Drugs, Homelessness, and Shady Dealings | Anthony Furey | EP 358

So much of what's going on relates to the drug crisis. So you'll have a news story about a random stabbing, and a couple of days later a cop will text me and say "drugs obviously." If we can help these people, we help clean up the streets in general and we make our family safer. We bring back trust in the city, and then we can say, "All right, we will invest in building beautiful buildings. We will invest in bringing jobs back to downtown." That's what lets things flourish again.

Today I'm speaking with Canadian journalist, broadcaster, and most importantly perhaps now, potential mayor of Toronto Anthony Fury. We're going to discuss the need for urban renewal in Toronto, the effects of ramped-up homelessness, the demoralization of the police, urban as well as academic decay, a new vision on the artistic front for the city, and those pesky bike lanes—a bigger issue than one might first think.

Mr. Fury, thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today. Let's start with this: you are doing perfectly well as a journalist; I presume you kind of had your own life and that was spinning out quite nicely. Why in the world did you decide to make a move into the political realm and run for mayor? What impelled you to do that?

Yeah, Dr. Peterson, it's great to be here. Thank you so much. I get asked that question a lot because, yeah, it's a big undertaking to run for mayor of a major city. The main reason I'm doing it is the issues are so acute right now in terms of the challenges that Toronto faces and the concerns that people have. As you know, I've been a newspaper columnist and broadcaster for well over a decade, interacting with people from all walks of life across the city on these issues. It really just seemed like the status quo—the people who have caused these problems—the city councilors, the political class—they're not the ones to fix that. The people who broke it are not the ones to put it back together again.

I feel like the center has shifted in recent years such that people are much more interested in those positions that I've been steadfast on for a number of years. Politicians say, "I'll go to you, I'll focus group, I'll poll and I'll create an issue," and I think people see that they're phonies. The things that I've been talking about for the past number of years, the things that you've been talking about for the past number of years, I think people say, "I want to see more of that now."

More of just regular folks. The political center, the apolitical people, they want to talk about those things now, and that's what I'm putting forward right now. That's what you'd be fighting for. I mean, as you know well, Toronto is a city worth fighting for, and that's what I'm doing right now.

So what do you think? Two questions then: what do you think are the issues that you just described that need to be addressed by, say, someone other than a member of the standard political class? What do you think those issues are? And also, one of the reasons I decided to do this podcast today, despite the fact that it's a local election in some sense—I mean, Toronto is a major urban center, obviously—is that I do have the feeling that the problems that are besetting Toronto are similar in nature to the problems that are besetting cities, say, all across North America and probably broadly across the Western and even the rest of the entire world. So what do you think? What are the specific issues that you have been concentrating on as a journalist over the last few years that you particularly think need to be addressed in the course of this mayoralty campaign and then in your tenure as mayor, if that turns out?

Now that I've become a politician, I'm going to be really good at flipping the question around and moving to the generality, even though you asked for the specific. But the overarching generality is that they are the issues that it takes someone to be able to take the criticism of the mob to move forward on, because I think so many of the issues that have led to the urban decay that a lot of our cities are facing right now are because there have been politicians who because 10 or 20 people show up at City Hall, kicking and screaming and calling them bad names and saying mean words to them, they cave on those issues.

And what are those issues? They are obviously crime issues, law and order issues, and I think the general sense that politicians and cities have started focusing on things that are frills—things that only speak to these niche special interests that don't represent the interests of the regular folks—and that the core services that we rely on in our daily lives are not being tended to anymore. And that is the crisis of municipal government, local government all across the Western world right now. We feel that in Toronto when it comes to transportation; you just can't get around. Law and order—there's so much decay on our streets, violence on the subways—things that we have not seen in decades.

And we talk about Vancouver, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco—things happening on those streets; they are coming to Toronto, and a lot of people are really concerned. Again, a lot of apolitical regular folks are concerned. And again, the center is shifting for the solutions people want to see.

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So let's talk as well about what the different domains of government are, in fact, responsible for. So we have responsibilities parsed out in Canada at the municipal level, the provincial level, and the federal level. My sense, most fundamentally, is the level of government most crucial to people's day-to-day lives is the municipal level. It's also the level that is most difficult to get people interested in and involved in unless they're radicals, as you pointed out, and that gives them a disproportionate sway.

So do you want to outline for people what the responsibilities of the municipality are and how the choice of mayor, let's say, is going to affect, well, the realities of their day-to-day lives?

Yeah, there's a saying that goes, "All politics are local," because the things that do affect our daily lives are mostly at the local level. So garbage collection being done, for instance, being able to move from point A to point B—transportation, whether that's on the roads, the sidewalks, or the streetcars, the subways, the public buses—all of those things are day-to-day lives. Policing: feeling like the streets are clean, both in a sense that they're being garbage or litter or injection needles lying around on the streets, or just in terms of knowing that there's a police officer there to deal with any disorder.

And you know what? I was reflecting on this very question: what is municipal government? What is local politics? As I was going into this race, I remembered back to my philosophy studies when you look at Plato and Aristotle; those guys didn't really know much about countries. Countries weren't much of a thing; it was the city-state. All of the original thinking about how do we live together as a society, as a community, what is politics—the original questions around that—all are actually about cities. That was the beginning; that's where it all started.

Yeah, well, in Toronto, let's go through these: garbage, transportation, crime, and policing. One of the things I've observed, let's say, on the garbage collection front is that it's switched from being a service provided by the city so that people can quickly and efficiently get rid of the things that are no longer necessary and so the city can remain orderly and productive, to a moral play where every act of garbage disposal, let's say, is freighted with the entire weight of saving the planet. And it's become extremely expensive and time-consuming. And you know, that would all perhaps also be fine if there was some evidence—for example, that recycling plastics, which has been a big deal in Toronto—has actually done more good than harm, which by all evidence it hasn't.

And then on the transportation front, I noticed—started to notice probably ten years ago—that there was something weird going on in Toronto with regard to automobiles because the city seemed to be going out of its way to make driving in Toronto as annoying as possible. And for a long time, I thought that was just stupidity and the consequence of falling sway to the radicals in the "I bike therefore I'm saving the world" crowd. But I started to understand—I’d like your thoughts on this—I started to understand more recently that there is a consortium of municipalities worldwide; I think they're called C40, if I've got the acronym right—that do, in fact, have as a long-term goal the radical reduction of private transportation, especially in anything that's powered by fossil fuels, which is like everyone's car.

So the war on automobiles and the continual multiplication of these bike lanes is driven by a very anti-development agenda. I think it's particularly pathological in Toronto because, of course, it's an uninhabitable city on the climate front because it's so bloody cold for five months of the year. And the only people that can use bike lanes regularly are fit 20 to 25-year-old men who actually don't have anything better to do, and that's not a very good group of—what would you call it—constituents to design an entire city around.

So let's talk about, let's talk a little bit about bike lanes and garbage collection and then maybe move to the catastrophe on the public transportation front that's been unfolding for 20 years, for example, on Eglinton.

Yeah, and you know, going back to my saying that all politics is local, I've also found that the things that can cause you the most controversy on the issues you discuss are surprisingly local. The comments you just made on bike lanes might prove to be the most controversial comments you've ever made because that really gets people so irate.

I've found that the bike lane discussion in Toronto is so polarizing because that small constituency of people who are really fixated on the bike lanes—oh boy, they hold it passionately. But the majority of people in Toronto say what you're saying: that we've had enough with this obsession with putting bike lanes in every major road. I came out with a press conference announcement the other week saying no more bike lanes on major roads. Look, I like biking; I go out with my kids; we do it on non-arterial roads, so there's different side roads or roads that are adjacent to major roads where you could put a painted bike lane. But right now in Toronto, all of the bike lanes have these concrete block dividers where there's such rigidity, the sort of free-flowing flexibility—aesthetically speaking—they're absolutely beautiful. They've really done a great job on the aesthetics of the city to put up these bloody barriers that are totalitarian in their hideousness.

And also those plastic tubes that obviously have a shelf life of about six months—they're as hideous as anything could possibly be. And everyone listening who isn’t from Toronto, one of the things you need to know about Toronto is that the city's laid out on a grid, and so there are roads everywhere like there are in Manhattan. It's a grid. There's absolutely no reason whatsoever to put bike lanes on a major thoroughfare because there are adjacent roads that are much underused that are actually safer to bike on that wouldn't interfere with traffic, particularly because in Toronto, the traffic is routed already away from residential areas to centralize feeder streets that feed the whole city.

And many of them now have bike lanes on them, which all that seems to do, especially in the winter when there are no bikes whatsoever in the lanes, is snarl up traffic. And, you know, unfortunately, that's a feature and not a bug because the point is to make people so frustrated with their vehicles that they decide to abandon them. That's a pretty, that's an absolutely pathological demonstration of policy—that the way you change people's behavior is by inconveniencing them, irritating them unnecessarily while interfering with their economic productivity and driving polarization.

You know it's no—that could be a worse set of policies. That's absolutely the approach here, of course. People are very vocal about the idea that we want to limit people's choice, but there are videos that have gone viral on social media where you see when you have those concrete block bike lanes means you only have two vehicle lanes, so there's nowhere for the vehicles to go when an ambulance passes by. So lots of videos of an ambulance trying to get through, and then how do you make space for the ambulance if you've made those bike lanes so rigid?

So I've announced that on some of the streets we're going to have to tear up those posts you talk about to make room for vehicles to divert in. In any other situation, some streets, we're just going to have to get rid of them entirely and put them on non-arterial roads. Look, we're all reasonable people, moderate folks. I mean, there are options for all this sort of stuff; but the idea you have to jam it all into one thoroughfare, take away the vehicular lanes—we're building a new subway line, and I announced the other week that on those streets where we got a major street, Queen Street, that's being shut down—and then there are other roads where obviously the traffic's going to spill over onto—and we have an entire lane taken up of a bike lane. We should open that up to vehicular traffic because then you can get transportation moving for the five years construction of this subway line, which, to your point, January, February, March—which we pay—we pay many millions of dollars to actually clear the bike lanes in the winter when the ridership numbers are not zero, but they're pretty darn close to zero. They're a rounding error.

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Yeah, yeah, well think about this polarization issue too because, with regard to the bike lanes, because I think it is emblematic of something that's going on on a broader scale. It's like this is something like the equation: it's something like, well, carbon dioxide is destroying the planet, and cars emit carbon dioxide. So people who own cars are destroying the planet, and so if I ride a bike, then I'm saving the planet. And if you oppose me riding a bike, then you're opposing saving the planet. And anybody who opposes saving the planet is obviously akin to an agent of Satan.

So now you have the polarization, and the thing that irritates me about that—or one of the many things that irritates me about that—is that that has transformed the simple act of riding a bike, which should be just something you do with your family or you do because you can, in fact, use it to get from point A to B. It's turned it into a kind of messianic moral crusade. And I should point out to all of you who are riding bikes and who think you're saving the planet, you are not saving the planet by riding a bike; you're just riding a bike. And so you should pull the morality out of that argument and put it back into the religious domain where it belongs, and we could actually have a sensible discussion about how we could integrate the multiple forms of transportation that now exist, including scooters, electric scooters, and that sort of thing, with cars, so that we could all get around, so that our ambulances could work, and so that we didn't make every damn city street as hideous as possible in this counterproductive way, expensively, and while doing absolutely no good.

And to your point as well, one of the things that we've seen happening in the West in recent years is that very vocal minorities are holding disproportionate sway over public policy. And that is definitely the case in the biking situation, particularly in Toronto, because it is a very small minority of people who are pushing this. So why do you think, Anthony, that if you—why do you think that you'll be immune to this sort of pressure that you've seen so many people fall prey to? Like, it's no joke to be mobbed, and you know what? It's very, very hard on people, and the radicals are extremely good at weaponizing that mob attack. So why do you think that you'll be able to withstand that, and have you, in some ways, been able to withstand that already?

Yeah, I mean, I've been a newspaper columnist, radio show host for about a decade, and I'm used to it. You know, you say something, and, you know, to your point, it's something that you feel is a totally reasonable position, and people in person come up to you on the street and they say, "Hey, I saw what you said. I read your piece. It's pretty reasonable. Thank you for that," or people send you a lovely email. But in the anonymity of social media, people are saying these awful, dreadful things to you, and you go, "Oh man, I got these 50 awful things said to me." You go, "Okay, 50 people in a city of well over 2 million, it's actually not that big of a deal." And I think just remembering that people's rudeness, people's acting out says more about them than it does about you.

I also think there's something to be said about just not coveting the approval of people who are not going to like you in the first place and not coveting a certain sort of social approval that sees you kind of moderately liked by everyone. The outgoing mayor of Toronto, he resigned the other month is what triggered this election. A lot of people have said to me, who were friends of that mayor, they said, "You know, we really liked him. He was a nice guy, but he just wanted to be liked so much that he couldn't make a single tough decision because he didn't want 50 people to say mean things about him." And that is ultimately what I think stopped so many leaders from leading.

You know, I have a friend who was a minister in the Mike Harris government, which for people who aren't in Toronto or Ontario, they should know, that was a conservative government that made some tough choices. So I got a lot of people out yelling at them in the 90s, and my friend said, "Look, if they’re not out burning you in effigy in the first three months—not the regular folks, but sort of the niche interests—if they're not out yelling and screaming about you, what on earth are you doing? Why are you out there? Because it means you're not actually making any sort of meaningful decisions." So you just got to be willing to take the heat and I'm willing for the mob to come for me.

That's a good inversion of the fear, is that your claim fundamentally is that if you're not annoying irritable ideologues, you're not doing your job.

Yeah, I think there’s really something to be said for that.

So I'm going to go in two directions now. The first is: what makes you think that you're qualified for this job? What does it take to be qualified for the job of mayor? What makes you think you're qualified in an absolute sense, but then also what makes you think that you're qualified in comparison to your opponents, who we should also discuss, and to lay out the—what would you say—the entire situation on the mayoralty race front? So why are you qualified to be mayor in an absolute sense, to begin with?

Or why do you think you are?

Being in the media for the past 10-15 years in this city, doing the columns, doing the radio work when it comes to municipal issues, puts you in touch with people from all walks of life, all spectrums of society, all across the city. You hear about their concerns. And then as you're writing about, studying, interviewing, meeting with people about these issues, you're meeting with the top decision-makers.

I don’t think politics should be about kidding yourself that you’re the smartest guy in the room. I think it's about acknowledging that you have the ability to get the smartest guy or gal into the room to say, "Okay, we're dealing with this or that." I got to have the humility and good sense to say, "Get me that guy" as a principal tenant of leadership. And as I’ve been devising these policies, I’m not pulling them out of thin air; I’m saying, "Get this guy on the phone, get this person on the phone and we’re going to figure this out." You know, bring the best here. And throughout the past decade, I mean, I’ve been getting in touch with the best as I navigate these issues.

And it’s never, it’s never been me myself. It’s been me navigating it with these people’s guidance, and you bring them to city hall because I think part of the problem is that the status quo politicians only bring on those special interest niche activists and just elevate their voices. I want to elevate the voices that are actually able to get things done. You know, so many people in the business community, and they all say, "Why aren't we bringing business best practices to city hall?" Why, and whatever you want to call it, there's all these zero-based budgeting, lean, Six Sigma—there are all these different terms they have about bringing managerial practices to the public sector. Why is none of this being done? And I say to them, "That's an excellent point. I will bring that. I will elevate those voices. I'll bring you guys to the table."

Right? So you feel that you've been in a position to aggregate the concerns of Torontonians serving as a journalist, but also that you've made contact with people who have genuine competence in a variety of areas, and you would be willing to consult with them to find the best solutions going forward?

I mean, I've met with leaders all over the world and tried to generate what would you say—a theory of competent leadership. And I've seen, I think you actually hit the nail on the head—hit two nails on the head with your description because the first thing I've seen that characterizes people who are genuine leaders, sort of independent of whether they're normally on the left or the right, is that they actually go out and listen to people.

So one of the things that—the word lobbyist— you know, the word lobbyist is derived from this old practice in England where you could meet your member of Parliament in the lobby, which was the central building in the House of Parliament, and you could call on them at any time so that you could discuss your concerns with them. So being a lobbyist actually—well, the lobby was where the politicians actually met the people. And the great leaders that I’ve seen really listen to their constituents.

So, Preston Manning, for example, when he built the Reform Party—which was quite an act of leadership—he told me at one point that the part of the campaign to build that party that he enjoyed the most was the Q&As after the speeches he gave in arenas and so forth across Alberta because by listening, you know, in 150 different locations to what people were concerned about, he could find out what their problems actually were and then start to generate policies that were focused on people's actual problems.

Then the next point you brought up was that, you know, if you're—this is another characteristic of great leaders that I've seen in a variety of realms—is that they're perfectly willing to surround themselves with people who are more informed and smarter than them on any number of issues. You know, they don't have the kind of ego that demands that they are the smartest person in the room all the time and so they can call on people who are true experts without, what would you say, sacrificing the responsibility of the decision-making to those experts, because that's also another danger as we saw with COVID.

And so, okay, so you think you've managed to talk to a lot of people and you know what the real concerns are in Toronto, and that you've been in a position that enabled you to do that over, like, a decade. And also that you do have the ability to identify people that are competent and the willingness to listen to them. Do you have any qualms on that front? Like, if you were looking at your weaknesses procedurally with regard to your team, what do you think they might be? What do you need to have bolstered as you go forward?

Well, you just want to bring everybody to the table. More voices—and you want to get out there, and you want to meet as many people as possible, identify as many people as possible, whether it's the small business people who I've been meeting with over the years, or whether it's the influential people. I mean, it's finding that sort of perfect combination of bringing everyone to the table. When it comes to lobbyists, the big corporations, they are able to pay to have someone come and book a time to meet you at City Hall and talk about their grievances. But I found the smaller businesses, the medium businesses, the ones still run by families, I mean, they're just not able to do that. They can't afford that, obviously, to hire a lobbyist, and they have to fight a lot more aggressively to just get the air time for politicians.

So you want to go to them. I've said I'm going to convene a mayor's roundtable of small businesses and restaurateurs, which is an industry that's just been totally messed with and decimated. And of course, restaurants are one of the things that people say. People don't say, "I'm going to Paris or Rome or Toronto because I want to try the McDonald's at this intersection." They go, "I want to go to that unique restaurant I've heard so much about." Yeah, we've totally gutted that industry during COVID.

So giving them a voice too, including those voices. You know, I was in Romania the other day, and I talked to one of the ministers in the government there, and they've put together a system they call Ion. It uses a chat GPT-like artificial intelligence system to aggregate public concerns and to bring them to the attention of their political leadership.

So you said one of the weaknesses perhaps in your operation is that you see the necessity of making contact with groups of people who don't have a lobbyist, paid lobbyist voice, and that's a constant challenge. Back to the issue of competence and leadership, you know, you want a leader. You want someone who's intelligent on the general cognitive ability front; you want someone who's conscientious and dedicated; and then you want someone who has a very wide social network because that's one of the multipliers of competence, right? If you know people who know how to get things done, well, you don't have to know—you just have to call on them—and then you have to get the hell out of their way if you have any sense.

So you're telling everyone who's listening that, you know, one of the challenges you face is trying to figure out how to expand that social network so that you're aggregating the concerns of people who don't necessarily know how to make their voice heard. I think the restaurant example is a really good one because, as you said, that's crucial to the kind of culture in a city that might bring in tourists, for example, and attract well.

And that's a major, what would you say, an increasingly major economic force and something that Toronto would like to pride itself on being a cultural center. And so, all right, so let's talk, let's talk a little bit about your vision for the city. If Toronto was what it could be five years down the road or ten years down the road and you had a hand in determining that, how would the city change direction and what might you see happening down the road?

On the city development side, I mean, we have the whole waterfront; that's quite the catastrophic mess, although that seems to be improving. There's lots of things about Toronto that work well. What would you like to see improved, and what would the city look like if it was really thriving?

Yeah, and you got to start from the premise that you just love this city, you love everyone in it. It's a city worth fighting for, and you're going to throw your passion in it 100%. The frustrations right now, the concerns—oh, we're slipping towards being like Seattle, San Francisco—awful videos of things happening in Vancouver where you have a downtown that is increasingly in decay; it's being hollowed out, and the people who have taken over the streets are people who are just not doing well, and they need help. Some of them need incarceration depending on what they’re getting up to.

And you know, we really want to develop those places that are primed for beautification. You're right, talking about the waterfront areas where other cities have totally beautified them, and at the same time, you want to deal with those decay aspects. One thing that has been front and center to what I've been campaigning on is we have a lot of random attacks going on the streets of Toronto on public transit, and that's why everybody is saying public safety is such a concern.

They're nervous, people say—and it doesn't matter whether I'm meeting with a small shopkeeper or the executive—they say my 13-year-old used to take the subway alone; I'm not letting it happen anymore. The subways are dirty; literally, there are people sleeping in them, camping on them, they smell of pests. People are just so unhappy that it never used to be that way. I had a carefree childhood, teenage years growing up in Toronto, and I was gallivanting all around town, and it was just great.

So much of what's going on relates to the drug crisis. So you'll have a news story about a random stabbing, and a couple of days later, a cop will text me and say "drugs obviously." And we have this growing number of drug injection sites that are really enabling this. A compassionate society doesn't keep people on drugs; it helps get them off of it. And I have found alarming stories about attempts by the city to create new injection sites—called another name.

I went to a public hearing where there's a senior center in North York, and they have some green space in front to do their Tai Chi and so on. And that green space—they're putting what they call modular housing for chronically homeless men. You go, "Okay, what does that mean?" And then they add, "And there will be harm reduction on-site." Oh, okay, you've actually explained what this is. You're going to create a drug injection site on the front lawn of a seniors complex—their only green space. Drug dealers—they're pretty smart people, they go to where the customers are—so obviously they're going to go to this site. It's going to be total little decay.

And that's why I have said as mayor of Toronto: no more new drug injection sites. We're going to take the allocated resources; we're going to flip them into treatment centers to get these folks off of drugs. The goal should be to put these injection sites out of business, to phase them out. We're helping these people reclaim their lives because I've been speaking to parents who are so worried about their kids on the street who are just in violence. They're being arrested. They're hurting themselves. They're hurting other people. They want them off of it. And if we can help these people, we help clean up the streets in general, and we make our families safer.

We bring back trust in the city, and then we can say, "All right, we will invest in building beautiful buildings. We will invest in bringing jobs back to downtown," and that's what lets things flourish again.

Yeah, well, it doesn't look like turning over municipal spaces to drug adult homeless people and their dealers constitutes a move forward for anyone. I mean, countries in Europe, like Portugal, that have liberalized their drug laws with some degree of success, have actually paired them. This is something that people in Vancouver, in particular the politicians in Vancouver, haven't seemed to clue into one bit is that Portugal, for example, didn't just decriminalize drug use; it also set up very stringent rules surrounding acceptable public behavior on the drug use front.

And so the policy is something like, well, it isn't obvious that criminalization of drugs has proved to be a particularly successful social policy, but that doesn't mean that you get to scream in a meth-induced rage and run toothless and naked down the street—right? Those aren't the same necessary policy. And what I have seen in Ontario in particular, this ominous tendency to presume that homeless people, so to speak, have a right to municipal territory by right of their, I don't know, catastrophic disarray, and that it's incumbent on everyone to turn over our green spaces to people who are homeless—which is a preposterous notion because it means that your misery now entitles you to real estate, and to public real estate, and highly valuable public real estate at the expense of other people.

And there's nothing in that policy that's the least bit sensible. There's certainly nothing in it that's compassionate as well because, from a psychological perspective, that looks a lot like enabling to me. If you make it easy for people to continue to destroy themselves, you're not doing them a favor, and you're certainly not some kind of hero; you're just putting forward bad policy because you're ignorant, because you want to feel good about yourself. And if you're doing that at the expense of municipal property that's valuable—the green spaces, for example—then making them unsafe, there isn't anything good in that for anyone.

Absolutely. And one of the challenges we have in Toronto is the affordability crisis. People can't afford homes anymore, so more and more young families are living in downtown with their children, and they take condo spaces. And there are not that many parks. I mean, Toronto has a shorthand known as "a city within a park" because there is so much green space and trees, which is great, but actual parks where you can go out and have a great picnic and a great time downtown, there's not that many of them. And past couple of years a lot of them have been taken over by encampments, which is why I'm saying as mayor of Toronto, no, the public space must be available to people and to families to enjoy.

And are we compassionate about these people having their troubles? You bet we are. But they can't take over the parks, and the tent encampments must go down so the public space can be reclaimed by the people. It's just getting warm again in Toronto, and we've got to be able to enjoy a summer without these tensions happening again where kids can go down a slide without the parents having to go, "Oh, are there needles on this side?" I've had that very experience. We now live in the East End of Toronto; we live downtown in condoland, and I have had to say, "Sorry son, you cannot go down this slide because, well, there's the needle right there, and I'm not picking it up because I don't have the right material to deal with this stuff." So we've got to move on. I mean, that's just awful.

Yeah, so okay, let's talk about the brass tacks on that front. I mean, when you say something like, "We need to take the parks back from the encampments," how the hell are you going to do that? I mean, I'm imagining that I think, "Well, if you want the woke mob to attack you in a very successful way, it seems to me that a media campaign showing the brutal hand of Anthony Fury oppressing the homeless in parks in Canada—that's a hell of a fine story, and I'm sure there's no shortage of narcissistic journalists that would go to town all night."

Like let's, in the—we can take the example of a single park—how would you envision actually going about that? Once this camp—the camps are established, like what do you do with the homeless people that are there? And how do you actually take action without it being an ethical catastrophe?

Well, the police go in at the right time, and they get rid of the tents, and they take the people out, and they move them to another location. That's how it's done. It's the only way it can be done, and I will make sure we do it. One of the reasons it hasn't been done before—two big reasons: one, the politicians are afraid of encouraging that policy because they don't want the headline saying, "Oh, look what this guy did." I know the silent majority is on my side, though, that we just can't have this compassion—yes, but you can't take over the parks.

Number two, one unfortunate thing that's happened with the anti-police movement in recent years is the police feel demoralized. So many officers tell me, "What is the point of doing my job if I do my job, follow protocols?" And I'm not talking about the ones that don't follow protocols and do awful things; they have to obviously follow all the consequences of being bad cops. But the good cops who are just trying to do their job, and then they’re thrown under the bus by the politicians and their own chiefs—we have a chief of police also running for mayor here who demoralized his force. He threw the force under the bus. If you allow that to happen, if you demoralize your police force, obviously, they're going to stop doing the job, and they don't feel like there's any reason to do it because they're just going to be punished for doing it.

So one, you say go in and do this: clear the parks. And number two, when the headlines start coming for me, I'm not going to go, "Oh, I can't handle this," so I'm going to blame the cops; I'm going to throw them under the bus for something that I initially encouraged them to do. No, we're going to bring back law and order, and I'm going to have the backs of the officers. I'm going to support the police.

So do you—how are the police reacting to your campaign? Do you have any sense of whether the rank-and-file officers are in support of the sorts of things that you've been putting forward?

They are, and I'm having a lot of meetings with officers, both officially and unofficially, to hear what's really going on and to say I support you guys and to get the sense of what's going on on the ground—to speak to the beat cop—although to clarify that phrase "beat cop" there, one of the things that they identify as a problem is there aren't beat cops anymore. You walk around the streets of Toronto; you're not going to see any police officer just walking the streets, and that was a normal thing for decades. That was how policing used to work.

Right now, people walking downtown Toronto go, "The next person who turns that corner could be a person in a drug-induced psychosis who's going to attack me." I'm nervous about that. I want to get us to a situation where people go, "The next person turns that corner could be a cop." So both the people feel a sense of assurance, and anyone who's thinking of causing trouble knows, "Well, okay, I better careful because the next guy around the corner could be a cop who stops me from making that trouble."

So why were the police taken off the walking beat? Do you know how that came about?

Because we increasingly put our investments, our tax dollars, and our political capital into these shiny new baubles, these distractions, these fringe projects, and we let the core services be ignored. So it's a funding problem. I mean, we have defunded the police in Toronto, without a doubt. We have fewer police officers in Toronto now than we did 10 years ago, despite the fact the population has grown. Where did all this crime come from? Where's all this disorder? Well, obviously, cause and effect—that's what's going on right now, and we've got to turn it around. We have to invest again in the basics, whether it's public transit, which I'm going to do, or in policing.

And we've just got to do it. We have to reprioritize.

Okay, so let's talk about public transportation. We could talk about—while the war on automobiles has been raging in Toronto, there's also been a tremendous amount of noise about improving the transportation system—the public transportation system—and most of that's been noise. And I think that Eglinton is a very good example of that. So the LRT system—light rail transit system—there have been plans to make that functional along the Eglinton route, and that whole major business thoroughfare has been a quagmire and nightmare for what, 20 years? Something like that, and with no real progress of any sort evident on the transportation front.

And yet we hear stories constantly coming from, say, China—which I'm not holding up as a shiny example, by the way—of the ability to lay, like literally, hundreds of miles of subway down within, you know, a two or three-year span. So like the subway system in Toronto for a city of its size and wealth is pretty damn shoddy; it's insufficient. I've lived in Toronto for 20 years. The development plans on the subway side have been appalling, to say the least. Very little has got done. It's unbelievably expensive; it's caused endless disruption.

Now apparently the plan is to shut down Queen Street, so what? Is it going to turn into another Eglinton? That doesn't seem like a very good plan, given how essential Queen is to the entire culture of Toronto. So like what's going on on the public transportation front, and why put more money into a system like that if it's—if it's already been demonstrated for 20 years that the city is, for some reason, incapable of managing it properly?

And that's why I came out and said that I will be suing Metrolinx, the agency that's creating all of these lines, for a billion dollars for breach of contract and damages because this Eglinton line was supposed to be finished a while ago—two years ago. They took the median politicians on a tour and said, "Look, it's over 90% complete," and it actually worked. They took the train from end to end. What's the problem? They're not closers. They can't get it done. They can't do the granular. They've just found out there's no credible timeline to complete it.

There are over 250 deficiencies, and city council and the good people of Toronto are expected to just shrug and go, "Oh well, another delay." I've said, "No, it's not acceptable." My team and I read the contracts; you're in violation of so many of these terms. We're suing you for breach of contract because we got to light a fire under their rears. We can't keep taking this anymore. Yes, we're all sort of polite Canadians, but at a certain point, you have to go, "We're being abused here; we have to fight back; we have to stand up for ourselves."

And that lawsuit should hopefully set the tone that this new line—the Ontario line—it's called along Queen Street, a downtown relief line. We're grateful this is being built; it's long overdue. So I'm going to be a willing partner with the other levels of government in getting it built, but you guys better not mess around, and you better stick to schedule because I'm showing we're serious now about holding people to account.

This idea that contractors in the public sector can just totally screw up on things in a way that the private sector would never tolerate—we just can't be doing that anymore.

To your point about China, I can bring it closer to home. I was touring this beautiful Hindu temple, this Mandir, in the west part of the city, and they were telling me the construction on it—how it did not take very long. They brought people in from India who are experts. It's such a beautiful building with so many details to it, and they built it in such a short period of time. I was just gobsmacked. I said, "We got to bring you guys in to build the subways!" You know, because you're closers, and they're not.

Like come on. Well, what seems to happen on the policy front constantly is that virtue-signaling narcissistic politicians announce huge spending projects, and then they make the case that the spending is the accomplishment. Then they spend the money, but they don't do any of the work necessary to actually supervise the spending because the actual benefit of the spending isn't the spending—because any idiot can spend money; the benefit is the results.

Now, if you've done even a home contracting project, you know perfectly well that you have to keep an eye on the project all the time. There has to be someone there making damn sure that everything is—I mean, you have to have competent people doing it, but even then, if you let a home construction project go unsupervised for any amount of time, first of all, it'll grind to a halt, and second, the costs will multiply extensively.

So, particularly the contractors have other jobs, and so, you know, they're putting out the noisiest fire. To mix metaphors terribly, they're always putting out the fire that's producing the most smoke and noise. And so the same thing—it scales. The same thing happens on major league construction projects. And one of the questions that's burning for me is like, well, who the hell abdicated their responsibility on the Eglinton front?

And I guess the other thing I'm curious about is, you know, if I was an Eglinton business owner, I would have been inclined 10 years ago to go light a fire at City Hall. I mean, what's happened in Eglinton has destroyed the lives of many people over a decades-long period. These are hardworking people who put a tremendous amount of money into their businesses, and they've just been screwed over in 15 different ways—another example of the pathology of Canadian politeness.

I mean, they shouldn't have been putting up with that at all. It's just beyond belief, that traffic snarl and the mess that's been created there.

And so, what makes you think that you'll be able to, number one, go after this company successfully without them just folding and disappearing or claiming bankruptcy and disappearing? And number two, to put in place people who actually have the expertise to supervise these projects so they'll actually be completed on time, particularly germane given that, you know, the plan is to shut down Queen, which strikes me, given the Eglinton example, as a pretty terrifying thing to undertake.

Yeah, well we've got to change the way we approach these issues. Your point about the home rental projects is so important. I remember a house that I had; we brought in some roofers, and there was a major problem with it, and I said, "Look, guys, like you’ve got to be held to account on this." And they wanted more money, even though it was their own ineptitude.

I remember at one point one of the guys shrugging, saying, "Well, look, roofing is hard." I said, "I know it's hard; that's why I didn't do it myself. That's why I hired someone who claims that they have 30 years experience and they're the experts in all of this." So it's all about holding the contractors to account, and right now the provincial government is trying to say to this city, "Oh, it's the contractor's problem."

Okay guys, manage the contractors because that's your sole job.

And one of the interesting things in government is we have so many people paid really good six-figure salaries to not just do the job, but to outsource it and to manage the outsourcing. It's like, "Guys, you're $500k salary; you're not even doing the job—it’s your job to manage the contractors."

We should be expecting that from you.

So part of this lawsuit that I want to get going here, as soon as I get into the mayor's office, is both—and I should say that billion dollars—I want to redistribute those funds in part to those businesses that you identify as being quite wrongly aggrieved and, of course, losing some of their life savings over all this. This is to reframe how we approach this and to reset who is the boss because right now, increasingly, I think in public sector contracts, people who get the contracts almost feel like they are the boss.

So I want to reframe the way we approach it and that we can manage this very rigorously. We can demand excellence because part of the problem is we're just not demanding excellence and accountability, obviously in the interests of crooked contractors to drag out a high-paying job as long as possible, especially if you can also combine that with not doing the work, which is a good way of saving costs.

So the impetus for making these projects inefficient is absolutely clear, especially, like I said, if you're dealing with corrupt contractors.

And so, have you talked—I presume that you've talked to legal advisors about the advisability and practicality of such a lawsuit. What have they told you? And I mean, this isn't, as far as I can tell, this isn't common practice with regard to the relationships between municipal or provincial government and contractors, right? Doesn't generally degenerate into a billion dollar lawsuit; like, what makes you think that you can go forward with this on legal grounds?

Well, because you read through the contracts and it's glaringly obvious that they are in breach of contract on a number of fronts. So you proceed from that. And actually, I mean, you're right, but when it comes to dealing with the subway system, actually the contractors are currently suing the provincial government over their own grievances.

So it's like these guys, again, the contractors think they run the show. They’ve actually come in against the lawsuits, and the City of Toronto is once again the passive player, and the residents are just expected to take it. I want to get the City of Toronto in the game. I don't like endless litigation, but the contractors are the ones who almost have the greatest inertia; they got the biggest balls at the table right now. And again, we got to say, "No, we're getting in the game too."

We’re the only ones not triggering legal action right now, so again that just puts us on the defensive and we don't have a voice at the table.

Wait, okay, well we've talked a fair bit about, you know, some of the remediate some of the idiocies that currently plagued Toronto, let's say, on the bike lane front, and the park front, and the public transportation front. Might be fun for a bit to talk about what the city could look like.

I mean, one of the things that's really struck me—I was in Montreal not so long ago—and Montreal has done a lovely job of revitalizing their old city and the waterfront. So it's extremely accessible to people; it's very, very beautiful, and it's a lot of fun—which, and that's something Montreal is really good at. I mean, that damn city, man, it's produced a civic life that's just top-rate.

You know, if you're speaking of world-class cities, there's probably one in Toronto, or one in Canada, and that would be Montreal given all the things that it has to offer. And Toronto claims world-class city status constantly, which is one of the reasons, you know, it's actually not true because if you are a world-class city, you don't have to yell about it constantly.

But we have this amazing waterfront; that's because the whole city is spread out along this gigantic lake with its beautiful beaches. But so much of that is still marred by construction rubbish and like detritus of the last 150 years of pointless and counterproductive planning. And like the city could be very waterfront-centered, and there have been some moves on that front, right downtown with some real—wow—progress made, I would say over the last 20 years.

I mean, then there’s nighttime in Toronto too. I think what was done with the CN Tower, for example, lighting it up—that's kind of fun and playful. And many cities across the world have instituted these festivals of lights that make their cities really glow and dance at night. And like Toronto could be a real hopping place; it has the possibility for that: a very well-developed waterfront and like a very exciting downtown and a cultural hub.

If that was handled intelligently, what do you see on the positive front for Toronto under your guidance as mayor?

As mayor, I'll say yes to big, bold, exciting, and fun ideas because Toronto has become a city of "no." And we always look for reasons to knock things down—what we call tall poppy syndrome. There's something that's going to be very inspirational, very powerful—well, let’s come up with reasons to actually criticize it instead.

I've been speaking to a lot of real estate developers who have some very ambitious ideas, and when development is coupled with beautification, with boldness, it can be a really powerful thing to rebuild the city because you don't want the bureaucrats and you don't want the politicians beholden to special interests. You want the people who are great innovators and what so many of these developers say, and also other forward-looking sectors, like the tech sector for instance, what so many people in these sectors say, development—the tech sector—that things are so slow-moving, rigid, and negative when it comes to planning, when it comes to approvals, when it comes to red tape.

I was speaking to one developer who said he's been waiting six months for a meeting about whether or not this wall is kept or not as a heritage designation wall. And I said, "Well, what's the problem here? What's the hold-up?" He said, "Well, the guy comes by from the city, and then he says, 'Okay, I got to go back for this other paper.' And then the meeting is pushed for six weeks later." I'm like, "Why can't you be a closer? You get the guy in the room, you're looking at this darn wall, yay or nay, and just close the deal right then and there. What's the problem?"

So you want to expedite all these things? It's almost like we’re deliberately dragging our feet on all of this. If you want a beautiful city tomorrow—and we should have one yesterday—but if you want it tomorrow, you've got to start saying yes to things, and approval processes are so slow.

Well, here’s an example, so—and I haven’t—I’ve been traveling a lot in recent years, and so I haven’t paid as much attention to this particular issue as I might, so my knowledge might be out of date. But I noted that there was a protracted attempt in Toronto to diversify the food carts away from just hot dogs, which is kind of what they are now—hot dogs and sausages—and there was a notion that given Toronto's thriving ethnic communities, that we could set up a system of food carts, and that could offer an incredible plethora of different dishes.

And this happens in places like Manhattan, for example, and those street restaurants, let's say, are good entry points for people who want to start a new business, and they do add a lot to local life because they can move to parks and so forth. But the last time I checked, none of that had happened; all the carts were still serving hot dog sausages and french fries essentially. And that much-touted diversification of food carts hasn't occurred at all—it had no current at all. It seemed to me a classic very local and detailed example of that culture of no that permeates Toronto thinking.

I saw a lot of that at the University of Toronto, for example. There was always a thousand reasons why something interesting and exciting couldn't be done, you know, covered up with a patina of "We celebrate excellence." It’s like, "Yeah, I don't see much evidence of that; plenty of evidence to the contrary."

What's happened? Do you know what's happened on the food truck front, and do you think that's emblematic of the kind of problems that you've been describing?

It is, and the issue has regressed so—the other year, we introduced something called Cafe Tio where, because of COVID, and indoor spaces were in lockdown, so they said, "Okay, we want to have more outdoor spaces." So we’re going to expedite letting you have patios that are just on the sidewalks or even sometimes in the parking spaces there; we'll just let you turn it into a patio.

So it would be like a Parisian experience, and great, awesome. So we did it, and then this year they've decided, "You know what? Let's start charging." We let them do it for free; let's charge them $3,000 for each one of these patios. You're like, why? What's going on here? Because it's a cash grab—because they realize we can do this; we started it, they've already put the outlay for it, now we’ve got them, and we'll get the $3,000 out, and we’ll bring in $20 million on all this dinging them all.

So hold on a second; this is a great—it’s a beautification measure; it gets the place jumpin', it’s brought in all this economic activity. So of course, how can we take something from them? How can we screw them over on the sly a little bit? And so many businesses are outraged.

I came out in front of the cameras the other day; I said, “No Café Tio fees." I'm axing them; I'm getting rid of them. We shouldn't be in a situation where government wants to micromanage everything, stifle everything, and key to government: How can I get money out of this? How is this a revenue opportunity? And that's really concerning.

And that plays into how they can't get the food truck game going and the general approach to any good thing that comes along.

So when you're out talking to people now, tell some of the stories that you've heard from people that have struck you most deeply and that you regard as, say, pointing in an emblematic way to the problems that the city faces. I mean, you've been talking to people all over the place, and what's that been like, and what have you learned?

Well, like I said, everybody brings up the public safety issue. It doesn't matter where they are on the spectrum of society. One story I will never forget: a father knew my positions on the drug injection sites. His daughter has been all through the system in tragic ways. He told me, completely sort of sober-faced, emotionless, his family story of the past couple of years. He spoke for about 20 minutes straight to tell his daughter's story.

I was in tears at the end of it, and I was just hearing this story. I always thought the father reliving it; it's still ongoing. It is an absolute tragedy what's going on in our streets in terms of enabling the drug culture. Obviously, there’s so much violence, hospitalization; the girl had been pushed into sex trafficking, and, you know, just horrendous details. And this is happening in people's daily lives.

And yet, because we have a small number of activists who stand up and use buzzwords around "harm reduction," we're just supposed to not say boo about this. We're supposed to accept it all. I'm not gonna. A very deeply human emotional conversation with a father in pain—an ongoing pain for that family—and I'm not supposed to do anything about it because 20 people are going to hold up a placard with a rude word about me not cutting it.

The safety issues and the urban decay are so real. It is just dreadful—these videos coming out of Vancouver, Seattle. Everyone says they're seeing that stuff on Instagram and Twitter. They don't want to see Toronto go one step further in that direction. My commitment to the people of Toronto, I've said, as mayor of Toronto, I will stand strong on that stuff. We're going to clean up the streets, or else we're just gonna decay further.

So would you regard that—like if you had to make another—fact that I've noted that characterizes leaders rather than pretenders is that they actually have a list of priorities, because the pseudo-leaders have a hundred problems, and they're going to solve all of them. And wherever they turn, someone has a problem, and they're instantly offered the assurance that that's going to be a top priority.

And the thing about top priorities is that there's actually one top priority. You know, and you can't do everything; you have to make a hierarchy of necessity. It's one of the reasons I like Bjorn Lomborg's work on the environmentalist front, for example, is he's rank-ordered solutions according to cost-benefit, for example. And so it sounds like one of the primary priorities that you would have as a leader is that it's public safety broadly. That includes cleaning up the parks; that includes making the subway safe. Is that your number one priority? How does that fit in with the idea of beautification of Toronto and development of economic opportunity? Where do you see your priorities? How would that be laid out in your first, say, year of government?

Public safety is a hundred percent key; it's my main priority. Phasing out the drug injection sites, getting beat cops back on the streets so people feel like this city is something they can make beautiful again. They want to make beautiful again.

They can build buildings here. People are going to buy those buildings, pay property tax, which gives us the funds to keep investing in things. Businesses say, "I do want to reinvest in downtown because my employees feel like there's a place for them to live and a safe place for them to live," where they no longer want an exodus from both downtown and it's spilling out to other parts of Toronto as well. If you don't have public safety, if people don't want to be in the city, then it's a non-starter, and we've got to bring law and order back; we got to bring back those assurances.

Do you have any concerns about—well, I mean, one of the concerns, and I suppose it's a reasonable concern, is that if you are pushing a law and order platform, that you tilt the city towards excess policing, towards excess authoritarian heavy-handedness and obviously that can be a problem, because there can be too much policing, and as there was during the COVID era, let's say the so-called pandemic of authoritarian virtue.

How do you do—what dangers do you see on the policing front, and do you have some sense of how you might ameliorate the concerns of people who are afraid of a more law and order approach?

Yeah, and a couple years ago, when people were taken to the streets across North America to protest the police more broadly, I never once said in my commentary, "Don't do those protests. Don't go out there." And I've never said to anyone, "Don't protest; don't make your voice heard," because part of that experience was reminding police that their job is to serve and protect the people. They're hired by the people, and they respond to the people's concerns, so there's a pressure valve moment where people want to get their thoughts out on the police and hold them to account; by all means, do it.

The problem is what we did a few years ago is we threw the baby out with the bathwater. The pendulum just went bonkers in totally the wrong direction. Defunded the police, demoralized the police, and detasked the police— that's the phrase officers use when they're speaking to me.

They took away the things they do so right now. I'm not particularly afraid of going in the wrong direction. I just want the pendulum to get back to normalcy right now. So when the police—their being detasked—I suspect that has something to do also with the removal of localized autonomy, right? I mean, policemen have to be able to make their own decisions at the micro level because, well, someone in a managerial position isn't on the ground and watching the situation, and individual policemen get thrown under the bus a lot for doing that.

And obviously, that's going to be demoralizing. And when you talk to policemen about their concerns about doing their job, what sort of things are they telling you that are interfering? What are they afraid of?

Toronto has a broken windows problem where all the minor infractions are totally allowed. There is zero policing of minor infractions, and that sends the message that, well, why not do a major infraction if no one cares about the little things? Are they going to care about the big things?

So the detask means that there was a time when you'd call 911 or call the local division directly and you'd say, "We have some graffiti here," or "We have a guy causing a disorder problem," or "My house has been broken into; my car was stolen." You're increasingly redirected to this service, 311, where an operator who's not at all connected with the police says, "Okay, sir, I'll take a note, and maybe one day someone will get back to you."

I'll give a very real example. I saw in my community Facebook page that there were injection needles under these risers under these bleachers at a park right near where my kids play, and someone said, "Watch out; these are here." But we called the service because they say, "Don't touch the drug needles because the great thing about having all these injection sites is all these experts who deal with this stuff." So don’t you touch them; we're going to bring the experts.

He called this service, and the needles were not collected. I went and took a look. I called the service again to say, "Are these needles getting collected?" They just never were, and they say, “Oh yeah, someone will be there to pick them up,” and they’re just not.

Issues where, who's even dealing with these issues anymore? Detask just means they're not responding to things. Car thefts are massive in Toronto right now. Part of the problem—and we haven't really spoken about the media yet—is that mainstream media is being hollowed out; there's tons of layoffs. People are not actually reporting on what's going on, and they don't really have a sense of just how much crime has gotten out of control unless they're on top of it.

So community Facebook groups will post the news releases that are on the police website that talk about these sexual assaults, these stabbings, these robberies, and they get to people via their community hubs. But they're not in the news, so if you're not in those community safety Facebook pages, or if you're not talking to someone who's had this stuff happen to them, you're oblivious to what's actually going on, and it is brutal right now, the volume of things.

You know, I was in the capital city of Albania a while back, and unlike most Eastern European cities, it is graffiti-free. And you might think, well, that's who cares? And I would say, well, if you traveled through Eastern Europe, you'd care.

And this is also true of Rome, by the way, because there is an assortment of magnificent architecture that's absolutely marred, and it's not bloody well marred by street art—it's marked by miserable little psychopathic thugs who are doing nothing but tagging—and the cities look dreadful as a consequence.

And they actually fixed that in Albania; they had about 50 people to begin with tasked with going around and painting out the graffiti, but they started working; they started finding the graffiti artists, so-called, and they identified the small number of them that were actually talented and figured out how to use their talents in a more productive way, and so they've managed to reduce their graffiti removal team to one person, and the whole city is clear of this scourge.

And it really is a scourge, and I think it is a broken windows scourge, is that if tagging is allowed to go unaddressed, first of all, it adds to the general ugliness of the city, and that's demoralizing. It shows that the thugs can, what would you say, manifest their psychopathic narcissism without any danger of being stopped, and that does encourage broader scale, what would you say, social misbehavior and crime.

And so, well, I’ve been trying to think through what processes might be necessary to bring a vision of, you know, a culturally thriving but well-ordered society into being, and this idea of co-opting some of the people who are involved in these low-level criminal activities seems to be an interesting one.

I mean, you talked about the broken windows problem; you talked about the needle problem, for example, and the fact of homelessness in parks. What other elements of urban decay do you think are sending the wrong message to people in Toronto?

One big issue that so many different groups talk to me about, and I've met with Hindu parent groups, Asian parent groups, meeting with an Islamic association—so many concerns about an issue you've talked a lot about: education and the school system. Now the mayor of Toronto does not run the school system; it's a provincial issue. But you have a relationship with the head of the school board and the trustees, an ongoing relationship.

And I’ve told these parents I will be your advocate; I will elevate your voices because they are very concerned about the lack of academic excellence. Instead, there’s a lot of advocacy, a lot of activism going on in the school system, and that schools have become zero-consequence environments where the broken windows theory is almost being taught in the worst possible ways in the system.

That as kids, there's zero consequences to things—you know, my wife and I are always telling the kids, "Hurry up! You're going to be late for school! What are you doing? This is unacceptable!" You can't show up to hockey late; you can't show up to class late.

And yet there was a time when I was a kid, when if you did that, well, there'd be a problem. It would be acknowledged that you let the team down, you've let the class down, maybe you have to go to the office; it’s marked on the page, and now there's no consequences. So we're kind of saying, "Come on, guys!"

And then when it actually happens—and there—the couple times they are late or the kid who's late every day, they go, "Mom, Dad, why are you nagging us about this? This is clearly not a problem." We can think it doesn't matter; you don’t have to do your homework. If I don't do my homework, what are the consequences? Nobody cares if I don’t do my homework.

And I'm not blaming the teachers—or at least I'm not blaming all of them for this, because a lot of teachers tell me that this is a problem as well. The system just doesn't allow this to happen because, again, going back to the policing, we reached a crossover point where principals, teachers, superintendents who did bring consequences to kids where they were needed, they were thrown under the bus by the politicians, by the senior bureaucrats.

So we have this cascading problem at the education level as well.

So why not, when you graduate from high school or you know you're in grade 10 and school lets out, why not go do tagging on people’s private property? I mean, what's that? There's no signal that that's something one shouldn't be doing.

Yeah, so that's part of a reflection of this broader social malaise and also the increasing hyperdominance of the radical types who use this narcissistic compassion to twist things around. And so you got involved in municipal politics, and what has that done to your journalistic career at the moment?

Like, what are you putting on the line to run this mayoralty campaign? I mean, if you win, obviously you're going to be mayor, but if you lose, what happens if you lose? What do you have waiting for you? Do you go back to your journal, do your career in journalism? How does that work out?

I'd like to think I have a lot waiting for me because this has just been such an amazing experience, and I say if you want to fall in love with the city of Toronto all over again and remember what you like about it, you run from there because you just meet so many amazing people, and people open up their doors; they open up their hearts to you.

So I think everything opens up when you just go around and you make those meaningful human connections. I'll say, particularly coming out of a period where we weren't making human connections for a good two years, and as you know, Toronto was one of the most locked down jurisdictions in the world. To sort of reopen things and just sit down and have meaningful human connections, this has been such a great privilege for me.

And I think regular folks really want the sort of stuff that you've been talking about for years, that I've been talking about for years. So I'm in it to win it, and you know every day we’re making connections with new people and more individuals joining the team because they want to go in this new direction.

And the people—the fringe niche activist agenda—is increasingly, I think, losing momentum. People don't realize that they're undeniably on the downturn; all the indicators show that these folks do not have the influence and power they did, and it's time to put the regular folks back in charge again, and we can do it.

Okay, so let’s talk about that. You made two points then. I'm going to ask you about the alternative skin to being mayor, let's say. Because I'm interested in the price you pay for this. But you made the case, I've been talking to people in my audience, that, you know, if they're concerned about what's going on in the political front, especially with regards to the more extreme activist types, that they should really think hard about involving themselves in the political process because obviously something's wrong, and obviously if people who are centrist and competent don't involve themselves, then people who are extreme and incompetent will take over.

And that's—and so, you know, part of the rise of the woke nightmare is also the abdication of the competent. And so now you said you got involved in this political campaign, and it's actually been really good for you. It's been heartening; it's made you more optimistic. And you said that it would be good for people to join the team.

So maybe one of the things you could help people understand practically is if people wanted to be of service to your enterprise, say, right now, what concrete steps could they take to do that? And then also, why should they do that? What would be useful and productive on their front for, you know, taking the time and energy to involve themselves politically?

So first of all, how would they do it? And then what would you know, what would they might—what might they learn and how might they develop for doing it?

Yeah, thanks so much for the opportunity. So you can go to my website fury.ca, F-U-R-E-Y.ca. We're looking for people to obviously vote, to spread the word, to get involved as a volunteer, to commit whatever talents they may have. It's all about activating different networks, meeting with people, getting the word out. And obviously campaigns also cost money, so make a contribution which you can make at fury.ca.

And there is a rebate program where you actually get about 75% of your money back after the election; they just write you a check back. It's how the system works right now. So I say, "Would you give me $75?" And people say, "Oh yes, I would." I say, "Oh well, then could you give me $300? Because they're going to give you $225 back." So that's—you’re only on the hook for the $75.

And why do it? Well, because we have a great opportunity here. I will say, practically speaking, it's a very divided field, and there's about eight people with serious campaigns who are running for mayor right now. Most of them are in the left of the spectrum, and they're all going to be fighting over each other for those left-wing votes.

I feel like I'm pretty much the only person who’s out there in the same aspect of the spectrum, and those of us who are like-minded have this opportunity because, while I want to win a mandate widely across the city and all voices matter, and I want to get as many votes as possible, this can actually be won with only about 18% of the vote is kind of the number that a lot of the strategists say.

So I will be in