Tag Archives: Adam Giambrone

This Is Your Song, Mike Del Grande

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It’s a little bit funny this feeling inside/I’m not one of those who can easily hide…

… my feelings toward the city’s budget chief, Councillor Mike Del Grande.

And yeah, warm and fuzzy they usually ain’t. I have gone on at some length previously about my general disdain of the man. But this is not going to be a similarly themed diatribe.*

In fact, I have come not to bury the councillor but to praise him. Yes, that’s right. Praise him.

In the game of baseball, players may disagree with a particular umpire on his strike zone but if he’s consistent with it, well, pitchers and hitters both will settle in and deal with it. Yes, Oscar Wilde said, ‘Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.’ Sure, Ralph Waldo Emerson believed ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.’ And I believe it was Aldous Huxley who claimed that ‘Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.’

But I’m actually serious here in commending the budget chief for his consistency in adhering to the notion that if the city is actually facing a fiscal tsunami and money is exceedingly tight, then everyone has to buckle down and tighten their belts. And. I. Said. Everyone. Widows. Orphans. Bridge designers. Everyone.

And the police. Or at least when it comes to paid duty for Toronto’s finest. Now, I don’t know where the councillor came down on the latest contract agreement with the TPS. We know he didn’t send anyone around to try and derail it. But at yesterday’s budget committee meeting, he appeared quite vocal in expressing his view that the cushions on the police couch must be checked under to find all the loose change. Like every other couch at City Hall except for the one that used to be in Adam Giambrone’s office.

“When we talk about the police, everybody’s kind of timid to talk about it,” Del Grande said. “But you know what, right is right and wrong is wrong.”

Ignoring the simplistic, black and white, patently untrue second sentence, stop and marvel at the one preceding it. It’s not a sentiment that tumbled from the mouth of some left wing, pinko kook still smarting from their mistreatment at the hands of the police at last summer’s G20 debacle. This is Mayor Rob Ford’s budget chief telling us what everybody knows but is afraid to talk about.

Certainly the mayor’s mouthpiece, councillor-brother Doug didn’t want to hear it. “It just seems like we’re pounding away on the police here when there’s so many other inefficiencies in the city,” councillor Ford pronounced. Adding, “Keep in mind [paid-duty costs represent] one-half of 1 per cent of the construction projects that we have to pay for.”

I says, what?! This coming from a guy who has spent his 6 months or so in office railing about paltry office budgets, staff chocolates, excessive retirement parties? (Or was that mayor? I keep getting those two mixed up.) Now he wants to talk small potatoes percentages?

That is what I’d call inconsistency. Brushing off the budget committee’s concerns about certain aspects of police pay with an ‘it’s only a fraction of the cost’ shrug while having derided that same rationalization when it came to almost every other city department. Inconsistency bordering on hypocrisy.

At least with Councillor Del Grande, you know he wants to slash anything and everything down to balanced budgetary size. I may not agree with that approach or sentiment but at least it’s a stationery target. The budget chief (appropriately named Mike – see 1970s Life cereal ad) dislikes everyone and wishes they’d all stop asking him for money. It is what it is and you can engage it head-on for whatever merits (next to none) and weaknesses (many) it possesses.

His boss and boss’s brother are far more capricious, far less willing to spread the pain of austerity around equally. Their respect is really only for some of the taxpayers. They play favourites. As we wrote just recently, the Fords are not fiscal conservatives. They’re fiscal ideologues. Happy to spend money, they’re just particular about where and whom they spend it on.

It’s hard to see how such a focused but cavalier attitude will continue to sit well with the actual conservatives like Councillor Del Grande that make up Team Ford. While the lot of them seem very willing to lay waste to services in the name of restraint, many seem less inclined to spare some the rod of discipline, even the usually untouchable Toronto Police Services. With such a determined and inflexible personalities in the mix, it’ll be fun to watch who blinks first.

*(Normally I sound much like this.)

— grudgingly submitted by Cityslikr

Deputations And Disregard

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Let it be a given that annual public consultations on City Hall’s proposed budget are, always have been and always will be an exercise in, if not futility, let’s call it pretense. The people talk. City councillors (at least, those with a hand in crafting the budget) pretend to listen. A show trial of democracy without all the messiness of executions afterward.

So I hesitate to suggest that the consultations currently underway for budget 2011 are any more of a façade than previous ones but some councillors and the mayor seem to be jettisoning even the pretense of pretending. After hearing overwhelmingly from deputants telling him that they’d prefer no service cuts to tax cuts, Mayor Ford claimed that, “Obviously people want a zero-percent tax increase. I’ve heard it from all over.” Someone get the mayor a Q-Tip. Clearly he has some waxy build-up.

And after a particularly fractious and protracted process in East York, Budget Chief Mike Del Grande reportedly quipped that he “heard lots of numbers but at end of the day, I’m not sure it’s reflective.” Not reflective of what, Councillor Del Grande? The opinion of a vast majority of people who took the time to come out and have their voices heard? Or just not reflective of the opinions of those you agree with?

But, to be fair to the Budget Chief, he had endured what sounded like a grueling quarter of a day or so, defending the proposed budget out in East York. Me? I chose to attend the meeting up in North York as it was much easier to get to from downtown. I’m all about getting involved in the democratic process as long as it doesn’t put me out too much.

The proceedings in the council chambers at the North York Civic Centre were more placid than those, it appears, in East York. One might even call them somnolent. Presided over by a congenial even folksy Councillor Ford, deputants came and went, almost exclusively decrying the budget’s proposed cuts to both services and taxes without raising much of a stir from the other members of the budget committee. Councillors Milczyn, Parker, Shiner, Di Giorgio and Deputy Mayor Holyday rarely interacted with anyone other than themselves, asking few questions of the deputants or providing little to no feedback. Only when those stepping forward to speak heaped praise upon the proposed budget (I counted 4 of the 40 or so deputations doing so) did any of these councillors snap to attention or show even a lick of interest.

In fact, the four hours of deputations could’ve been completed in half the time if it hadn’t been for Councillor Shelley Carroll and, to a lesser extent, Anthony Perruzza. They, along with Councillor Ford, appeared to be the only ones from the council perspective who came to actually listen and react to deputations. Carroll did much more than that. Ask questions, tweet pictures, head up into the crowd to assist deputants who were having trouble figuring out the process. It was the Shelley Show, and when she finished up in North York, she made her way over to the East York location to pitch in there.

To be honest, these deputations are in many ways as much about Carroll’s time as budget chief as they are about the 2011 budget. While the proposed document sets out Mayor Ford’s plan for Toronto, it is also a complete repudiation of the previous administration. Tax and spend. A spending problem not a revenue problem. (Dis)respect For The Taxpayers. That which made The Gravy Train run. All of it (or at least the last 4 years) under Carroll’s fiscal watch.

She is the remaining face of the Miller administration’s power group. The mayor retired voluntarily. His Deputy Mayor Joe Pantalone, Speaker Sandra Bussin, protégé Adam Giambrone, likewise all gone, less voluntarily. Carroll is the last one standing. She is doing so boldly and unwaveringly.

Carroll was at her best last night when she tangled with the few speakers who heaped praise on the budget for its attacks on spending and taxes but offered little in the way of helpful suggestions about which fat to trim. This includes the Board of Trade’s Carol Wilding who categorically refused to go on the record to say which services she would recommend cutting in order for the city to achieve a budgetary balance. Distancing herself from the dirty business of fiscal belt-tightening, all she would say when asked about cuts was that it was all in the presentation she’d handed out to the councillors.

It was especially invigorating to witness Councillor Carroll verbally pick up the representative from the Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses by the scruff of the neck and point that, for all his squawking about tax relief for businesses, he had failed to inform his membership and the public at large about the special program the Miller administration had established to help smaller businesses offset property tax increases. Much blubbering and backtracking ensued from Mr. CFIB and no attempted assistance from Councillor Di Giorgio could rescue him. At least, I think it was assistance Di Giorgio was offering. It was never clear exactly what he was up to on the rare occasions he opened his mouth.

Councillor Carroll is emerging as the voice of sanity at City Hall in the face of the Ford juggernaut. She has been relentless in not only defending the spirit of the Miller administration but in insisting on reasonable debate and discussion, conducted in the proper manner using established protocol. She is standing firm in front of the bulldozer Ford and his boys want to take to our municipal government.

She is being assisted certainly by the likes of Councillors Vaughan, Perks, Davis and McConnell. The difference is, the mayor’s supporters will all dismiss these as downtown, pinko, left wing, elitist kooks. That’s a smear they can’t use on Carroll. Despite her high rank in the Miller administration, she has serious big L liberal pedigree (which we don’t hold against her) and represents a suburban ward, deep up in Ford Country. She should be one of them. She’s not. This makes her a formidable foe of the mayor which we should remember and hold onto when things begin to look bleak.

And there will be times over the course of the next 4 years when things will look bleak.

— fan boyishly submitted by Cityslikr

Vision Quest V

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So far on our Vision Quest we’re batting .500, with a couple candidates we profiled dropping out of the mayoral race after our write-up on them. Last week was Rocco Rossi. With the chatter swirling around election circles in the last few hours, let’s see if the trend continues.

Up today: Joe Pantalone!

Frankly, even factoring in the Rob Ford phenomenon, we here at All Fired Up in the Big Smoke find the Deputy Mayor’s campaign to have been both the most confounding and aggravating. Confounding, because as the only highly recognizable progressive voice in the race, he should be enjoying a wide swath of support from what we thought was a deep well of left of centre leaning in this city. Aggravating, because his campaign took so long to start pushing back against the prevailing nonsense of a city on the road to ruin that had taken hold of the campaign imagination.

Some of this, obviously, was beyond Mr. Pantalone’s control. With anti-incumbency in the air even before the race started, he represented the face of an administration the howlers howled about. Worse still, it felt like he wasn’t the best face put forward. A 2nd, 3rd or even 4th choice meekly offered up after the Adam Giambrone flame-out and a couple other ‘names’ declined to toss their hats into the ring. If this was all the last 7 years was going to give us, well, it’s little wonder those on the left developed a bit of a wandering eye. Joe Pantalone felt unsatisfactorily compensatory. A definite sense lingered that if David Miller had one more election in him to defend his legacy, we would’ve rallied mightily to the cause. But since Mayor Miller wasn’t up for the fight, his supporters felt a little gun shy too.

More disheartening still, Mr. Pantalone is not the strongest of campaigners. There’s an uneasiness you detect when he’s doing the dirty work of politicking in big crowds or even up on stage during debates. Pantalone has shown flashes of spirit and intellectual acumen at points in debates but mostly it’s been awkward mouthing and re-mouthing of talking points and moldy gardening analogies that simply haven’t ignited the fire under an unsettled electorate.

The ironic and sad fact of the matter is that the exact same could be said about Councillor Rob Ford. He’s sweatily awkward out there glad-handing in crowds. His participation in debates consists of talking points and talking points only. Yet, he’s managed to flame the zeitgeist of angry sentiment into a poll position in the race until recently. Perhaps it all comes down to what Councillor Adam Vaughan said in pulling the plug on his support of Mr. Pantalone earlier today, “…you have to fight the election you’re dealt, not the one you want.” Arguably, Joe Pantalone got a mitt full of dud cards.

Vaughan’s move to help shore up support for George Smitherman in the race against Ford is the latest defection of left-leaning names that leaves the Deputy Mayor dangling, essentially. There are calls for him to pull out of the race to help ensure a Smitherman victory. (Or more pointedly, ensure a Ford loss.) So inconsequential has Pantalone become in the race that when he released his economic plan earlier this week, it received scant notice. Who cares? It’s not like he’s going to be mayor anyway.

And yet, here we are, demanding fidelity to a two man race between candidates whose plans and platforms have been examined, re-examined, and examined again, only to be found severely wanting in almost every case. Two candidates who have pushed the premise of a city on the brink of ruin while the facts suggest otherwise. Two candidates pledging to bring in tough, neo-conservative policies that are suspect and very likely unnecessary if not harmful to the well being of this city.

Two candidates who, theoretically, should be splitting the right wing vote and allowing a progressive like Joe Pantalone to sail on through up the middle. Somehow that just isn’t happening. The progressive base just has not bought into Councillor Pantalone as its standard bearer. There is, it seems, what they are calling down south in the U.S. of A., an  “Enthusiasm Gap”.

Yes, Joe Pantalone and his team must accept some blame for that. Things just did not click when they needed clicking. But the wind was never, ever, at Pantalone’s back. Enough voters simply did not want to hear what Joe had to say, no matter how much truth there was to it (and there was much more truth emanating from the Pantalone campaign then there was from any of the other front runners), no matter how many outside, unbiased voices assured us that Toronto was faring alright, given what was going on in the wider world around us.

That was a tough, pretty well impossible, sell to the voters of Toronto in 2010. The salesmen of defeat and retreat have been louder, more forceful and ultimately, it seems, more persuasive. If there was a time when more reasonable voices should’ve been heard above the din, clearly this wasn’t it. This wasn’t Joe Pantalone’s time. A sad end to a 30 year municipal career which deserved better.

— sadly submitted by Cityslikr