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That last one, certainly, could wind up looking pretty bloody awful for a very long time, and it may wind up as a point of contention in next year’s election campaign.

But there is this idea that it really doesn’t matter if one of Tory or Doug Ford wins next year’s mayoral election: both are low-tax, no-vision, cars-over-transit, screw-the-poor dinosaurs. They “have the same policies,” as Chow put it in 2014, and they are leaving the most vulnerable behind. So you might as well go ahead and vote for whichever left-wing visionary joins the race, and not worry about vote-splitting scenarios that could hand the mayor’s office back to Etobicoke’s first family of fiasco.

Is Tory the same as Ford? In a year-end interview in his office, Tory accepts an invitation to rebut.

Photo by Michael Peake/Toronto Sun/QMI Agency

He suggests casting one’s mind back to the FordMess: the yelling, the cursing, the partisan attacks on Kathleen Wynne and Justin Trudeau, who (like it or not) control purse strings that are vital to any Toronto mayor.

“Let’s look at what I said I was going to do when I came here, which was first and foremost to reestablish a sense of stability, a sense of respect, a sense of integrity and honesty in the office of the mayor,” says Tory. “Even my harshest critics,” he suggests, would have to call that a promise kept.

Tory said he would focus on transit, and he’s calling that a win too. “For the first time ever, we’ve had the agreement of council on a long-term network transit plan,” he says, and he claims significant credit for the money now on the barrel from senior levels of government to build the component projects — including $150 million from the province to begin planning work on the Downtown Relief Line, Toronto transit’s white whale.