Ari Goldkind broke one of his cardinal rules a couple of months ago.

He kissed a baby.

The little boy is the baby of an acquaintance’s friend, an adorable baby with Down syndrome, so Goldkind says he doesn’t regret his decision, but he wants you to know that this is the one and only baby he has kissed the whole campaign. He wouldn’t want to get a reputation.

Kissing babies is something pandering politicians do. Goldkind is running for mayor as an anti-politician — a “no BS,” straight-talking outsider who knows the whole system is broken and shouts the things the polite establishment doesn’t dare whisper.

Despite his big glasses and fancy suits and day job as a criminal defence lawyer, there’s a hint of Rob Ford circa 2010 in his persona. And various candidates of the Tea Party, and Mike Harris, and any number of other populist insurgents.

The difference: Goldkind is attempting to rouse the masses with an explicitly anti-populist, pro-government message. He is mad as hell — and he’s not going to take these low taxes anymore.

Goldkind, a meandering but polished speaker who sprinkles in the occasional “oy” and “mazel tov,” held a town hall meeting a month ago on Roncesvalles. Over the course of a 45-minute unscripted address, he proposed: an increase to the land transfer tax on homes worth $1.1 million or more, tolls on the Gardiner Expressway and Don Valley Parkway, and a congestion charge on cars entering the city core.

Then the question-and-answer session began. A man in the audience asked him about a Toronto sales tax. Goldkind said he is pushing for one already — a 0.5 per cent levy dedicated entirely to transit.

He wasn’t even done. In a news release nine days later, he pledged to bring back the vehicle tax that council eliminated under Mayor Rob Ford’s leadership four years ago.

Goldkind won’t use the euphemistic phrase “revenue tools.” Only with taxes, he says, can the city build the kind of big transit network it needs. Only by putting a price on precious road space, he argues, can the city actually reduce traffic congestion.

“I’m not saying anything that is really rocket science. It’s that nobody else has the guts to say it,” Goldkind told the town hall crowd of about 100 people at the Revue Cinema. “Because they know if you say it, people won’t vote for you. I actually don’t care.”

Goldkind has the luxury of low expectations. The car tax announcement got him some rare mainstream press. His Bulworth-lite performance has otherwise gone largely ignored. In a 69-candidate election widely seen as a five-candidate race, he is Candidate Seven, stuck in the off-Broadway, no man’s land between the fringe and the big stage.

Candidate Six is Sarah Thomson, the transit advocate and small-magazine publisher who has taken to seeking attention by arriving places on a horse. Goldkind says he will not stoop to stunts despite his continued obscurity.

“I have advisors all over politics, people that you know far better than me, that say, ‘You’re not going to get anybody to cover you unless you jump off the CN Tower in a diaper,’ ” Goldkind, a tall 40-year-old with a mischievous grin, said in an interview. “Well, I am not going to jump off the CN Tower in a diaper. I’m putting out adult ideas. There’s a view that it’s closed to anybody but The Five. But The Five aren’t resonating.”

If someone, anyone, would let him into a debate with the top five candidates, he believes, it would “change everything.” No one will. So he runs a traditional campaign in the shadows. Without a big team of aides — he says he has “20 to 30” volunteers — he sometimes hand-delivers his press releases to reporters at city hall, who smile politely and file them away.

He has a detailed platform. Among other promises, he says he would “deprioritize the car” in favour of other modes of transportation, “audit” the sacred-cow police budget to search for savings, and, like candidate David Soknacki, find the money to make all TTC stations fully accessible.

“Every week, we’re putting out substantial, real policies that affect people’s lives,” Goldkind said, “and if other, famous candidates were putting this out, they’d be hailed as ballsy, honest, forthright with the people of Toronto, but because it’s little old me — we’re trying to be the little engine that can.”

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If we’re doing straight talk, here’s some: Goldkind would have a minuscule chance of victory even if he got the coverage afforded to the veteran politicians who alternate in fourth and fifth, Soknacki and Karen Stintz. He has no government experience. He lacks money and organization. His pre-election name recognition was nonexistent. And he is far from a perfect candidate.

His career, for one, is a liability: he was in the news in April as the defender of notorious pedophile Gordon Stuckless. Like others who are convinced they are right and everybody else wrong, he can come across as gratingly self-righteous. And there is no indication that a winning number of Toronto residents are clamouring for several kinds of tax increases at once.

That does not make Goldkind’s proposals radical. University of Toronto municipal finance experts said in August that the city needs new taxes. Toronto’s top bureaucrat, city manager Joe Pennachetti, said the same in March and again in May. Pennachetti suggested a sales tax, and said cancelling the car tax was a mistake.

None of the leading five candidates are willing to say anything similar.

Goldkind says he respects Soknacki, the top-tier candidate who has been most frank about the need for transit taxes. He is contemptuous of the other four contenders, saying they’re proposing “little Mickey Mouse changes” that will keep Toronto decades behind cities that are bolder.

He is harshest toward Ford, and he mocks right-leaning John Tory (“water taxis!”) and Karen Stintz (“doesn't have anything to offer”) with abandon. He reserves special disappointment-tinged criticism for Olivia Chow, the one left-leaning candidate among the frontrunners.

Chow has promised property tax increases “around” the rate of inflation, a pledge only slightly different than Tory’s “within the rate of inflation.” The tax hikes imposed by Ford have been about the same — only high enough to cover rising prices.

“You would think that somebody on the left — and she’s very, very famous — would actually be brazen enough to say, ‘You know what? I’m not joining Rob Ford and John Tory on their no-tax-raise promise,’ ” Goldkind said at the town hall. “And it isn’t happening, and nobody’s called it out.”

His outspokenness has won him fans among the most engaged followers of city politics. Kevin Carney, a painter and musician, got invited by Goldkind to the town hall after he praised Soknacki on Twitter. Carney was so dazzled he later sent an unsolicited rave to a journalist.

“His no-BS approach is something that I believe a city like ours needs to get caught up to the world-class status we so covet,” Carney wrote. “We need an adult who isn’t afraid to tell Torontonians what is going on, what is broken, and how to fix it.”

Converts like Carney have Goldkind claiming “there’s a buzz growing.” If it exists, it’s barely perceptible.But the candidate who scoffs at everyone else’s wishful thinking insists it is so, insists he’d be on the verge of a breakthrough if he was just given some attention. He’s so assured, you could temporarily believe Toronto might elect a pro-tax truth-teller.

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