Tag Archives: Core Services Review

To Cut Or Not To Cut

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I don’t think it’s too unreasonable or cynical to call this week’s public deputations before the budget committee political theatre. Deputants stepped into the spotlight to deliver their lines in defence of certain items or programs, or why cuts needed to be enacted (although, to be fair, the number of the latter could be counted on one hand that was missing a finger). Budget committee members performed the role of an attentive and, occasionally, interactive audience, listening to the players strut and fret before them. Visiting councillors acted as the play’s chorus, commenting on and interjecting with the action as it unfolded, filling in any expositional gaps in the narrative that arose.

If you believe in the power of theatre to change things, then all of that is a legitimate and necessary part of the process; something bigger and more compelling than simply a game of pretend.

To dismiss it as little more than an empty show, the mere appearance of listening to the public – that whole open and transparent business – diminishes both the deputants and, frankly, the Ford Administration. Write them off as blundering buffoons at your and the city’s peril. There was much more at work here than simply trying to seem engaged while having every intention to just ram the 2012 budget untouched through to council next month.

The key plotline in all this from Team Ford’s perspective was to get the public, an overwhelming majority of it hostile, everybody knew that would be the case, to come in, plead their case for their cause to be spared the axe and respond by simply asking, well, how are we to pay for it? The city has a spending problem, remember? That’s why we find ourselves in this current fiscal mess.

So heavy praise or sage nods toward anyone coming forward to offer up suggestions of paying higher user fees to save pools, programs, libraries. See? This is what we’re talking about. Thinking outside the box. If you want all these ‘nice to haves’, Toronto, you’re going to have to pay for them not the city.

Ignore the hulking presence lurking just off stage, the buried child. The family secret no one in charge really wants to talk about. That none of this is necessary. No individual sacrifice needed. A collective tweak here and there and everything would be OK even in these dark economic times. There is absolutely no reason we had to start chopping off limbs and tossing weight overboard to stay afloat. If there was any type of crisis it was one of leadership. They didn’t appear to know what they were doing. That, or they were hiding their true intentions.

Only when deputants pointed out this fact, that things weren’t at all like the budget committee claimed they were, did the conflict start. They were met with pure bile and mocking obstreperousness. Raise taxes? Is that all you got? What special interest do you represent? We want real solutions. Solutions that meet our very narrow definition of acceptable responses. Cuts or increased user fees. The only two options. So contestant, I mean, deputant, will it be what’s behind door #1 or door #2?

Clearly having felt they lost the momentum or upper hand after the first day, the mayor’s designated hit men were dispatched to beat back deputants who tried veering off the preferred path. Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti made an early morning, Snidely Whiplash appearance. Councillor Frances Nunziata brought her best Cruella DeVil impression, piping a single note. Gone was solicitous Councillor Doug Ford. Replaced by his braying alter ego. Budget Chief Mike Del Grande was, well, pretty much the same. Grumpy, grim and easy to revert to hectoring mode.

While perfectly happy to hear someone offer to pay higher user fees to stave off cuts, they would not so much as entertain anyone saying they’d accept a tax hike. The fairly regular demand to reinstall the Vehicle Registration Tax was also a non-starter. If there was a method set up that allowed individuals to voluntarily pay a higher tax, hey, have it. There’s one born every minute, right?

How are you going to pay for the service you’re here to defend, was the constant refrain, and no, you can’t say raise taxes. We’re already taxes to death, haven’t you heard?

It was with that approach, however, the fatal flaw was exposed. No one would come right out and say, feed hungry kids? Where the hell’s their parents? Should the city really be in the business of lending out books for free? Culture? What’s culture ever done for us?

That would’ve been the honest route to go. Instead, they pleaded poor. We don’t have the money. Where’s the money going to come from to pay for that? Our hands are tied. We have no choice.

We have a revenue problem.

Ooops.

See, this whole thing, this whole charade was predicated on the campaign claim of Rob Ford that the city had a spending problem not a revenue problem. We didn’t need to increase revenues. We just needed to tighten our belts. Stop spending beyond our means. There was plenty of extraneous stuff we could jettison and nobody would notice. Gravy.

That’s what they call the reveal. Anti-climactic to those of us who been watching and criticizing as this enterprise developed but, I guess, something of a surprise twist to those who didn’t. Not much to cut or excise without people noticing. As the KPMG Core Services Review laid out way back in Act Two, there was a dearth of fat to trim. The city wasn’t a spendthrift. It was revenue starved. That’s what needed to be dealt with.

In fact, not only was the city not looking at a terrifying three-quarters of a billion dollar hole this year, they had something of a modest surplus. It could’ve been bigger had we properly tended to our revenue sources but still, we had a surplus. Big enough to cancel all the cuts and shoe away a little money for a rainy day.

And when the budget chief and his vice-chair quickly went public almost immediately after deputations ended to assure everyone they had heard loud and clear that children’s nutritional programs were to be left alone and pulled them off the table, the gig was up. We did have a choice, it turned out. Across the board cuts were completely arbitrary. You want to feed hungry kids in this city? OK. We can do that. All you had to do was ask.

Of course, they will try and take that pound of flesh from somewhere else. A library, maybe? The TTC remains under very serious threat of rollbacks above and beyond the normal degree perpetrated by neglect by the other levels of government in this country. Community centres and arts funding still have guns pointed to their heads. The treacherous villains of this piece aren’t going to roll over and die that easily.

But the thing to remember is, they blinked. They were forced to come clean about what they were really up to. Austerity was always optional, never compulsory. A choice was made not enforced upon them. In the face of sustained public pressure, they conceded. Just on this one point, mind you. They didn’t throw in their cards. What we witnessed was a tactical retreat on one front. The curtain’s come down but only for intermission. The play continues.

They are on the run, however, having conceded the moral high ground of selfless duty righting previous fiscal wrongs. I mean, the same person who claimed to be only looking out for the little guy lunged at vulnerable children for chrissakes. There’s really no going back on that. The mask slipped. We all saw it.

They will try to continue to play the role of sound fiscal managers. It’s just that we now know that’s what they’re doing, playing a role. They’re not who they claim to be. So, let’s stop pretending they are.

— dramatically submitted by Cityslikr

Ford Nation Notion

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The good news, after reading Trish Hennessy’s post over at Framed In Canada, Mythology: Ford Nation, one year later, is that the great urban-suburban, car-bike, conservative-progressive divide that we all presumed existed may be overblown, misunderstood and little more than a scary figment of our collective imagination. Hoo-rah! The bad news? Well, there may be a division much more pernicious and tough to bridge.

Looking on the bright side first, let’s just set aside all that talk about de-amalgamation, shall we? It’s unhelpful, pretty much unrealistic and quite possibly detrimental to our future well being as a city and region. Rather than a Ford Nation, we all are a Leafs Nation, united in quiet pride at almost getting it right and fumbling with what was once a great franchise. Here’s to being in constant rebuilding mode.

“As regionally divisive as the election of Rob Ford might appear,” Ms. Hennessy writes, “most of the Ford voters we listened to identified as being Torontonian first. Most have either lived in different parts of the city or have to cross the city for work and they feel some responsibility for Toronto as a whole.

Rather than wanting to see their city fall into decline, these Ford voters expressed a hope and vision for the city that is positive, united, safe, clean, green, diverse, welcoming, vibrant and easier to get around in. Some even dream of having more bike lanes, as long as they’re safe for both cyclists and drivers.

They want a city that works together, for a common purpose.

They still believe in the value of public services, and many want better public services – especially when it comes to public transit, which is becoming a symbol of a city in need of a fix.”

That those wanting all of that for the city saw in candidate Rob Ford someone who’d deliver such things is, for those of us who didn’t, the crux of the mystery. Green? Diverse? Welcoming? Where did they see that in Ford’s campaign? Wasn’t he the one who said Toronto couldn’t afford any more people? And Mr. War On The Car green?

It’s almost as if we were talking about two completely different candidates for mayor. Those of us seeing Rob Ford as a destructive force for this city and those who, to again quote Trish Hennessy, “…believed he was willing to fight the establishment on behalf of the people…He [Ford] made them feel hopeful that positive change was coming; that he was going to punch a hole into the bubble of the elites.” How was such a gaping cavernous dichotomy of opinion possible?

Bringing us to the bad news I took away from the post. I read and reread it a few times and nowhere did I see the Ford voting participants in the Environics focus group talk about taxes outside of “…a simmering sense that they have been paying more taxes and user fees while getting less or worse public service in return.” Ford’s Gravy Train “…was considered a symbol for city finances in need of restraint, for people at the top of the city hall food chain abusing power – the ones they read about in the newspaper [italics ours]…” All those fat cats, Rob Ford railed against. “In terms of job cuts, their expectation is that Ford would go after the people ‘at the top’ of the scale.”

What I didn’t find in Ms. Hennessy’s post was any talk of if there was no gravy or not anywhere near the amount candidate Ford claimed he could find — like say 10%, in each and every city department — would they be willing to acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, the ‘simmering sense’ they felt about paying more taxes and user fees ‘while getting less or worse public service in return’ was unfounded? “While participants support the notion of some service and job cuts to balance the budget, they raised several points that indicate most won’t support across-the-board massive cuts.” So would these Ford supporters pay more to avoid ‘across-the-board massive cuts’? If so, how much more? A 30% property tax increase the mayor and his strict adherents are now throwing around?

I don’t know if such a question was asked of this small Ford voting cohort by Environics. How much are the services that they believed the public relies on worth to them? The same? More?

That, I think, is the fundamental divide we’re facing right now. Between those believing we’re paying more or just the right amount for the services we want and demand from the city and those who aren’t as convinced that’s the case. We in the latter camp never, the 53% of Torontonians not casting their ballot for Rob Ford last year, never “… believed Rob Ford when he said he could cut government waste without affecting city services.” Nearly a year later we see the proof of that conviction in the pudding. The KPMG core services review backed that up. The mayor’s slash-and-burn proposals provides further evidence that the city, despite some of the instances of wasteful spending and other seeming excesses that are regularly trotted out as examples of profligacy, is delivering services at very reasonable rates. Perfect? No one ever claimed that. Value for money? Overall, it’s looking more and more like it.

In her post, Ms. Hennessy uses turns of phrases like ‘whether the facts add up or not’ or ‘when in reality’. About cancelling the Vehicle Registration Tax, she suggests “Few [of the focus group participants] associate the cost of that tax cut with the city’s budget woes today.” It suggests a disturbing gap between belief and reality. Even now, a year into Rob Ford’s mayoralty, some of those who voted for him are holding on to the notion that we can have all the amenities our city offers without paying the price necessary to maintain them. They seem to think there’s an easy fix that doesn’t involve having to pay more.

To my mind, that’s the gap needing to be filled. Rob Ford promised gain without pain, a shift of blame from our unrealistic expectations onto manufactured bogeymen who either weren’t real or weren’t sticking it to the honest, hardworking taxpayers to the degree he claimed. Ford voters were duped which is a hard pill to swallow and not a constructive point of departure in reaching out in going forward from here.

The question is, how do we bridge such a chasm of perspective?

— wonderingly submitted by Cityslikr

Hoisted On Our Own Petard

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Conventional wisdom has it that all politicians lie. They tell us what they think we want to hear in order to get elected. Once in power, they turn around and do the exact opposite. All politicians lie.

Sometimes these are lies of omission. They don’t tell us what we need to hear because we’re still living in denial about facing the hard truth. Remember Stéphane Dion and his chatter about a carbon tax? Both the ruling Conservative government and his very own Liberal party quickly ran him out of town after he dared to speak of such things. Shh-shh-shh. Canadians weren’t yet ready to face the fact their fossil fuel use needed to come at a much steeper price. They don’t want to hear about it.

Last fall, 47% of Torontonians who deigned to vote in their municipal election were similarly unprepared to accept the fact a properly functioning, liveable city came with a price tag. Instead, we bought into the notion that we the taxpayers were doing our bit, paying more than enough taxes to provide all the services we wanted. It was profligacy and profligacy only that created the fiscal mess at City Hall.

From that mindset emerged Rob Ford and his twin pillar campaign. Stop The Gravy Train. And, The City Doesn’t Have A Revenue Problem, The City Has A Spending Problem. It’s not your fault, taxpayers. Your expectations are completely reasonable. There’s just too many union fat cats and out-of-touch left wing kooks sucking us dry. Nothing else to see here.

A Mayor Rob Ford would sort all that out for us.

Turns out, according to reports commissioned by the mayor himself, there wasn’t that much gravy at City Hall. And, in fact, the city did have a rather substantial revenue problem. So instead of trimming excessive fat from what was supposed to be a bloated budget, the mayor was looking at service cuts which, on the campaign trail, he had guaranteed wouldn’t be necessary. The mayor’s also had to go to the province already – cap in hand, as he derided his predecessor for doing – asking for a little hand out to get his pet subway project up and going. And for anything else they might have a little extra change to throw our way.

Nowhere, no how was Mayor Ford’s No Revenue Problem assurance more repudiated than last week when his self-proclaimed quarterback, Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti, mused out loud about the prospect of the Province of Toronto. “We’re getting stiffed by two levels of government on a regular basis,” Mammoliti told the [Toronto] Sun. “It may be time for us to start thinking about acting on our own and becoming a province.”

“I know people think it is a joke but we can’t run this city on eight cents on the dollar.”

Now, it’s well documented that Councillor Mammoliti has come up with some wacky ideas in his time as a public office holder although Toronto as its own province would be well down the crazy list. The important takeaway from the above statement is his admission that Toronto cannot function properly with the scant taxation revenues municipalities in this province are forced to subsist on. Yes, Mayor Ford and all those still in his corner, this city does have a revenue problem. That comes from one of your very own.

If there has been a bigger 180 turn on a dime, a quicker, more thorough thrashing of a campaign platform once elected than that of Rob Ford, it doesn’t jump immediately to mind. His so-called election mandate was based entirely on misinformation, un and half-truths, outright lies. How much of it was intentional is difficult to tell. Being an anti-government zealot to the bone, perhaps Rob Ford believed every word he said. It doesn’t alter the fact almost none of it was true.

Undeterred, he’s attempting to proceed as if we all knew what he really meant, that no service cuts guaranteed is the same as no major service cuts is the same as finding efficiencies. That, yes, we do have a revenue problem but finding and implementing new sources of revenue is hard and not very politically palatable so instead we’ll just hack away at spending. Same diff.

But for everyone aside from the mayor and his most ardent supporters there is a gaping chasm between what he said to get elected and what he’s doing now in office. The election mandate he likes to toss around in defence of his actions propped up on nothing but blowsy hot air. Maybe Mayor Ford is doing exactly what he intended on doing all along if only we had looked a little closer at the fine print.

Maybe we didn’t look at the fine print because we knew we weren’t going to like what we saw. We wanted to believe that it was all going to be as easy as we were told it would be. A cut here and there to those who deserved it and everything would be fine, we wouldn’t feel a thing. Tough choices are for suckers.

Unfortunately, nothing worthwhile comes about without tough choices especially in terms of city building. If we want substandard services, uninspired public spaces and shoddy civic behaviour, those things are cheap. Cheap, cheap, cheap. Ultimately, though, you get what you pay for and before long, you look around at the place you live and it’s not a pretty sight.

That’s the wagon we’ve hitched a ride on. We’re lying to ourselves pretending otherwise. Why should we expect our politicians to treat us any differently?

— honestly submitted by Urban Sophisticat