Minnan-Wong ready to work with mayor elect Ford
[attach]2619[/attach]Denzil Minnan-Wong won his seat back no problem in Ward 34 on election night.
And he’s happy that he’ll see a new face in the mayor’s chair, he says.
“Rob Ford is our new mayor. Mayor Rob Ford: get used to it,” Minnan-Wong said shortly after being declared winner. “And I am committed to work with him. I voted for him.”
He said he shares many common issues with the mayor-elect.
“(Let’s get) the financial house in order, bring down the costs of the city and try to keep taxes down,” Minnan-Wong said.
He said the next four years on council will be interesting, with so many new faces winning tonight.
“It’s going be a difficult council…we’ve got a 9.3 billion dollar ship heading in the wrong direction and it’s going to take a lot of work to turn that ship around,” Minnan-Wong said. “It’s not going to happen overnight and it’s going to be a tough job for council.
“Locally we’ve got to work on trying to get a replacement for the civic town arena, there are some local developments that are still controversial that need to be addressed and traffic in various communities is becoming a bigger and bigger problem.”
Minnan-Wong sailed into victory with 53 percent of the vote. Peter Youngren garnered 39 percent.
In nearby Ward 33, Shelley Carroll easily found her way back into her seat.
Carroll took 57 percent of votes in Ward 33 with Fil Giannakopoulos second with just 20 percent.
The win wasn’t a surprise for Carroll.
“We were definitely expecting to be successful,” she said. “In the last three weeks we sort of knew because we were beyond strategic: we were surgical about this.
“For the first time ever we did every door in the ward and then went back and started doing some a second time.”
It was a similar race to 2006 when Carroll had 59.3 percent of votes as compared to the runner up with 13.6 percent of votes.
