Zero tolerance for litter. It seems to me that dirty streets are the dirty secret of Toronto’s surprisingly competitive mayoral race. David Miller, the most “left” of the candidates — in the mild sense that he actually seems to believe local government can act to improve people’s lives — now leads the polls. Commentators have said it’s because he set himself apart by being against the expansion of the city’s downtown island airport. But his signs also read, “For a clean city.” That hits more of us, more of the time. Living amidst filth and mess tends to sow lack of self-respect and undermine confidence, at home or outside. The difference is: It’s your fault at home and you can fix it; it’s your community’s fault outside and you can’t.

The city is where we live, not the province or the country. It — and the crap in its streets — is in our face or at our feet every time we step out. This didn’t use to be so, and it shows real lack of respect for people who live here, on the part of those who have led us.

It’s also a great little way to focus debate on things like taxes and public services. In the past decade, right-wing governments (I include both the Chrétien and Harris regimes) have let services such as transit, health care and schools decline as a result of funding cuts, leading to resentment by citizens who must pay for the services while suffering their inadequacies.

They in turn grow receptive to calls for tax cuts, which governments wanted for their own reasons (to reward corporate donors, or based on dubious claims about global competitiveness). The tax cuts then make further decline in services inevitable, leading to calls for privatized alternatives like private hospitals and schools, which would entail further tax cuts to allow consumer choice, etc. One quick way to break into this chain of manipulation would be to clean up the streets people pass through each day, as a plain sign of the efficacy of public use of public funds.

I also like the idea of recuperating one of the stupidest terms (along with “closure”) of the last decade. Applied to human beings, zero tolerance is: intolerant, immoral, un-Christian and ineffective. Applied to litter, it just might work.

Yes, no and shut your mouth. There was a horrible moment in last Sunday’s mayoral debate, when the topic of tolls on Toronto’s Don Valley Parkway was raised. Mr. Miller had said he would consider them as a way to prevent further decline of public transit if federal and provincial funding continued to fall. Another candidate, John Tory, more or less barked: Yes or no, would you impose tolls? Answer the question! Mr. Miller tried to say, roughly, It’s not in my platform, but I’d be an idiot not to consider it in a crisis, and I’d also be an idiot to try to impose it against mass resentment and anyway it’s a democracy and a mayor with one vote on council can’t impose — but he got none of it out. Answer the question: yes or no? Mr. Tory kept barking. Eventually Mr. Miller reverted to barking back about where Mr. Tory would put an incinerator, tell us the truth right now and so forth.

I don’t know if anyone else had a post-traumatic flashback to primordial domestic situations in which someone yells, Do you love me, yes or no? Answer the question! When all the other party wants to say is: That isn’t the only question, there are other things I need to talk about. The reason I wanted to yell at the screen, Will all of you please shut up? was not that they were yelling at the same time, which can be amusing and maybe therapeutic. It was because they would not let the issues that really matter onto the table.

The Hall phenomenon. Candidate Barbara Hall presents an odd spectacle in this campaign. I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite like it in politics. She seems to have forgotten why she wants to be mayor. Others have noticed. One TV reporter, Adam Vaughn, said she has still “failed” to give a reason why she wants it, much less why we should choose to let her have it. Sometimes she speaks about her passion for Toronto. But then she sounds to me like an actor cast in a charismatic role — Saint Joan, Marc Antony — who keeps repeating, I’m charismatic, rather than doing something to prove it.

Every actor knows that you convey the sense of a general state of mind, like passion, by striving for a specific objective you are passionate about, such as a clean downtown or a big incinerator in the suburbs. Nor must you necessarily be able to articulate your motives. I don’t know if the former mayor, Mel Lastman, ever explained why he wanted the job, and if he did it probably sounded implausible or worse — yet one knew that on some level, he had his reasons. In the Hall case, it’s not so clear. Maybe she thinks, since she was once mayor in the past, when she gets there again, she’ll remember.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.