Anthony Furey is the only one who can beat Olivia Chow | National Post - Conrad Black:
June 3, 2023 - "The Toronto mayoral election on June 26 is raising important urban issues and its significance will ramify far beyond Toronto.... Although there are over one hundred mayoral candidates, polls indicate that approximately 90 per cent of decided voters support the seven leading candidates. These are bracketed by Olivia Chow on the left and Anthony Furey on the right. Neither of these could reasonably be called an extremist and the other five principal candidates are somewhere between them in policy terms: former provincial education minister Mitzie Hunter, former Toronto police chief Mark Saunders, environmentalist city councillor Josh Matlow, former deputy mayor Ana Bailao, and councillor Brad Bradford.
"Chow is a veteran former councillor and widow of federal NDP leader Jack Layton. Anthony Furey is a journalist who recently left Postmedia, which publishes the National Post. As the only prominent person in the race who is not a career politician, Furey is refreshingly original in his views, and is the only overt capitalist among the principal contenders. He has risen from zero to about 10 per cent in the polls in two months, but Chow seems to have about a third of decided voters. She ran for mayor in 2014 against John Tory and Doug Ford. There were almost a million votes in that election, ... and Ms. Chow, the NDP’er, polled less than a fifth. She has not been politically active in the intervening years, and her strong showing now demonstrates superior name recognition, but ... if one or more of her opponents starts to make inroads, there is no reason to be confident that her present standing is unshakeable....
"Furey is the candidate who is moving quickly and has attracted prominent and interesting supporters, including the eminent public intellectual Jordan Peterson and former Conservative foreign minister John Baird. His candidacy has practical as well as symbolic importance. If he is able to get his message out more widely in the three weeks before election day, his rapid advance in the last month could accelerate and make him a serious contender. The other candidates apart from Ms. Chow have generally moved laterally in this period, and are not easily distinguished from each other. If they all withdrew in favour of one among them, that candidate would inherit a strong challenging position as a middle-of-the-road alternative....
"Furey is advocating 500 more policemen to assure the safety of the transit system and launch a counteroffensive on the streets of more crime-ridden areas, while Olivia Chow wants to send out more social workers on police emergency calls. Furey as the only outspoken capitalist contender in this race, is the only advocate of municipal tax cuts, specifically the municipal land transfer tax. He also advocates reductions in some expenses. He wants to repurpose plans for new safe injection sites to treatment centres where drug addicts are not simply supervised while they take drugs, but are actually treated to fight their addiction.
"Furey is the only serious candidate who really wants to roll back the corrosive despotism of the bicycle lanes that are strangling Toronto’s streets. Chow is a peppy and in policy terms, aggressive, cyclist.... It is a symbolic issue ... [T]he lanes are little used, are almost completely unused for the five coldest months of the year, and are really just a method for enforced technological regression and the coercion of the population to patronize the public transit system, which is substantially infested with drug addicts and hooligans.... In the same spirit as her championship of bicycling, Olivia Chow wants to level the elevated Gardiner Expressway and funnel all traffic onto the ground....
"The only other candidate apart from Chow who at this point appears to have any chance of winning, the only one who will roll back the soft left consensus that has produced the deterioration of security in the subway, the increasing obstructive presence of drug addicts, homelessness, and assorted misfits, and an increasing crime rate, and the only one who is not steeped to the eyeballs in platitudinous and robotic continuation of the policies that have made the city less enjoyable even as its physical proportions become more impressive every year, is Anthony Furey.
"It’s time for leadership and innovation, for some course corrections, and deference to the legitimate wishes of the majority rather than the poseurs and mythmakers of the left. The office seeks the man, and dull habit, humbug, and socialist fear-mongering must not be allowed to stall the maturation of this remarkable city.... We must not fail to seize this opportunity to take the next step in Toronto’s metamorphosis toward becoming one of the great cities of the world. Anthony Furey should be the next mayor."
Read more: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/conrad-black-anthony-furey-is-the-only-one-who-can-beat-olivia-chow
Candidate Anthony Furey gains ground in the polls for Toronto mayor | CityNews | June 1, 2023::
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