City Hall’s The Leafs Of Politics: QUOTABLE

Published 04/26/2024 · Updated 06/10/2024

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“The Leafs don’t got it. They’ve never had it. They don’t know where it is, and if they did, they wouldn’t know how to get there.”

Cathal Kelly, The Globe and Mail

Kelly, who is among the best, if not the best, columnizing in journalism right now, has described the hapless Toronto Maple Leafs above in a brilliant piece.

The Bulldog can’t give you the whole column for copyright reasons (as in I’d be breaking copyright) but if you can get past the Globe’s paywall … by, say, paying for it … here is the URL. Kelly is at his best when he writes on the Leafs because they give you so much patheticism (doubtful that’s a word, but it should be) that they are the motherlode of good writin’ stuff.

So in the quote above, substitute Ottawa City Hall for the Leafs. Then you’ve pretty much got it.

“City hall don’t got it. They’ve never had it. They don’t know where it is, and if they did, they wouldn’t know how to get there.”

City hall would have to look up to see the Leafs. At least, the Leafs have a couple of guys who can score goals. But like city hall, they’re horrible at defence. City hall gets it wrong, then blubbers all over itself trying to find excuses. And then gets those wrong. City hall can’t even get its excuses right.

And when they try to get better people to replace those who boarded the lifeboat, the good candidates vote with their feet. As in let’s join another team … this one sucks. So the cycle of bad continues on. God bless ’em.

Look, even bad teams have stars. But who are the stars at city hall? Allan Hubley? He’s no Auston Matthews.

Poor Happy Town News (the city’s PR department which might soon be called the Tower of Babble) is like a Leafs’ goaltender. It’s back-stopping a team that knows defence from pictures seen in magazines. No support. Get pelted with pucks. Do your best to stop the barrage of mistakes. There should be a mercy rule for city hall’s goaltenders.

So city hall can’t score goals, can’t play defence and their goaltenders are under fire all time.

Credit where credit is due … to the Leafs. At least they haven’t botched $6.4 billion on the team bus.

But there are similarities. They replace bad with more bad like Lansdowne. They over-paid for players like the new central library and have no money left over for the basics like roads. And their strategy for the hideous traffic woes caused by the botched LRT fiasco is to close more roads. What could go wrong?

And city hall is like the Leafs in one more respect. Each year the Leafs win the Stanley Cup in October but don’t in April. City hall says LRT will revolutionize Ottawa. And it did.

People are buying cars.

Ken Gray

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