Chris Caple, the leader of the sit-in protest outside Mayor Rob Ford’s office, is doing what everyone in this city should be doing but isn’t.

Since law, decency and luck haven’t yet rid us of Ford, we should be crowding Nathan Phillips Square in the tens of thousands, telling him to go. Every prominent person in the city should have signed a declaration to be nailed to the door like Luther’s 95 Theses. And 18 candidates should already have started a run against him, to be threshed like wheat until one person alone, a Ford-beater, is backed by anyone with standards, even low ones.

I am dreaming but not uncontrollably so. What makes Caple better than the rest of us? Why aren’t we all Capling?

Caple, a website designer with two magic things, a supportive girlfriend and a flexible schedule, told the Star’s Robyn Doolittle that he finally snapped when Ford came out against flying the flag for gay rights during Sochi. “When he started to become openly homophobic, in my opinion, it was beyond the pale.”

What a beautifully Toronto remark, full of cautious qualifiers like “started to,” “openly” and then the clincher “in my opinion.” For when you are asked for your thoughts and you offer them, isn’t it always your opinion that you’re offering? Even the man who’s doing the boring thing — protesting morning until night while the rest of us merely fulminate — softens his tone.

Why do we do this? It’s self-destructive, it’s stultifying, why it’s positively . . . Finnish.

I am reading the book I was itching to get my paws on, British journalist Michael Booth’s new takedown of the Nordic nations, The Almost Nearly Perfect People: The Truth About the Nordic Miracle, in which he studies Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Sweden and Finland and finds them not quite living up to their cool reputations.

Nice neutral Sweden is one of the planet’s biggest arms manufacturers, 5 per cent of Danish men have had sex with an animal, Iceland is a lava moonscape that got overexcited by cash and blew its wad, rich Norway is getting richer by investing in the filthy Alberta tarsands, and Swedes are a race of “wallflowers racked with insecurities.”

And then he got to Finland, and my eyes popped. Truly, we are Finns. Toronto is Helsinki but without the charm.

Booth bent backwards — I could hear bones breaking — in his effort to praise the Finns. “Finns are solid and dependable,” he wrote. “They are the most courteous of all the Nordic people,” and so on. “It would be all too easy to form a picture of the Finns as an unhappy, often paralytically drunk hybrid of repressed, Swedish-style conformism and Russian barbarity, as many do.”

But seriously, Finns. Everything he said about them struck home about Torontonians. They dress like us, “with big puffy jackets, sensible shoes and expensive-looking spectacles.” They are unsmiling, a heavyset cold people whose most-prescribed drug is an anti-psychotic, which seems sensible. Like us, they are functional.

Helsinki’s opera house looks like a gleaming white sewage treatment plant; Toronto’s is a blackish brick storage unit. Finns obsessively love summer houses; we drone on about our cottages. We’re both loners. Our streets are deserted; Helsinki’s make Oslo look like Mumbai, Booth says.

Toronto houses are made quickly and cheaply of beige “fucco,” which is the nickname builders give to fake stucco; Helsinki’s are made of “porridge concrete.” In Finnish saunas, it is considered horrifyingly rude to speak even while naked and hot, which one generally is not in Toronto elevators where one also does not speak.

The silent men of Finland love their guns (third highest ownership after the U.S. and Yemen), as do the Angry Pyjamas of Canada who told Stephen Harper to destroy the gun registry and he did. Harper, there’s a Finn for you. Imagine him in the sauna, steaming by rote. Imagine Ford slumped over.

With a mayor like Ford, we have no future, just like the Finnish language, which has no future tense, only the present.

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“Either you do it, and consider it done, or not,” as Booth says, which sums up our Fordness. Either you get rid of him or you don’t. Toronto mumbles on endlessly. The noble Caple sits. Time passes.