[URBAN NOTE] On the threat of Toronto Communism

[rfmcdonald]

The politics of my city of Toronto are becoming almost inconceivably exciting, for Toronto city councillor Giorgio Mammoliti has just let us know that Toronto risks falling to communism.

Featured in "A Smell of Communism", a blog post by Andrew Barton.

Flag of the People's Democratic City of Toronto, constituent entity of the Canadian Federative Socialist Republic via the Socialist Republic of Ontario, perhaps? Andrew Barton is to be thanked, regardless of the nomenclature of the political unit.

How so? The former New Democratic Party MPP knows that people who don't support the mayor's cost-cutting agenda are communist.

Mammoliti, the conservative and controversy-courting Ford ally, is going after people he sees as reds. To get his approval to join the group he started Monday — “Save the City..Support the Ford Administration” — you must not emit the sour odour of “communism,” he said Tuesday.

“I’m really sick and tired of hearing from the communists in this city,” he said in an interview. “I don’t want anything to do with them. I don’t want to listen to them. I don’t want to listen to their griping and their whining. I want to listen to people who are clearly working for a living, and wanting their tax dollars to be used in a particular way. I’m clearly trying to wean out the typical communist thinker who will be doing nothing but whining.”

Mammoliti was a union leader in the 1980s and New Democratic Party MPP in the early 1990s before making a sharp turn to the right. He has frequently referred to citizens who have spoken against budget cuts at committee meetings as out-of-touch and self-interested “socialists.” “Communists” appears to be new.

The group had 588 members as of 6 p.m. on Tuesday. Mammoliti, who often seems to delight in inflaming his opponents, said he had not yet rejected any applicants.

“But I will be monitoring their comments,” he said, “and if I get a smell of communism, they’re off the page.” Asked by a laughing reporter how he would smell communism, Mammoliti laughed and said, “Only Mammoliti has that keen sense of smell.”

Famous for recommending the creation of a brothel district on the Toronto Islands, Mammoliti now wants to save Toronto's soul from the red peril.

Calling up the National Post on Thursday to respond to comments made by a Marxist, Mr. Mammoliti read out three definitions of communism, including the one in Oxford Dictionary which describes it as “a theory or system of social organization in which all property is owned by the community and each person contributes and receives according to their ability and needs.”

“I’m going to say something that might be very controversial for the city, but it’s my view that the communist movement in Toronto is hidden, and it’s hidden through one of its major parties, and I used to belong to that party,” said Mr. Mammoliti, who was an MPP for the NDP party during the 90s.

“It’s very clear to me, many of the directions that the former City of Toronto took in planning was done in a very intelligent way that brought policies closer to the objectives of the Communist Party.”

And it’s because of that, Mr. Mammoliti maintains, that the Ford administration is encountering opposition to its cost-cutting agenda.

He wants to “weed out the communists in this city and one of them has surfaced. I’d like to know how many more there are.”

When asked to clarify, he said that everyone has a right to live in the city, and advocate their positions, “but they should be doing it publicly and not hiding behind a political party that very clearly disguises itself as a social democratic party.”