Tag Archives: Christopher Hume

Days Of Sue-Ann Supreme

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In future days, will this be the face of the Toronto Sun?

DEVILITATOR

One might argue it already is but I’m referring specifically to the paper’s former editorial page editor, Rob Granatstein’s thoughts on the most recent cuts to Sun Media’s newspaper chain.

The cuts have crushed the local newsrooms. When the latest victims of downsizing are gone, Toronto will be down to three general assignment news reporters, according to people in that newsroom, unless staff is reassigned. That’s flat out ridiculous. The Sun will rely even more on its columnists to generate the news going forward. [Bolding ours.]

The Sun. Columnists. Generating news.

Information flowing forth, free of context, full of personal opinion. News from top down not bottom up.

This isn’t just about it being the Toronto Sun. Any newspaper working with a skeleton crew of reporters and teetering precariously with op-ed writers isn’t a newspaper. It’s, well, an organ of opinion, both informed and otherwise.

It would be just like… All Fired Up in the Big Smoke. Only with inkier fingers.

Frankly, I wouldn’t be able to do whatever it is I do without piggy backing on the work of Daniel Dale, David Rider, Robyn Doolittle, Kelly Grant, Elizabeth Church, Don Peat and a handful of other reporters who tirelessly dig up the dirt and parse information on Toronto politics on a seeming 24 hour, 7 day schedule. I’d hazard a guess neither could the bigger names a couple paragraphs up. The less reporting that gets done, the more, what would you call it?, PRing happens?

Picture Toronto, with the discourse only consisting of the views from the likes of Sue-Ann Levy, Joe Warmington, Royson James, Christopher Hume, Rosie DiManno, Chris Selley, Matt Gurney, Christie Blatchford, Marcus Gee, Margaret Wente?

“Columnists have found themselves out of jobs because they were too agreeable to those in power,” says Granatstein in this week’s Grid profile of Ms. Levy, “and it makes for weak reading. Wearing the Ford colours has hurt Sue-Ann…That means she struggles to get the other side of the story sometimes. People don’t feel she gives them a fair shake.”

While at the moment this may be a bigger bind for Sue-Ann because she’s in so deep with Team Ford, this can be a ditch all opinion writers must fight not to steer into. I’m sure the Star’s Christopher Hume has problems gaining access to the mayor and his staff. His colleague, Royson James, could hardly be considered an honest broker back in the day with the Miller administration. Remember his one-man, moralistic crusade to de-rail Adam Giambrone’s mayoral bid?

But that’s not really why we read columnists, is it? For impartiality or objectivity? We’re looking for opinions. Hopefully ones based on at least a semblance of reason and reality but we certainly don’t view their words as gospel or final on any given topic. Their purpose really is to either make our blood boil or confirm our biases.

Newspapers stressing op-eds over real reporting are nothing more than modern versions of olde thyme pamphleteering. And, if I do say so myself, that’s kind of our bailiwick, over here on the interwebs. We need newspapers to remain newspapers. Otherwise, we’ll all just be making shit up to push forward our agendas, unchecked and unsupported.

— opinionatedly submitted by Cityslikr

Childish Behaviour

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I could not disagree with Christopher Hume more if he were, well, Rob Ford.

He’s plea to the province to assume control of Toronto’s transit file is nothing short of madness, an adolescent whine. I want my mommy. Send lawyers, guns and money. Dad, get me out of this.

Long has been my stance, if not in these pages than in discussions I’ve had, that the main reason voters in cities including here seem comfortable casting their ballots at the municipal level for, how to say this delicately, clowns, clowns, jokers, the inept and certifiably deranged, is because they believe that it doesn’t really matter. There’s this blind faith that regardless of what happens, no matter what shit we manage to cover ourselves with, there’s a safety net to break our fall. The province would never let us burn our playhouse down.

We are the junior level of government, the farm team if you will, the bush leagues. Expectations are low, so why not have some fun with it? Politics as performance art. Since there are no consequences, we can afford to take a flyer or two, an appliance salesman here, a blustering buffoon there. It’s not like it’ll make any difference to our lives, right?

As we’re slowly beginning to realize, that’s not in the least bit true. In fact, it’s downright misguided from where we’re standing. Municipal politics matters. A lot. But to scream for a lifeline now, to call for the cavalry only reinforces the already hardened preconception that we’re not responsible enough to take care of ourselves. That when push comes to shove, we’re happy to hand over responsibility to the adults in the room and let them sort through the mess we’ve created.

And even that’s more than a little galling. In terms of public transit in Toronto, we are hardly the chief culprits in the bind we’re in currently. Plenty of blame to go around, with Queen’s Park topping the list. I mean, hey. If cities are nothing more than creatures of the province than the province has to bear some of the burden in how we’ve turned out, right?

Imagine if you will, the Mike Harris government (and yeah, I’m looking hard at you, Councillor John Parker) not filling in the hole that had already been dug in Eglinton Avenue back in 1996. This whole above/below ground LRT battle would be moot. We might even already have a Sheppard subway extension! Or what if the McGuinty government had long since made good on its promise to re-upload it’s portion of the annual TTC  operating budget that their predecessors had wiped their hands clean of (again, I’m looking hard at  you, Councillor John Parker)? That’s hundreds of millions of dollars Toronto would’ve had in its coffers or been able to give to the TTC for expansion or state of good repairs. Maybe had Premier McGuinty not wavered back in the spring of 2010 and scaled back on some of the original Transit City plans, then candidate for mayor Rob Ford wouldn’t have seen it as negotiable. Maybe had Premier McGuinty not wavered again, this time in the face of a Mayor Rob Ford, and signed their Memorandum of Understanding, throwing all transit planning back up into the air.

These are the people Mr. Hume wants to take charge? Arguably the very architects of our transit disarray? What on earth will that accomplish?

Despite Mayor Ford’s continued intransigence, city council is getting a handle on the situation. Doddering patrician types like the National Post’s Terence Corcoran sniffs at the February 8th city council meeting that asserted council’s primacy over the mayor, calls a timeout and declares we should just start all over. Well you know what, Mr. Corcoran? Fuck you. Democracy’s messy.

If people would just accept the fact that Mayor Ford lost, that city council (re)approved the Transit City plans for the Eglinton and Finch LRTs, that in a sop thrown to the mayor, a panel will make recommendations about Sheppard Avenue next month, we could just get on with things. Ignore the petulant child jumping up and down, holding his breath and turning red in the face. It doesn’t matter. Paying attention to him only reinforces the grade school view of municipal politics.

As does asking the province to come in and sort our problems out. Ironically, it also puts the normally fierce critic of the mayor, Christopher Hume, on the same side as the man he so obviously loathes. You don’t think Mayor Ford would love to divest himself of public transit decisions? Here, take it and all the related costs. Then we can just bitch and moan if it doesn’t work out to our liking, blameless. Take our traditional place in the backseat, counting on our parents to get us to where we’re going and only asking over and over, are we there yet? Are we there yet?

We’re not but we also need to realize that dad’s handed us the keys to the car.

— adultly submitted by Cityslikr

Keeping The Gravy Train From Derailing

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Colour me confused by a couple articles posted over at the Toronto Star yesterday.

In them, we read of improper, sole-sourced contracts being paid out by the city since mid-2009, amounting to some $2.5 million dollars. The headline grabber was $3674 spent on a tai chi instructor. Oh my God! Gravy! Big numbers. Little context. The city has a spending problem!

Except that, except that in the overall scheme of things, nothing could be further from the truth. As the Star itself points out (in paragraph 5) “…the purchases in question constitute a minimal share of the more than $2 billion that the municipality spends each year on various purchases. And the vast majority of sole-source deals, totaling about $154 million last year, are properly authorized.” Moreover, a city spokesperson claimed that “…instances of staff breaking sole-source procedures are rare, totalling just 1.6 per cent of the 1,257 untendered purchases made in 2010.”

Yet the headlines intones: ‘City improperly approved millions in sole-source purchases’ and ‘The more things change…’ You finish that thought. The more they stay the same. Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose.

We hang our heads, throw our hands up in the air. The bureaucracy. It can’t be tamed. Not under the profligate David Miller. Not under the cost cutting Rob Ford.

Or am I misreading the Star’s intentions? Paragraphs rearranged and headlines rewritten, one might garner from the information delivered that, in fact, the city has been doing a remarkably good job in keeping a lid on sole-sourcing contracts. Isn’t a 1.6% compliance rate, even if committed by repeat offenders, very, very low? Where is the comparison to other corporations with billions of dollars in expenditures? How does 1.6% stack up with similar corporations both public and private? That there might be pertinent data to have access to.

Instead, we get Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday teeing off in the school marmish way he does best. “We have rules there because those rules are necessary to protect tax dollars and make sure what we’re buying is done properly and at the best price.” Yes, Deputy Mayor, we have rules and it seems they are followed 98.4% of the time. Are our tax dollars really best used releasing the Auditor General to undercover that last 1.6%?

And Councillor Paul Ainslie doing his best Donald Trump imitation. “If you’re going to continue to flout the rules, break the rules in a substantial way, you’re fired.” In a substantial way? Show us, Councillor Ainslie and the Toronto Star, examples of rules being flouted in a substantial way. Context, please, not just big numbers.

“It’s not chump change,” Councillor Ainslie informs us. No it isn’t, councillor. But neither will this charge to eliminate questionable contracting practices help to substantially (or even significantly for that matter) fill the gaping budgetary gap you insist on hanging over our heads, Damocles-like. $2.5 million is not only a small fraction of the city’s spending over the course of the last couple years, it is even infinitesimally small compared to the revenue lost by getting rid of the vehicle registration tax last year.

While it comes as no surprise that alleged fiscal hawks like Councillor Ainslie and the deputy mayor try and make hay with these findings, I’m just not sure what the Toronto Star is attempting to do with them. I look at their article and think immediately that it goes to show all the gravy the mayor campaigned on is largely in his own mind but is the Star suggesting only that he’s no less able to reign in what there is of it than his predecessor was?

Or is this just another example of what passes for objective journalism these days? Since the Star has been labeled anti-Ford and certainly a couple of their columnists, Christopher Hume and Royson James have emerged as vehement critics of this administration, is this nothing more than a bone thrown to the Ford Nation? See? We’re not biased. We too can find examples of wasteful, improper spending. There’s still gravy, people. Our fiscal house remains in disorder.

It does little to get to the heart of the matter and only serves to give both sides some red meat to beat each other over the heads with. Little learned. Just more heedless noise.

— curiously submitted by Cityslikr