“It’s Kirk Russell Time”

And hey, speaking of Davenport’s Progessive Conservative candidate Kirk Russell, these signs were pretty much everywhere in the area during the provincial election:

On election day, I biked past a woman walking along Dovercourt, south of Bloor, ripping the posters down, one after another. She did not look especially happy.

Quick calls to the two phone numbers I could find for the Russell campaign didn’t yield any return call, and of course the election is over now. So it’s not like we’re likely to confirm who put these up, though somewhere, there’s someone who expended no small amount of effort putting hundreds (thousands?) on poles around the provincial riding.

However crude, posters like these don’t appear to go against Toronto’s bylaws that govern election signs [PDF here].

The relevant bit:

Election signs are not permitted anywhere on public property other than on:

(1) A highway, or a public utility pole located on a highway, provided there is compliance with the requirements of Subsection B(1) and Subsection C(1); or

(2) A structure, including a bus shelter and a municipal garbage container, located on a highway, if permitted under the terms and conditions of any agreement between the owner or operator of the structure and the City or one of its agencies, boards or commissions, and provided there is compliance with the requirements of Subsection B(1) and Subsections C(1)(e) to (g).

“Public Property,” it’s worth noting here, includes “public utility poles, regardless of whether the poles are owned by or under the control of the City.” But “highway”—the word the whole thing hinges on—is tricky. “Highway,” in City legalese, means, say, Bloor Street, or Dovercourt, or Euclid, or Shaw, and so on, not just Highway 427 or the QEW or Gardiner. You just can’t violate specific other terms of the bylaw, like, say, putting signs like these on a pole that’s within fifteen metres of an intersection, or on poles that happen to somehow be between the curb and the sidewalk (which my brain can’t even fathom at the moment). 

If election signs do violate Toronto’s bylaws, it doesn’t matter whether they’re unattributed, as these ones were—as Fernando Aceto, a coordinator with Municipal Licensing and Standards, told me over the phone today, an invoice is usually sent to the campaign that the posters are advertising for, and the campaign can then appeal it.

As for Ontario election rules on advertising, it seems like it’s in the clear there, too.

Regardless of the sign’s legality, though, it sure wasn’t effective in helping Kirk Russell, whose time it definitely wasn’t: he got 8.2% of the vote.

Thanks to Claire Richardson for the photo.