This is what multiculturalism looks like: third world immigrants couldn't care less about Jews, even when they don't actively hate them. Indigenous Canadians should take a warning from that.
This is the second post of mine where you've led with some unverified swipe at immigrants. We'll get a sense of this when someone breaks down the ward-level results, but I have a hunch that Toronto's long-established "old stock" likely broke for Chow, because they're comfortable and monied enough to not care about the problems that many of our newer residents have to see up close every day.
I agree that the professional and managerial classes in my neighbourhood voted for Chow too. It's hard to judge votes by ethnicity, since Toronto neighbourhoods are still fairly mixed.
But do you seriously think that recent immigrants from India, China, and North Africa are sympathetic to Jewish Canadians who have been harassed and intimidated?
As an election issue, anti-Semitism is not on their radar - at least not in the way you and I would hope.
I quibble with describing Toronto as a “left-leaning” city. It is a proudly far left city, rivalled only by Vancouver as North America’s crucible of unrepentant far-left toxic antisemitism
FAR left? Really? Is there a statue of Trotsky in Nathan Phillips Square? Does previous Mayor John Tory qualify as far left? Surely Toronto is as bourgeois as It gets. I agree and I'm very concerned that the line between supporting the people of Palestine and anti-Semitism gets blurry but let's not forget that the biggest enabler of anti-Semitism in the world is actually Elon Musk with X. The farther right you go on the spectrum the more anti-semites you will encounter. Somehow that always gets left out of the conversation. Back at home, It's easy to forget how anti-Semitism was baked into "decent" culture in Toronto and the rest of the country. My Jewish friend's father was not allowed to join the country club that abutted their backyard until the 1970s.
Toronto is the anti-semitic hub of what is becoming an anti-semitic country. Perhaps the majority are not anti-semitic but they do appear willing to turn a blind eye to the antics of the raging anti-semitic mobs that frequent our streets and campuses. For evil to triumph it requires only that the good people do nothing.
I am Jewish and voted for Chow without hesitation over a chameleon who was so widely disliked by the people (his constituency residents) whom he was supposed to represent in his job as councillor that he knew running for Mayor was his only remaining path to power.
I visited Toronto for the first time in a couple of decades this past July. Great city. Loved the St. Lawrence Market - oh man, that fresh pasta!
Also saw quite a few people clearly untethered to reality, screaming obscenities at the sky, invisible bystanders, the payphone they’d just smashed, or, in one unfortunate case at Sherbourne Station, people waiting for a subway train. Panhandling is one thing, but I saw assault. As a guy from provincial New Brunswick, it boggled my mind as to what greater priorities Torontonians could have had other than removing deranged, violent addicts from their streets.
I loved this comment because, just a few days ago, I took my wife out for a change of scenery/fresh air as she recovers from another operation, and we went to ... St. Lawrence. For the fresh pasta.
My own assessment of Toronto, and this is just one man's view, is that in recent years we've gotten on top of a lot of the most acute examples of crisis. Encampments being an example. But I think that we dispersed a lot of that problem to other areas. Downtown seems to have less concentrations of dystopia, but the trade off is homeless in smaller numbers in parts of the city where that's unusual.
Glad you liked Toronto You might not believe me but things are way better now than they were during the dark days of Covid. On the other hand, I've seen similar scenes on the streets of Calgary and Vancouver and probably a lot of other places in North America. These people need mental health facilities but everybody else seems to need tax cuts so...
Your post leads me to reflect back on Oct 7 and on how few of my friends I saw reaching out to Jewish friends with support. My immediate reaction was to contact Jewish friends and directly tell them I supported them. Most people I knew remained silent. I went so far as to immediately tell my teenage children the importance of standing up for Jewish friends and not getting pulled into any antisemitic beliefs or rallies. (One was in university at the time.)
Today I’m reminded that in 2 years, nothing has changed about that silence. Where hate against any group is allowed to fester, society risks turning against itself and breaking down. I worry that as the years pass we are inching closer to another world war. Clearly the lessons of ww2 have been forgotten by far too many, along with the history of how persecuted the Jewish community was in the decade leading up to ww2. I find it tragic but don’t know what more to do besides continuing to support my friends and speak up when I hear anything that puts them at risk.
> My immediate reaction was to contact Jewish friends and directly tell them I supported them.
That never occurred to me... because it never occurred to me that it would be necessary.
Surely EVERYBODY in Canada not literally named Hitler Murderman would be appalled at October 7th and agree that whatever else might have happened before, October 7th had to mark the absolute end of Hamas and any toleration of Palestinian terrorism or Arab/Iranian attacks on Israel. Hamas & Hezbollah needed to be crushed completely... and could no more be allowed to exist any more than the west would have allowed the surviving Nazis to run the Germany government in 1946.
But apparently I was wrong and a LOT of people are sufficiently bonkers to believe letting the Nazis continue to run part of Europe would have been acceptable.
I don’t think this is true. Toronto was governed by conservative mayors from 2010-2023. And bradford had a pretty strong showing against olivia chow even though she was the incumbent.
This is what multiculturalism looks like: third world immigrants couldn't care less about Jews, even when they don't actively hate them. Indigenous Canadians should take a warning from that.
This is the second post of mine where you've led with some unverified swipe at immigrants. We'll get a sense of this when someone breaks down the ward-level results, but I have a hunch that Toronto's long-established "old stock" likely broke for Chow, because they're comfortable and monied enough to not care about the problems that many of our newer residents have to see up close every day.
I agree that the professional and managerial classes in my neighbourhood voted for Chow too. It's hard to judge votes by ethnicity, since Toronto neighbourhoods are still fairly mixed.
But do you seriously think that recent immigrants from India, China, and North Africa are sympathetic to Jewish Canadians who have been harassed and intimidated?
As an election issue, anti-Semitism is not on their radar - at least not in the way you and I would hope.
I seriously think that this is your second unverified comment on immigrants and that that might be worth you pausing to reflect on.
I quibble with describing Toronto as a “left-leaning” city. It is a proudly far left city, rivalled only by Vancouver as North America’s crucible of unrepentant far-left toxic antisemitism
FAR left? Really? Is there a statue of Trotsky in Nathan Phillips Square? Does previous Mayor John Tory qualify as far left? Surely Toronto is as bourgeois as It gets. I agree and I'm very concerned that the line between supporting the people of Palestine and anti-Semitism gets blurry but let's not forget that the biggest enabler of anti-Semitism in the world is actually Elon Musk with X. The farther right you go on the spectrum the more anti-semites you will encounter. Somehow that always gets left out of the conversation. Back at home, It's easy to forget how anti-Semitism was baked into "decent" culture in Toronto and the rest of the country. My Jewish friend's father was not allowed to join the country club that abutted their backyard until the 1970s.
Toronto is the anti-semitic hub of what is becoming an anti-semitic country. Perhaps the majority are not anti-semitic but they do appear willing to turn a blind eye to the antics of the raging anti-semitic mobs that frequent our streets and campuses. For evil to triumph it requires only that the good people do nothing.
I am Jewish and voted for Chow without hesitation over a chameleon who was so widely disliked by the people (his constituency residents) whom he was supposed to represent in his job as councillor that he knew running for Mayor was his only remaining path to power.
I visited Toronto for the first time in a couple of decades this past July. Great city. Loved the St. Lawrence Market - oh man, that fresh pasta!
Also saw quite a few people clearly untethered to reality, screaming obscenities at the sky, invisible bystanders, the payphone they’d just smashed, or, in one unfortunate case at Sherbourne Station, people waiting for a subway train. Panhandling is one thing, but I saw assault. As a guy from provincial New Brunswick, it boggled my mind as to what greater priorities Torontonians could have had other than removing deranged, violent addicts from their streets.
I loved this comment because, just a few days ago, I took my wife out for a change of scenery/fresh air as she recovers from another operation, and we went to ... St. Lawrence. For the fresh pasta.
My own assessment of Toronto, and this is just one man's view, is that in recent years we've gotten on top of a lot of the most acute examples of crisis. Encampments being an example. But I think that we dispersed a lot of that problem to other areas. Downtown seems to have less concentrations of dystopia, but the trade off is homeless in smaller numbers in parts of the city where that's unusual.
Glad you liked Toronto You might not believe me but things are way better now than they were during the dark days of Covid. On the other hand, I've seen similar scenes on the streets of Calgary and Vancouver and probably a lot of other places in North America. These people need mental health facilities but everybody else seems to need tax cuts so...
Your post leads me to reflect back on Oct 7 and on how few of my friends I saw reaching out to Jewish friends with support. My immediate reaction was to contact Jewish friends and directly tell them I supported them. Most people I knew remained silent. I went so far as to immediately tell my teenage children the importance of standing up for Jewish friends and not getting pulled into any antisemitic beliefs or rallies. (One was in university at the time.)
Today I’m reminded that in 2 years, nothing has changed about that silence. Where hate against any group is allowed to fester, society risks turning against itself and breaking down. I worry that as the years pass we are inching closer to another world war. Clearly the lessons of ww2 have been forgotten by far too many, along with the history of how persecuted the Jewish community was in the decade leading up to ww2. I find it tragic but don’t know what more to do besides continuing to support my friends and speak up when I hear anything that puts them at risk.
> My immediate reaction was to contact Jewish friends and directly tell them I supported them.
That never occurred to me... because it never occurred to me that it would be necessary.
Surely EVERYBODY in Canada not literally named Hitler Murderman would be appalled at October 7th and agree that whatever else might have happened before, October 7th had to mark the absolute end of Hamas and any toleration of Palestinian terrorism or Arab/Iranian attacks on Israel. Hamas & Hezbollah needed to be crushed completely... and could no more be allowed to exist any more than the west would have allowed the surviving Nazis to run the Germany government in 1946.
But apparently I was wrong and a LOT of people are sufficiently bonkers to believe letting the Nazis continue to run part of Europe would have been acceptable.
“Toronto is a left-leaning city”
I don’t think this is true. Toronto was governed by conservative mayors from 2010-2023. And bradford had a pretty strong showing against olivia chow even though she was the incumbent.
I suppose left and right are relative positions. Federally, Toronto has reliably supported the LPC, even as it probed new progressive terrain.
It is always a problem when the electorate is faced with no good candidate.