Hey, look at the positives!
Up here in North Bay, the spiritual home of ex-Premier Mike Harris, there’s a lot of chortling going on over the panic in downtown Toronto at having to face four years of Rob Ford, the manners-challenged mayor elect. Up here, when Harris was tearing apart Ontario, we learned that the best way of dealing with it was to emphasize the positive: Harris got rid of photo radar, didn’t he?
So here’s some positives I collected from my friends down at Tim Horton’s this morning.
1.) You’ll be able to drive your car without feeling guilty about it. Personally, I’d recommend that everyone select one day a week to drive everywhere, even to the corner store, so the Fordites will experience what it’s going to be like when they dismantle the transit system.
2.) The Mob will have something useful to do. Ford will privatize garbage collection, so they’ll be collecting the garbage. You’ll once again be able to bribe the garbage truck drivers to take those spent plutonium pellets you’ve been hoarding in the basement, or get rid of your construction debris for a couple cases of beer.
3.) No more recycling. Instead of having David Miller’s people sending your recycling to landfill, you can just toss it all in your garbage bin so it’ll go there directly. And when the recycling percentages go down, that’ll be on Rob’s head, not yours.
4.) Gay Pride day, and the parade will be cancelled, so here’s an opportunity to replace it with a parade in support of the truly oppressed.
5.) No more of those arts festivals with foreign-sounding names. Rob Ford will pass a bylaw stating that everything has to be in plain English, so Nuit Blanche will be renamed “White Night” and those Illuminati clowns will have to rename themselves “The Light Bulbs.”
6.) There will be more police to protect you—when they’re not out partying with Rob, or protecting him against all those communists who didn’t vote for him.
7.) You’ll be able to wander down to the Toronto Island airport and watch those wide-bodied jets take off and land.
8.) You’ll be able to lip off at those bicyclists as much as you want. There’s a rumour that Ford is planning a bylaw that allows motorists to nail them whenever they stray out of their designated lanes. That’s only until the bike lanes are removed, so this will provide only temporary recreation.
9.) The Gardiner Expressway won’t be torn down, and the Spadina Expressway will be resurrected. That’ll give all those unemployed communists at City Hall a threat to keep themselves mentally alert with.
10.) You will have a legal defense for beating up on your wife, and a legalized brothel to go to after you make bail—when Rob Ford closes the licencing departments at City Hall and rents out the space.
11.) There will be no policy reports and plans to be non-implemented.
12.) You’ll be able to spray your closets with DDT after Rob Ford legalizes it to get rid of the bedbugs and all those birds nesting on the office buildings.
13.) You’ll have a female deputy mayor who won’t look or act like Sandra Bussin. It’ll be Rob Ford’s mother.
14.) You’ll be free to throw beer around at hockey games and insult people, and there will be mandatory fighting at Leaf’s games—on the ice and in the stands.
15.) All those under-employed standup comedians the CBC has been breeding in its basement lab will have a new target.
16.) No more of those bothersome ethnic street festivals because there won’t be anyone to issue them permits, and you can forget about the Pan Am games or anything else.
17.) The waterfront will become a nice, dull place to drop off garbage and construction debris you can’t bribe the mob into taking off your hands.
So, you can see from this that it isn’t all going to be bad. If you run out of fun things to do, wander out on your front porch. In between the bursts of gunfire, you might be able to hear us laughing all the way from North Bay.
