The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 358. Drugs, Homelessness, and Shady Metro Dealings | Anthony Furey

Episode Date: May 18, 2023

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson speaks with Anthony Furey on his current run for mayor of Toronto, breaking down the key issues in the areas of homelessness, injection sites, transportation, bike lanes, and general safety. Anthony makes his case for running, and explains what he wants to focus on and what he places as top priority, driving the message that all politics are local, and so we can all fight for the changes we wish to see. Anthony Furey is a journalist, broadcaster, and political commentator with over 15 years of experience. He has covered numerous elections with breakdowns of candidates and their positions, while also appearing on many news outlets such as CTV, CBC, and Global News. Now running for mayor of Toronto, Furey seeks to champion policies that respect the taxpayer, promote economic growth, and enhance public safety.  - Links - For Anthony Furey: (Website) https://furey.ca/ Social Media(Twitter) https://twitter.com/anthonyfurey(Facebook) https://www.facebook.com/AnthonyFureyTO/(Instagram) https://www.instagram.com/anthonyfureyto/(Youtube) https://www.youtube.com/@anthonyfureyto(Linkedin) https://www.linkedin.com/company/anthony-furey-for-mayor/ If you’re a concerned citizen in Ontario, this is where you can go to donate to Anthony Furey’s campaign!https://furey.ca/donate/?ref=jordanbpeterson

Today I'm speaking with Canadian journalist, broadcaster, and most importantly, perhaps now potential mayor of Toronto, Anthony Fury. We're going to discuss the need for urban renewal in Toronto. The effects have ramped up homelessness, the demoralization of the police, urban as well as academic decay, new vision on the artistic front for the city, and those pesky bike lanes, a bigger issue than one might first think. Mr. Fury, thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today. Let's start with this.

You are doing perfectly well as a journalist. I presume you kind of had your own life and not was spinning out quite nicely. Why in the world did you decide to, you know, make a move into the political realm and run for mayor? What impelled you to do that? Dr. Peterson, it's great to be here. Thank you so much. And I get asked that question a lot because, yeah, it's a big undertaking to run for mayor of a major city. And the main reason I'm doing it is the issues are so acute right now in terms of the challenges that Toronto faces, the concerns that people have. And as you know, I've been a newspaper columnist broadcaster for well over a decade, interacting with people all walks of life

across the city on the issues. And it really just seemed like the status quo people who have caused these problems, the city councilors, the political class. You know, they're not the ones to fix it. The people who broke it are not the ones to put it back together again. And I feel like the center has shifted in recent years

such that people are much more interested in those positions that I've been steadfast on for the number of years. You know, there's politicians who say, I'll go to you, I'll focus group, I'll pull, and I'll create an issue. And I think people see that they're phonies, whereas the things that I've been talking about for the past number of years,

the things that you've been talking about for the past number of years, the things that you've been talking about for the past number of years, I think people say I want to see more of that now. And more of just regular folks, the political center, the apolitical people, they want to talk about those things now. And that's what I'm putting forward right now. That's what you'll be fighting for. I mean, as you know, well, Toronto is a city worth fighting for. And that's what I'm doing right now.

So what do you think, two questions, then? What do you think are the issues that you just described that need to be addressed by, say, someone other than a member of the Standard Political Class? What do you think those issues are? And also, one of the reasons I decided to do this podcast today, despite the fact that it's a local election in some sense. I mean, Toronto's a major urban center, obviously, is that I do have the feeling that the problems that are besetting Toronto are similar in nature to the problems that are besetting cities,

say all across North America and probably broadly across the Western and even the rest of the entire world. And so what do you think? what are the specific issues that you have been concentrating on as a journalist over the last few years that you particularly think need to be addressed in the course of this morality campaign. And then in your tenure as mayor, if that turns out. Yeah, and now that I've become a politician, I'm gonna be really good at flipping the question around

and moving to the generality, even though you ask for the specific. But the overarching generality is that they are the issues that it takes someone to be able to take the criticism of the mob to move forward on. Because I think so many of the issues that have led to the urban decay that a lot of our cities are facing right now are because there have been politicians who, because 10 or 20 people show up at City Hall kicking and screaming and call them bad names and say mean words to them, they cave on those issues. And what are those issues?

They are obviously crime issues, line order issues. And I think the general sense that politicians and cities have started focusing on things that are frills, things that only speak to these niche special interests that don't represent the interests of the regular folks, and that the core services that we rely on in our daily lives are not being tended to anymore. And that is the crisis of municipal government, local government, all across the Western world. Right now, we feel that in Toronto when it comes to transportation you just can't get around

law and order there's so much decay on our streets violence on the subways things that we have not seen in decades and we talk about Vancouver Seattle uh... la san francisco things happening on those streets they are coming to Toronto and a lot of people are really concerned. And again, a lot of apolitical, regular folks are concerned. And again, the center is shifting for the solutions people want to see in regards to that. The content I've created over the past year represents some of my best to date, as I've

undertaken additional extensive exploration in today's most challenging topics, and experience the nice increment in production quality courtesy of daily wire plus We all want you to benefit from the knowledge gained throughout this adventurous journey I'm pleased to let you know that for a limited time you're invited to access all my content with a seven-day free trial at daily wire plus This will provide you with full access to my new in-depth series on Plus, this will provide you with full access to my new in-depth series on marriage as well as guidance for creating a life vision and my series exploring the book of Exodus. You'll also find there the complete library of all my podcast and lectures. I have a plethora of new content in development that will be coming soon exclusively on DailyWire

Plus. Voices of Reason and Resistance are few and far between these strange days. Click on the link below if you want to learn more and thank you for watching and listening. So let's talk as well about what the different domains of government are, in fact, responsible for. So we have responsibilities parsed out in Canada at the municipal level and the provincial level and the federal level. And my sense, most fundamentally, is the level of government most crucial to people's day-to-day lives is the municipal level. It's also the level that is most difficult to get people interested in and involved in unless they're radicals as you point it out and that gives them a disproportionate

sway. So do you want to outline for people what the responsibilities of the municipality are and how the choice of mayor, let's say, is going to affect, well, the realities of their day-to-day lives. Yeah, and there's a saying that goes all politics are local, because the things that do affect our day-to-day lives are mostly at the local level. So garbage collection being done, for instance, being able to move from point A to point B, transportation, whether that's on the roads, the sidewalks, or the street cars, the subways, the public buses, all of those things are day-to-day lives, policing,

feeling like the streets are clean, both in a sense of being garbage or litter or injection needles lying around on the streets, or just in terms of knowing that there's a police officer there to deal with any disorder. And you know what I was reflecting on this very question, what is municipal government, what is local politics as I was going into this race? I remembered back to my philosophy studies and when you look at Plato and Aristotle, those

guys didn't really know much about countries. Countries weren't much of a thing, then it was the city state and all of the original thinking about how do we live together as a society, as a community? What is politics? The original questions around that all are actually about cities. That was the beginning, that's where it all started. Yeah, well, in Toronto, let's go through these garbage transportation, crime and policing.

One of the things I've observed, let's say, on the garbage collection front, is that it's switched from being a service provided by the city so that people can quickly and efficiently get rid of the things that are no longer necessary, and so the city can remain orderly and productive to a moral play where every act of garbage disposal, let's say, is frated with the entire weight of saving the planet. And it's become extremely expensive and time consuming. And that would perhaps also be fine if there was some evidence, for example,

that recycling plastics, which has been a big deal in Toronto has actually worked in that they are recycled and done more good than harm, which by all evidence evidence it hasn't. And then on the transportation front, I noticed, started to notice probably 10 years ago that there was something weird going on in Toronto with regard to automobiles because the city seemed to be going out of its way to make driving in Toronto as annoying as possible. And for a long time, I thought that was just stupidity

and the consequence of falling sway to the radicals in the, you know, I bike, therefore I'm saving the world crowd. But I started to understand, I'd like your thoughts on this, I started to understand more recently that there is a, there is a consortium of municipalities worldwide. I think they're called C40, if I've got the acronym right, that do in fact have as a long-term goal the radical reduction of private transportation, especially in anything that's powered by fossil fuels, which is like everyone's car. And so the war on

automobiles and the continual multiplication of these bike lanes is driven by a very anti-development agenda. And I think it's particularly pathological in Toronto, because of course it's an uninhabitable city on the climate front, because it's so bloody cold for five months of the year. And the only people that can use bike lanes regularly are like fit 20 to 25-year-old men who actually don't have anything better to do. And that's not a very good group of what would you call constituents to design an entire city around. So let's talk about

let's talk a little bit about bike lanes and garbage collection and then maybe move to the catastrophe on the public transportation front that's been unfolding for 20 years for example on egglinton yeah you know what going back to my saying that all politics is local i've also found that the things that can cause you the most controversy on the issues you discuss are surprisingly local the comments you just made on bike lanes might prove to be the most controversial comments you've ever made just that really gets people so irate and I've found that the the bike lane discussion in Toronto is so polarizing because that that small constituency of people who who who who are really fixated on the bike lanes. Oh boy, they hold it passionately, but the majority of people in Toronto say what you're saying that we've had enough with this obsession with putting bike lanes in every major road and I came out with a press conference announcement the other week saying no more bike lanes on major roads.

Look, I like biking, I go out with my kids, we do it on non arterial roads. So there's different side roads or roads that are adjacent to major roads where you could put a painted bike lane. But right now in Toronto, all of the bike lanes have these concrete block dividers where there's such a rigidity the sort of free-flowing flexibility. Oh, and they're beautiful, too.

They're absolutely beautiful. They've really done a great job on the aesthetics of the city to put up these bloody barriers that are totalitarian in their hideousness, and also those plastic tubes that obviously have a shelf life of about six months. There is hideous as anything could possibly be. And everyone listening who isn't from Toronto, one of the things you need to know about Toronto is that the city's laid out on a grid. And so there are roads everywhere, like there are in Manhattan, and it's a grid.

And there's absolutely no reason whatsoever ever to put bike lanes on a major thoroughfare, because there are adjacent roads that are much underused that are actually safer to bike on that wouldn't interfere with traffic particularly because in Toronto the traffic is routed already away from residential areas to centralized feeder streets that feed the whole city and many of them now have bike lanes on them which all that seems to do, especially in the winter, when there are no bikes whatsoever in the lanes. All it seems to do is snarl up traffic. And, you know, unfortunately, that's a feature at not a bug, because the point is, is to

make people so frustrated with their vehicles that they decide to abandon them. And that's a pretty... That's an absolutely pathological, what would you say, demonstration of policy, that the way you change people's behavior is by inconveniencing and them and irritating them unnecessarily, well interfering with their economic productivity and driving polarization, you know, it's, no, and that's the point. Could be a worst set of policies. That's absolutely the approach here, of course. People are very vocal about the idea that we want to limit people's choice.

But there are videos that have gotten viral on social media where you see when you have those concrete blocked bike lanes, means you only have two vehicle lanes. So there's nowhere for the vehicles to go when an ambulance passes by. So lots of videos of an ambulance trying to get through. And then how do you make space for the ambulance if you've made those bike lanes so rigid. So I've announced that on some of the streets we're gonna have to tear up those posts you talk about to make room for vehicles to divert in any other situation and some streets we're just gonna have to get rid of them entirely and put them on non-interioral roads. Look we're all

reasonable people, moderate folks. I mean there's options for all this sort of stuff but the idea you have to sort of jam it all into one thoroughfare there. Take away the vehicular lanes, we're building a new subway line and I announced the other week that on those streets where we've got a major street, Queen Street that's being shut down, and then there are other roads where obviously

the traffic's gonna spill over onto, and we have an entire lane taken up of a bike lane. We should open that up to vehicular traffic because then you can get transportation moving for the five years construction of this subway line, which to your point, January, February, March, which we pay, we pay many millions of dollars to actually clear the bike lanes in the winter when, when the ridership numbers are not zero, but they're pretty darn close to zero. They're a rounding error.

Yeah, yeah. Well, let's talk about this polarization issue too, because with regard to the bike lanes, because I think it is emblematic of something that's going on on a broader scale. It's like, this is something like the equation. It's something like, well, carbon dioxide destroying the planet and cars emit carbon dioxide. And so people who own cars are destroying the planet. And so if I write a bike,

then I'm saving the planet. And if you oppose me writing a bike, then you're opposing saving the planet. And anybody who opposes the saving the planet is obviously akin to an agent of Satan. And so now you have the polarization. And the thing that irritates me about that, or one of the many things that irritates me about that is that that has transformed the simple act of writing a bike, which should be just something you do with your family, or you do because you can, in fact, use it to get from point A to B. It's turned it into a kind of messianic moral crusade. And I should point out to all of you who are writing bikes and who think you're saving the planet. You are not saving the planet by riding a bike.

You're just riding a bike. And so you should pull the morality out of that argument and put it back into the religious domain where it belongs. And we could actually have a sensible discussion about how we could integrate the multiple forms of transportation that now exist, including scooters, electric scooters, and that sort of thing, with cars so that we could all get around so that our ambulances could work, and so that we didn't make every damn city street as hideous as possible in this counterproductive way, expensively, while doing absolutely no good. And to your point as well, one of the things that we've seen happening in the West in recent years is that very vocal minorities

are holding disproportionate sway over public policy. And that is definitely the case in the biking situation, particularly in Toronto, because it is a very small minority of people who are pushing this. And so why do you think, Anthony, that if you, why do you think that you'll be immune to this sort of pressure that you've seen so many people fall prey to? Like it's no joke to be mobbed and you know what? It's very very hard on people and the radicals are extremely good at weaponizing that mob attack. So why do you think that you'll be able to withstand that and have you in some ways been able to withstand that already?

Yeah, I mean, I've been a newspaper columnist radio show host for about a decade and I'm used to it. You know, you say something and to your point, it's something that you feel is a totally reasonable position and people in person come up to you on the street and they say, hey, I saw what you said, I read your piece, it was pretty reasonable, thank you. For that, or people send you a lovely email,

but in the anonymity of social media, people are saying these awful dreadful things to you. You go, oh man, I got these 50 awful things said to me, you go, okay, 50 people in a city of well over 2 million, it's actually not that big of a deal. And I think just remembering that people's rudeness, people's acting out says more about them than it does about you. I also think there's something to be said about just not not coveting the approval of people

who are not gonna like you in the first place and not cover, not coveting a certain sort of social, social approval that sees you kind of moderately liked by everyone. The outgoing mayor of Toronto, he resigned the other month. It's what triggered this election. A lot of people have said to me who are friends of that mayor they said you know we we really liked him he was a nice guy but he just wanted to be liked so much that he couldn't

make a single tough decision because he didn't want fifty people to say mean things about him and that is ultimately what I think stopped so many leaders from leading you know I have a I have a friend who was a minister in the Mike Harris government, which for people who aren't in Toronto, aren't in Ontario. They should know that was a conservative government that made some tough choices. So I got a lot of people out yelling at them in the 90s. And my friend said, look, if they're not out burning you in effigy in the first three months, not the regular folks, but the niche interests.

If they're not out yelling a screaming about you, what on earth are you doing? Why are you out there? Because it means you're not actually making any sort of meaningful decisions. So you just got to be willing to take the heat and I'm willing for the mob to come for me. That's a good inversion of the fear, is that so your claim fundamentally is that

if you're not annoying irritable ideologues, you're not doing your job.ologues, you're not doing your job. Yeah, I think there's something to be said for that. So I'm going to go in two directions. Now, the first is, what makes you think that you're qualified for this job? What does it take to be qualified for the job of mayor? What makes you think you're qualified in an absolute sense?

But then also, what makes you think that you're qualified in comparison to your opponents who we should also discuss? And to lay out the, what would you say, the entire situation on the mayoralty race front? So, why are you qualified to be mayor in an absolute sense to begin with, or why do you think you are? Being in the media for the past 10, 15 years in this city, doing the columns, doing the radio work

when it comes to municipal issues, it puts you in touch with people from all walks of life, all spectrums of society, all across the city. You hear about their concerns, and then as you're writing about studying, interviewing, meeting with people about these issues, you're meeting with the top decision-makers, and I don't think politics should be about

kidding yourself that you're the smartest guy in the room. I think it's about acknowledging that you have the ability to get the smartest galler guy into the room, to say, okay, we're dealing with this or that. I gotta have the humility and good sense to say, get me that guy as a principal tenant of leadership. And as I've been devising these policies, I mean, I'm not pulling them out of thin air.

I'm saying, get this guy on the phone, get this person on the phone, and we're gonna figure this out. You know, bring the best here and throughout the past decade, I mean, I've been getting in touch with the best as I navigate these issues. And it's never been me, myself. It's been me navigating it with these people's guidance. And you bring them to City Hall, because I think part of the problem is that the status quo politicians only bring on those special interest niche activists and just elevate their voices.

I want to elevate the voices that are actually able to get things done. I mean, there's so many people in the business community and they all say, why aren't we bringing business best practices to city hall? And whatever you want to call it, there's all these zero-based budgeting, lean six sigma, there's all these different terms they have about bringing managerial practices

to the public sector. Why is none of this being done? And I say to them, that's an excellent point. I will bring that. I will elevate those voices. I'll bring you guys to the table. Right. So you feel that you've been in a position to aggregate the concerns of Torontonians serving as a journalist, but also that you've made contact with people who have genuine competence

in a variety of areas, and you would be willing to consult with them to find the best solutions going forward. I mean, I've met with leaders all over the world and tried to generate what would you say, a theory of competent leadership. And I've seen, I think you actually hit the nail on the head, hit two nails on the head with your description, because the first thing I've seen that characterizes people who are genuine leaders, it's sort of independent of whether they're nominally on the left or the right, is that they actually go out and listen to people.

So one of the things that the word lobbyist, you know, the word lobbyist is derived from this old practice in England where you could meet your member of parliament in the lobby, which was the central building in the House of Parliament, and you could call on them at any time so that you could discuss your concerns with them. So being a lobbyist, actually, well, the lobby was where the politicians actually met the people. And the great leaders that I've seen really listened to their constituents. So Preston Manning, for example, when he built the reform party, which was quite an active leadership, he told me at one point that the part of the campaign

to build that party that he enjoyed the most was the Q&A's after the speeches he gave in arenas and so forth across Alberta, because by listening, you know, in 150 different locations to what people were concerned about, he could find out what their problems actually were and then start to generate policies that were focused on people's actual problems. Then the next point you brought up was that, you know, if you're, this is another characteristic of great leaders that I've seen in a variety of realms is that they're perfectly willing to surround themselves with people who are more informed and smarter than

them on any number of issues. They don't have the kind of ego that demands that they're the smartest person in the room all the time, and so they can call on people who are two experts without what would you say sacrificing the responsibility of the decision making to those experts because that's also another danger as we saw with COVID and so. Okay, so you think you've you've managed to to talk to a lot of people and you know what the real concerns are in Toronto and that and that you've been in a position that enabled you to do that over like a decade and also that you do have the ability to identify people that are competent and the willingness to listen to them. And that, do you have any qualms on that front? Like if you were looking at your weaknesses procedurally with regard to your team, what do you think they might be?

What do you need to have bolstered as you go forward? Well, you just want to bring everybody to the table. More voices and you want to get out there and you want to meet as many people as possible, identify as many people as possible, whether it's the small business people who have been meeting with over the years or whether it's the influential people. I mean, it's finding that sort of perfect combination of bringing everyone to the table. And it comes to lobbyists the big corporations that they are able to pay to have someone come and book a

time to meet you at city hall and and talk about their grievances but i found the smaller businesses the medium businesses the one still run by the families i mean they're just not able to do that they can't afford that obviously to hire lobbyists and uh... they they have to fight a lot more aggressively to just get the airtime for politicians. So you want to go to them.

I've said I'm going to convene a mayor's round table of small businesses and restaurant tours, which is an industry that's just been totally messed with and decimated. And of course, restaurants are one of the things that people say. People don't say I'm going to Paris or Rome or Toronto because I want to try the McDonald's at this intersection. I want to go to that unique restaurant I I've heard so much about, yeah, we've totally gutted that industry during COVID. So giving them a voice too, including those voices.

You know, I was in Romania here the other day, and I talked to one of the ministers in the government there, and they've put together a system they call ION, ION, and it uses a chat GPT-like artificial intelligence system to aggregate public concerns and to bring them to the attention of their political leadership. So, you know, you said one of the weaknesses, perhaps, in your operation is that you see the necessity of making contact with groups of people who don't have a lobbyist to pay lobbyist voice. And that's a constant challenge back to the issue of competence and leadership. You know, you want a leader, you want someone who's intelligent on the general cognitive ability front, you want someone who's conscientious and dedicated,

and then you want someone who has a very wide social network, because that's one of the multipliers of competence, right? If you know people who know how to get things done, well, you don't have to know, you just have to call on them and then you have to get the hell out of your way if you have any sense. So you're telling everyone who's listening that, you know, one of the challenges you face is trying to figure out how to expand that social network so that you're aggregating the concerns of people who don't necessarily know how to make their voice heard. I think the restaurant example is a really good one because, as you said, that's crucial

to the kind of culture in a city that might bring in tourists, for example, and attract well, and that's a major, what would you say? That's an increasingly major economic force, and something that Toronto would like to pride itself in being a cultural center. All right. So let's talk a little bit about your vision for the city. If Toronto was what it could be, five years down the road or ten years down the road and you had a hand in determining that, how would the city change direction and what might you see happening down the road on the city development side.

I mean, we have the whole waterfront that's quite the catastrophic mess, although that seems to be improving. And there's lots of things about Toronto that work, well, what would you like to see improved and what would the city look like if it was really thriving? Yeah, and you got to start from the premise

that you just love this city, you love everyone in it. It's a city worth fighting for and you're going to throw your passions in it, 100% to it. And the frustrations right now that concerns, oh, we're slipping towards being like Seattle, San Francisco, awful videos of things happening in Vancouver where you have a downtown that is increasingly in decay, it's being hollowed out. And the people who have taken over the streets or people who are just not doing well and they need help and some of them need incarceration depending on what they're

getting up to. We really want to develop those places that are prime for beautification. You're right talking about the waterfront areas where other cities have totally beautified them and at the same time you want to deal with those decay aspects. One thing that has been front and center to what I've been campaigning on is, we have a lot of random attacks going on the streets of Toronto on public transit. And that's why everybody is saying public safety

is such concern, they're nervous. People say, and it doesn't matter whether I mean with a small shopkeeper or the executive, they say my 13 year old used to take the subway alone. I'm not letting it happen anymore. The subways are dirty, literally, there's people sleeping in them, camping on them. They smell of pests.

People are just so unhappy that it never used to be that way. I had a carefree childhood teenage years growing up in Toronto. And I was galvanating all around town and it was just great. So much of what's going on relates to the drug crisis. So you'll have a new story about a random stabbing and a couple days later, a couple texts me and say, drugs, obviously.

And we have this growing number of drug injection sites that is really enabling this, a compassionate society doesn't keep people on drugs, it helps get them off of it. And I have found alarming stories about attempts by the city to create new injection sites called another name. I went to a public hearing where there's a senior center in North York and they have some green space in front

to do their Tai Chi and so on. And that green space, they're putting what they call modular housing for chronically homeless men. You go, okay, what does that mean? And then they add, and there will be harm reduction on site. Oh, okay, you've actually explained what this is. You're gonna create a drug injection site on the front lawn of a senior's complex. They green space, drug dealers or pre-smart people they

go to where the customers are. So obviously they're going to go to this site. It's going to be total decay. And that's why I have said is Mayor of Toronto, no more new drug injection sites. We're going to take the allocated resources. We're going to flip them into treatment centers to get these folks off of drugs. The goal should be to put these injection sites out of business, to phase them out, and we're helping these people reclaim their lives because I've been speaking to parents who are so worried about their kids on the street who are just in violence. They're being arrested. They're hurting themselves.

They're hurting other people. They want them off of it. And if we can help these people, we help clean up the streets in general. And we make our family safer. We bring back trust in the city. And then we can say, all right, we will invest in building beautiful buildings. We will invest in bringing jobs back to downtown. And that's what lets things flourish again.

Yeah, well, it doesn't look like turning over municipal spaces to drug-addled homeless people and their dealers constitutes a move forward for anyone. I mean, the countries in Europe like Portugal that have liberalized their drug laws with some degree of success have actually paired them. This is something that people in Vancouver, in particular, the politicians in Vancouver, haven't seemed to clue into one bit.

Is that Portugal, for example, didn't just decriminalize drug use. It also set up very stringent rules surrounding acceptable public behavior on the drug use front. And so the policy is something like, well, it isn't obvious that criminalization of drugs has proved to be a particularly successful social policy. But that doesn't mean that you get to, you know, scream in a meth-induced rage and run toothless and naked down the street, right? Those aren't the same necessary policy. And what I have seen in Ontario in particular, this ominous tendency

to presume that homeless people, so to speak, have a right to municipal territory. By right of there, I don't know what catastrophic disarray and that it's incumbent on everyone to turn over our green spaces to people who are homeless, which is a preposterous notion because it means that your misery now entitles you to real estate and to public real estate and to highly valuable public real estate at the expense of other people. And there's nothing in that policy that's the least bit sensible. There's certainly nothing in it that's compassionate as well because from a psychological perspective

that looks a lot like enabling to me. If you make it easy for people to continue to destroy themselves, you're not doing them a favor and you're certainly not some kind of hero. You're just putting forward bad policy because you're ignorant, because you want to feel good about yourself. And if you're doing that at the expense of municipal property that's valuable to green spaces, for example, then, and making them unsafe, there isn't anything good in that for anyone. Absolutely. And one of the challenges we have in Toronto, affordability crisis, people can't afford homes anymore, so more and more young families are living in downtown with their

children and they take condo spaces, and they're not that many parks. I mean, Toronto has a shorthand known as a city within a park, because there is so much green space and trees, which is great, but actual parks where you can go out and have a great picnic and a great time downtown, there's not that many of them. And past couple of years, they have been taken over by encampments, which is why I'm saying as Mayor of Toronto, no, the public space must be available to people and to families to enjoy. And are we compassionate about these people having their troubles?

You bet we are, but they can't take over the parks. And the tent encampments must go down, so the public space can be reclaimed by the people. It's just getting warm again in Toronto. We've got to be able to enjoy a summer without these tensions happening again, where kids can go down a slide without the parents having to go, oh, are there needles on this slide?

I've had that very experience. We now live in the East End of Toronto, we live downtown in Condoleland, and I have had to say, sorry son, you cannot go down this slide because well there's the needle right there and I'm not picking it up because I don't have the right material to deal with this stuff. So we got to move on. I mean that's just awful. Yeah, so okay, let's talk about the, let's get down to the brass tax on that front. I mean, when you say something like, well, we need to take the parks back from the encampments, how the hell are you going to do that?

I mean, I'm imagining that. I think, well, if you want the woke mob to attack you in a very successful way, it seems to me that a media campaign showing the brutal hand of Anthony Fury oppressing the homeless in parks in Canada. That's a hell of a fine story. And I'm sure there's no shortage of narcissistic journalists that would go to town on that. It's like, let's, in the, we could take the example of a single park. How would you envision actually going about that? What, once the camps are established, like, what do you do with the homeless people that are there,

and how do you actually take action without it being an ethical catastrophe? Well, the police go in at the right time, and they get rid of the tents, and they take the people out, and they move them to another location. That's how it's done. It's the only way it can be done,

and I will make sure we do it. One of the reasons it hasn't been done before, two big reasons. One, the politicians are afraid of encouraging that policy because they don't want the headline saying, oh, look what this guy did. I know the silent majority is on my side though that we just can't have this compassion. Yes, but you can't take over the parks. Number two, one unfortunate thing that's happened with the anti-police movement in recent years is the police

field demoralized. So so many officers tell me what is the point of doing my job? If I do my job follow protocols and I'm not talking about the ones that don't follow protocols and do awful things, they have to obviously follow all the consequences of being bad cops, but the good cops who are just trying to do their job and then they're thrown under the bus by the politicians and their own Cheves we have a chief of police also running for mayor here who demoralized his force he threw the force under the bus If you allow that to happen if you demoralize your police force obviously they're gonna stop doing the job and they don't feel like There's any reason to do it because they're just gonna be punished for doing it So one you say go in and do this clear the parks and number two, when the headlines start

coming for me, I'm not going to go, oh, I can't handle this. So I'm going to blame the cops. I'm going to throw them under the bus for something that I initially encouraged them to do. No, we're going to bring back law and order and I'm going to have the backs of the officers. I'm going to support the police. So do you do how are the police reacting to your campaign? Do you have any sense of whether the rank and file officers are in support of the sorts of things that you've been putting forward? They are, and I'm having a lot of meetings with officers both officially and unofficially to hear what's really going on, and to say I support you guys, and to get the sense of what's going on on the

ground to speak to the beat cop. Although, to clarify that phrase, beat cop there, one of the things that they identify as a problem is there aren't beat cops anymore. You walk around the streets of Toronto, you're not going to see any police officer just walking the streets. And that was a normal thing for decades. That was how policing used to work. Right now, people walking downtown Toronto

go, the next person who turns that corner could be a person in a drug induced psychosis who's gonna attack me. I'm nervous about that. I wanna get us to a situation where people go, the next person who turns that corner could be a cop. So both the people feel a sense of assurance and anyone who's thinking of causing trouble knows,

well, okay, I better be careful because the next guy around the corner could be a cop who stops me from making that trouble. So why were the police taken off the walking beat? Do you know? Do you know how that came about? Because we increasingly put our investments, our tax dollars, and our political capital into these shiny new bo bubbles, these distractions, these fringe projects, and we let the core services be ignored.

So it's a funding problem. I mean, we have defunded the police in Toronto. Without a doubt, we have fewer police officers in Toronto now than we did 10 years ago despite the fact the population has grown. Where did all this crime come from? Where's all this disorder? Well, obviously, cause effect. That's what's going on right now. And we got to turn it around. We have to invest

again in the basics, whether it's public transit, which I'm going to do, or in policing. And we've just got to do it. We have to reprioritize. Okay, so let's talk about public transportation. We could talk about, well, the war on automobiles has been raging in Toronto. There's also been a tremendous amount of noise about improving the transportation system, the public transportation system. And most of that's been noise. And I think that England and is a very good example of that. So the LRT system, like rail transit system, there have been plans to make that functional along the Eglinton route. And that whole major business thoroughfare has been a

quagmire and nightmare for what, 20 years, something like that. And with no real progress of any sort, evident on the transportation front. And yet we hear stories constantly coming from, say, China, which I'm not holding up as a shiny example, by the way, of the ability to lay, like literally hundreds of miles of subway down within, you know, a two or three years spat. So like, the subway system in Toronto for a city of its size and wealth is pretty damn shoddy. It's insufficient. I've lived in Toronto for 20 years. The development plans on the subway side have been appalling to say the least. Very little is got done. It's unbelievably

expensive. It's caused endless disruption. Now apparently the plan is to shut down Queen Street. So what is it going to turn into another England? That doesn't seem like a very good plan, given how central Queen is to the entire culture of Toronto. So like what's going on on public transportation front? And why put more money into a system like that? If it's already been demonstrated for 20 years, that the city is for some reason incapable of managing it properly.

And that's why I came out and said that I will be suing Metrolinx, the agency that's creating all of these lines, for a billion dollars, for breach of contract and damages. Because this Eglinton line, it was supposed to be finished a while ago, two years ago, they took the median politicians on a tour and said, look, it's over 90% complete and actually work. They took the train from end to end. What's the problem? They're not closers.

They can't get it done. They can't do the granular. They've just found out there's no credible timeline to complete it. There are over 250 deficiencies. And City Council and the good people of Toronto are expected to just shrugging. Oh, well. Oh, another delay. And I've said, no, it's not acceptable.

My team and I read the contracts. You're in violation of so many of these terms. We're suing you for breach of contract, because we got a light of fire under their rear. So we can't keep taking this anymore. Yes, we're all sort of polite Canadians. But at a certain point, you have to go, we're being abused here. We have to fight back.

We have to stand up for ourselves. And that lawsuit should hopefully set the tone that this new line set the tone. That this new line, the Ontario line, it's called along Queen Street, a downtown relief line, we're grateful this is being built, it's long overdue, so I'm going to be a willing partner with the other levels of government and getting it built. But you guys better not mess around and you better stick to schedule because I'm showing we're serious now about holding people to account.

This idea that contractors in the public sector can just totally screw up on things in a way that the private sector would never tolerate. We just can't be doing that anywhere. To your point about China, I can bring it closer to home. I was touring this beautiful Hindu temple, this man deer in the west part of the city, and they are telling me the construction on it,

how it did not take very long. They brought people in from India who are experts is such a beautiful building. So, finally, Rod and so many details to it, and they built it in such a short period of time. I was just gobsmacked. I said, we've got to bring you guys into build the subways. You know, because you're closers, and they're not. Like, come on.

Well, what seems to happen on the policy front constantly is that virtue signaling narcissistic politicians announce huge spending projects. And then they make the case that the spending is the accomplishment. And then they spend the money, but they don't do any of the work necessary to actually supervise the spending. Because the actual benefit of the spending isn't the spending, because any idiot can spend money, the benefit is the results. Now, if you've done even a home contracting project, you know perfectly well that you have to keep an eye on the project all the time. There has to be someone there making damn sure that everything is, I mean, you have to have competent people doing it. But even then, if you let a home

construction project go unsupervised for any amount of time, first of all it will grind to a halt and second the costs will multiply extensively. So part because the contractors have other jobs and so you know they're putting out the noisiest fire to mix metaphors terribly. They're always putting out the this fire that's producing the most smoke and noise and so the same thing it scales the same thing happens on majorly construction projects and one of the questions that's burning for me is like, well, who the hell abdicated the responsibility on the eggplant in front? And I guess the other thing I'm curious about is,

you know, if I was a eggplant and business owner, I would have been inclined 10 years ago to go light a fire at City Hall. I mean, what's happened in eggplant and has destroyed the lives of many people over decades long period. These are hardworking people who put a tremendous amount of money into their businesses and they've just been screwed over in 15 different ways. Another example of the pathology of Canadian politeness. I mean, they shouldn't have been putting up with that at all. It's just, it's beyond

belief that traffic snarl and the mess that's been created there. And so what makes you think that you'll be able to, number one, go after this company successfully without them just folding and disappearing or claiming bankruptcy and disappearing. And number two, to put in place, people who actually have the expertise to supervise these projects so they'll actually be completed on time, particularly your main given that, you know, the plan is to shut down queen, which, you know, strikes me, given the egglinton example as a pretty terrifying thing to undertake. Yeah, well, we've got to change the way we approach these issues. Your point about the home rental projects is so important. I remember a house that I had, we brought in some roofers,

and there was a major problem with it, and I said, look,, you've got to be held to account on this and they wanted more money even though it was their own ineptitude. And I remember at one point one of the guys shrugging and saying, well look, roofing is hard. I said, I know it's hard. That's why I didn't do it myself. That's why I hired someone who claims that they have 30 years experience and they're the experts in all of this. So it's all about holding the contractors to account.

And right now the provincial government is trying to say to this city,. So it's all about holding the contractors to account. And right now, the provincial government is trying to say to this city, oh, it's the contractors problem. OK, guys, manage the contractors. Because that's your sole job. And one of the interesting things in government is we have so many people paid really good six-figure salaries to not just do the job, but to outsource it and to manage the outsourcing.

And it's like, guys, you're 500K salary. You're not even doing the job. Your job is to manage the outsourcing. And it's like, guys, your 500K salary, you're not even doing the job, your job is to manage the contractors. We should be expecting that from you. So part of this lawsuit that I wanna get going here, as soon as I get into the mayor's office, is both. And I should say that billion dollars, I wanna redistribute those funds in part to those businesses

that you identify as being quite wrongly aggrieved and of course losing some of their life savings overall of this, this is to reframe how we approach this and to reset who is the boss because right now increasingly, I think in public sector contracts, people get the contracts almost feel like they are the boss. So I want to reframe the way we approach it and that we can manage this very rigorously. We can demand excellence because part of the problem is we're just not demanding excellence and accountability. Yeah, well, it's obviously in the interests of crooked contractors to drag out a high-paying

job as long as possible, especially if you can also combine that with not doing the work, which is a good way of saving costs. So the impetus for making these projects inefficient is absolutely clear, especially like I said, if you're dealing with corrupt contractors. And so, have you talked, I presume, that you've talked to legal advisors about the advisability and practicality of such a lawsuit? What have they told you? about the advisability and practicality of such a lawsuit. What have they told you? And I mean, this isn't, as far as I can tell, this isn't common practice with regard

to the relationships between municipal or provincial government and contractors, right? Doesn't generate, degenerate into a billion dollar lawsuit. What makes you think that you can go forward with this on legal grounds? Well, because you read through the contracts and it's glaringly obvious that they are in breach of contract on a number of fronts, so you proceed from that.

And actually, I mean, you're right, but when it comes to dealing with the subway system, actually, the contractors are currently suing the provincial government over their own grievances. So it's like these guys, again, that the contractors think they run the show, they've actually commenced the lawsuits. And the City of Toronto is once again the passive player and the residents are just expected to take it. I want to get the City of Toronto in the game. I don't like endless litigation, but the contractors are the ones who almost have the greatest inertia. They got the biggest balls at the table right now. And again, we gotta say,

no, we're getting in the game too. We're the only ones not triggering legal action right now. So again, that just puts us on the defensive and we don't have a voice at the table. Right. Okay. Well, we've talked a fair bit about, you know, some of the, remediating some of the idioses that currently plague Toronto, let's say, on the bike lane front, in the park front, in the public transportation front and the park front and the public transportation front. Might be fun for a bit to talk about what the city could look like. I mean, one of the things that's really struck me, I was in Montreal not so long ago. And Montreal's done a lovely job of revitalizing their old city and the waterfront. So it's extremely accessible to people. It's

very, very beautiful. It's a lot of fun, and that's something Montreal's really good at. I mean, that damn city, man, it's produced a civic life that's just top-rate, you know? If you're speaking of world-class cities, there's probably one in Toronto or one in Canada, and that would be Montreal, given all the things that it has to offer.

And Toronto claims world-class city status constantly, which is one of the reasons you know, it's actually not true, because if you are a world-class city, you, which is one of the reasons you know it's actually not true, because if you are a world-class city, you don't have to yell about it constantly. But we have this amazing waterfront that's because the whole city is spread out along this gigantic lake with its beautiful beaches, but so much of that is still marred by construction rubbish and deptertis of the last 150 years of pointless and counterproductive planning.

And like the city could be very waterfront centered. And there has been some moves on that front right downtown with some real progress made, I would say, over the last 20 years. I mean, then there's nighttime in Toronto too. I think what was done with the CN Tower, for example, lighting it up, that's kind of fun and playful. And many cities across the world have instituted these festivals of lights that make their cities

really glow and dance at night. And Toronto could be real hopping place. It has the possibility for that, very well developed waterfront, and like a very exciting downtown, and a cultural hub, if that was handled intelligently. What do you see on the positive front for Toronto under your guidance as mayor?

As mayor, I'll say yes to big, bold, exciting, and fun ideas because Toronto has become a city of no. And we always look for reasons to knock things down, what we call tall poppy syndrome. There's something that's going to be very inspirational, very powerful. Well, let's come up with reasons to actually criticize it instead. I've been speaking to a lot of real estate developers who have some very ambitious ideas. And when development is coupled with beautification, with boldness, it can be a really powerful thing to rebuild the city because you don't want

the bureaucrats and you don't want the politicians behold to special interests. You want the people who are the great innovators, and what so many of these developers say. And also, other forward-looking sectors, like the tax sector, for instance, what so many people in these sectors say, development, tax sector, that things are so slow moving, rigid and negative when it comes to planning, when it comes to approvals, when it comes to red tape. I was speaking to one developer who said he's been waiting six months for a meeting about whether or not this wall is kept or not as a heritage designation wall. And I said, well, what's the problem here?

What's the whole thing? He said, well, the guy comes by from the city and then he says, okay, I got to go back for this other paper and then the meeting is pushed for six weeks later. I'm like, why can't you be a closer? You get the guy in the room, you're looking at this darn wall, yay or nay, and just close the deal, right then and there. What's the problem? So you want to expedite all these things. It's almost like we're deliberately dragging our feet on all of this. If you want a beautiful city tomorrow, and we should have one yesterday, but if you want it tomorrow, you've got to start saying yes to things, and approval processes

are so slow. Well, here's an example. So, and I haven't, I've been traveling a lot in recent years, and so I haven't paid as much attention to this particular issue as I might, and so my knowledge might be out of date. But I noted that there was a, there was a protract that attempt in Toronto to diversify the food carts away from just hot dogs, which is kind of what they are now, hot dogs and sausages. And there was a notion that given Toronto's thriving ethnic communities that we could set

up a system of food carts and that could offer an incredible plethora of different dishes. And this is how this happens in places like Manhattan, for example. And those street restaurants, let's say, are good entry point for people who want to start a new business. And they do add a lot to local life because they can move to parks and so forth. But the last time I checked, none of that had happened.

Although cards were still serving hot dog sausages and french fries, essentially, and that much touted diversification of food card hasn't occurred at all. Had it occurred at all. It seemed to me a classic, you know, very local and detailed example of that culture of no that permeates Toronto thinking. I saw a lot of that at the University of Toronto, for example. There was always a thousand reasons why something interesting and exciting couldn't be done.

I covered up with a patina of we celebrate excellence. It's like, yeah, I don't see much evidence of that. Plenty of evidence to the contrary. What's happened? Do you know what's happened on the food truck front? And do you think that's emblematic of the kind of problems that you've been describing? It is.

And the issue has regressed. So the other year, we introduced something called CAFETO, where because of COVID and indoor spaces were in lockdown. So they said, OK, we want to have more outdoor spaces. So we're going to expedite letting you have patios that are just on the sidewalks or even sometimes in the parking spaces there.

We'll just let you turn it into a patio so it would be like a Parisian experience and great. Awesome. So we did it. And then this year they've decided, you know what, let's start charging. We let them do it for free. Let's charge them $3,000 for each one of these patios. You know, like, why?

What's going on here? Because it's a cash grab because they realize we can do this. They started it. They've already put the outlay for it. Now, now we've got them. Let's get the 3,000 out and we'll bring in $20 million on all of this, digging them all. Hold on a second. This is a great, it's a beautification measure. It gets the place jump in. It's brought in all of the economic activity. So, of course, how can we take something from them? How can we, how can we screw them over on the slide a little bit? And so many businesses are average.

I came out in front of the cameras the other day, I said, no cafe T.O. fees. I'm asking them. I'm getting rid of them. We shouldn't be in a situation where government wants to micromanage everything, stifle everything, and key to government, how can I get money out of this? How is this a revenue opportunity?

And that's really concerning. And that plays into how they can't get the food truck game going and the general approach to any good thing that comes along. So when you're out talking to people now, tell me some of the stories that you've heard from people that are talking to you on a day-to-day basis that have struck you most deeply and that you regard as, say, pointing in an emblematic way to the problems that the city faces. And you've been talking to people all over the place. And what's that, what's that been like and what have you learned? Well, like I said, everybody brings up the public safety issue. It doesn't matter where they

are on the spectrum of society. One story I will never forget, a father knew my position on the drug injection sites. His daughter has been all through the system in tragic ways. He told me completely sort of sober-faced emotionalists, his family story of the past couple years. He spoke for about 20 minutes straight to tell his daughter story. I was in tears at the end of it, and I was just hearing this story. I was not the father reliving it. It's still ongoing. It is an absolute tragedy. What's going on in our streets in terms of enabling the drug culture. Obviously, there's so much violence, hospitalization. The girl had been pushed into sex trafficking and just horrendous details. And this is happening. People's daily

lives. And yet because we have a small number of activists who stand up and use buzzwords around harm reduction, we're just supposed to not say boo about this. We're supposed to accept it all. I'm not going to, a very deeply human emotional conversation with a father in pain, an ongoing pain for that family and I'm not supposed to do anything about it because 20 people are gonna hold up a placard with a rude word about me, not cutting it. That the safety issues and the urban decay are so real, it is just dreadful, these videos coming out of Vancouver,

Seattle, everyone says they're seeing that stuff on Instagram, on Twitter, they don't wanna see Toronto go one step further in that direction. And my commitment to the people of Toronto, I've said, is Mayor of Toronto, I will stand strong on that stuff. We're going to clean up the streets, or else we're just going to decay further. So is that, when you regard that, like if you had to make another factor I've noted

that characterizes leaders rather than pretenders, is that they actually have a list of priorities because the pseudo leaders have a hundred problems and they're going to solve all of them. And wherever they turn, someone has a problem and they're instantly offered the assurance that that's going to be a top priority. And the thing about top priorities is that there's actually one top priority. And you know, and you can't do everything. You have to make a hierarchy of necessity. It's one of the reasons I like Bjorn Lomburgs work on the environmentalist front, for example, is he's rank-ordered solutions, according to cost benefits, for example.

And so it sounds like that one of the primary priorities that you would have as leader is, is that it's public safety broadly, that includes cleaning up the parks, that includes making the subway safe, is that your number one priority? How does that fit in with the idea of like beautification of Toronto and development of of economic opportunity? Where do you see your priorities? How would that be laid out in your first say year of government? Public safety is 100% key. It's my main priority, phasing out the drug injection sites, getting beat cops back on the streets so people feel like this city is something they can make beautiful again.

They want to make beautiful again. They can build buildings here. People are going to buy those buildings, pay property tax, which gives us the funds to keep investing in things. Businesses say, I do want to reinvest in downtown because my employees are going to buy those buildings, pay property tax, which gives us the funds to keep investing in things, businesses say, I do want to reinvest in downtown because my employees feel like there's a place for them to live and a safe place for them to live, where they no longer want an exodus from both downtown and it's spilling out to other parts of Toronto as well. If you don't have public safety, if people don't want to be in the city, then it's a non-starter and we've got to bring law and order back. We've got to bring back those assurances.

Do you have any concerns about, well, I mean, one of the concerns, and it's supposed it's reasonable concern, is that if you are pushing a law and order platform, that you tilt the city towards excess policing towards excess authoritarian heavy-handed authoritarianism. And obviously that can be a problem because there can be too much policing. And as there was during the COVID era, let's say the so-called pandemic of authoritarian virtue, how do you do what dangers do you see on the policing front? And do you have some sense of how you might emeliorate the concerns of people who are afraid of a more law and order approach? Yeah, and a couple of years ago when people were taking to the streets across North America

to protest the police more broadly, I never once said in my commentary, don't do those protests. Don't go out there and I've never said to once said in my commentary, don't do those protests. Don't go out there and I've never said to anyone, don't protest, don't make your voice heard, because part of that experience was reminding police that their job is to serve and protect the people. They're hired by the people and they respond to the people's concerns.

So there's a pressure valve moment where people wanna get their thoughts out on the police and hold them to account by all means do it. The problem is what we did a few years ago is we threw the baby out with the bath water. The pendulum just went bonkers in totally the wrong direction, defunded the police, demoralized the police, and detasked the police. That's the phrase officers use when they're speaking to me. Tuck away the things they do.

So right now I'm not particularly afraid of going in the wrong direction. I just want the pendulum to get back to normalcy right now. And so when there's policemen say that they've been detached, my suspicions that has something to do also with the removal of localized autonomy, right? I mean, policemen have to be able to make their own decisions at the micro level because, well, someone in a managerial position isn't on the ground in watching the situation. And individual policeman get thrown under the bus a lot for doing that, and obviously that's going to be demoralizing.

And when you talk to policemen about their concerns about doing their job, what sort of things are they telling you that are interfering? What are they afraid of? Toronto has a broken windows problem where all the minor infractions are totally allowed. There is zero policing of minor infractions and that sends the message that, well, why not do a major infraction? If no one cares about the little things, are they going to care about the big things? So the detast means that there was a time when you'd call 911 or call the local division directly and you'd say,

we have some graffiti here or we have a guy causing a disorder problem, my house has been broken into my car was stolen. You're increasingly redirected to this service 311 where an operator who's not at all connected with the police says, okay, sir, I'll take a note and maybe one day someone will get back to you. I'll give a very real example. I saw in my community Facebook page that there were injection needles under these risers, under these bleachers at a park right near where my where my kids play and someone said, watch out, these are here, but we called the service because they say don't touch the drug needles because the great thing about having all these injection sites is there's all these experts who deal with this stuff.

So don't you touch them, we're going to bring the experts. He called this service, the needles were not collected. I went and took a look, I called the service again to say are these needles getting collected, they just never were. And they say, oh yeah, someone will be there to pick them up and they're just not. Issues where who's even dealing with these issues anymore? Detask just means they're not responding to things. Car thefts are massive in Toronto right now. Part of the problem, and we haven't really spoken

about the media yet, but because mainstream media is being hollowed out, there's tons of layoffs, people are not actually reporting on what's going on, and they don't really have a sense of just how much crime has gotten out of control unless they're on top of it. So community Facebook groups will post the news releases that are on the police website that talk about these sexual assaults, these stabbings, these robberies, and they get to people via their community hubs, but they're not in the news. So if you're not in those community safety Facebook pages,

or if you're not talking to somebody who's had this stuff happen to them, you're oblivious to what's actually going on. And it is brutal right now, the volume of things. You know, I was in the capital city of Albania a while back. And unlike most Eastern European cities, it is graffiti free. And you might think, well, that's who cares. And I would say, well, if you traveled through Eastern Europe, you'd care. And this is also true of Rome, by the way, because there is an assortment of magnificent architecture that's absolutely marred. And it's not bloody well marred by street art. It's marred by miserable little psychopathic thugs who are doing nothing but tagging. And the cities look dreadful as a consequence, and they actually fixed that in Albania.

They had about 50 people to begin with tasked with going around and painting out the graffiti, but they started working. They started finding the graffiti artists, so-called, they started finding the graffiti artists so called and they identified the small number of them that were actually talented and figured out how to use their talents in a more productive way. And so they managed to reduce their graffiti removal team to one person. And the whole city is clear of this scourge. And it is a scourge and I think it is a broken window scourge is that if tagging is allowed to go on address, first of all it adds to the general ugliness of the city and that's demoralizing. It shows that the thugs can, what would you say, manifest

their psychopathic narcissism without any danger of being stopped. And that does encourage broader scale, what would you say? Social misbehavior and crime. And so, well, I've been trying to think through what processes might be necessary to bring a vision of, you know, an artistically thriving, but well-ordered society into being. And this idea of co-opting some of the people who are involved in these low-level criminal activities seemed to be an interesting one. You talked about the broken window problem. You talked about the needle problem, for example, and the fact of homelessness in the park.

What other elements of urban decay do you think are sending the wrong message to people in Toronto? One big issue that so many different groups talked to me about. And I've met with Hindu parent groups, Asian parent groups, meeting with an Islamic association. So many concerns about an issue you've talked a lot about, education and the school system. Now, the mayor of Toronto does not run the school system. It's a provincial issue, but you have a relationship

with the head of the school board and the trustees and ongoing relationship. And I've told these parents, I will be your advocate. I will elevate your voices because they are very concerned about the lack of academic excellence. Instead, there's a lot of advocacy, a lot of activism going on in the school system, and that schools have become zero consequence environments, where the broken windows theory

is almost being taught in the worst possible ways in the system, that as kids there's zero consequences to things. You know, my wife and I are always telling her kids, hurry up, you're gonna be late for school. What do you do? It's just unacceptable. You can't show up to hockey late, you can't show up to class late.

And yet there is a time when I was a kid when if you did that, well, there'd be a problem. It would be acknowledged that you let the team down, you've let the class down, maybe you have to go to the office, it's marked on the page, and now there's no consequences. So we're kind of saying, come on guys, and then when it actually happens, and the couple times they are later,

the kid who's late every day, they go, mom, dad, why are you nagging us about this? This is clearly not a problem. It doesn't matter, you don't have to do all this. I don't have to remember you do my homework. If I don't do my homework, what are the consequences? Nobody cares if I don't do my homework. If I don't do my homework, what are the consequences? Nobody cares if I don't do my homework. And I'm not blaming the teachers, or at least I'm

up blaming all of them for this, because a lot of teachers tell me that this is a problem as well. The system just doesn't allow this to happen. Because again, going back to the policing, we reached a crossover point where principals, teachers, superintendents, who did bring consequences to kids where they were needed, they were thrown under the bus by the politicians, by the senior bureaucrats. So we have

this cascading problem at the education level as well. So why not when you graduate from high school or you're in grade 10 and school, that's why not go do tagging on people's private property? I mean, there's no signal that that's something one shouldn't be doing. Yeah, so that's part of the reflection of this broader social malaise and also the increasing hyper dominance of the radical types who use this narcissistic compassion to twist things around.

And so you got involved in municipal politics and what has that done to your journalistic career at the moment? What are you putting on the line to run this morality campaign? If you win, obviously, you're going to be mayor, but if you lose, what happens if you lose? What do you have waiting for? Do you go back to your career in journalism? How does that work out?

I'd like to think I have a lot waiting for me because this has just been such an amazing experience and I say if you want to fall in love with the city of Toronto all over again and remember what you like about it, you run for America. You just meet so many amazing people and people open up their doors, they open up their hearts to you. So I think everything opens up when you just go around and you make those meaningful human connections. I also particularly coming out of a period where we weren't making human connections for

good two years and as you know Toronto was one of the most locked down jurisdictions in the world to sort of reopen things and just sit down and have meaningful human connections. This has been such a great privilege for me and I think regular folks really want the sort of stuff that you've been talking about for years that I've been talking about for years. So I'm in it to win it. And every day we're making connections with new people and more individuals joining the team. Because they want to go in this new direction. And the fringe niche activist agenda is increasingly, I think, losing momentum. People don't realize that they're undeniably on the down. That all the indicators show that these folks do not have the influence and power they

did, and it's time to put the regular folks back in charge again. And we can do it. So okay, okay, so let's talk about that. You made two points, then I'm going to ask you both the alternatives again to being mayor, let's say, because I'm interested in the price you pay for this. But you made the case. I've been talking to people in my audiences that, you know, if they're concerned about what's going on in the political front, especially with regards to the more extreme activist types,

that they should really think hard about involving themselves in the political process because obviously something's wrong. And obviously if people who are centrist and competent don't involve themselves, then people who are extreme and incompetent will take over. And that's, and so, you know, part of the rise of the woe nightmare is also the abdication of the competent. And so now you said, you know, you got involved in this political campaign and it's actually been really good for you. It's been heartening. It's made you more optimistic. And you said that it would be good for people to join the team.

So maybe one of the things you could help people understand practically is if people wanted to be of service to your enterprise, say right now, what concrete steps could they take to do that? And then also, why should they do that? What would be useful and productive on their front for taking the time and energy to involve themselves politically? So first of all, how would they do it? And then what would, what might they learn and how might they develop for doing it?

Thanks so much for the opportunity. So you can go to my website fury.cafurie.ca. We're looking for people to obviously vote, to spread the word, to get involved as a volunteer, to commit whatever talents they may have. It's all about activating different networks, meeting with people, getting the word out, and obviously campaigns also cost money, so to make a contribution, which you can make at Fury.ca, and there is a rebate program where you actually get about 75% of your money back after the election. They just write you a check back. It's how the system works right now. So I say, would you give me $75? And if you say, oh, yes, I would, I say, oh, well, could you give me $300? Because they're going to give you $225 back.

So that's, you're only on the hook for the 75. And why do it? Well, because we have a great opportunity here. I will say, practically speaking, it's a very divided field. And there's about eight people with serious campaigns who are running for mayor right now. Most of them are in the left of the spectrum and they're all going to be fighting over each other for those left-wing

votes. I feel like I'm pretty much the only person who's out there in the same aspect of the spectrum and those of us who are like minded have this opportunity because while I want to win a mandate widely across the city and all voices matter and I want to get as many votes as possible, this can actually be won. With only about 18% of the vote is kind of the number that a lot of the strategists say. So I will be in it to exceed that 18%, but to definitely get that 18% and the rest of the field is crowded, whereas there's a whole terrain out there that I can totally go out and capture, and it's about activating the network. So anybody who has a community group,

a church group, a group of friends, a business association, say, hey, I like what Anthony's saying. I don't wanna bring him on a Zoom call or wanna get him to an event or let's do that because it's all about spreading the word. And more people are joining by the day and the word is spreading. I just feel so great about it.

I feel like there's only upside to me for this and for everybody in Toronto who wants positive change. Okay, so I'm going to outline that in a very detailed way. So you can contribute financially and you can vote. Those would be kind of the entry level. What would you say? Contributions, right? I should classify, so I don't run a foul of election laws here. Only people in Ontario can contribute. Not just to Antonians, but everybody in Ontario. But people outside of Ontario aren't eligible to contribute. Right.

Okay, okay. That's a good clarification. So you can vote. You can support it financially. Then you said, if you're the member of a community group, if you have some local charisma and clout, then you can contact your campaign to make that network available to you and to your team. So that would be useful for people who are organizers at

the business level, for example, or in other community ways. If young people want to volunteer to help, what would you have them do? in other community ways. If young people want to volunteer to help, what would you have them do? Like, I know people go door-to-door in campaigns, for example, that's a very good way to cut your political teeth. You meet a lot of people that way. You have to develop your social skills very, very rapidly,

because you'll meet every sort of person you can possibly imagine by going door-to-door knocking, and you'll find friends and foes quite rapidly. And so, you know, that's good experience for people who haven't had that kind of experience. If a young person wanted to volunteer, you said they could go to your website, that's fury.ca. What would you ask them to contribute and what opportunities might lay themselves out for them? Yeah, and they can email me personally, Anthony at fury.ca. The opportunities that we'd lay out is,

you're right, the door knocking is just such a big part of it, whether it's just distributing flyers to people's houses to get the message out, or knocking on doors, making those meaningful connections, or we go to places like very large, attended events or local farmers markets, and it is that human connection. And that's what it's all about

me saying this is my vision and also what's your vision for the city what are your thoughts and you made an excellent point uh... earlier on in our conversation where if you hear the same thing from ten twenty a hundred people you go well these folks are onto something and there's a wisdom on the street and part of the problem uh... with the the the people in politics right now is they they deny street wisdom and part of the problem with the people in politics right now is they deny street wisdom.

So it's people joining me to really make those positive connections with people all across the city. And to me, with people who you maybe otherwise wouldn't have met with, a neighborhood you don't always go to or someone who you just normally would see, you go, wow, and the great thing. And one of the things that the social justice warriors get so wrong is they wanna accentuate our differences, but when you just start getting on meeting people, you realize our similarities are so much more powerful

and profound than our differences, and you come together with someone who you might think I don't have a lot in common with, oh no, you do have a lot in common with them. So please, everybody join the team, and we're gonna go out and do that. We're gonna knock on doors, distribute flyers, we're gonna organize Zoom calls, join me at events, as I go out and do that. We're going to knock on doors, distribute flyers. We're going to organize Zoom calls, join me at events,

as I go out and connect with people. And it's just, it's so cool to be in that car with a team and go, we're going out to this event and that event. And it's a pack schedule. I'm working. And as things ramp up, the elections on June 26th, I'm just going to be working like 18 hour days. But it's amazing.

It's a beautiful experience. And I'd encourage everybody to join me. Yeah, well, you know, one of the things that young people who are listening might consider is that it's very useful as you attempt to make your way through life to improve your social skills, to improve your ability to talk to a wide variety of people and to listen to them, improve your ability to talk to a wide variety of people and to listen to them and to expand your social network. And you can do that with incredible rapidity by getting involved in the political campaign. You doorknark, you're going to be a lot of people than you met before in your life.

You're going to get a lot sharper on your feet. And then if you're the least bit useful and reliable, then people who will, at some point, in principle, have some access to opportunities are going to know who you are. And if you proved yourself useful, those doors are going to open like mad. And so there's nothing in it but upside. And so for those of you who are listening and who are concerned on the political front or who have some political interests or who are maybe just cynical, it's like, well,

get out there and get involved a little bit and see, you'll see for yourself quite quickly that the institutions that govern our society are actually quite functional if we actually use them. And so, and it's a good opportunity. So I didn't encourage people who are watching to do this. No, absolutely. I mean, my role of Dex has only grown in terms of the great connections I've made

the people I've met and these really, like I said, genuine positive connections. And then people join the team, and they're meeting all the different people, these people, obviously, many people in the business community, and the arts world, and in this sector, and that sector. And you're interested in this. You're like, hey, I met this guy on this campaign a couple years ago. Now I'm doing this new product. I got to get back in touch with that guy again.

I mean, the people who get involved in political campaigns, yes, there's political junkies, but it's also people from every sector, every walk of life, and the creative opportunities that come from we're all coming together for this shared interest to make our city better. But then bam, it opens the door in the world

for anybody on the team to do so much more with the connections they made. You're totally right. It really is, it's a movement is what it is. Yeah, well, and it's such a good opportunity for young people because political campaigns are generally extremely desperate for help of all sorts. And so you actually wanna go somewhere

where people are extremely desperate for help of all sorts because then you're even your rather limited talents because you're young and you don't know what you're doing, are welcome. And then you have this opportunity to take on responsibility that otherwise wouldn't be granted to you and to learn extremely rapidly. And so if you're looking to foster your career, which shouldn't be your primary goal on the political front,

but things can work in concert. Political campaign is an excellent way of learning about the city and developing your skills and your social networks. I want to drive home the fact, too, that if responsible people don't take up their political responsibilities, then irresponsible people take up their political responsibilities, then irresponsible people take up the political responsibilities, and then you tilt things toward a kind of non-productive narcissistic tyranny. And that's not a good idea.

And that's happening everywhere very rapidly. And I think one of the ways to remediate that is to get involved at the local level where things actually happen. And so it's part of the reason, you know, why your campaign interested me. Maybe we could close a little bit. What kind of vision do you think the people who are also running for mayor, putting forward that's different from yours? And how would you contrast that specifically? Who's the front runner? Is Olivia Childe the front runner?

Who's the front runner in this race at the moment on the more progressive side? Yeah, Olivia Childe, for those who don't know, is sort of like the elder stateswoman of the far left movement all across Canada. She was a federal politician for a while. Her husband, who passed away, was the leader of the left wing party in Canada. She's now seeking the mayoralty. Again, she was rejected 10 years ago. She wants to, I guess, get her revenge

on the good people of Toronto. And those ideas are about tearing down the gardener, the major highway, just tear it down, out of bike lane to pretty much every single street. Bringing in more taxes, I guarantee you that's gonna happen. They do not believe that City Hall has a spending problem, which I believe. I can talk about this stuff in great detail, the financial matters. But what so many of the other guys want to do is just look for opportunities to just steal more taxes from people.

They've, all the counselors running for mayor have voted to proceed with this municipal sales tax, so a whole new level of tax. Oh, don't worry, it'll just be one or two percent in the first year. Yeah, right. And then four and then five and so forth. They're going to get addicted to the revenues from it. If we have an affordability crisis right now, which we do with the rising price of food, is this a good thing for folks, particularly low-income folks? Absolutely not. Shopkeepers disincentivizing them.

They're coming up with all these other crazy new taxes, entirely new taxes that they're gonna try and impose upon people that is not the right way for it. It's not the responsible way. I have said flat out no to these new taxes. And instead, what we gotta do is be responsible with the books. And if we grow our city, the more units of housing you're building, well, there's property taxes that come with that.

So you're building your revenues that way. You're doing a positive growth, a positive way of growing the coffers by inviting more people into town to share in this great city building project we're doing. All right. So we'll sum up. So your primary concern is to reestablish trust and reasonable trust in public safety to ensure that the city doesn't degenerate into a crime-ridden nightmare. The way so many cities have degenerated and continue to do so. And you believe that if you do that, well, that's going to restore people's faith in

the downtown, for example, and encourage development, encourage habitation. One of the great things about Toronto compared to many North American cities is that the core, downtown core, is very residential. And so it doesn't have that ghetto-like aspect of just stark business with no life that characterizes so many cities in North America. That is a great advantage of Toronto. You see a positive vision on the beautification front, more development of parks, a more vibrant

artistic and culturally alive Toronto. You're not particularly fond of increased taxation. You are looking at intelligence solutions to transportation which don't involve, for example, multiplication of bike lanes that do nothing but interfere with the flow of traffic. You want to do something to remediate the corruption on the transportation front, especially that's plagued areas, devastated areas like the Eglinton corridor. And you've encouraged young people to involve themselves in your, not just young people, but also young people to involve themselves in your campaign.

You said that was fury.ca, F-U-R-E-Y.ca, and your email address again for people who want to contact you directly. Is Anthony at Fury.ca? Right. Okay. Well, I think that's probably not a bad place to end this. Is there anything else that you'd like to say to the people of Toronto, but people more broadly as well who are watching this because they're interested in the issue of municipal

politics? Is there anything else you'd like to say before we close off? Yeah, thank you for the opportunity. All politics is local. We've got to take back our cities from this decay. It's happening in cities all across the Western world, all throughout North America. Toronto is a city worth fighting for,

and on a number of fronts, the municipal issues, but advocating for parents, for parents' rights, the number of parents who come up and say, why are they sending grade threes home with surveys asking, are you non-binary or not? People of all walks of life, all political backgrounds, left wing parents, gay and lesbian parents are saying this stuff is bonkers, it's gone too far. And like I said at the outset, the center is shifting, and it's shifting in the direction of the sort of things that you and I have been talking about for years. So that's the opportunity, and that's the play

here, and that's why I'm doing this, and why I'm so passionate to become the next mayor of Toronto. All right, well, we'll close with that. For everyone watching, listening, you know that many of you know that I spend an extra half an hour with the people that I talk to on the daily wear plus platform. We'll talk about more autobiographical issues there. I'm interested in how Anthony's interests in journalism and in public policy more generally unfolded across time. So we'll address that and whatever other issues we feel are germane along the way. For all of you watching and listening on the YouTube platform, thank you very much for your time and attention to the Daily Wire Plus people for facilitating this conversation, setting up the technical end and the film crews who were involved in Toronto and I'm in Thessaloniki Greece doing this video right now. Thank you to the film crew here for making this well flawlessly on for putting this together flawlessly on the technical front, much appreciated. Anthony will continue to communicate.

I'll be back in Toronto second week of June and I'll be there for quite a while. And so, well, we'll get a chance to talk some more. Maybe there's some event we could do together. That might be fun. We can talk a little bit about some of the more visionary ideas that we've been discussing behind the scenes. That would also be entertaining.

And so thank you very much for, well, for running for mayor first, that's no trivial thing. You know, you have to, you have to put a fairly big detour in your life to manage that. And then also for agreeing to talk to me in my audience today. Oh, thank you so much, Dr. Peterson. It's been a pleasure and an honor. Hello, everyone. I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on DailyWire in order.