Performing Toronto: Enacting Creative Labour in the Neoliberal City

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