All Fried Up In The Big Smoke

Less political. More fictional.

Connecting The Dots Thoughts

Posted on March 1, 2015 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

Since last October’s municipal election, I’ve been telling anybody willing to listen that, in a way, 2014 was more disappointing than 2010. Yeah, yeah. Rob Ford as mayor, yaddie, yaddie. No more crack scandals. No more drunken stupors. With Rob Ford out of the mayor’s office, everything can return back to normal.

Ah yes. Return back to normal. Regression to the mean.

As I’ve pointed out previously, 36 of 37 councillor incumbents were re-elected. Of the victorious rookies, all were white, and 6 of the 7 were male. Return back to normal, indeed, if it were the 1970s. Business as usual.

The especially frustrating aspect of this is that there were fantastic challengers running for office last year, all over the city. At least 10 off the top of my head but closer to 15 if I did an actual headcount. None of them won their races, few even came close.

Change was heralded with the election of a new mayor. 2014, however, represented anything but change. Toronto swapped up captains of a ship of state which remains charted on the same course it’s been for 4 years now. Full steam ahead!

The reasons for that outcome were multifold. (If only there were simple solutions to these kinds of complicated matters, eh?) I tend to lean on the idea that last October was a referendum on the mayoralty. The Rob Ford reign had sucked all the oxygen from local politics. Voters turned out to cast judgement on the Ford administration, yea or nay. Council and school board trustee races were secondary. Even more secondary than usual.

That’s just a fact of municipal political campaigns. Mayoral races oftentimes shape voters opinions on their perspective city council candidates who, not irregularly, get asked on the doorsteps if they support candidate X for mayor. Even though a mayor is ultimately just one vote of 45 (with a handful of extra executive powers), there’s this perception that the position is imbued with almost mystical, presidential powers.

This reduction of the role and powers of city councillors to a secondary or supporting position at City Hall by much of the voting public can have a pernicious effect on how some of these councillors go about their business. lordmayor Under the radar, out of much public view. Going about their business as usual.

Even if there’s nothing nefarious to that mode of operation in individual cases, it helps contribute to this notion of ‘low information voters’. You know, a solid majority of the general public who lead busy lives and have neither the time nor inclination to keep tabs on what exactly it is their respective city councillor is doing. In the scheme of things, they’re not that important. Just keep the potholes filled and taxes low, am I right?

That this is nowhere near the reality of the dynamics in local politics is ultimately harmful to the governance at City Hall.

Which is why Dave Meslin’s post on Friday is so fucking essential and exciting.

Connecting the dots: Exposing the influence of lobbyists at City Hall.

I’m not even going to try and summarise it here. Meslin does a magnificent job doing that himself and, quite frankly, there may not be a more important post-election article yet written as this one. Take the time and read it.

The movement for Open Data has been very successful at getting raw information available. And the creation of the Lobbyist Registry and the banning of corporate election contributions were important steps. But it’s time to connect the dots, and put all of this data to work!

This is about bringing all the data on the governance operations at City Hall that is already publicly available under one, easy to follow, umbrella. See who lobbies your councillor on what issues, who donates to their election campaign. See how your councillor votes on a particular issue and does it reflect the interests of their residents or those of the people lobbying and donating to them? All with the click or two of your computer’s mouse.

(Hmmm. I guess I did just summarise my take on the article. Read it anyway!)

As you can tell by the title, Mez’s gist is about curbing lobbying influence on our local politics. A valuable and vital goal, for sure, but I’m equally as excited about the other possibilities he hints at in the post. Not only would this collection of data together in one easy and interactive online location serve a useful tool for busy reporters and other media types as they file their City Hall stories, but an equally harried and busy public could take just a few moments to see what brought their city councillor to vote a particular way on an issue of particular interest to the constituent.

Equally as exciting for me is the opportunity this creates for candidates running against incumbents. Imagine having easy access to the speeches a city councillor made during the debate on a certain issue, almost effortlessly linked to any lobbyist contact the councillor had on that issue, the campaign donations the councillor received from interested parties on that issue. Lifted onto a candidate’s website or sent out in email blasts to voters. Low cost and not onerously labour intensive, fledging and cash-short candidacies can tap into a handy, dandy campaign tool while leaving themselves more time to tend to other critical matters like canvassing and fundraising.

To be sure, this use of open data will not, cannot replace the other key aspects to a successful political run. Too often, open data, social media, the internetz in general are seen as a panacea to the drudgery of traditional campaigning. Did I mention canvassing and fundraising? It isn’t. But as a complimentary instrument in what will always be an uphill battle in unseating municipal incumbents, this could be, dare I say it, revolutionary. By shining more light into the backrooms and lessening the shadows in which some city councillors function, voters can be given easy access to more thoroughly assess not only the job their city councillor is doing on their behalf but also just how important that job is to the daily lives of the city’s residents.

With information comes knowledge and from knowledge comes power. Historically, incumbents at City Hall have held that power to maintain what seems like, in some cases, a death grip on office. If we learn how to better connect the dots, as Dave Meslin is thinking, we just might be able to tilt the dynamic a little more in the voting public’s favour.

— over-the-moonly submitted by Cityslikr

Already Tired Of Tory’s Timid Toryness

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

Two articles written last week underlined the fundamental problem facing this city right now. Simply put, we have a crisis of leadership. It manifests itself in all that isn’t working, people freezing to death in the streets, crumbling infrastructure, substandard public transit. These failures, though, can all be traced back to a consistent failure at the top.

After the spectacular implosion of the radical Rob Ford experiment of misgovernance, Toronto desperately looked around for an upgrade in competence in the mayor’s office. John Tory, we were told, was just the ticket. Competent – no, prudent! – yet bold. He was a successful businessman, top gun at a huge corporation, shortform for possessing a supreme fitness to lead the city from the crack-dazed darkness of the last 4 years.

Career politicians got us into this mess. Only stood to reason that a giant from the private sector was needed to clean it up. Because, that’s how the world works.

Post-election, a flurry of activity signified that business was being tended to, being taken care of. Cars were towed. Bus service increased. Mayor Tory got to work early, got down to busy-ness. Hey. Did you hear? The mayor’s having another press conference.

That’s how you run a city, yo.

Correction:

That’s how you look like you run a city.

In comparison to his predecessor, John Tory just had to show up without soup stains on his tie and having not obviously wet himself to immediately earn the mantle of competency. The bar was that low. Policy ideas were secondary to appearances.

Even beauty pageants, however, consist of more than just the swimsuit competition. Stuff needs getting done. Decisions have to be made, some significant. Like say, budgeting.

As David Hains wrote in the Torontoist Saturday:

There are no good choices in the budget, and it is time to wake up to why that is the case and what that means. There is a much bigger discussion to have here: Toronto needs to talk about the fact that there is a structural deficit, and that it is also willing to acknowledge that things cost money, particularly the cost of making responsible decisions. If we fail that, we will see Toronto go from budget crisis to budget crisis, pulling out its hair until it wonders how it became bald.

Like every other previous mayor of the city, John Tory has numbers to deal with, big numbers. He has to decide what to fund, what to build, what to repair, what programs and services to maintain, expand or cut. Like every other previous mayor of the city, John Tory will be constrained by the fact there’s only so much money to go around, that on the annual operating side of things, he has to balance the books. Like every other previous mayor of the city, John Tory must make some tough choices.

Turns out, Mayor Tory isn’t like every other previous mayor of the city. He’s going to spare himself the trouble of making tough choices. He’s going to pretend like there’s another way of going about business at City Hall. His choices “represent…a methodical, responsible approach to budgeting.” Carve out some cash from capital expenditures to plug the hole on the operating side. Hike user fees to help pay for some of the increases in services. Keep property taxes ‘at or below the rate of inflation’. Nix talk of any new revenues. Demand 2% in efficiencies from city departments.

Done and done.

Responsible. Methodical. Prudent. Competent.

Except, it is none of those things. In a word, as Mr. Hains suggests in his article, ‘wrong’.

Mayor Tory is ducking a systemic fiscal problem in the hopes of some magical appearance of money from the other two levels of government sometime down the road. sweepundertherug Money both Queen’s Park and Ottawa should be handing over in the areas of transit and affordable housing at the very least but money they’ve shown little inclination in handing over for years, decades now. Money the mayor should definitely be pushing for but money he should definitely not be counting on.

It’s like planning your life around the expectation of a relative dying and leaving you some money sometime down the road.

Not what you’d classically consider responsible, methodical, prudent or competent.

And then there’s the mayor’s bold transit plan, SmartTrack.

As John Lorinc pointed out in his Spacing article last week, we’re not even close to knowing what the price tag of that thing’s going to be or what portion the city’s going to have to come up with. Tory’s campaign-driven funding scheme, TIF, is another complete mystery, untested as it is on such a scale. Never mind how much the proposed eastern section of it while overlap with the Scarborough subway extension that he has tried to keep clear of. (Let’s not re-open that debate no matter how dumb and financially onerous it may turn out to be.)

Whatever its merits may be, aside from threatening to blow the city through its debt ceiling limit and, with that, future construction and repairs of, well, pretty much everything else, SmartTrack also looks as if it could further delay much needed transit building in Toronto. What if, in a year’s time when staff reports come back and questions arise about the viability of both SmartTrack and the Scarborough subway, “a kind of supercollider for Toronto’s latest transit ambitions,” Lorinc writes? Imagine that pitched battle at city council.

Subways, subways, subways versus SmartTrack, SmartTrack, SmartTrack!

And the shovels remain firmly unplanted in the ground.

After 4 years of paralytic, farcical uncertainty on the transit file, Mayor Tory has simply upped the ante instead of bringing clarity or even a semblance of sanity to it. In campaigning for the job, he refused to risk any loss of support by coming out against the Scarborough subway while offering up another fanciful transit plan that may well ensure the subway turns out to be nothing more than a costly white elephant. That’s political calculation not leadership.

It isn’t responsible, methodical, competent or prudent either.

In barely under three months, John Tory has fully revealed himself to be nothing more than just another small-time, parochial politician who is using this fiscal crisis (yes, it is a crisis) to diminish the city’s ability to deal with it rather than strengthen its hand. Why? Either he’s a committed small government ideologue or he possesses a steadfast aversion to making hard choices. Probably a healthy dose of both.

Whatever the reason, we need to stop expecting him to be anything other than an obstacle going forward, another failed experiment in the mayor’s office.

— hands wipingly submitted by Cityslikr

Subway Ground Down

Posted on January 28, 2015 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

I really don’t want to be writing this. Like the Toronto Star’s Ed Keenan, I’m tired of it, of the Scarborough subway debate. Just as likely, you’re sick of it too. There’s gathered a great storm of ennui, a wave of yawn. Just Get On With It has now become the default position. Build Something!

But…but…There’s always the but.

In Keenan’s article today he points to a recent Forum Research poll that shows, given the full options of what Scarborough would get if we spent $3+ billion on transit there, 61% of Torontonians would pick the Scarborough LRT extension of the Bloor-Danforth subway line. A healthy majority of those living in Scarborough too favoured the LRT option given to them.

Just yesterday, as I was railing about the $75-85 million the city is in the midst of handing over to the province via Metrolinx for the work already underway on the Scarborough LRT that council cancelled, I cited a Leger poll from back in February 2014 that showed similar numbers. 61% of respondents preferred the Scarborough LRT option over the subway. 56% of those living in Scarborough leaned that way also.

So why the fuck are we here, spending billions of dollars building something the majority of Torontonians don’t want?

Public enemy number 1, of course, is Rob Ford. Subways, subways, subways, am I right? The people want subways.

Not to diminish his role in the mess but let me say this. At the very least, Rob Ford and to a lesser extent, his brother Doug, truly believed that subways were the way to go. As committed car drivers, public transit was something of a puzzle to them. They hated streetcars that blocked up the middle of the roads. Buses they tolerated because they were easier to get around. But underground transit? Out of sight, out mind, out of the way.

Because the folks voted for him, giving him a mandate, they too wanted subways. Subways, subways, subways! Like the classic bullshitter that he is, Rob Ford (and again, to a lesser extent his brother) actually believed the bullshit he spouted. He didn’t need no stinkin’ polls to tell him what he knew in his heart, heard every day from the folks he met in line at Tim Horton’s.

This is not to excuse him. He served as the bullhorn for the subway cause. The self-appointed guardian of the taxpayers’ nickels and dimes stubbornly contributed to throwing away of billions of dollars of their money to further a cause he willfully knew nothing about.

The larger question though is, how, with these numbers, 4+ years after the debate started, 4+ years after the People Want Subways campaign slogan metastasized into a corrupted conventional wisdom, we’re determined to plunge ahead into this madness? The villainous list is long. Rob Ford becomes little more than the inciting incident in this story, a preening, comic foil Malvolio.

The true monsters in this sorry-assed tale sit up at Queen’s Park. First in the form of the skittish Dalton McGuinty Liberal government, seemingly dead in the polls and facing an election in 2011. In the face of the first (and only true surge) of Ford Nation, they quickly buckled when the newly elected mayor unilaterally declared Transit City dead. Hey. If you say so. Whatever. They would survive the initial assault, holding on to power but reduced to a minority government.

But imagine if instead they had stood their ground, stood up in the face of what was little more than a noise-making machine. Was subway support really ever as strong as the mayor and other Scarborough politicians came to claim it was? Certainly Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker didn’t think so in 2012 when city council wrestled the transit file from the mayor and re-instated Transit City.

At this point of time, it seemed cooler heads had prevailed. Subways, subways, subways had been revealed to be little more than the dying bluster of a mayor who’d soon be sidelined to little more than a cranky observer. Pheee-ew, right? We narrowly dodged that bullet.

But then…

What the hell happened?

Well, here’s where the story gets nothing short of clusterfuckery.

New leader of the provincial Liberals, new premier, new beginning, we’re told. They start to get their sea legs, win a by-election or two including one in Scarborough-Guildwood with Mitzie “The Subway Champion” Hunter. A by-election where, curiously, her NDP opponent, former TTC chair Adam Giambrone, an early Transit City advocate, docilely nods in a similar subway support direction.

Suddenly everybody loves subways! Egged on by Scarborough MPPs, city council lurches once more, agreeing to scrap the Scarborough LRT in favour of a subway. A subway the city will now have to contribute to building and maintaining. Scarborough deserves nothing less than a subway, we are told.

Except, still, with the options laid out for them, residents would opt for the LRT.

Despite that, here we are. The Liberals are back as a majority government. They now have both the city and federal government pitching in to build a Scarborough subway. They have a new mayor who, despite his claim to prudent fiscal management, campaigned on a pledge not to reopen the subway debate and is perfectly content to just piss away 10s of millions of dollars in order for that not to happen. In addition to which, his signature transit plan, SmartTrack, is offering even more city money to help the provincial government build their regional transit system.

And all the Scarborough pro-subway city councillors who ran for re-election last year are back. (Interestingly, so is the one very vocal pro-LRT Scarborough councillor, Paul Ainslie, easily re-elected.) The debate is over. The people have spoken. They want subways.

Except, apparently, they don’t. Or more precisely, if given an option, they’d take LRTs. It’s the politicians who want subways.

If there’s a more salient example of why we’ve become so cynical and disengaged, I can’t immediately think of one. It’s little wonder we’re bored of this debate. Our elected representatives aren’t listening to us. What’s the use of continued talking?

— repeatedly submitted by Cityslikr