Category Archives: Law

Time For A Little Game Of Chicken

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Despite the divisive and highly acrimonious environment that has settled over council chambers at City Hall these days, through all the sniping and partisan hackery, there is one item that could easily muster the support of more than a 2/3s majority of councillors. This city is being severely short-changed financially by the two levels of senior government, and have been for going on 20 years now. It is not a situation unique to Toronto or other municipalities in this province. It’s happening nationally. Listen to Calgary’s mayor, Naheed Nenshi. It’s taking place in the United States. Witness Chicago’s budget battles.

The difference of opinion, however, arises over what exactly to do about it.

While many of the right leaning councillors acknowledge the problem, their solution seems to consist of shrugging their shoulders and saying, what are you gonna do. We’ve tried and tried with very little to show for it. Let’s move on. It doesn’t hurt that the lack of proper funding plays into their desire to shrink local government down to size. Any case they might make for a more sound fiscal arrangement between the city, the province and the federal government is undercut by the mayor’s refusal to stop claiming that we don’t have a revenue problem.

Still, they do have a point. Previous administrations have endeavoured to secure not only more money from Queen’s Park and Ottawa (in most cases, money they once provided) but also to establish a stable funding formula in order to move past the almost ad hoc, yearly struggles to balance our books. All to only limited success.

Moderate councillors suggest we keep on keeping on, nagging away at our deadbeat provincial and federal politician to do the right thing and start ponying up the cash they owe us. On Tuesday, Councillor Pam McConnell successfully put through a motion for the City Solicitor “…to report to the Executive Committee on the legal implications of the allocation, funding and downloading of Provincial responsibilities to municipalities including a comparison of how municipalities in other provinces have responded to provincial downloading pursuant to the British North America Act and the Constitution Act, 1982.” The BNA Act? Chortles were heard from the council floor. Or maybe that wasn’t chortling. Maybe it was the sound of straw clutching.

But why not seek legal counsel on this issue? We are, after all, legally bound as nothing more than ‘creatures of the province’. Doesn’t that entail a degree of responsibility on the province’s part to keep us properly fed and housed? Aren’t even the lowliest of creatures entitled to move about freely, outside the cage of inadequate transit? (Yeah, I went there.)

Yes, yes, yes. Of course, go about your quixotic tilt. Councillor MacConnell’s motion passed 39-6, with only the mayor and some of his hardest core supporters voting against as well as.. what? Councillor Josh Matlow? What up with that, Councillor?

(Nope.. nope.. Do not get distracted by the curious case of Councillor Josh Matlow’s centrism. That’s… another post entirely.)

In any case, that’s more long term thinking. What about the here and now? Dire warnings rang out over the course of the meeting’s two days that if we could not get our fiscal house in order, if we could not come to some sort of agreement between service cuts and tax hikes, if we could not balance our budget as we were legally mandated to do, as we have every year previously, well, provincial caretakers would swoop down from their perch at Queen’s Park and do it for us. Oh, the shame! Oh, the horror!

You know what? Sometimes I think we should just dare the province to do it. One budget year, we just simply acknowledge that we have not been given the proper tools to do the job adequately and that instead of inflicting damage upon the city and the people living within it, we choose instead not to balance our books. Like the other two levels of government do, we run an operating deficit.

And if the province has a problem with that, hey, come on down, folks. You try it. You get your hands dirty, slashing and burning. You take the heat from citizens outraged at tax hikes. Yeah. Not so easy, is it?

Maybe the time for playing nice has come and gone. Maybe it’s time to up the ante a little. To, I don’t know, start withholding any money we normally pass along in the form of HST payments. The feds owe us some back taxes? Queen’s Park has some outstanding fines? We’ll just take that off the cheque we’re cutting for you, shall we?

Now, as with any belligerence married to a woeful lack of understanding about the implications, ramifications or even possibility of such gestures, my suggestion comes with a Wikipedia-like citation needed. All I’m saying is that we start exploring different approaches to the dysfunctional manner of our relationship to the other levels of government. Playing nice, rolling over and hoping for a rub of the tummy and the occasional bone thrown our way is not proving to be the healthiest of methods. Been there. Done that. And the fucking t-shirt is about 3 sizes too small.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. A more aggressive approach may be in order. By any means necessary. It’s time we thought of ways to beat our federal and provincial representatives out from the bushes where they’ve been hiding, avoiding their responsibility. We need them to come to the table and negotiate not from a position of power but as equal partners. Asking politely hasn’t worked to date. We need to start demanding. To do that, we just might have to upset an applecart or two.

— feistily submitted by Cityslikr

Responding To Our Responders

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So we here at All Fired Up in the Big Smoke received, if not a deluge of comments to our post from a couple days ago, A Plea to Conservatives Everywhere, let’s call it a handful. A good percentage of which were from almost exclusively well-behaved self-described conservatives taking exception to much of what we’d written. It would’ve been time-consumingly impossible to respond to each one individually. Instead, we’re lumping them together into a single response post which, undoubtedly, will look as if we’re misrepresenting what everyone wrote and deceptively framing the terms of debate in order to make ourselves seem much smarter than we actually are.

Alas, the burden of ultimate editorial control.

There seemed to be four currents of argument running through the anti-comments that came in. When we asked to be shown “…how further corporate tax cuts will kick start our economy,” we got a lesson in the theory of corporate taxes. Yes, we understand the concept. We just weren’t sure where the proof was that cutting them further at this particular time was going to help. Unless you’re one of those anti-Keynesian absolutists, reducing spending along with taxes in such an anemic state of recovery doesn’t make a whole lot of economic sense.

Besides, we’ve been hacking away at corporate tax rates both federally and provincially for a few years now, haven’t we? When should we expect to see positive results? And if corporate tax cuts are such an effective weapon in stimulating the economy, why not lobby for their complete removal? Eliminate them entirely. If 13% is going to help, why not 0? Point to a jurisdiction with significantly lower corporate tax rates than ours are currently and say, see? They work. And if I can’t find one, like say Mexico, that counters your argument, I’ll lay down my sword.

A number of commenters suggested the burden was on me (or the entire Left) to prove that de-regulation and less oversight was the source of the global financial meltdown. I thought they already had. Google Nobel Prize winning Paul Krugman and see what he’s been saying over the last couple years. Or Jeffrey Sachs if he’s more to your economic taste. Check out Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone for the naked criminality at the very heart of the meltdown. Read Michael Lewis’s The Big Short or Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big To Fail. Watch Charles Ferguson’s documentary, Inside Job. The case has been made quite definitively. You dispute it? You refute it.

And on a couple little side notes. One commenter asked if we wanted to return to the days of the Glass-Steagall Act “…which limited credit growth and therefore slowed down economic growth…” Errr, am I wrong in remembering that the full repeal of Glass-Steagall occurred in 1999, at the height of one of the biggest economic expansions in history? So how exactly did it slow down economic growth? The commenter then went on to point out that no Canadian banks failed due to smart regulations — which, while in opposition, the current Conservative government fought against — and kind of proves my point for me, doesn’t it? We missed the brunt of the financial shitstorm because of government regulation and oversight not because a lack of it. Or am I missing something?

“Prove this whole trickle-down theory to me,” I taunted. “How rising tides raise all boats.” That brought forth a litany of indignation, mostly in two forms. One, things were much better now than they were 100 years ago, owing to the miracle of free market capitalism. OK, sure. But my line of attack wasn’t necessarily directed at the idea of free market capitalism, only how it’s been conducted in the last 30 years or so. Cast your minds back, 50, 60 years ago, to the more immediate post-War era. Where governments taxed the richest of the rich more prodigiously and spent massively on things like infrastructure, established universal health care and sent men to the moon. An era when a single bread winner could buy a house, raise a family, put the kids through college and retire comfortably.

A picture, I’m sure, more idyllic than it actually was but one that is a pipe dream nowadays. Much of our prosperity is built on a mountain of debt. Two income households are the norm. Post-secondary education has grown into an onerous financial burden that is increasingly failing to deliver on its promise of leading to better lives.

Secondly, please, please, please stop bringing up China and India when attempting to defend modern day capitalism. Yes, millions of people are climbing their way out of poverty. And yes, China in particular has turned away from its Maoist past and heartily embraced aspects of the free market. But as another commenter pointed out, both countries remain planned economies, control highly centralized. If our governments here attempted to intrude into the economy the way the Chinese and Indian governments do, conservatives would howl in outrage before soiling themselves and passing out. Witness the reaction to the various stimulus packages.

Finally, conservative commenters took exception to our painting them all with the same brush. There were pro-environmental conservatives who believed in anthropogenic climate change. Conservatives who suspected the War on Drugs was a bust. Pro-choice conservatives. Non-Rob Ford voting conservatives.

Fair enough but that type of red Toryism or socially liberal conservatism is hardly in the ascendancy. Your movement has been hijacked by the radicals under your umbrella and they’ve seized Washington, Ottawa and city hall in Toronto. They’re attacking women’s rights. They’re declaring climate change hokum and maybe even beneficial. The federal Conservative government is trying to close down a safe injection site in Vancouver in the face of overwhelming evidence of its positive contribution. At the same time they’re attempting to roll back drug laws to a Draconian state in order to fill the prisons that they are building. These neocons hate government and everything it stands for.

They don’t believe much of anything you’re claiming to believe. In fact, your views sound much closer to my left wing bias. So why are you fighting me and not those who are doing great damage to your conservative brand and giving you all a bad name?

— respondingly submitted by Cityslikr

Toeing The Line

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It has been eye-opening over the course of the past week, just how much difficulty I’ve encountered attempting to write something, anything about the circumstances surrounding the death of Toronto Police Sargeant, Ryan Russell. What’s that nagging voice, tub-thumbing from the depths of my frontal cortex? No, no, no, no! Don’t say that! You can’t say that! Is that… could it be… self-censorship? Really?

Where I seem to possess precious little hesitancy in hammering away at our politicians, when it comes to the police, I have proven to be a veritable pussycat. A sign of respect? Maybe. Worse, fear? I would hope not, after all, we’re not living in Russia. This isn’t Russia. Is this Russia? This isn’t Russia. (A quiet shout-out to all you Caddyshack fans in the audience.)

Surely I don’t think that if I speak out in less than glowing terms about the police, their conduct, their budget demands, I will somehow be targeted. My name added to a list, my movements monitored, mysterious break-ins at the office. That’s ridiculous. I mean, look at former mayor John Sewell. A much more visible target, standing on a higher platform, making far more contentious comments. Yet, he continues to freely cycle around town, subject only to printed personal attacks (links h/t to Orwell’s Bastard) and not any unsolved hit-and-runs attempts. We don’t live in that kind of country.

No, my hesitancy in writing about police issues is much more internalized, bred into the bone with a steady diet of reverence and dutiful observance to the service performed by our men and women in blue. Selflessly putting their lives on the line each and every day, providing that Thin Blue Line between order and chaos. I’ve accepted the narrative and on most days even believe it. During the course of a lifetime, I’ve met a number of cops who, to a person, have been genuinely decent people.

I do not begrudge them their outpouring of grief for their fallen compatriot and the public spectacle that will be Sgt. Russell’s funeral tomorrow. A word will not be peeped about the traffic congestion created as police numbering in the thousands march down University Avenue in downtown Toronto. So it should be. (Here’s that self-censoring gnome, hammering away again.) Society must maintain a heightened shock at the death of a police officer in the line of duty. The graveness of such an act needs to be underscored. We cannot simply shrug off the murder of one who has sworn to protect citizens and uphold the laws of the land.

But… but… at the same time we seem to have become blithe in the face of the pain and suffering occurring amongst the weakest members of our society. No, Sgt. Russell’s accused killer, Richard Kachkar, did not die in the course of his arrest. He was just wounded. But over the last two decades, some 10 individuals suffering from mental illness have been killed at the hands of Toronto police.

While I’m certainly not blaming the police directly for such killings (or at least, my self-censoring self doesn’t), neither do I think we should simply shrug our shoulders and brush it off as just another crazy fuck snapping. It can hardly be a coincidence that over the course of those same last two decades, senior levels of government have cut deeply into mental health funding in their rush toward fiscal responsibility, opening wide the doors of psychiatric institutions and leaving the vulnerable to the vagaries of the streets, the kindness of strangers and the stretched-to-snapping resources of municipalities. We’ve delegated the police to be the last line of defense in our handling of those afflicted with mental illness, resulting in all too regular tragic turns of events like the death of Sgt. Russell.

It is not my intention to politicize all this but it can hardly be avoided, I guess. Witness Councillor Ford’s outburst at the budget committee meeting last week. However, it is worth noting and repeating that the Toronto Police Services budget, already comparable to what the city spends on all its social services, is not in line to be cut. Its requested increase decreased somewhat but not cut. In order to balance the city’s budget (while maintaining sacrosanct tax cuts and freezes), ‘inefficiencies’ and ‘re-allocations’ will have to be found elsewhere. With such a zero sum, dog-eat-dog scenario, it’s tough to believe that more confrontations between our police and already neglected sufferers of mental illness won’t be in the offing.

All this is not to say we shouldn’t mourn the death of Sgt. Ryan Russell. But perhaps afterwards, when all the solemn pageantry has finished, we can take a moment to consider those we’ve marginalized and left to their own devices. Initiate a discussion about this systemic neglect we’ve allowed to happen and whether there are more sensible and humane methods of dealing with those who’ve so sadly fallen through society’s cracks.

Nothing can be easier than celebrating and venerating our most powerful institutions especially when they suffer a loss. Our measure, though, should be taken by how we regard and tend to those left abandoned and neglected, with little voice to speak for their cause. Those who should be cared for not policed.

— reluctantly submitted by Cityslikr