The cast and crew of the City Idol competition watched the Toronto municipal election results come in at Paupers Pub in the Annex, even if the television coverage hardly had the suspense of a World Cup match. Citytv proclaimed David Miller’s re-election as soon as they signed on-air, and went to rival Jane Pitfield for an instantly incredulous reaction: “They’ve already decided on the winner?” The effort to make no-contests like Kyle Rae’s inevitable victory in Toronto-Centre Rosedale sound suspenseful was a pretty fruitless allocation of CityNews resources, especially when the four political neophytes who won their campaign in an ambitious year-long contest were celebrating their achievements, having a chance to play in the municipal campaign field that is historically hostile to neophytes. “Only two candidates really had a chance in Trinity-Spadina,” Citytv reporter Dwight Drummond opined from the party of his former colleague Adam Vaughan, who clinched a majority win in what was presumed to be a horserace against Helen Kennedy — but third place, with almost five per cent of the vote, belonged to Desmond Cole (pictured), the most visible of the City Idol winners, due to his running in a heated downtown ward. (Anthony Reinhart has a profile of Cole in the Tuesday morning Globe.) While the screens showed Senator Jerry Grafstein hailing his “warrior queen” Pitfield following her concession speech, Cole was much more modest in addressing the crowd of about 50 campaign supporters, pleased with them for mounting a campaign rooted in “dignity, friendship and respect”, in contrast to the surrounding crossfire between Vaughan and Kennedy. The story of City Idol has also been captured throughout for a documentary, and Cole didn’t fail to thank the camera crew for obsessively preserving his experiences during these months “because I don’t know what the hell has been going on”.
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