Good For Table Talk

I am delighted that Geoff Dawe won the race for Mayor, I never doubted that he would. However, before the AC released the news that they were being sued by the Mayor, I never would have imagined him winning by such a huge margin. I wonder at how many of those 7254 votes that Geoff got were really for him or just against Phyllis. I know it makes no difference but I am curious. Morris completely torpedoed her own campaign and she has nobody to blame but herself.

I appreciate the irony though in her five constant supportors giving her the ammunition to shoot herself in  the foot with

LuckyWife.

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Geoff Dawe is the first candidate ever elected to the Office of Mayor without first having served on Council . One can  put up a good argument  the Mayor's Office is the only one  voters really care about. If there is no mayoralty contest, turn-out drops  in half.

This time, I was eager to see if there would be an increase in turn-out. Well there was but not by much. Of course  percentile  doesn't tell the whole story. Not the way it  used to when we did our own enumeration.

I'm no longer sure how  voters' lists are created. l heard they had started using the census. But the census has people  who don't have the right to vote. Somebody said, those who don't have the right to vote don't, even if they are on the list.

Well, supposing  that's right. What does it do to the voters list if  people who are not entitled to vote and don't vote, are on the list ? Does that not skew the  percentile  turn out, to numbers on the list  though not  entitled to vote.How much of a factor is that?

This year, MPAC, the company that does  assessment for the municipalities screwed something up.As a result, the province didn't get voter cards out to everyone. Everyone was asked to carry photo I.D. and one other piece of identification to the poll with them.

It wasn't because they didn't get cards out to everybody. Apparently, in the last election, bus loads of Tamils were dropped off at polling stations in Markham during the election. Voter registration cards can be easily forged so the government quietly introduced new security measures.

But to get back to Geoff:  I have never seen a more professionally organized campaign in Aurora. It started  right after the last election although Geoff himself was not yet the candidate.

 People who had experience of working with Ms Morris had serious misgivings about the town's well-being.  They were not wrong.

After  Geoff  Dawe  finally  declared,  he never put a foot wrong. He made clear the obvious problems without ever making the campaign personal.

At the same time, the incumbent  Mayor was his best asset.She didn't show for the HoJo event and the Sports Alliance event was a wash-out. Lists of numbers at the all-candidates meeting in the library caught nobody's attention.

There is no doubt, legal action by the Mayor, against three highly respected Aurora families , at taxpayers' expense was the last straw. It was the clincher.

But the race was already lost. The  decision to launch legal action was a final act of desperation.A favorite ploy to distract attention.

Alison Collins Mrakas, until the end, kept looking for logic.  I kept saying, "there isn't any"

Until the votes were counted, she could not believe it would happen. While I  never  doubted  it would.

What is often left out of a calculation ,when people look at candidates, campaigns, organizations,  issues, what is consistently left out of  most equations,  is the sense of fairness and decency that resides among people.

When the Smitherman crowd dredged up stuff about Mayor-elect Rob Ford having nothing to do with  issues  and everything to do with personally maligning the candidate, they were doomed from that point. If that was all they had to offer, they had nuthin'.

Rob Ford on the other hand never went off message. When he talked about Kyle Rae spending what was left of his Councillor's allowance  giving himself a  retirement party and he, Rob Ford would stop the "gravy train" at taxpayers' expense.  His audience understood his point well.

When the Miller faction talks about not co-operating with the electorate's choice of Mayor,they know not whereoff  they speak.

Toronto will listen to the Mayor.

 Aurora will too