All Fried Up In The Big Smoke

Less political. More fictional.

It All Depends On How You Define ‘Respect’

Posted on April 24, 2014 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

This isn’t about Rob Ford (although he’ll think this post is about him, about him). At least, not directly, it isn’t. It’s about how we’ve slipped into his skin, donned his way of thinking, his attitude toward government.

Following along yesterday to the monthly proceedings of the Executive Committee, the committee the mayor no longer chairs but remains part of only out of legislative necessity – everyone elected to city council must serve on one standing committee – it all felt so petty and small-minded. Bereft of heft. Lacking in rigour. These are the tiny men of a big institution.

It’s no surprise, really. They all were picked to be there by the mayor before his tumble from the seat of power. Not one to challenge his own preconceptions or belief systems, unLincolnian in assembling a team of rivals, the mayor sought nothing more than to surround himself with fellow boobs and yes-men. The worst and the dimmest.

During the debate over somehow commemorating the 1915 Armenian genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Empire, Councillor Frank Di Giorgio presented a muddled view of history where the Holocaust was fact but South African apartheid was still contested. Or something. Councillor Peter Leon referred to the Armenian genocide as an ‘unfortunate mishap’ which he later upgraded to a ‘horrible atrocity’.

Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti moaned about not being paid to have to deal with international issues like European history. He was elected to fill potholes and cut grass, he told the room. If only you would stick to that, Councillor Mammoliti. If only.

Councillor Anthony Perruzza mentioned prosciutto.

But where that item, tabled late in the afternoon when many members of the Executive Committee might’ve been passed their nap time, brought out the dumb, it was a couple matters earlier in the morning that really saw the collective sparkle fizzle.

A proposed council pay increase, council office budgets and city travel expenses, all the mayor’s bread and butter, led to not so much a healthy debate as regular opportunities to politically grandstand. Protestations of We Are Not Worthy (which is true for many in that room) mixed with talk of gravy and the need for more oversight and micromanaging. Apparently, our city councillors aren’t paid enough to sort out matters on an international scale but don’t make so much money that they can’t waste time looking through colour swatches to find just the right colour at the right price for their office walls.

Of course, there was no way this committee was going to push forward the 12.9% pay increase for council members recommended by the OCG Strategy and Organization Consulting company after surveying 16 Canadian municipalities. Despite the fact that, comparatively speaking, our mayor and city councillors are not in the upper echelon of renumeration in terms of their fellow municipal representatives, this is an election year. Nobody’s dumb enough or brazen enough to face the voting public after giving themselves a substantial pay hike.

OK. Maybe Giorgio Mammoliti is. And Frank Di Giorgio might push the wrong button when it came to casting his vote.

It would also be monumentally hypocritical for this group of men to give themselves a raise after nearly 4 years of preaching the gospel of austerity and penny-pinching. What’s good for the goose and all that. They kind of painted themselves into a fiscal corner on this one.

“We can all agree we are well compensated for the job we do,” declared the mayor, mindful I’m sure of his own financial situation as the scion of a wealthy family. In his case, it’s true. Given the job he does, the time he puts into it, I’d argue Mayor Rob Ford is amply compensated, as are many of his colleagues sitting on Executive Committee with him.

How much should the going rate be for bad representation at City Hall?

How much should the going rate be for good representation at City Hall?

I’ve seen how much work the diligent and dedicated city councillors put in on a daily basis. Forget your notions of any 40 hour work week. Double that. On call 7 days a week most weeks of the year. You break their 6 figure salaries down to an hourly rate and I think you’d find a much more modest pay rate.

But because we’ve assumed the anti-public sector stance that the mayor believes so passionately in, any amount is too much. It’s our taxes that pay their bills, we trumpet. Respect, we demand. Why should they be entitled to anything more that we are?

We’ve willing agreed to travel down the deceptive road of misconception, believing that somehow the taxes we pay at a local level don’t go toward paying for all the useful things we use on a daily basis. We hear that this councillor makes $100, 000 a year in salary, plus perks, and imagine, well, there goes all my money. Straight into the councillor’s already stuffed pocket, so they can jaunt off to some all-expenses trip to somewhere they have absolutely no need to be going to, somewhere I’ll never get to go.

In actual fact, the operations of city council costs us collectively around $20 million a year. Throw in the mayor’s office along with the city clerk, and I’ll generously round it up to $30 million. $30 million, in a $10 billion operating budget. Do that math. .003 Every municipal tax dollar you submit, .3% of that goes to our elected officials, and the general operations of their offices and meetings.

So, if you pay $5000 a year in property tax about $15 of that is used for your mayor and city councillor to do their respective jobs. Do that math. $1.25 a month. Less than a nickel a day.

So when the mayor goes on some outraged tirade about all that gravy, pointing to $150,000 in councillor travel expenses (.00000015 of the operating budget, I think) or the not quite $6 million in city staff travel expenses, reach into your pocket and pull out all the change. We no longer use the denomination small enough needed to pay for your portion of that. And then stop to think about how we’re paying someone $170+K a year to fussily focus on saving us that amount of next to nothing.

Then honestly tell me who exactly it is respecting the taxpayers?

— generously submitted by Cityslikr

A Man Of Many Words

Posted on March 11, 2014 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

Not going to lie to you. I am kind of a sucker for the occasional outburst of oratorical thunder that Councillor Anthony Perruzza (Ward 8 York West) unleashes at city council meetings. And by ‘oratorical’ I don’t really mean to suggest any sense of eloquence or particular skills in rhetoric. It’s more to do with the loud noises that come out of his mouth in no discernible pattern or meaning. Most of the time, I have no idea what the councillor’s on about or the point he’s trying to make. It’s just fun to watch him perform.

Which pretty much sums up my impression of his term on council during the Ford administration. I don’t know what he’s been up to or the reason why he’s there. I get no sense of who he represents. It’s a mystery to me who Councillor Perruzza stands up to advocate for when Councillor Perruzza gets up to thunder.

I imagine if he didn’t have such a unique style of delivery, I’d hardly notice Councillor Perruzza at all.

He is (at least according to his Wikipedia page) a member of the New Democratic Party, serving as an MPP for one term as part of the Bob Rae government alongside now Communist defector Giorgio Mammoliti. Both men voted against their own party’s same-sex rights and benefits bill, helping to defeat it. Perruzza was also a North York Separate School Board Trustee and councillor before eventually becoming an amalgamated city councillor.

He seems to have been a long time advocate of affordable housing, tenants’ rights and low property taxes. Throughout much of the past 3+ years, unlike his former NDP MPP colleague Councillor Mammoliti, Perruzza has kept his distance, politically speaking, from Mayor Ford while still managing to eventually snag a chair position of one of the city’s standing committees, Community Development and Recreation. That’s the kind of appointment the mayor usually only grants to his closest allies. Councillor Perruzza was even tapped by the mayor as one of only five councillors worthy of being re-elected this year. “Although he doesn’t vote with us sometimes,” the mayor said, “but he supported me when times were tough.”

This is where the whole Anthony Perruzza enigma gets really unsettling for me.

Somewhere along the line, the councillor softened toward the mayor, going to bat for him on two recent fronts. First, the Scarborough subway. Not only would this transit line provide zero help to transit users in his part of the city, Councillor Perruzza voted in favour of a property tax increase to pay for it (at least, initially he did.) Councillor Perruzza is not a big fan of property tax increases.

More baffling however was the councillor’s standing up for Mayor Ford in his fight to keep all his powers after the crack scandal broke wide open. The ‘tough times’ the mayor referred to. Perruzza rose to his feet to boom about the political implications of such a move, worrying that it might set a dangerous precedent. The next time a city council and a mayor had a falling out. He even voted against asking the mayor to apologize for lying about smoking crack.

As if smoking crack and lying about it while impugning the reputation of others is in any way political. As if the motion to remove the mayor’s power wasn’t at all a reflection of his job performance and somehow just political posturing. As if the mayor’s behaviour could be categorized as the normal functioning of the office that some of his colleagues simply didn’t agree with.

Matt Elliott later pointed out when Mayor Ford YouTubely endorsed Councillor Perruzza that the worthy list of re-electable councillors consisted of only those who voted against stripping the mayor of his powers. So a cynic might conclude that Councillor Perruzza’s motivation was with an eye on the upcoming election. In order to tell voters in Ward 8 that, while he opposed the mayor on many issues, he wasn’t against the mayor, if you catch the fence straddling there.

Why would not being perceived as too anti-Rob Ford be a goal for Councillor Perruzza?

In the Etobicoke-York-Scarborough axis of… nevermind… that served as the base of support for Ford Nation, Ward 8 ranked at the bottom, with just 47% voting for Rob Ford, almost the same as the average city wide numbers. One would think approval ratings for the mayor haven’t increased there more than anywhere else in the city over the last 18 months or so. Does an unofficial endorsement from Mayor Ford actually help Councillor Perruzza’s re-election chances?

On the other hand, the councillor has been engaged in electoral war in Ward 8 over 4 campaigns since 2000, all with the former incumbent, Peter Li Preti. He lost twice (3 times if you count the pre-current council alignment in 1997) before winning the last two times. All of the elections, save in 2000, have been close. The last three were determined by a combined 1381 votes, less than 500 an election.

Now, in the 2010 election Mr. Li Preti was nailed for various campaign finance violations. Last summer the Compliance Audit Committee voted in favour of proceeding with a prosecution. So, there’s a good chance the two men won’t meet in a council race for the first time since the city amalgamated.

But you can never be too sure about these things. Councillor Perruzza may just be hedging his bets, making sure all his bases are covered. That roar you hear when he gets to his feet to bellow could be the sound of someone marking their territory. I am Councillor Anthony Perruzza. I represent Ward 8 York West.

Sound and fury, signifying nothing more than a re-election bid.

— cynically submitted by Cityslikr

They’ve Got A Committee For That?

Posted on June 27, 2013 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

Early on at yesterday’s Community Development and Recreation Committee meeting, it dawned on me that I wasn’t really that interested in people. Sure, in the abstract, I spend my time thinking about things like transit and budgeting in a (hopefully) people friendly manner but the nuts and bolts of their daily lives? That’s what reality TV’s for. To watch the mundane aspects of real life without actually having to experience it.

Apparently it is an indifference I share with Mayor Ford because the Community Development and Recreation Committee whose task it is to oversee “social cohesion, with a mandate to monitor, and make recommendations to strengthen services to communities and neighbourhoods” may be the most non-Fordian of any of the city’s standing committees. The makeup skews centre to left. Former chair, Councillor Jaye Robinson, was perhaps the most natural ally of the mayor’s and he turfed her because of her outspoken stance on his alleged crack use.

Social cohesion and strengthened services to communities and neighbourhoods is stuff the mayor is prepared to leave up to the lefties on council to sort out. Or, more to the point, stuff he can quash at the Budget or Executive Committees. From his perspective, it’s easy to see CDR as the sandbox he sends the usual suspects off to play in.

Which translates into a very amicable and constructive atmosphere in the committee room. With no vendetta seeking animosity brought to the table by any of the mayor’s remaining allies, the meeting represented the complete antithesis of the dysfunction normally on display at the higher profile meetings like council, budget, public works and infrastructure. Hell, the mayor’s own hand-picked Executive Committee has become more strained and combative than Community Development and Rec.

That’s not to say everything was roses.

There’s clearly a shit storm brewing with the continued roll out of full-day kindergarten and the question of before and after school child care. It pits three entities – Queen’s Park, the school boards and the city – against one another with the latter holding the bag when the inevitable shortages appear. The big question is who’s going to provide child care for the newly minted kindergarteners before and after class. Licensed child care businesses were led to believe the schools would, so adjusted their staffing and facilities to reflect that. Many of the schools have not taken up the task. The province just shrugs. Community Development and Rec committee members scramble to figure out how to fill in the void.

Another agenda item, the Toronto Youth Equity Framework is an ongoing part and parcel of “…the development of a Toronto youth equity strategy”, undertaken after the 2008 Review of the Roots of Youth Violence report from Roy McMurty and Alvin Curling, and the provincial Ontario Youth Action Plan that came in response to a couple high profile shootings in Toronto last year. You know, the low hanging fruit our elected officials can easily strike off their To Do list. Inequality. Discrimination. Exclusion.

I will grant Mayor Ford this. He isn’t the first politician to place such matters on the back burner of their administration although few have been as open in their disinterest as this one. There’s not a whole lot of political capital to be gained dealing with issues like poverty and racism especially when you get elected vowing to rein in spending. The axe tends to fall easily on the disenfranchised if it saves the hard-working taxpayers a buck or two.

So the workings of the Community Development and Recreation committee feel like a slog. The type of business only the likes of Councillor Janet Davis could love. Seemingly intractable problems moving in imperceptible slow-motion. Troubles mount quickly. Solutions appear stingily.

There are no easy wins and the steps needed to set things on the right course invariably cost money. That’s a formula to strike fear in the hearts of any but the most intrepid of politicians. The weight of the status quo hangs heavy over the Community Development and Recreation committee.

Councillors taking on this work deserve the utmost respect from us. When all is said and done, they are the faces of the city at ground level, doing the grunt work while lacking the necessary control over the factors that influence what comes before them. It was Queen’s Park who made the decision to institute full-day kindergarten but the implications of it fall on the desk in front of the members of CDR committee.

Judging from the tone of Wednesday’s meeting, they do so with a certain resolve, grace and equanimity. It just so happened to be Councillor Anthony Perruzza’s first meeting as chair and, despite the fact I still question his decision to take the position that pushed aside the last female member of the mayor’s Executive Committee, I thought he did a good job. He was solicitous with all the deputants, accommodating with both visiting councillors and the members of the committee. There was no bombastic oratory. Disappointing to those of us who are a little partial to his bombastic oratory.

Once again, I was left with the feeling that the dysfunction ascribed to City Hall currently flares up only when the mayor or his brother or Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong gets involved. For the most part, at most committee levels work is getting done. Councillors do get along. The business of the city is proceeding apace.

It just doesn’t make for an immediately compelling story.

— applaudingly submitted by Cityslikr