I'm very sorry that I'm not in Toronto right now because Toronto is in the midst of election fever.

That's right folks, for all our international listeners, for all our non-Toronto Canadian listeners,

buckle up because we're going to tell you a little bit about local politics. We are entering,

careening into a new election in our city, the two-term mayor, John Tory. Listen I don't want to make

any predictions. I don't want to put my thumb on the scale. The poll suggests he's cruising to an

easy third term, but you know maybe if we work together we can stop that. What do you think Luke?

So if you're one of the many people listening to this and you don't live in Toronto,

you know you haven't heard that there's a municipal election underway, you're kind of in the same

boat I think as a majority of Torontonians. I think this election has not really grabbed people

at all a few months ago in the provincial election, the Ontario election. We had the lowest voter turnout

in history so that is since 1867 the lowest voter turnout, probably lower still if you go back to

when Ontario was upper Canada. Absolutely pitiful. The incumbent PC party led by Doug Ford,

pursued his very deliberate strategy, sort of suppressing the vote, being boring. They knew that

victory would depend on low turnout. In fact this increased majority that they got in 2022

was earned on about the same number of raw votes as they got in 2018. So that is how you win in

politics today is by doing anti-politics and Toronto's mayor, John Tory, is perhaps a version of

this on steroids. John Tory for some quick context and you know that'll give you a sense of what

the political culture in this city and this province is that you can have a mayor whose name is

literally John Tory. I mean it's like an Anglo Tory political culture that we get from the 19th century

and because you know post-modernity has stripped politics of all kind of irony and subtlety. Yeah

the mayor is literally called John Tory. But John Tory was elected in 2014. He is the former leader,

very unsuccessful leader of the Ontario PC party. In fact he ran an also unsuccessful mayoral

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