By André Bovee-Begun

Okay, first John Cartwright kicks David Miller out of his parade, and now George Smitherman wants his job. We can only assume that Stephen Harper is about to burn down Miller’s house and shoot his dog. Anyway, Smitherman, Ontario’s deputy premier, looks ready to step out of Dalton McGuinty’s shadow and into City Hall next year, depriving Queen’s Park of a major cabinet minister in the process. “I think there is a bit of a consensus forming in the city that the status quo is not getting the job done,” Smitherman told the Star. Hmm, wonder where he got that line?
Not to sugarcoat it, but Miller’s approval rating is tanking and Smitherman is only one of the contenders who smell mayoral blood. Karen Stintz, not quite famous for supporting a not-quite-likely Eglinton subway line, is signalling she’s ready for a fight, too. [Publisher's note: One key member of Karen Stintz's mayoral campaign exploratory committee is Rob Silver, who is also a co-owner of Ink Truck Media, Torontoist's publishers.]
Well, Toronto’s elections are a year away, but if Smitherman were to seek and win the city’s highest public office at 100 Queen West, would he be Toronto’s first gay mayor? Does it matter? Well, at the very least, it would be a fun fact to include in the materials for World Pride 2014 if Toronto wins its bid for the event, (which sounds a million times better than 2015 Pan Am Games—though both would be good).
And troubled driver Michael Bryant is still a top story in Toronto dailies—does that count as reputation rehabilitation? The PR firm Navigator Limited, which Bryant hired after his traffic accident in which cyclist Darcy Allan Sheppard was killed, has launched a social media campaign to help the former (and future?) politician restore the shine to his public image. So basically, it’s like a mini Obama campaign, only backwards! Never heard of Navigator? Well, fancy that—you should definitely take a skim through the Star’s eyebrow-raising piece on the low-profile firm).
As well as shoring up Bryant’s facebook page, Navigator has opened a blog and a twitter account, both named Bryantfacts. The blog, (which seems to have disabled comments at this time) puts out brief statements defending Bryant, while @bryantfacts mostly tweets rebuttals to any twit who tweets about this video on their twitter feed. Oh, and for trivia fans out there, the visual theme Navigator has chosen to use at this time for the Bryantfacts blog is, oddly enough, called “Contempt.” Dang, they didn’t have to go right out and say it.
Okay, time is short and so are attention spans this early in the morning, so let’s do the lightning thing for the rest: City Hall won’t decide whether to make garbage collection and ambulance driving essential services until the mayor’s office does some homework on the issue. A report on why Toronto man Jim Hearst died while waiting for an ambulance that took over half an hour to arrive is…late, because “key police and ambulance contacts” were on vacation and couldn’t be interviewed. Check back on Tuesday. And while the Conservative government is talking strategy for this election, a judge is getting ready to rule on whether or not Harper’s parliament-melting electoral manoeuvre last year was illegal—but hey, look, it’s even got China reporting on Canadian realpolitik! There’s some leadership for ya.

CORRECTION: SEPTEMBER 9, 2009 This article’s second paragraph originally said that “before rattling a laundry list of complaints about Miller’s civic stewardship, [Karen Stintz] paused to pose the question of how Miller could get even the little bit of approval he has. Says Stintz about Miller’s poll numbers, in a quotation now missing from the Post‘s article: ‘I don’t know where he gets the traction. Maybe cyclists [in] downtown Toronto?’ Torontoist would love to make heads or tails of that remark, but sadly, that job falls to you.” In fact, those words were actually said by Rob Ford, not Stintz; the Post, and subsequently Torontoist, attributed them incorrectly.