Thursday, July 9, 2009 3:35 PM
Miller's 15 minutes of fame, almost
Jennifer Lewington, Toronto City Hall Bureau Chief
When you have lemons, make lemonade.
That seemed to be the strategy for Toronto Mayor David Miller when he appeared today on CNN to answer questions about the city’s 18-day garbage strike.
Former Toronto television reporter Ali Velshi, now CNN’s senior business correspondent, apparently had inside information (his parents live here) on the stink related to the labour stoppage.
But at every downbeat question from Mr. Velshi, the mayor had an upbeat comeback.
"Despite the fact we have 30,000 people on strike, the city is coping very well,” said Mr. Miller, praising residents for calm in the face of the inconvenience.
When Mr. Velshi brandished a striker’s leaflet passed on from his Dad, the mayor chuckled “you are contacting me on behalf of your parents, I guess.”
Pressed about potential health risks from a prolonged strike and clean-up costs, Mr. Miller held firm to the message he has been delivering here for days. “We are managing the garbage very well,” he said, with temporary dump sites inspected by health officials.
Unprompted, the mayor steered the interview towards a tourist plug for Toronto.
“The city is buzzing, we have the Dead Sea Scrolls [at the Royal Ontario Museum], a new Art Gallery of Ontario renovation by [Frank] Gehry and a new opera house with the best sound in the world,” he said.
But before Mr. Miller could finish his rundown of all the city’s summer attractions -- insisting tourists would not much notice the garbage piling up in the parks -- a technical glitch abruptly ended the interview.
Without skipping a beat, Mr. Velshi quipped “All right, clearly somebody didn’t agree with his position on garbage,” and turned to a report on civil unrest in Iran.
Of course, Mr. Miller’s appearance on CNN brought back vivid memories of former Toronto Mel Lastman’s performance on that same American network at the height of SARS in 2003.
Interviewed after the World Health Organization issued a travel advisory against Toronto because of the deadly virus, Mr. Lastman did not mince words that made the locals here wince.
"They don't know what they're talking about,” he thundered, dismissing the international health authority. “I don't know who this group is. I've never heard of them before. I had never seen them before. Who did they talk to? They haven't even been to Toronto. They're located somewhere in Geneva."