Tag Archives: Councillor Norm Kelly

Who Wouldn’t Want A Casino?

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I joked about this on the Twitter last week. Probably wasn’t the first one. Definitely not the last.

But now it seems to deserve more than the 140 character treatment as, zombie-like, it’s an idea, a dumb idea, a highly unoriginal idea that just won’t die. A waterfront casino cash cow. Ching-ching!

It reminds me of one of my favourite movie lines from one of my favourite 80s movie, Prizzi’s Honor. “If Marxie Heller’s so fucking smart, how come he’s so fucking dead?”

If a casino’s so fucking smart, how come suburban councillors are so fucking dead set against having one in their ward? Never does a council or committee meeting go by when we don’t hear the whine from the likes of councillor Mammoliti or Nunziata or Ford about how downtown gets everything and the suburbs get stiffed. Hey, folks. Here’s your chance. Step right up and claim your casino.

Remember The Great Sheppard Subway Struggle of 2012? Sure you do. Scarborough councillors Ainslie, Berardinetti, Crawford, Del Grande, Kelly and Thompson all demanded that Scarborough residents get what downtown had, subways not no stinkin’ streetcars. They weren’t second class citizens. They deserved first class transit.

Well, where  are they all now? You want something downtown doesn’t have? Here, take the casino. Please. There’s some waterfront out there in your neck of the woods, isn’t there? Stick the casino there, why don’t you.

That's NIMBY not GUMBY

I heard Budget Chief Del Grande on the news this morning, suggesting that the old city of Toronto’s inability to say no is a source of the city’s money woes. Well, here you go, Mr. Budget Chief. Downtown’s finally saying no to a casino. Maybe Ward 39 would like to take it off our hands.

For the casinos biggest supporters, it’s a really good idea in someone else’s ward.

Just like transit planning. As John McGrath wrote about the commissioner of Los Angeles transit, Richard Katz’s seminar yesterday, “…everyone wants a transit solution that other people use.” Or development planning. John tweeted from today’s Toronto-East York Community Council meeting (he’s everywhere, that John McGrath): Councillor [Pam] McConnell, speaking for every deputant against height ever: “This is a beautiful design, for somewhere else.”

Everybody wants the upside — Yeah, whatever. That’s for another post — of a casino, the benefits but none of the headaches. Parking and congestion. Down-and-out gamblers. A Jeff Foxworthy crowd streaming out into the streets, looking for a post-show nosh at a Cracker Barrel.

If I wanted a fucking casino in my neighbourhood, I’d move fucking downtown!

It’s almost as if these councillors all know a casino is little more than a dog and pony show, it’s not really going to contribute much to city’s bottom line but it’s a great way to stick to downtowners. Ohhh, they’re gonna hate this! Like they did tearing up the Jarvis bike lanes, de-fancifying the Fort York bridge and making threatening noises about the Portlands.

In his Metro article today, Matt Elliott pointed out that one of the mayoral campaign platforms of Rob Ford was to give “…more power to local community councils to make neighbourhood decisions.” Instead, we’ve seen a whole lot of imposing their will upon others by Team Ford. Might I suggest that for some of the more vocal, pushy ones, they take a little more time to tend to their own garden, gussy up their own respective wards. That way, perhaps, in the future we won’t have to listen to their bellyaching, complaining how they never get anything.

How about starting with a casino?

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

— generously submitted by Cityslikr

It’s Not Just About The Money

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In hindsight, I wish the outcome of this week’s subway-LRT transit battle hadn’t been settled on the question of money. Everyone conceding the ground that subways would be great but we just can’t afford them. If money grew on trees, we’d have subways running every which way until Sunday. But it doesn’t so we can’t.

There’s always money in the banana stand. Everybody has a scheme for raising money to build subways. Even tight-fisted fiscal conservative, Budget Chief Mike Del Grande, gave the impression of floating a proposal to look at the possibility of a parking levy before trying to pull it the following day. Earlier in the week at a TO Townhalls transit debate, Councillor Norm Kelly checked off a list of taxes and fees the city could pursue in order to raise enough funds to build a subway as if it was as easy as all that, as if any of these ideas hadn’t already been swept aside by Mayor Ford.

Councillor Kelly invited the audience to join him in being bold. A variation that Dr. Gordon Chong employed as well in getting us to think big, to think outside the box. Don’t have a closed mind, you stick in the mud squares. Explore the possibilities of private public partnerships. There’s always money in the banana stand.

Except there’s not, of course, there never was. All nonsense or hogwash to use the parlance of the mayor. Team Ford had the better part of two years to come up with a funding plan for the Sheppard subway, to think outside the box, to be bold, to give us a transit vision. But what did they deliver? Let’s start digging and go from there. Use some $1 billion ($2 billion if you do your math in the Councillor Doug Ford double-clutch fashion) in funding from the provincial and federal governments and get those shovels in the ground. Say, whatever happened to all that private sector cash to fill the subway funding gap, Mayor Ford? Those magical tales of a city with a spending not a revenue problem. A guarantee we could have it all, low taxes and shiny new infrastructure. No money down. No interest payments. Ever.

Councillor Jaye Robinson epitomized that gulf between fact filled reality and misguided fantasy. I’m trying really hard to like the councillor. She seems very honourable, sensible and well-intentioned. But her speech on Thursday (including her first ever request for a speaker’s extension) coming out in favour of closing the Sheppard subway loop was nothing more than ill-informed, area-centric parochialism.

Firstly, there was no talk of how to pay for a complete Sheppard subway loop. Ooops. There I go, doing it myself, asking about funding, funding, funding.

The councillor opened up with an attempt to undermine those who pointed out that 1st class cities such as Paris and Madrid are building/have built LRTs, saying those places already have a robust, fully integrated subway system. Their LRTs are simply feeding into it. Toronto’s subway system needed a full Sheppard loop to bolster its subway system not an LRT to feed into it.

That’s simply wrong. What Toronto needs to shore up its subway system is the Downtown Relief Line. Not to cater to the core elites but to relieve capacity on the Yonge-University and Bloor-Danforth lines for all those coming in to work downtown from the… wait for it, wait for it… inner suburbs and exurbs.

Don’t believe me? Fair enough. I’m no transit expert. Why not ask the TTC’s new CEO?

Despite being expropriated by Team Ford as a proponent of their crazy scheme, Andy Byford quietly stated his actual subway priority at a Board of Trade breakfast talk yesterday. “Although the TTC accepts the decision made by council, I maintain the city does also need to have a sensible debate around a subway provision,” he told reporters. “Sooner or later we’ve got to address the subway capacity, particularly in regard to the downtown relief line.”

‘A sensible debate’.

In fairness, that did begin to happen this week. With the mayor’s refusal to provide any sort of cogent funding plan for his pet subway project, his allies rushed to fill in the void. Half-hearted and vague as most of the proposed measures were, right wing councillors kicked started the conversation about revenue generation that had been pooh-poohed pretty well since our previous mayor stated that you can’t build a great city for free.

That said, great cities aren’t simply great cities because they build subways everywhere. Great cities build subways where it’s feasible, where subways transport the greatest number to the places they need to get to.

For Toronto, all of Toronto not just where Mayor Ford’s trying to get the greatest amount of votes, the answer isn’t along Sheppard Avenue. It never was. We should never have been talking about it in the first place.

So let’s start having that sensible debate.

— calmly, coolly submitted by Cityslikr

Leading With The Long Knives

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Another Monday (albeit a long weekend Monday), another start (albeit a slow one) to another week and once again I don’t have a fucking clue to what Mayor Ford is up to. I mean, I know what he’s up to, petulantly, punitively striking out at someone who stood up to him and his goofy, loopy public transit plans while striking a blow against bureaucratic integrity in the process. But what’s his over-arching strategy, is what I’m wondering. What’s his end game?

Because, there has to be an end game even from this administration. It can’t just be about this low rent gangster shit… no wait. Let’s use the mayor’s own words… It can’t just be about this low rent Stalinist shit, purging City Hall of any and all dissenting voices. Creating a smaller and ever shrinking circle of obedient foot soldiers, their loyalty directly proportional to their dubious grasp of how a city council and municipal government actually works. Some of the dimmest bulbs that represent us locally will be deciding general manager Gary Webster and the TTC’s near future. Step up into the spotlight, Councillors Vincent Crisanti, Frank Di Giorgio, Norm Kelly and Cesar Palacio.

Even someone as short-sighted and driven on a power panel of spiteful resentment as the mayor seems to be must recognize this situation as untenable. With friends like his, who needs enemies and all that? Mayor Ford can’t possibly be operating under the assumption that if he makes all his bone-headed decisions early enough in his term voters will forget in a couple years. Re-hire master tactician Nicky K. who’ll magically spin electoral gold again from policy dross. Mr. Kouvalis is good but he ain’t that good.

So there’s a bigger picture at work, right?

When news broke on Friday about the special TTC Commission meeting called to deal with personnel issues, I joked on Twitter that maybe it was part of the mayor’s shrinking the size of government agenda. By acting so brazenly irrational, so out-of-control erratic and dictatorial, he’s hoisting up a red flag to our provincial overlords. Hey, guys. Your capital city has gone crazy. If you don’t step in and take over, there’s no telling what we might do. Stop us before we inflict further damage.

A self-manufactured plea and sly manoeuvre to abolish Toronto’s city council. See, folks. We reduced the size of government.

Slightly more seriously, @lifeonequeen responded that perhaps Mayor Ford was making a crafty bid to have the province simply assume control of the TTC. For the sake of public transit here in Toronto and the GTA, please take this off our hands. Clearly we are incapable of managing such a complex file. You must step in before we can inflict any further damage. Irreparable harm. Save Us From Our Silly Sheppard Subway.

That tweet went on to suggest Team Ford wasn’t far-sighted enough for that to be truly the case. But I am steadfast in believing that nobody can be successful in politics as long as Rob Ford has been without possessing a modicum of foresight, let’s call it. It’s simply impossible for him not to have some sort of a game plan at this point, regardless of how bad it might be. He can’t honestly believe that he’ll prevail in an escalating tit-for-tat battle with city council, can he? At least not with the quality of allies he has at his disposal as his team’s numbers dwindle.

I mean, really. Councillor Frank Di Giorgio? With his comments in a Toronto Star piece Sunday, the man practically handed Gary Webster a wrongful dismissal case on a platter.

“Di Giorgio said Webster’s integrity and job performance are not what is at issue.

The issue is a matter of — in my view — whether a bureaucrat has the responsibility to undertake a task as mandated by the people and reflected in the mayor’s mandate.”

If this is who the mayor will have carrying water for him as we lurch forward, the war’s already lost. Councillor Di Giorgio as your point man is akin to a losing army throwing 12 year-olds on the front line in order to beat a hasty retreat. It’s a prelude to a massacre.

So what is Mayor Ford’s pit bull on a poodle attachment to burying the Eglinton LRT and building the Sheppard subway extension that he’s so determined to jeopardize his political future on it? It can’t just be about the very tenuous anti-streetcar/pro-subway ‘mandate’ he claims to have been given with his election in 2010. At least not when it threatens to eviscerate his fiscal conservative, looking out for the taxpayers aura that shone bright during the campaign. And eviscerate it, it will. Spending more money for less transit plus a whole host of new taxes and fees necessary to actually extend the Sheppard subway. A regular profligate spendthrift he will be viewed as if this all comes to pass.

And as Edward Keenan pointed out yesterday in The Grid, this subway mandate was a minor component to the Ford campaign. An afterthought, almost; a throw in when they realized he needed some sort of transit plan. For this, he’s going to the mat?

I’ve never thought of Mayor Ford as a backroom kind of guy in the sense of doing deals with ‘friends’ and such, mostly because he’s seemed largely friendless. A proud lone wolfer on a quixotic quest to reduce the role of government in our lives. But the lengths to which he appears prepared to go to put all transit underground causes one to wonder, even after factoring in other possibilities.

Yes, it’s got the urban-suburban divide the mayor thrives on. The politicization of the bureaucracy at City Hall he might see as advantageous to his cause. There’s probably a certain satisfaction in carrying out a vendetta.

However, the downside to such a grade school minded putsch is enormous. The power of the mayor’s office is not unlimited. It’s not out of the question that council will act to clip his wings (see the last section, Taking Control) before too long, rendering him impotent and irrelevant.

Why exactly would Mayor Ford risk all that? What is it I’m missing here?

— confusedly submitted by Cityslikr