Article content continued

Selley: Nothing. He was David Miller’s budget chief and is thus evil incarnate. I kid — or, rather, I foreshadow what Team Ford will tell us about him once the campaign gathers steam. Based on his speaking notes and what we’ve heard from him so far, he seems to offer the race a no-nonsense, pro-business, low-tax candidate who’s also a total non-celebrity and totally unexciting. He doesn’t have a radio show and he isn’t chairman of the TTC, and as such I heartily welcome his presence in this contest. I don’t support what is probably his best known proposal, which is to abandon the Scarborough subway and revert to the LRT option — thus eliminating the need for a property tax hike, which he frames as a massive tax cut — because we cannot afford more dithering on that file. But I’m glad there’s someone in the race who’s taken that position, because he should be able to hold Rob Ford’s and especially Karen Stintz’s feet to the fire on the half-assed, politically motivated decision-making that led to the current status quo.

Gurney: Chris kind of stole my thunder there, because the main thing I think he brings — other than sober policy positions — is experience. But it’s a good kind of experience. Obviously, there are a lot of voters out there who weren’t wild about David Miller’s tenure as mayor, and his policies weren’t my cup of tea, either. If you despise Miller with the fury of a thousand suns, Soknacki probably isn’t your guy. But if you judge him on his own merits, you can see that Soknacki had a good reputation as a quiet, competent councillor, and best of all, he’s been absent from all the lunacy of the past few years. Yeah, a lot of said lunacy stems directly from the Mayor’s troubled personal life, but the rest of council has found plenty of ways to screw up things that have nothing to do with Ford’s drinking and crack smoking. They even found ways to screw up their response to the drinking and crack smoking — remember how, for a little while, the councillors would turn their backs when Ford spoke? Whose stupid idea was it treat the Mayor like a disgraced Klingon? Did they really think they’d just continue to do that, every single time the Mayor said anything, forever? It was dumb, and theatrical, and all too typical of what this council has been like. Soknacki, and Tory and Chow, should they run, have the advantage of coming in from the outside. Ford and Stintz, err… do not.