Mayor John Tory has been talking quite a lot about “real people” this week, and the things they say to him that he then offers as evidence in debates. I considered writing a column based on the things some real people tell me about Tory.

But I realized if I did so, I and my children might wind up homeless as a result of a libel lawsuit. Because often the things real people tell me about the mayor are filled with conjecture, wild speculation, and faulty conclusions based on half-understood evidence. So I’m not about to repeat accusations of malice, corruption and conspiracy unless I have evidence that convinces me — evidence I can show you, my readers, to demonstrate my own belief. Real people tell me things they believe, but real people often believe things that turn out to be untrue.

Lawsuit fears aside, it wouldn’t be fair for me to smear Tory based simply on something some random person told me. It wouldn’t be fair to him, and it wouldn’t be fair to you, who might believe some falsehood because you trust me to tell you the truth. Or to at least try to tell you the truth.

Tory wants you and me to trust him in the same way. Almost nothing seems to get under his skin and move him to demonstrations of anger like the suggestion that he is being dishonest.

Disregarding the famous warning embedded in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s saying “the louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons,” Tory’s highest volume proclamations are in defense of his own honesty. This was true at city hall this week discussing his “real people” evidence, where he said, “I’ll be totally honest with you, and I try to be honest all the time around here … I think for someone to suggest that I’m making this stuff up, or that I’m not telling the truth, or fabricating stuff, I think is way over the top. I don’t think you can cite an instance in which I have stood here and been dishonest with you, privately or publicly…” and so on, and etcetera.

But of course, no one had accused him of fabricating anything. No one questioned whether the people he was citing existed, or whether he was making things up. The suggestion was simply that he was citing the predictive speculation of people he met as evidence, when there was no reason to treat it as such — in fact, when the analysis of the experts that report to Tory at city hall, and the further analysis of academic experts who had closely studied the proposal, contradicted it.

Imagine the president of Ford Motor Company standing up to say, “Our engineers say this new Mustang model will have a top speed of 250 km per hour, but I have had real people tell me they think it will be able to break the speed of sound. Real drivers who have driven Ford cars before, telling me about their own experiences. Now I’m not saying I accept those people as having the absolute truth, any more than anyone else has the absolute truth. Certainly the car’s engineers don’t have the absolute truth either, they’re just speculating on a car that hasn’t been built yet. But let’s not make real people into fake news!”

In any event, I’m not interested in prolonging the particular discussion about Scarborough subway travel times that prompted this outbreak of person-on-the-street-wisdom at city hall this week. I’m more interested in looking at this concept of “real people” as a rhetorical device of Tory’s. Because if he’d said it once or twice, here or there, it’d simply be a phrase. But when you repeat it often as he has, it sure looks like a message strategy.

Looking back, I see it’s a familiar strategy. When Tory was leader of the provincial Conservative party in 2007, he started accusing then-premier Dalton McGuinty of being afraid of talking to “real people.” Tory went on what his staff reportedly called “the real people tour” of the province to hammer home this message. When the eastern Gardiner Expressway was being debated in 2015, Tory’s deputy mayor, Denzil Minnan-Wong, said that while experts claimed the commute-time changes from tearing it down might be minimal, “the real people of this city know the truth” that it was probably 20 minutes each way.

It appears to me that perhaps this is a bit of a tell, or a crutch: Tory and his team trot out the things they hear from “real people” when they can’t find real evidence to support their message. It is certainly better than making things up, I suppose.

But that’s another thing: Tory’s sudden defence of these people as actually existing was strange in part because, while the possibility they are fictional is one reason someone might emphasize the people as “real,” that’s not how I had been understanding his phrasing until then.

The more obvious reason Tory and his allies would want to emphasize what they hear from “real people” is to suggest that the evidence and opinions being offered by others — city planners and transit staff, academics doing detailed analysis, rival politicians — is coming from people who are somehow not real. As if there are the people Tory represents, who are authentic Torontonians in the real Toronto, and then there are those who disagree with him, who are more of an abstract concept living in a theoretical ivory tower. Fake people.

This is the same crap we hear from down south about “Real America” versus the coastal elites. The same crap we heard from Rob Ford when he contrasted the “folks” of Ford Nation against the downtown pinkos.

I’d like to think we are all real. All of us in Toronto.

And I know a lot of real people who thought that when they voted for John Tory, they were voting for an end to that kind of ugly, divisive nonsense. And they thought they were voting for the end of uninformed folksy anecdotes serving as a rebuttal to informed evidence. They believed that when they cast their votes.

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Well, like I say. Real people often believe things that turn out to be untrue.

Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca . Follow: @thekeenanwire

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