yes, like so many of Toronto’s citizens, he comes from somewhere else?

It’s incredible that rich kid Ford can be depicted as an Everyman when Pantalone and his parents arrived in this city in poverty to emerge as yet another in the millions of success stories Toronto is so proud to tell.

So don’t be bullied because of fears of a possible Ford nightmare. Consider voting for someone you can be proud of.

This is a city of miracles, a progressive, inclusive town that the rest of the world is in awe of. It will take less than a miracle to keep us on this ascendant path; it just requires that we as voters do not narrow the race too soon.

You still have plenty of choices before election day October 25, so take a look at the little man with big ideas before rushing to judgment.