33 Replies to “Trendsetters”

  1. Looks like maps of Berlin in the last days of WW2 . . . the empire shrinking away.
    I can almost hear Iggy’s plaintive voice . . .
    ‘Where is Wenck?”

  2. Just wondering what the ethnic makeup is of the two areas.
    Would I be out of line if I were to say the Smitherman voting core are predominantly white?
    Or am I making shit up?
    een

  4. OMG ~ So the innuendo at that leftard blog is the amalgamation of white bread suburbia and multicult inner core foiled the vote for the multicult left ~ complete Bolshy codswallop. The arrogant left is already concocting conspiracy myths for Ford’s victory because the thought of their group identity voting theories being oblitereated by the new populism is unnacceptable to their frail egos.
    Kate, please warn us when you link to these lefty crank sites. I really do not appreciate the acrid taste of vast right wing conspiracy vitriol with my AM java.

  6. I guess the inner city “elites” now have a taste of what it’s like to be a Western Canadian over the last 40 years, always with a government elected by someone else.

  7. I was born in TO and moved away many years ago. I will never go back. All this angst about that sprawling wasteland is just so much noise. I suspect that most of Canda could care less. Curious though that the result seem to follow a correlation to proximity to CBC HQ.

  8. Would I be out of line if I were to say the Smitherman voting core are predominantly white?

    I don’t think it would be accurate to say that. The Smitherman wards really are a mix of demographics — they include several well-known ethnic “towns” (Chinatown at Dundas/Spadina, Chinatown at Dundas/Broadview, Little Portugal/Brazil, the gay village, and others), but I would not say that the wards are dominated by these groups — those aren’t the only people living there. All of his wards also have a wide range of income groups — from poverty in Parkdale, to million-dollar homes in the better areas of many of the wards.
    Calgarygrit’s comment “if you live … on a subway line, you likely voted for Smitherman” is probably the better indicator here. Smitherman’s wards encompass most of the subway and streetcar systems.
    If your world is constrained by the reach and speed of Toronto’s subways and streetcars, the world must seem like a very small place indeed.

  9. Correction: I should edit before I submit.
    The gay village is not an “ethnic town”. I should have changed that before posting.
    The overall point is the same, though: a quick glance at the map suggests that Smitherman captured Toronto’s best known “distinct societies”, but that would be an over simplification. Ford also captured large but perhaps lesser-know identifiable communities in the non-central portions of the city.

  10. These maps are -very- interesting. The Smitherman vote closely follows the subway, Ford won huge everywhere else. People like their taxpayer subsidized transit eh?
    I’d be -extremely- interested to see these results overlaid on ethnic data by postal code. I notice that none of the usual Lefty suspects have done that. I think its because we all know that the heavily non-White areas elected Ford by a wide margin.
    As I keep saying over and over, immigrants are not the problem. Socialists are the problem. Immigrants are getting a clue as to the source of their discontent in T.O. Possibly we will soon see the Toronto Left tossing immigrants under the Big Pink Bus in favor of some other strategy.

  11. Simple demographic separator:
    If you drive your car more than you ride a subway you vote conservative. If you drive a car you usually buy your groceries at a supermarket and do so on a weekly basis. If you ride the subway you almost always shop at a corner market and do so almost daily. This has long been understood by most pollsters.

  12. If you ride the subway you almost always shop at a corner market and do so almost daily.

    To that I would add that if you ride the subway, you also almost always smell of urine and vomit by the time you get home. And it’s worse if you actually get a seat on the way home.
    I work in the building above the York Mills subway station. You can smell the urine from the station in our building’s lobby. Just… lovely.

  14. Does the stat that says about 50% of Toronto is foreign-born apply to just the city of Toronto, or to the Greater Toronto Area?
    This could be diasterous for the federal Liberals if the immigrants really start voting ‘whats best for my city/province/country’ rather than the traditional Liberal pandering hook ‘what’s in it for my ethnic group’.

  15. Groceries (fruit and vegetables) are cheaper in China Town and Kensington Market than the burbs.
    (Lock all your bags in your trunk, including dry cleaning)
    I live behind one of the big grocery stores in Chinatown, and have actually witnessed signs with “FREE” on things like romain lettuce.
    I don’t think it’s a car/subway divide it’s that all the downtown people are beholding to big gubmint somehow.
    They either get subsidies or work at the trough and they vote for their entitlements.

  16. richfisher:
    the map supports my and other assertion. and BTW, If you rely on the subway, you are beholden to “big gubmint” every day…

  17. “Has anyone told them this?”
    They don’t get it, they are bad at math.
    Tell you something else, TTC riders don’t buy more at one time than they can schlep for an hour. I used to live at Dufferin and St. Clair, the streetcar ride from Dufferin down to Loblaws at Bathurst often took half an hour or more. Some days you could walk faster, pretty much every day you could ride your bicycle faster. On a bike you can cut traffic and skip stoplights.
    This is a distance of about a mile and a half we’re talking about.
    I’d make the amazingly inconvenient trip because buying right across the street at the Italian IGA cost more than the Loblaw’s bill plus the TTC fare both ways. If it wasn’t pouring (or snowing!) I’d ride my bike because of the faster/cheaperness.
    This is at age 30 btw, I wasn’t a kid anymore. Shopping was a major, major pain in the @$$, but I had to do it a lot because you can’t carry that much stuff on a bicycle at one go. If you don’t feel well, you pay the money at the corner store.
    The insane inconvenience makes you and everyone around you really, really cranky. IMHO this is the source of the “Toronto Attitude” we all know exists. New York City has it in spades, that place is orders of magnitude more annoying.
    Apartment living is another wonderful thing. Sure you can park your car in the basement, but then you have to haul everything upstairs. It takes about ten minutes per trip in some buildings. That’s a lot of time spent carrying heavy crap from one place to another. God help you when you forget something in the car. Like your phone, glasses, book…
    And Lefties wonder why people like their cars and detached houses. It was fun as a young man, but only because there were lots of girls. The rest of it was bollocks.

  18. We begin tonight with breaking news: According to anonymous inside sources with access to highly classified electoral maps, Rob Ford supporters have the CBC building surrounded…

  19. mouth, the people of Toronto dont spend their lives hating the people of Sask,its worse than that,they dont know that we exist!They dont know that their lives depend on the hinterlands for their survival,be it Sask,Alberta or,for that matter,rural Ontario.They think that oil comes from the gas station,natural gas comes from the air and food comes from Safeway or the corner store.As Kate often says,we need a famine.

  20. mouth mouths: “Wonder if the urban Torontoites waste their time hating on rural folks in Saskatchewan”
    Torontoites think the world begins at Oakville, ends at Ajax and sort of peters out up around Newmarket someplace. They aren’t really sure, having never been that far. TTC doesn’t go there, right?
    The rest of the world thinks y’all are a bit stupid, mouth.

  21. spike 1 @ 12:33 has it right. Furthermore, Toronto people, to the extent that they know the hinterland exists, have the gall to think that everybody should think like they do and exist to serve them and are somehow deficient if they do not.
    Many of Rob Ford’s photo ops showed quite a cross section of visible ethnic origins. Obviously they were voting as concerned responsible Canadian voters and were tired of the Toronto centric white liberal elites and their socialist agenda.
    Fred @ 8:14 and EBD @ 12:22, those comments are funny.

  22. By simply commenting in this section Mouth you have admitted by your own definition that you have ‘no life’.
    Way to go ArTard!

  23. Agreed Gord, I should have been clear and said It’s MORE than just cars vs. TTC.
    My mistake.
    The TTC is a urine scented entitlement for plenty, but Bob Rae and the Forest Hill/Rosedale set would never lower themselves.

  25. This has been raised before, but many ethnic groups are significantly more “conservative” in their views that many of the “Liberal Elite”. That may finally be coming home to roost as people realize the demonized “Right Wingers” can’t actually deport them on a whim…

  26. Every day 1.5 million leftards suck up to the great entitlement known as public transit and cavort the day away on meaningless trips between body art parlors and flash mobs.
    But wait – no, that can’t be it. Who would be doing the work?
    Every day 1.5 million rich elite Toronto liberals hop on the subway to Bay Street where they spend the day sucking wealth from the west and contributing it to the Power Corp/Quebec Liberal axis, because they all love to do that.
    But wait. That can’t be it. The subway is urine scented. They’d never suffer that.
    Every day 1.5 million Rob Ford voters take the TTC into Smitherlandia, where they work, eat, go to movies, and shop, before hopping back on the subway to Fordurbia.
    Wait, no that’s not it. Rob Ford pledged to rip up plans for light rail lines and build subways. Doesn’t he know that he’d be playing right into Smitherman’s hands? Who would be left to vote for Rob Ford if everyone lived on the subway line?
    Hmmm. How about:
    Every day millions of people in Toronto think about the next trip they have to take, and weigh the pro’s and con’s of walking vs biking vs TTC vs TTC (take the car). If they feel like sticking it to the right wing and peeing in public they choose the subway. If they hate being beholden to the gubmint they walk, carrying a pail of urine and nightsoil, because using the roads or flushing the toilet would make them beholden as well.
    Wait, no, something went wrong there. It’s so hard figuring out why we hate who we hate!
    I’ve got it: though many Torontonians are Rob Ford voters, they’re still Torontonians, and we hate them, cause that’s how we roll.
    Signed, subway riding, except when car driving, Rob Ford voting Torontonian.

  27. I ride the TTC and York Region Transit twice a day, five days a week, and sometimes on weekends. Granted, I’m not riding the midnight bus (although I’ve done so in the past). I have never been on a “urine scented” bus or streetcar. There is the occasional stench around the public washrooms, but it’s no worse than the washrooms of many restaurants I’ve been to. I have yet to see anyone vomit on the bus or subway.
    Why do I suspect that all the allegations of public micturation are made by people who rarely, if ever, take public transit?

  28. hick in the city, you don’t think it could have anything to do with all the people who don’t take the TTC being tired of paying for all the ones who do?
    GTA dwellers might also be getting sick of forking over for all the dough spent on Harborfront every year. And the T.O. Bored of Ed. And garbage men, and on and on and ON.
    Personally I hate Toronto because people are ruder than hell both on and off the road. That’s why I left, and why I never ever go back.

  29. The vast number of people who live in these wards of downtown Toronto are white and affiliated with government either retired, employed or receiving largess of some sort.
    Having canvassed for conservatives of all levels here in Don Valley West many times you would be astounded at the number of government employees in this one ward. One lady I talked to knew all the people on her street and identified each one with a Liberal lawn sign (provincial election) as a teacher, hydro worker, TTC etc.
    We were talking after curling on Wednesday and all the people who voted for Smitherman at the table were retired government staff, the rest of us voted for Ford who only won by 50 votes in our ward.
    Friends that live in the Beaches and Jack Laydown’s riding say it is ever more solidly left wing.
    These people see the destruction of politicians like Miller or McGuinty but find it impossible to support anyone but the left.
    Ford won the city because of the larger than normal turnout that were sick of the elitists and their obscene taxes.

  30. “These people see the destruction of politicians like Miller or McGuinty but find it impossible to support anyone but the left”
    Proving – yet again – that liberalism is a mental disorder.

  32. hahaha … the old angry conservative theme….
    And thanks for adding to my daily helping of schadenfeude….. it’s sweet … low cal….

  33. “From the mind of a Calgary Liberal, now living in the centre of the universe”
    Always amused by someone who calls their blog Calgary Grit and then skedaddles off to Toronto.
    I guess calling oneself a Toronto Grit would be considered redundant

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