All Fried Up In The Big Smoke

Less political. More fictional.

Smoke Them Out

Posted on December 20, 2015 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

Here’s the original, less gooder edited version of the 2016 budget launch post I wrote for the Torontoist earlier this week.

Speaking of which, while I recognize plenty of worthy causes out there for your consideration this holiday season, you would be making a very substantive contribution to the life of this city by sending some cash the Torontoist’s way. Councillor Shelley Carroll, a former budget chair at City Hall, gave her Best Budget Coverage nod to the Torontoist’s work this week. This can’t happen over the long run without help from readers and everyone else who wants to truly be in the know about the city they live and go about their business in.

So do yourself a favour. Contribute now.

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As the 2016 budget launch wrapped up at a special Budget Committee meeting today, I said to a fellow council watcher as we left the room, “Well, the chicks have come home to roost.” The piper was now demanding his payment. [Insert another cliché here for an imminent moment of decision.]

In what’s being referred to this year as a “Preliminary Budget” instead of what I believe has been called in recent years, “Staff Recommended Budget”, city staff crunched the numbers on both the operating and capital sides of the ledger and delivered up a document that, at first glance, didn’t scare the hell out of everybody. The opening pressure on the operating side seemed highly manageable. $57 million, and bringing in Mayor Tory’s proposed at the rate of inflation property tax rate increase of 1.3%, drops it down to just $23 million. A relatively meagre 2.17% bump in the rate would eliminate the opening pressure altogether.

But here’s where the budget qualified as only ‘preliminary’ and not ‘staff recommended’.

City staff did not eliminate the operating deficit as it has done previously, recommending a property tax rate increase for city council to essentially rubber stamp (after much back and forthing during the next couple months). This year, staff threw down the gauntlet, as City Manager Peter Wallace said they would do earlier this month at his fiscal foundation presentation at Executive Committee. Here’s the revenue you have. Here are the things you said you want to have. You, city council, decide on how and what gets funded. You balance the books, not staff.

Oh, and one last thing: there’s an additional $67 million of requests and directives from council that staff have yet to find any funding for. TTC service improvements like early Sunday openings. Much of the mayor’s Poverty Reduction Strategy. Unfunded. In reality that makes for a $124 million opening pressure before you start factoring in property tax rate increases.

And hey. Let’s not even get started on the unfunded capital expenditures city council has thought would be nice but conveniently forgot to find funding for.

Lest you think I’m all gloom and doom here, that is not my intention.

This approach by staff to starting the budget process in the hole, negatively unbalanced, forces city council to start putting its collective money where its mouth is. For too long, too many of our local representatives have drawn up grand Wish Lists, amassing proverbial castles in the sky (and subways in the ground) without ponying up the cash to pay for it. Worse yet, strangling off sources of revenue in the name of Respecting The Taxpayers.

Well, not this year, not if city staff has their way. With this year’s preliminary budget introduced not balanced, staff is attempting to smoke out councillors from their respective hiding spots. You want to keep taxes low and refuse talk of any other new sources of revenue? What are you going to cut? What services are you going to deny or take from city’s residents? You want to help people lift themselves out of poverty? You want the trains to run on time and not over-capacity? How much do you want to increase taxes (above the rate of inflation, by the way)? Do you want to have another discussion about new revenue tools?

City councillors can no longer have it both ways. That is exactly how Toronto has found itself with a mountain or two of unfunded liabilities and projects waiting in the wings. False promises of grand services, a world class city and low, low taxes. Efficiencies will pay for that, with a little dose of current from capital. All good.

As city staff made clear today, it wasn’t all good. If they have their way, 2016 will be the year city council will finally have to either put up or shut up. There is no longer anyplace they can hide for cover.

— resubmittingly submitted by Cityslikr

A (18) Year End Review

Posted on December 18, 2015 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

There are times when it’s impossible to match the city Toronto is, has become, to the leadership it’s regularly inflicted on itself and endured. In many, many ways this place exhibits a vibrancy and animated quality it in no way deserves. At least, looking at it from the top down which gives me pause to reflect on the importance I place on the role our elected local representatives play in the day-to-day operations of Toronto. Maybe they’re not all that ultimately. Maybe I’ve just wasted the last 5 years of my life in the mistaken belief that it’s in any way necessary to be following closely the ins-and-outs at City Hall.

Looking back over the almost two decades now of amalgamated Toronto, it seems voters don’t place the same kind of significance on municipal politicians as I do. The established pattern being, Don’t demand too much from us, especially money, Don’t change too much, especially near where we live, Don’t bother us much, especially at dinner time.

A variation on the old municipal maxim: Keep our streets clear and safe, get the garbage picked up on time and make sure our toilets flush properly. Do that, and keep our taxes low? We’ll get along just fine.

So when the 416 all became one big family back in 1998, most of us weren’t in the market for any sort of urban renaissance. The same as before, please. Only on a bigger scale.

We gave ourselves Mel Lastman who came to power promising a property tax freeze and a little bit of cable access razzamatazz! Despite his obvious inadequacies, Mel had friends in the provincial government. It was all going to be alright. If nothing else, Mel gave us our first taste of international embarrassment, developing us some antibodies for what was to come.

After 7 years of bumbling, increasing disinterest in governance and a whole lot of overt corruption, Toronto tidied itself up, putting David Miller in office on a promise to clean up the mess left behind by Mel and his cronies. He did, and a whole lot more. In the end, probably too much for Toronto’s conservative tastes.

I really need to elaborate on this for a moment. As an unrepentant Millerite, I brook little of the bullshit narrative about how his administration drove the city into the ground fiscally or caved in to the unions or whatever other bogeyman his opponents like to float out there. It’s simply not true, and any cold, hard look at the history will show it.

I mean, after all, who are you going to believe? Me or Sue-Ann Levy?

No, in fact, the Miller administration took the hard steps in the direction of making Toronto a more self-sustaining, fairer, more inclusive, 21^st-century city. What it didn’t do, and this is important, it was a crucial error that helped paved the way for the insanity that followed, the Miller administration did not attempt to engage with enough people beyond those who were already on board. I think it was smug with self-satisfaction, convinced that the rightness of what it was doing was obvious to all. It didn’t need to explain itself. The truth was self-evident.

It created the bubble that, when things got rocky, the financial crisis of 2008 which evaporated money coming from senior levels of government to Toronto for projects like Transit City, then the outside workers strike, retirement parties and bunny suits, when shit hit the fan, voters saw the bubble as the enemy, the thing to vote against.

Or maybe, 7 years, two terms, is more than enough time for a mayor and the city to sour on each hour.

Either way, in marched Rob Ford, on a wave of discontent and anger with the outgoing administration. Those feeling left out and left behind saw their champion in Rob Ford. He embraced that position and everything he did in office he did in the belief that he was looking out for the little guy. He fed on that discontent and anger, stoking it, inflaming it. Rob Ford represented Toronto’s angry era.

Mel the Clown. Earnest David. Angry Rob.

Civically, at the political level, we got tired. We wanted some peace and quiet. We wanted normal. Yes, after a decade of tumult, we pined for some of them good ol’ days. Just keep our streets clear and safe, get the garbage picked up on time and make sure our toilets flush properly. Do that, and keep our taxes low? We’ll get along just fine.

A little competence. Is that too much to ask?

Indeed.

I imagine you think you know where I’m going with this but, no, not entirely. This is not another John Tory hit piece. Do I think he oversold his competence? For sure. Do I believe he is severely over-matched for the job he faces? No question.

But this has to do with us, the voters, the residents of this city. We have to stop buying into the notion that there are simple solutions to the problems we face. We have to stop believing in all the fuzzy math we’re being pitched. This isn’t about throwing money at problems either. It’s about not looking to the familiar in the hopes of adapting to the change going on all around us.

The Toronto about to say hello to 2016 is not the Toronto that greeted 1998 although, looking at the faces still at city council, a counter-argument could be made about that. We have to recognize what’s no longer working and figure out ways to fix it because the truth is we’re coming up painfully short on important matters the will have an irreversible negative impact on this city if we don’t. Transit is the most obvious example but affordability, sustainability and our continued, cowardly refusal to insist on new ways to police and keep everyone in this increasingly diverse city safe are as equally important.

John Tory is not to blame for the current state of affairs. He is doing exactly what 40% of voters in Toronto in 2014 wanted him to do. Pretty much business as usual but without the crack and booze filled melodrama. What Torontonians need to accept, and accept quickly, is that business as usual is no longer good enough.

— hopefully submitted by Cityslikr

SDS

Posted on December 17, 2015 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

The holiday season is now fully upon us. With it, comes the spirit of giving. In a world seemingly gone mad, descended into a cesspool of despair, sadness and disorder, it is difficult, if not near impossible at times, to decide upon where to deliver your dedicated bounty of benevolent compassion.

This year, might I suggest, you bestow your gift of kindness close to home, here in Toronto, to a newly diagnosed local malady. SDS. Or, Subway Derangement Syndrome.

A relatively new ailment of the heart and mind, little is known about SDS, its causes, its pathogenic qualities. Initially, medical professionals thought it to be hypochondriacal in nature, affecting mainly the political class of this city. A mental affliction seeing personal and professional advancement entwined with the building of subways where none were necessary. This belief evolved into something of a persecution complex. Subways weren’t essential. Subways were ‘deserved’. Denying subways to those suffering from SDS was seen as tantamount to denying them civic citizenship.

Manifestations of SDS varied. For some it led to incessant chanting, like football hooligans, of a single word, the single word. Subways, Subways, Subways! (Chant along with us, won’t you?) The people want Subways! Others simply made up words or phrases like Surface Subways. Some even went so far as to see their political future in a sunflower.

Psychological projection is also a symptom of SDS. You see your glaring weaknesses in others, and accuse them of actions which you yourself have partaken in. Your self-serving motivations, say, become their self-serving motivations. Your ambitions are laudable. Theirs, dishonest and deceitful, driven only for personal gain.

Darkly and menacingly, SDS has lately been seen seeping into the professional ranks of the city. Those whose work would largely benefit from politically-motivated subways not being built are now exhibiting the same irrational behavioural outbursts as their similarly troubled political counterparts. Numbers are fuzzy to them. New, untested ways of managing reality are sought. Once outspoken, SDS induced professionals withdraw behind an impenetrable bureaucratic wall, never to be seen or heard from in any meaningful way again.

Unchecked, Subway Derangement Syndrome can grow in proportion to a point where an individual embraced in its destructive grip can become unrecognizable to their former self. Only SDS can explain such confusion, such mental to-and-froing in one individual over the course of barely a year!

At such an advanced stage of SDS, these particular victims also begin to display troubling signs of delusions of grandeur, wrapping themselves in flags of local pride and disenfranchisement. Modern day William Wallaces, if you will, defenders of their people, the disaffected, the subway-less. “They can take our lives but they will never take our subways! …. Which we don’t have in the first place … except for two or three stops … But we want more! We deserve more.”

Local Man Searches For Lost Dignity And Ethics

So far gone are such individuals that they no longer even bother to try making rational arguments in favour of their beloved subways. Ridership numbers are totally irrelevant to them. Chosen routes are neither here nor there. Just so long as there is a subway somewhere near them. A subway they can call their own. A subway to make them feel whole again.

Now, where would your generous donation to SDS go? Certainly not to the billions of dollars being asked to deliver that subway. That would be like giving candy to cavity-ravaged children in order to keep them quiet. As soon as it’s gone, they’ll demand more and more and more.

No. Your money and time would go to those prepared to make an intervention in an attempt to stop the downward spiral of budgets and reputations. Organizations holding firm to the fact that there are better options on the table, that an SDS subway would represent a step backward not forward. Individuals standing at the ready to unseat politicians undermined by a disease of their own making, who are no longer making a positive contribution to the public good.

While Subway Derangement Syndrome is an individual ailment, it has proven to be highly contagious, resistant to reason and what was once called common sense before the term became corrupted by misuse. We can no longer idly wish it away, hope it burns out in its own virulent malignancy. Only you, we together, can defeat this threat to our future well-being. By giving generously this holiday season to others, you will be giving yourself a gift. The gift of transit sanity.

— pledgingly submitted by Cityslikr