Ask Torontoist features questions posed by you, and answered by our elite team of specially trained investigative experts (also known as our staff). Send your questions to ask@torontoist.com. Reader torontothegreat asks: Is there such thing as a non-confidence vote on city council? Torontoist answers: Short answer: No. And in case you were wondering, there is [...]

Camp Ford on election night. Photo by Christopher Drost/Torontoist. In an interview with the Globe and Mail published this morning, Doug Ford (Ward 2, Etobicoke North) said some fairly offensive and highly contentious things about the state of affairs at City Hall, and how his brother has been finding things as mayor. The biggest obstacle [...]

Deputants pack a City Hall committee room, at yesterday’s meeting of the TTC. Photo by Steve Kupferman/Torontoist. The TTC’s masters met Wednesday to decide what to do about those forty-eight bus routes that were supposed to have their hours cut, and then reallocated to busier routes in the fall. The Commission ultimately decided to go [...]

Public consultations, as the City of Toronto currently conducts them, are at best formalities and at worst shams. The City has a Public Consultation Unit, and they tend to do a good job running consultations and then compiling the results into reports. The trouble is that the staff who run the projects on which consultations [...]

Michael Frayn’s play Democracy, currently playing at Tarragon, is not always easy to follow. For some reason, this doesn’t particularly matter. The second political drama set in Berlin in Tarragon’s current season chronicles the rise and fall of Willy Brandt, West Germany’s charismatic leader from 1969 until 1974, and is crammed full of politicians, spies, [...]

Democracy beckons. Will you heed its call? Today, Thursday, at midnight is your very very last chance to judge complete strangers and vote for your Superhero and Supervillain of 2007! Don’t forget to tune back in on Saturday for the extremely exciting results (which could, potentially, include a tie for one first-place position). Photo by [...]

The debate between mixed-member representation and first-past-the-post representation has been a spirited one, assuming that you’re one of the twelve percent of the public who knows what the hell that first half of the sentence just meant there. Friday night at the MaRS Centre, the Centre for the Study of Democracy held a debate, with [...]

You’ve probably heard by now that Ontarians will be asked to cast a second ballot on election day. That is, unless you’re among the 47% of Ontarians who, according to a recent poll, are completely unaware of the upcoming referendum question on whether to replace the existing first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system with a proposed mixed-member [...]

Last Monday was not just the start of the Ontario general election campaign—it was also the beginning of a campaign to change the way we elect our representatives to Queen’s Park. On October 10th, Ontarians will vote on a proposal by the Citizens’ Assembly (a randomly-selected group of 103 Ontarians) to switch to a Mixed [...]

Jagshemash! Borat is a hit. It’s getting rave reviews, grossing millions, and definitely the most quotable thing we’ve seen in ages. But Borat seems to have missed most of the -ist cities, and we were all wondering how the film would have been different if he’d made his way around the world on the -ist [...]