Don’t hold up a sign on the internet, because the internet will make fun of you.
Like Anne Coulter before him, Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong inadvertently made himself the target of online jokers Thursday when he allowed himself to be photographed by the Toronto Sun earnestly holding up a sign to protest the cost of a public washroom on the waterfront.
His sign originally carried the price of the Cherry Beach loo, $600,000, but there being a few hundred Torontonians out there who don’t like Minnan-Wong’s politics, know how to use Photoshop, and have a lot of free time on their hands, other versions quickly began to pop up.
His critics had a lot to work with, given the combination of Minnan-Wong’s oh-so-serious face and the subject of his outrage being a place where people poop. The visual gags range from the political to the scatological, but a common theme is that Minnan-Wong is attempting to manufacture some outrage and get his face in the papers in the run-up to the October election.
Mayor Rob Ford has certainly decided to run with the controversy over the costly commode, calling a press conference on Thursday to demand the resignation of the Waterfront Toronto CEO. Seven months after registering for the election Ford has yet to release a platform, and it appears he thinks that reprising his crusade against small-time public expenditures is his best bet to keep his job. The fact that he never went to any meetings when he had a seat on the Waterfront Toronto board from 2010 to 2012 is apparently no obstacle to him attempting to cast himself as a keen-eyed defender of the public purse.