I have been living in Toronto since 1989. My parents brought me here to exercise their freedom of movement. We are from Budapest, Hungary. I have lived and shared life with the immigrant experience in this city, and in the process have found my identity as a World citizen rooted and growing in Toronto. I am blessed with two children, a baby boy and a teenage girl, a loving partner, and a community I consider family. The last ten years of my life I have helped manage a family restaurant on Queen Street, but in my nearly thirty years of work I have been a window cleaner, a carpenter, an ESL teacher, a hat maker, a translator, a hotel manager, a small town tavern keeper, a writer, an explorer of all things Toronto.

I love Toronto.

If you love Toronto, we have much in common.

It is my privilege to participate in this Mayoral By Election. It is a privilege to be allowed to dream of becoming the Mayor of Toronto. I am ashamed of the way this privilege has been represented in the politics of this city. It is a shameful, irrelevant, scared group of corporate, self-preserving men that have gotten to have the privilege of representation at the highest levels of Toronto. These men suck. What they represent sucks. What this city needs is not another man that sucks. Please, for the love of Toronto, do not vote for another man that sucks.

Vote for whoever is going to show Toronto the most love, because it is a city in need of loving.

This is a deeply personal campaign for me.

My hope and my belief in the potential and the goodness of people sharing space is born of and bound to Toronto.

I believe that Toronto is the city that could and should be the model for the diverse and inclusive cities of the future.

What is the problem of Toronto?

What are we doing?

We rarely vote in any numbers approaching a majority, let alone elect any leaders who represent more than a quarter of the people they lead.

We are the most diverse group of people ever collected by a city anywhere.

HOWEVER! Our power structure, and the political ideologies and approaches it represents are inbred and not representative of the people of Toronto. Our government is out of date.

Like breeds with like in Toronto politics, and diversity disappears.

In the place of diversity, we have corporate interests. We have the colonizers, the magnates, and the tycoons who have branded their names on our food, our water, the land. There are the things that have the money or the things that do what the money says. Diversity is disappearing from our decision making process and from our decision makers. Our small enterprises and family owned businesses are in danger from the corporate brigade.

How is our government representing our diversity?

Out of 65 mayoral choices in the history of Toronto, a total of 28 have been William, John, Rob, or George.

All this diversity is policed by people who went to the same school and wear the same uniform.

What about our future?

The government is telling us to trust them. They say they are trustworthy because they have been doing things this way for a long time. The government will provide more police with more boots on the pavement to ensure that things continue the same way .

The less efficient our government is allowed to become, the easier it will be for corporations to suggest the efficiencies of takeover. Toronto is on property, purchased from a mall ( the Hudsons Bay Company ). That mall took it from the first-borns, the indigenous of this land. Now a mall mentality wants it back. And Toronto is selling.

What Now?

I am not the best candidate for mayor, not yet, but I am the best candidate to help us find one.

More than anything, this election is about removing egos from the process and critically, objectively uniting on the fundamental issues facing our city.

Corporatization. Deteriorating public infrastructure. Fear. Polarization. Othering. Blaming. Bystanding. The absence of responsibility and of accountability in government. Ignoring the fact that the government should be better at caring for our children, our elderly, our sick, and the shared interests of people in general.

This election is about the fact that we are a collective, a community, a great body of humanity that needs some self care and self recognition.

Caring is an exercise. Let us exercise it. Recognition requires observation. Let us be observant.

Fundamentally, this election is about standing in contradistinction to a dangerous set of political values:

That everything is okay because we have been doing it that way since 1867; That a whole set of beliefs can be dismissed because they are labeled “lefty”, or “righty” for that matter; That more guns and more boots on the pavement are the means to public safety; That it is reasonable to trust corporate interests with public welfare; That we the people, are too apathetic and too lazy to do anything about anything.

Please Stop.

Please, this election, let us unite behind ideals, and the person best prepared to represent them from the office of mayor. Please, let us all be in this for the love of Toronto.

I pledge to give to Toronto all my available thoughts and efforts, and to grow a community of like hearted people to help Toronto find it’s best of times.

Let us start with this election.

David Gulyas