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Photo by Ryan Remiorz/CP

It’s a lesson on one of the great ignored realities of electoral politics: candidates for office, especially those heading parties, seek office on the basis of a platform cobbled together in expectation of a surprise-free future, only to discover, too late, that events won’t wait for them.

As it is, once he is sworn in on Friday, Ford will face a situation to which he has likely given even less thought than he did the many other issues he glossed over with pledges of simple solutions based on everyman logic. Tory isn’t lounging around city hall, waiting for the new government to sort out who gets which office. The city is fast heading for a crisis it can’t settle without help from other levels of government, and the mayor is savvy enough to know this is one wheel that needs plenty of squeak if it hopes to get some grease.

On Tuesday he issued yet another blunt plea. “We have a problem and we need help,” he said. “We have exhausted our available sites, our resources and our personnel. We need the other levels of government to step up and assist Toronto in a true partnership.”

Photo by Stan Behal/Toronto Sun/Postmedia News

Toronto has been filling up with the overflow of refugee claimants from Montreal, where the situation has already passed the crisis point. Unable to deal with the continuing flood crossing the border from the U.S., Quebec closed off its shelter system to new refugee claimants in April. While Ottawa fiddled with a “triage” plan to begin diverting claimants elsewhere, hundreds headed off to Toronto, which is no better prepared than Montreal to handle them all. As of May, the shelter system was at 96 per cent capacity. More than 3,000 claimants are being housed, with more arriving every day. Some 800 have been stuffed into dormitories at two colleges, which have to be emptied by August for use by students.