JB's Warehouse & Curio Emporium

Toronto Sun , November 3, 1980. After a nine-month slog, the 2014 municipalelection campaign draws to a close today. Amid its stranger-than-fiction twists and turns, a sad truth has emerged: there is a segment of Torontonians who have discovered they can get away with boldly displaying small-minded attitudes we like to sweep under the carpet. As Ward 2 candidate Andray Domise observed in atweet this morning referring to a gawdawful Andy Donato cartoon of Olivia Chow published in the Sun, one of the campaign's big problems is "that we've given racists, sexists, xenophobes a platform of legitimacy in TO politics." From attacks on Chow's ethnicity to the mutilation of signs for Islamic candidates, it hasn't been pretty.

Cartoon by Sid Barron, the Toronto Star , November 23, 1962. Click on image for larger version. Adjust the dates to match this year's election (October 27, for the record), and you could easily recycle this cartoon. Some voters may feel as if the world ended long ago during the current drawn-out, fiction-writers-couldn't-make-this-stuff-up narrative.