Monthly Archives: June 2011

The Immoveable Mayor

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Mark it down in your calendar, folks. The week of June 20th, 2011. It’s the date the mayoralty of Rob Ford officially jumped the shark. (If such a thing is possible. To jump the shark suggests that there’s a point of quality from which to jump. For example, can it be said that a Full House or Who’s The Boss? ever achieved the necessary creative heights to attempt the shark jump?)

Within a matter of days this week our very own Mayor Danny Tanner signaled that he’s unwilling, unable or just downright uninterested in reaching out past his core constituency. First, in Executive Committee he deep-sixed an offer from the province to pay for 2 public health nurses. Then the mayor announced that he would not be marching in the upcoming Pride parade, opting instead for a family long weekend at the cottage. In two fell swoops, Mayor Ford made it clear he was not the mayor of all Toronto.

I wouldn’t for a moment be presumptuous enough to try attaching a motivation for these decisions of the mayor aside from a reluctance to accept things that he doesn’t understand. Public nurses? We’ve got hospitals for sick people. Use them. T’eh Gays? Well, it’s all just a little too.. err… queer to him. Have at it. Live your life. Just don’t expect the mayor to endorse something he’s unfamiliar or uncomfortable with.

The real takeaway message here for me is that Mayor Ford doesn’t feel a need politically to broaden his appeal among Toronto voters. He’s perfectly happy wallowing in the pond of support that brought him to power, and that shares his uneasiness with extra front line health workers and homosexuality. These are his people and the decisions he made in both cases make perfect sense to them. His intransigence might even solidify his reputation as a straight-shooting, uncomplicated, apolitical, little guy. Our mayor doesn’t bend to special interests. Just like us hard working, taxpaying, regular Joes.

Or something like that. We who are flummoxed by the choices our mayor makes need to get used to it. He ain’t ever going to change, so stop expecting him to. That trait may be his greatest strength, his best political asset.

So, let’s stop trying to find common ground with the mayor. It is a small and barren patch of land. A my way or the highway mentality means that the only compromise we can ever hope to reach is all on our part. We give. He takes.

We need to set our sights elsewhere. The time has come to turn up the heat on those at city council who continue their willfully blind support of Mayor Ford and who continue to enable him to do the things he does. If the standard operating procedure so far has been to back the mayor or suffer the political consequences, we have to find a way to point out that such unstinting support will also come with adverse political consequences. A light must be shone on those councillors who have, so far, been quietly cowering in the safe shadow the mayor casts.

Sure, Team Ford is made up of a handful of councillors sharing the mayor’s limited view of politics and the city. Brother Doug, for one, and the Deputy Mayor. They will be immune to such pressure. You might throw in Budget Chief Del Grande and Councillor Shiner as well although, they like Speaker Nunziata and QB Mammoliti, former Ford non-allies present now because the going’s been good but alert to any changes of fortune that might come if the mayor’s destructive and narrow-minded policies become something of a drag on their standing with the electorate.

Even in toto that’s a pretty small group and won’t be able to help dig Mayor Ford out of any holes he gets himself into.

The councillors I’m talking about are the rookies who haven’t established any sort of real foothold besides being the mayor’s flunkies. There’s Vincent Crisanti, Gary Crawford and James Pasternak (the two latter elected in 2010 with the slimmest of pluralities, within the margin of error.) Councillors Michelle Berardinetti and Jay Robinson, undistinguished members of the mayor’s executive committee. And the deadweight veterans, Cesar Palacio, Mark Grimes, Frank DiGiorgio, Chin Lee.

Then there are the moderates from both sides of the political spectrum that have already started bucking under the weight of Mayor Ford’s missteps. Peter Milczyn, Michael Thomspon, Denzil Minnan-Wong, Norm Kelly, Joshes Matlow and Colle, Ana Bailão, Mary-Margaret McMahon. TTC Chair Karen Stintz could be counted on to bail out if things get a little rocky.

Let’s refocus a grassroots effort from the mayor to these councillors, the non-ideological hidebound and opportunists, and start holding them accountable for participating in this war against the city. Alert their constituents with loud announcements of their collaboration and facilitating of this ruinous administration. We need a catchy name for it. Project 23 comes immediately to mind but may not be ominous enough.

Mayor Rob Ford is a lost cause for anyone hoping to build a strong city. It doesn’t interest him and he wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to even if he had the inclination. That’s not going to change.

What can change is the support he now has at City Hall if more councillors begin to realize a price will be paid for their ongoing association with a mayor determined to do his thing and his thing only.

— start a firingly submitted by Cityslikr

An Open Letter To Councillor Josh Matlow

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Dear Councillor Matlow,

I am desperately trying to like you. Or, if not like you, to respect and understand your point of view and manner for navigating the very partisan grounds upon which City Hall currently sits. You seem like a nice enough fellow, open-minded, wanting to understand both sides of an issue, a consensus seeker.

Yet, you oftentimes give me cause to pause. Fence-sitter, I find myself thinking regularly. Ass-coverer when I’m feeling less generous. Going whichever way the political winds are blowing.

Most recently it’s been your indulging our budget chief’s moronically empty symbolism of his little red piggy bank that’s put a burr up my ass. Do you really think it brings anything substantive to the city’s budget problems? Councillor Del Grande himself has referred to the situation as a threatening ‘tsunami’. How is a child’s piggy bank going to help us in the face of such an onslaught?

Stop being so humourless, I’m sure you’re saying to me. It’s just a gag, a little joke to lighten the mood. Hell, maybe I’m missing your point altogether. Your constant referencing and social media photo sharing of the cute little plastic porcine is actually a subversive method of mocking the budget chief. If so, apologies and my hat is off to you. I probably would’ve just ignored the stupid pig altogether, and left it to the likes of the Toronto Sun to treat with the significance it doesn’t deserve.

More troublesome to me, however, is your habit of invoking the phrase, the truth lies somewhere in the middle on issues that divide city council largely on its right-left axis. That axiom is only meaningful if both sides are equidistant from the truth you are seeking. Do you actually believe that to be the case in many of the matters that come before you at council? That truth and good governance can always be found by finding some middle ground? It kind of makes you a patsy for those who have little interest in seeking compromise or even honestly debating issues.

By giving serious or legitimate weight to ideas or opinions that don’t necessarily warrant any seriousness or legitimacy, you skew the so-called middle in an unreasonable direction and distance it from the apparent ‘truth’ you are seeking. If one side claims that black is white while the other says, no, in fact, black is black, what colour do you arrive at? Greyish? Surely that can’t be the truth or consensus you’re aiming for.

Thus you find yourself having voted to repeal the vehicle registration tax and make the TTC an essential service (both money losing propositions for the city) and a few short months later, standing up to defend the selling off of TCHC homes out of fiscal necessity. As we have said here many times previously to the likes of Budget Chief Del Grande, you can’t cut sources of revenue and then sorrowfully plead being broke later as a reason to not to live up to your responsibilities. Well I mean, you can. It just looks a little fishy. Disingenuous. Hypocritical, even. Not really the appearance of someone looking to find the truth.

It doesn’t make you a hardcore, intransigent ideologue to hold strong opinions if they are based on well-informed reasoning peppered with facts and data. You’re only a hardcore, intransigent ideologue if your strongly held opinions aren’t based on those things. Giving equal bearing to these two very different approaches lends credence to prevarication and legitimizes what is otherwise pure propaganda. You enable those who are intent on distorting the truth you so desperately seek to find.

After some six months on the job at City Hall, surely you don’t still believe that the city’s fiscal problems are due to spending excesses rather than a lack of revenue, do you? Or are you going to fall back on the notion of it being somewhere between the two? Look at all those chocolates the former TCHC board bought for themselves versus the maw still gaping wide open by the refusal of the province to resume funding their portion of the TTC’s operational budget. You see what I’m getting at here? Those two situations do not carry equal weight. They shouldn’t, at any rate. One represents, perhaps, a culture of entitlement amounting to thousands of dollars while the other displays a complete and utter abrogation of responsibility to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars that has helped render our transit but a sad shadow of its former self.

Spending problem small, revenue problem HUGE. Suggesting that the two have equal significance to our fiscal problems, that the truth lies somewhere in the middle between the two does nothing more than aid and abet those whose main goal is to gut and shrink the size and scope our local government. That isn’t a show of bi-partisanship. It’s encouraging reflexive ideology to run roughshod over reasoned political debate.

Your predecessor as councillor in Ward 22, Michael Walker, was thought of as being a true independent voice at City Hall during his 28 years there. A maverick even, Mr. Walker never seemed to cater to the pressures from those in power, choosing instead to represent ‘the needs and aspirations’ of his constituents. More often than not, this designated him an outsider regardless of the political stripe of the administration that was in charge. “I have actively promoted community organization,” Walker notes, “and input in the development of a fiscally sound and socially progressive city”.

So far, Councillor Matlow, your performance has been one of the courtier rather than a maverick, seeking not to step on the toes of the mayor and his crew on important issues. You’ve led the charge in staking out the middle ground, the so-called mushy middle, ultimately transforming it into the pliable middle more prone to siding with political expediency instead of principle. As the old saying goes, you’ve got to stand for something or you’ll fall for anything. I’ve yet to see exactly what it is you stand for, councillor.

 

Yours truly,

 

Cityslikr

How About That Infrastructure Deficit?

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Do you want to leave our grandchildren our deficit to deal with?

It is a mantra often sited by deficit hawks to guilt us into cutting government spending. An iteration of it was pronounced in the U.S. by former Senator Alan Simpson when he was appointed Republican deficit commissioner last year. “If you don’t want your grandkids picking grit with the chickens, better ignore soundbite politics and get lawmakers to find real solutions to the deficit,”  so said Simpson who seemed unaware of the irony of using a soundbite to criticize ‘soundbite politics’.

Two can play at that game, Senator Simpson. What if we plug one word into that phrase? Do you want to leave our grandchildren our infrastructure deficit to deal with? How does that change the equation?

I came across an article last week in my Kawartha.com via the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. In it was a laundry list of infrastructure needs for Ontario cities, towns and communities that amounted to $100 billion of unfunded ‘unrepaired and unbuilt’ infrastructure according to the provincial government’s own estimates. “… delaying upgrades means higher costs in the long run,” according to the FCM’s Gabriel Miller.

‘Higher costs in the long run’. Try using that phrase with fiscal conservatives and watch their heads explode. We don’t have the money, they’ll yowl. But if we don’t find the money now it will end up costing more later. Thus, the infrastructure deficit is born.

What’s doubly interesting in this debate is that it is not simply we here in ‘tax and spend’ Toronto facing such a dilemma. Places big and small, conservative and liberal are under similar pressures. According to myKawartha, every Toronto resident would have to pay more than $1,000 extra on their property tax bill to deal with its infrastructure gap while residents of wee places like Prince Edward County and Perth face closer to $2,000 per person. Even the Fords’ favourite frugal city, Mississauga, is looking at nearly $450 million of debt in the next decade needed to fund infrastructure projects.

Clearly, it is a situation beyond the control of municipalities to deal with on their own. The revenue tools necessary to grapple with it are not at their disposal. So the internecine, right-left battles we’re now witnessing here at city council are fruitless. We can slash and burn all we want but we’ll still have an infrastructure deficit. Probably even more so. Since our ability to generate more revenue is severely limited, neither can we tax our way to better infrastructure health because the costs would be too unbearable for most households to carry. Although claiming we are over-taxed as a way to cut and freeze taxes is fallacious at best, highly destructive at worst.

This is a fight that needs to be re-directed at so-called ‘senior’ levels of government. Their coffers are where our tax money goes (90%+ by most estimates). They, both Liberal and Conservative, have been the laggards on this issue, dating back to the 1980s. For the past 3 decades, successive federal and provincial governments have been able to ignore this coming perfect infrastructure storm as it manifests itself mostly at the local level. Disintegrating roads and sewer systems. Dilapidated community centres. Diminishing social housing.

In fact, one could argue that both Ottawa and Queen’s Park have attempted to balance their books on the backs of cities. We need to start calling them out on that. Municipal politicians who don’t are simply doing the dirty work of their provincial and federal masters. They are the ones burdening our grandchildren with an infrastructure deficit and should be judged accordingly.

— judgmentally submitted by Cityslikr