Friday January 25, 10:55 p.m.
Well, let's see. Ontario's losing a Premier under a cloud, Toronto's keeping a Mayor under a cloud. Enjoy the symmetry! For those folks who are completely outside of the Ontario sphere of influence, Premier Dalton McGuinty has probably spent his last few hours in the big chair down at old Maple Leaf Gardens where he's getting his final lionization by the Liberal Party hordes before his replacement is chosen at a good ol' brokered convention tomorrow. Supposedly, the mild-mannered fellow had a pretty good decade at the helm before things fell apart for him in the last 12-18 months in terms of a teachers' strike, and a fiasco involving the very wrong person as the top guy for the province's air ambulance service, ORNGE (as ORNGE you sorry you hired the dummy?), among other things. And I believe there are quite a few protesters outside the Gardens who plan to give him a sendoff of their own.
As for Mayor Rob Ford, I don't think I've seen local media so hyped up for a single political figure in this city in decades....no, let me change that....in ever. CP24, CTV, CBC, City....all of their talking heads were up early this morning to find out if Ford was gonna lose his appeal against the original decision to have him turfed out of office for violating conflict-of-interest laws. But he got the happy ending he wanted....he won the appeal, media just went nuts, and of course, the citizenry got split down the middle in their reaction. I'm just happy it's over (I don't think that counter-appeal by the lawyer and his client who had brought all this down on Ford in the first place will go anywhere); I'm not a huge fan of Ford's but I think it's time for City Hall to return to a relative sense of normalcy....which just means the political brawls are taking place inside chambers instead of outside.
