Calgary’s new mayor learned during a media scrum Monday night about the election of Rob Ford as Toronto’s new mayor. While many Hogtown scribes showed Cowtown envy, Nenshi himself was all congratulations and praise for his fellow big-city mayor:

I look forward to working with him. I’ll always have a soft spot for Toronto. It is, after all, the city of my birth

And I know that Mr. Ford and I — I should say Mayor-elect Ford and I — have a number of things in common, especially as it relates to moving the city out of the role of regulator to having less red tape.

I really hope we can learn from one another. And I really look forward to working with him with the federal government in helping push an urban agenda at the senior levels of government.”

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Work for a union? If you are a garbage collector with the city, your job is about to be outsourced to a private company. If you happen to work for the TTC, your days of wildcat strikes are over. If you work at City Hall, only half of your retiring colleagues will be replaced from now on. On the positive side, your days will be filled with amateur sleuthing as you compete for prizes in a quest to find $17 million in savings every year.

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“The way a cascading series of public-opinion polls have set up this election, Monday’s results come down to competing anxieties. Whichever candidate wins will be swept into office on a tide of unease from an electorate that appears poised, if advance polls are any indication, to turn up in record numbers and vote based on what they don’t want.

And what concerns observers of the marathon campaign leading up to Monday’s vote is that what really could hamper the city’s ability to move forward over the next four years – and the next 40 – is not so much municipal waste or a failure to go “line-by-line” through the city’s operating budget: It’s a bleak post-recession outlook for a city struggling to deal with a growing demographic chasm that could change the way Toronto functions.”

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“Smitherman admitted the close race means it’s critical to get out the vote and urged “progressive voters to use their vote wisely because there are only two clear choices for mayor.”

Ford’s name also came up while Joe Pantalone glad-handed at an east end sidewalk fair Saturday afternoon; Anne Khan told supporters of the last-place candidate that while she prefers Pantalone, she reluctantly will vote for Smitherman to try to block a Ford victory.”

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The Globe and Mail checks in on the surveys the Rob Ford campaign had sent to all local candidates,which they pledged to offer to the public:

“Mr. Ford was accused of trying to start an informal party back in September when he distributed a questionnaire asking council candidates where they stood on five of the Etobicoke councillors’ priorities: abolishing the vehicle registration tax; abolishing the land-transfer tax; reducing councillors’ office budgets; ending sole-source contracting; and cutting council in half.

At the time, the campaign said it was simply trying to provide voters some guidance. Rather than endorse any more council candidates – Mr. Ford formally backed three local contenders before halting the practice – they decided to survey candidates and post the results to their website.”

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Provincial Liberals are already contemplating Rob Ford as Mayor of Toronto while also examining how Ford could offer them a tactical advantage in the upcoming election:

“The Machiavelli in me sees a great deal of opportunity for us if Rob Ford wins,” confided one GTA Liberal MPP, with a mischievous grin.

“If he screws up, we can just point to him and then to (Tory Leader Tim) Hudak and say: ‘See what happens when you put this gang in charge,’ ” said the MPP, who like some Liberals interviewed spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of raising the ire of Premier Dalton McGuinty.

Another Toronto-area MPP agreed McGuinty — who has recently been likening Hudak to controversial former PC premier Mike Harris — could use Ford to “dust up” the rookie Conservative leader.”

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Ford and Joe Pantalone have both released their donor lists but under the election rules can still raise cash right up to the end of the year.

Ford called on Smitherman to follow suit and vowed, if elected, to amend the City of Toronto act to require all candidates to release their full donor list before Election Day.

“The voters deserve to know where the money is coming from,” Ford said in a campaign statement. “Every major candidate since 2003 has done this willingly, but with (Smitherman) refusing to release his donors’ lists, it’s clear we need new rules to improve transparency and accountability.

“It raises the question, what is George Smitherman hiding?”

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Eye Weekly sits down with former mayor Mel Lastman to get his thoughts on the last seven years and to get his advice for the next mayor of Toronto:

You said that council was less self-serving when you were there — what is the next mayor going to have to do to restore the situation?

Cut back on spending. They say I did a terrible thing by freezing taxes. Hey look, I froze taxes in North York for the last nine years that I was there and yet we had more services than anyone else. We had twice a week garbage pick-up, we had snow removal on every sidewalk, and out in front of the driveways and we had a clean city. And yet we had $200 million in the bank after the merger. And everyone else except Scarborough was broke at the time of the merger. What I did was perfect in order to give people a rest from tax increases, and yet I didn’t reduce services. And I did it all, not by firing people, but as they left or retired we just didn’t re-hire. We cut over 2,000 people and that’s how we saved the money. And we cut spending dramatically.”

Read the rest of the interview here.

“Arlene and I are close friends with George and his family, and we have always supported each other in our campaigns,” said Liberal MP and foreign affairs critic Bob Rae. “I’m doing a ‘phone drop,’ some canvassing, and whatever else I can do to help him get elected, as well as urge my team in Toronto Centre to do whatever they can. I am optimistic about the result.”

In interviews, Mr. Smitherman has remarked on the challenges of campaigning in such a large area with few resources, and without the backing of party machinery.”

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The National Post offers a piece profiling the lesser known (and in many cases the most colourful) candidates running for mayor of Toronto:

The other Rocco

Rocco Achampong is an articulate lawyer who moved to the top of the second-tier of candidates but could make it no farther. Some believe he could have been a real contender but was overlooked due to that old adage: One Rocco is a candidate, but two is a crowd.

In an online poll, he was selected by voters to attend a debate run by the civic advocacy group Better Ballots and after city councillor Giorgio Mammoliti withdrew as a mayoral candidate, he endorsed Mr. Achampong and encouraged the media to invite him to more debates.”

Read the rest of the article here.