So, a sports jock in a florid pink jacket is the star of a mayoral inauguration in Canada’s largest city.
Thanks to Don Cherry’s boisterous performance, there’s now a new standard of civility at Toronto City Hall.
“I’m wearing pinko for all the pinkos out there that ride bicycles and everything.”
Why do some sports jocks hate cyclists? Here in Vancouver, Dave Pratt on radio Team 1040 has cultivated a personal vendetta against bike-friendly behaviour by politicians in particular and cyclists in general.
It seems odd if not perverse for a sports jock to be ridiculing something that so obviously promotes fitness – and is even a sport. Irrelevant, obviously. But then “sports” in the media has bled together with reality TV and talk radio, linking together so many people with so much shouting.
Cherry’s bon mots not only branded the Rob Ford mayoralty but also doubtless gave licence to radio-ranters across this land looking to source civic politics for some testosterone-filled rhetoric. Sports talk is one of the permitted places in Canadian media where Fox-style hyperbole plays well. Since American role models from Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck have refined the scripts on how to fight the culture wars (first, target something vulnerable – oh look, cyclists), these dudes are ready for their cue. The Cherry performance brought trash talk into city hall as the new rhetoric.
Characterizing an entire community as left-wing kooks polarizes the debate Fox-style. Which then encourages other media to pile on, pushing everything to the extremes and forcing people to take positions at the far ends of the spectrum, reinforcing the polarization and ideally moving more pissed-off people onto your side of the issue.
But is this good politics?
Politicians who cultivate bicycle bashing may find they’re in danger of angering a majority of Vancouverites.
That explains, perhaps, why so far no candidates of any civic party have said they’re going to get rid of the new cycle tracks on Dunsmuir and Hornby, as much as they may criticize the process that put them there.
Maybe one of the sports jocks will run for the mayor’s office just to shake things up, pink suit optional. Maybe in 2011 we’ll see a new kind of politics, washed up from the south, reinforced by the arrival of Fox-style media, setting a new and discordant tone.
Maybe Rob Ford is just the first manifestation of this style.
Two differences, though, between Toronto and Vancouver. First, TO amalgamated into a megacity, dominated by the post-war suburbs. Ford could, like Mel Lastman before him, count on suburban resentment of the contemptuous centre to build a base. Vancouver is no megacity. Many of those annoyed with what’s happening in the city don’t live in the city.
Ford also benefited from a split on the left. Here, if an anti-cycling candidate ran separate from the NPA, the split would be on the right. That’s what happened in Calgary, where Naheed Nenshi benefited by a similar right-side split, so he could appeal to the centre while attracting the left. Now he has room to cultivate the right by calling for a lower tax rate and cut in services than even the council is prepared to support.
Most likely, Vancouver civic politics next November will be characterized by a continued search for the middle ground, as it has since Gordon Campbell used a similar strategy in 1986. The centre vote still determines who gets a majority after the votes on the far left and right are counted.
But it’s still early, and this is a year where there could be two leadership battles and three elections. Lots can happen.
Just watch out for a loud mouth in a pink suit.