Chris Selley: Norm Kelly’s Twitter renaissance a lesson for all politicians

Nationalpost.com
July 28, 2015
By Chris Selley

Norm Kelly might be Toronto’s best-liked city councillor at the moment. And that’s really quite odd, because by the standards of Toronto’s excitable left-wing politics-watchers, he ought to be a villain. In his two decades on Metro and then City Council, the Scarborough councillor has suggested shutting down the streetcar system; defended budget cuts for school playground equipment and to multicultural groups; dismissed calls for a “cosmetic” pesticide ban (correctly) for lack of evidence, boasting his lawn was “99.9 per cent grass”; staunchly supported police chief Julian Fantino against his progressive critics; and suggested climate change, if real - if - might benefit Toronto’s tree canopy. That was all before he hitched his wagon to the Rob Ford agenda, including as his second deputy mayor.

How is this man even somewhat popular? His performance as interim mayor once Ford finally went away certainly took a lot of the edges off his reputation - and it wasn’t just the low bar he had to clear. In public, Kelly turned an enthusiastic, friendly, competent face to the city and beyond, and he reportedly did likewise in his dealings with fellow councillors. But it’s on Twitter, for whatever that’s worth, that he has really remade his reputation.

On the 140-character social media site, he exhibits a sort of whimsy, humour, spontaneity and good-natured banter that’s very out of keeping with the popular caricature of flinty fiscal conservatives, and very rare in politics in general. Assuming he writes his own tweets - and he says that he does - this 73-year-old former Upper Canada College history teacher has become an unlikely master of the medium.

For the unfamiliar: Kelly’s feed contains standard political missives - a warning not to leave your dogs in hot cars; updates on the number of potholes filled. But it also features many of the tropes that tend to dominate Twitter conversation among much younger people. There are random, exasperated, sometimes self-deprecating observations about modern life: “Why do people leave voicemail? It’s 2015. Text me.” “That watery ketchup which comes out the bottle before the real stuff sucks. It’s 2015, someone do something about it.” There are faux-indignant interactions with corporate Twitter handles: Kelly once furiously demanded to know why Reese’s peanut butter-chocolate spread wasn’t available; several months later a photo showed him delighted at a Reese’s care package, then another showed him devouring a jar at his desk.

And Kelly seems to understand the sort of collective absurdity that often drives Twitter phenomena. When a tongue-in-cheek memorial to a dead raccoon sprang up at the corner of Yonge and Church, Kelly christened him “Conrad” and invented a friendship with the anthropomorphized mammal: there was a “photo” of the two together at a baseball game. At times he adopts the persona of an excitable civic booster: “Yo, @Drake. What the hell is this?” he asked of a photo in which the hometown rapper exchanged courtside pleasantries with a Washington Wizards player after a Raptors playoff loss.

And fittingly, he waded into the bewildering rap battle surrounding the Pan Am closing ceremonies, which were headlined by Kanye West - an American, to many Torontonians’ horror.

“What if it was Bieber instead,” Kelly wondered, trenchantly, aloud. “Just listened to (ceremonies performer) Pitbull for the first time,” he announced the next day. “Wonder if we’re focusing our attention on the wrong guy.” Suddenly Kelly was a hip-hop critic. When Philadelphia rapper Meek Mill accused Drake of not “writing his own raps,” Kelly declared him persona non grata in Toronto. It was retweeted a fairly astonishing 130,000 times. “U sound like a thug lol,” Meek Mill responded.