Giorgio Mammoliti @ Dyke March

That’s when he unveiled a Facebook page designed, as the Globe & Mail phrased it, “to give voice to the silent majority of working-class Torontonians who don’t have time to speak out at all-night City Hall meetings alongside layabouts and ‘communists.’”

Mammoliti says he saw the need for such a site—called “Save the City…Support the Ford Administration”—after surviving Council’s marathon 22-hour budget meeting two weeks earlier.

“Members of the public” were invited to debate Ford’s proposed massive cuts, but the hundreds of petitioners were mostly “community activists,” “artists,” and well-known Council chamber cranks.

“I want to hear from the average Joe Blow who doesn’t even know what City Hall looks like,” Mammoliti explained, adding emphatically, “I don’t want to hear from communists.”

That’s because he’s already spent so much time in their midst.

Mammoliti started out as a leader of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, then ran for provincial parliament and won on the New Democratic Party (NDP) ticket. (At the last NDP convention, delegates postponed a vote on whether to strike the word “socialist” from their constitution.)

Soon, however, the new Member of Provincial Parliament split with his party on issues such as extending benefits to gay couples. And fellow “dippers” didn’t appreciate his dissent.

“That’s where I learned how communists smell,” he told reporters last week.

When asked, Mammoliti defined a communist as “anyone who is able to work, doesn’t want to work and wants everything for free.”

Americans no doubt find a Canadian going on about “communism” midway through 2011 rather strange, but Toronto conservatives habitually use the word. It’s a weird quirk in a country with no equivalent to the McCarthy hearings, and frankly, I can’t explain it.

(During the municipal election, my husband took the bluntest, most blustering unofficial campaign slogan he could think of—“VOTE FOR ROB FORD—HE’S NOT A COMMUNIST”—and created a bumper sticker, which a local designer turned into a semi-controversial T-shirt. I’m told the merchandise was viewed with great amusement and grudging affection by Ford’s “team”—off the record, of course.)

Alas, Mammoliti’s new 1000+ member Facebook group is overrun with layabout communists with Che and Chou En-Lai avatars who are busily mocking the few assembled “haters” and posting quotations from Lenin and Mao. One of them wants to nationalize the Toronto Zoo. Another has nicknamed the councillor “Giorgio Mussolini.”

The councillor has accidentally proved his own point: Municipal “communist” bullies monopolize debates both online and off.

But the advantage of luring them over to Facebook instead of into windowless council chambers for speechmaking marathons?

No smell!