At the Evergreen Brick Works on Sunday, before a crowd of a couple hundred voters, Ari Goldkind experienced something he’s been waiting for since registering to run for mayor in March.

He leaned toward the podium and said, that Toronto “doesn’t have a spending problem, we have a revenue problem.” He said politicians should stop dancing around euphemisms, discussing complex financing strategies and revenue tools. “Let’s call them what they are. They’re taxes. And they help build the city we all dream of.”

There was applause from the crowd as loud as for anything anyone said that day. For Goldkind, the reaction must have been validating. He’s been hoping to get a fair hearing for his campaign, confident that if the people of Toronto hear his brand of straight talk, they’ll want to vote for it. It seems, at the very least, that they will clap for it.

Goldkind was on stage debating Olivia Chow and John Tory. (Rob Ford was to have debated before withdrawing for medical reasons. Doug Ford, who parachuted into the race in his brother’s place, was invited, but declined on short notice.) A trial lawyer used to making arguments in public, and a confident public speaker, he didn’t look out of place among the heavyweights.

When I met with him over breakfast late last week, the same day the Ford family was turning the whole campaign on its head with their medically-prompted ballot switcheroo, Goldkind was talking about how he hoped the race was shifting to allow him a glimmer of hope of breaking through in voters’ consciousness.

“Put me in, coach,” is how he characterized his attitude to the shrinking field late in the campaign. He feels he’s been doing the work, earnestly building a platform, canvassing, speaking to small groups and trying to build an organization that now regularly had 30 volunteers working for him.

He was feeling some momentum. David Soknacki, withdrawing from the race, had mentioned him as a possible alternative. Earlier last week, Goldkind had the chance to participate in one forum and one early-morning debate. He’d done an appearance on David Akin’s show on the Sun News Network, in a segment called “Toronto’s Longshot Candidate.”

“I’ve gone from ‘fringe candidate’ to ‘longshot candidate.’ I don’t mind being called a longshot,” he said. “It’s true.”

And now the Brick Works was putting him in what it called its “leading candidates” debate, before his largest audience yet. It suddenly seemed he might get at least a chance to impress voters, six weeks from election day.

And he impressed at least some, judging from social media and chats with crowd members who’d never previously heard of him. Throughout the debate, as in almost all his campaign materials, he emphasized his proud embrace of taxes. His plan calls for raising property taxes substantially (“50 cents a day,” he said), implementing congestion charges on the Don Valley Parkway and the Gardiner Expressway, bringing back the vehicle registration tax, and levying a higher land transfer tax rate on homes over $1.1 million.

The substantial revenue those measures would bring in were his response to most questions. What “stop the gravy train” was to Rob Ford in 2010, raising taxes is to Goldkind this year.

At times it seemed he and Chow were ganging up on John Tory: At one point, Chow said Tory’s transit-funding scheme was “faith based”; Goldkind followed up by saying, “There’s a reason it’s called a ‘scheme.’ I’ll leave it at that.” But Goldkind was equally willing to attack Chow, lumping her in with Tory and Ford in promising to keep property tax increases low and secure needed funding from the provincial and federal governments. He’s refreshingly willing to insist on raising the money he thinks the city needs with the taxes available to the city right now.

I have some questions about Goldkind as a candidate. It’s hard for me to think of the mayor’s office as an entry-level position. I am skeptical of his confidence in his ability to get council and staff to follow his lead. If he begins to gain steam, there’ll be a lot of due diligence to do on his platform.

But for the sake of having a voice in the debate unapologetically raising the possibility that if we want a great city we should be prepared — gasp! — to pay for it, I hope he gets the chance to be a part of the mainstream discussion more often.

After the debate, I asked blogger Daren Foster of All Fired Up in the Big Smoke what he thought, generally. “Well, they should keep Goldkind around. He didn’t look overmatched,” was the first thing he said.

A student named Robert Ong told me he was attending his first debate. “Goldman — is that his name? Goldkind? He impressed me,” he said “I think he could be the new Soknacki.”

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Even reaching Soknacki-esque levels of support might be a longshot for Goldkind. But after all these months of being ignored and left out of debates, he’s excited to be considered to have any kind of shot at all.

Edward Keenan is a Star columnist.

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