Performing Toronto: Enacting Creative Labour in the Neoliberal City

Abstract

On 7 December 2010, Toronto’s newly elected mayor, Rob Ford, was sworn in at City Hall. In keeping with recent shifts towards the right in Canadian politics, Ford rode to victory on a populist Tea Party-style platform promising small government, tight spending and tax cuts. 1 Setting the tone for a new era of municipal politics — one that has placed a combative mayor at the centre of highly theatrical and seemingly endless public scandals — Ford invited controversial hockey commentator Don Cherry to attend the ceremony as his special guest and gave him the honour of hanging the chain of office around his neck. 2 Cherry, a celebrity known not only for his political conservatism but also for garish attire, showed up in a flamingo pink floral-print blazer, a costume designed to match his equally colourful remarks. ‘I’m wearing pinko for all the pinkos out there that ride bicycles and everything’, he declared, going on to slam the left-wing media who turn up their noses at his church attendance and patriotic support of the troops. ‘This is what you’ll be facing, Rob, with these left-wing pinkos — they scrape the bottom of the barrel’ (in Nurwisah 2010). A few days earlier in an interview about Ford’s win, Cherry gave this rationale for his upcoming appearance in council: ‘People are sick of the elites and artsy people running the show […]. It’s time for some lunch pail, blue-collar people’ (in Rider 2010). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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