I saw a delightful quote in the Toronto Star recently that gave me shivers of schadenfreude.

An inhabitant of Toronto's outer limits, a region dreadfully served by public transit, criticised Mayor Rob Ford's slaying of Transit City and along with it a light rail line that was to travel down Finch Avenue.

She doesn't want to "badmouth Mayor Ford", but feels disrespected, especially since Ford "said he's one of us" and that he is the "voice of the people."

It's the common man frame that Ford plays so well.

With the seeming ascendancy of conservatism across Canada, particularly in my city of Toronto, I can't help but fret that we are becoming a cold-hearted, parochial nation. One that embraces a harsh, Victorian notion of poverty, where we have become servants to this amorphous thing called the "economy," where a strategy is afoot to starve the public sector of all function and form so that the favoured private enterprise and profit can swoop in.

I was at a conference recently where someone with a degree in science repeated the erroneous claim that humans use 10 per cent of their brains. I was shocked that someone with scientific training would make such a statement and I wondered both about the quality of the science degree and about this person's ability to think critically.

Quite the few days for Toronto. Rob Ford is working to drive a stake in the heart of Transit City. To stop this gravy train he'll blow over $130 million already spent on the project, be on the hook for whatever coin it's going to cost to cancel contracts, and bid adieu to five years worth of planning in a city that's a quarter-century behind in public transit. What loco motives drive this man?

Ontario's Ombudsman declared that the regulation that gave G20 fuzz jackbooted power was illegal and "likely unconstitutional". Andre Marin went on to say: "The effect of the regulation ... was to infringe on the freedom of expression in ways that do not seem justifiable in a free and democratic society."

Today, I was going to write about Rob Ford's new Executive Committee. I was going to make note that not one progressive holds an appointment and that Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, the new public works boss who will likely privatize garbage collection, has already set the tone of the Ford cabal. He said: "Sometimes, when you sit around and sing ‘Kum-ba-yah' you don't get anything done."

Margaret Atwood once remarked that she could count on one hand the number of Canadian writers who earned an annual six-figure salary; and she was one of them. The writer's life is a hard one, a living rife with uncertainty and typically, penury.

Some write because it's a passion, a calling. It's art and to be a scribe is to be fulfilled, no matter the unpredictable pay and measly cheques.

Now that progressives are no longer in the Toronto Mayor's office (but progressives did win council and mayoralty races around Ontario), there are two things we need to do over the next four years.

First, stop fighting the battles we decisively lost in the Toronto municipal election and understand what happened. Rob Ford didn't become mayor by magic; he was democratically elected. And he was supported by a broad spectrum of Torontonians, rich and poor, young and old, immigrant and Canadian-born, in old Toronto and in the suburbs, united in their anger toward the status quo.

One of my favourite scenes in cinema is Peter Finch's rain-soaked, pajama-clad Howard Beale commandeering the airwaves to bellow he's mad as hell and isn't going to take it anymore.

Much has been said since Monday's municipal election declared Rob Ford the mayor-elect of Toronto. And much of that analysis asks why and how a majority of Torontonians elected a fellow with a checkered past, a millionaire "every-man", an inarticulate and visionless politician who complained about dysfunction at City Hall and gravy trains while spending the last 10 years as a Toronto city councillor.

It's time to bid adieu to the publicly-funded Catholic school system.

Year after year, secularists make a valiant effort to raise this point with provincial governments, and provinces, especially in Catholic-rich Ontario (currently helmed by a Roman Catholic Premier who's married to a Catholic school teacher), want nothing to do with what they perceive as a political and constitutional nightmare.

In Ontario -- where the Catholic school system was controversially extended by former Premier Bill Davis to cover grades 11 to 13 -- religious school campaign promises are hazardous to one's political ambitions.