Tag Archives: Councillor Raymond Cho

A Debate 3 Months Too Late

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Do you hear that? The low humming, ever so slight grinding buzz? That’s the sound of triumphal ideological bluster awkwardly changing gears into reverse. It’s not particularly noisy or grating. In fact, there’s something quite soothing about it. Not yogic in its serenity. More like the summer cicada song, lulling us into a soporific state of waking slumber.

A motion to defer and rethink new recreation field user fees for the yout’ of Toronto was put forth by Mayor Ford yesterday and passed unanimously as did amendments from councillors Janet Davis and Paula Fletcher, an almost unheard of case of accord at city council during the Ford era. And as welcome as the situation was – consensus, that is, not necessarily the details which deserve another post entirely – it was deadly fucking boring. Conflict sits at the heart of good drama, yes? For those of us used to some 16 months of never ending, monumental struggle, it all felt like such a drag, man.

What’s good for the city is bad for city hall watchers?

Much of the anticlimax had to do with the vote result being pretty much a foregone conclusion. The story of new fees coming down on the kiddies of the city (‘a children’s tax’, Councillor Raymond Cho called it) to use Toronto’s playing fields took on such negative resonance that even the mayor thought it to be untenable. Either untenable or just another very likely black eye loss that he didn’t need to face at the moment. So get out there ahead of the curve on this one. Respect for the taxpayers taking a backseat to the widows and orphans out there.

But quite frankly, most of the air got sucked out of chambers because councillor after councillor stood up to defend themselves for letting these user fees see this much daylight in the first place. Notionally, if you voted in favour of the 2012 budget back in January, you voted in favour of bringing in these new user fees. Many of the 39 councillors who had given the amended budget a thumbs-up wanted to clear the air as to why they did what they did. Mea culpas and/or finger pointing get a little tedious after a while.

Here’s the thing.

This has been pretty much 2 years or so in the making. If you elect somebody as mayor who spent the entire campaign claiming he could cut waste, cut spending, cut taxes without cutting services or programs or facilities, well, new user fees shouldn’t really come as much of a surprise to anyone. Add to this that after burning through a previous year’s surplus and ridding city coffers of revenue by eliminating the VRT and pronouncing loudly and relentlessly that Toronto’s fiscal foundation was crumbling, any budget proposal was going to be chock full of user fees. It’s just basic math.

Besides, with the libertarian streak that runs deep in the mayor, a You Use It, You Pay For It ethos pretty much goes without saying. Unless of course we’re talking about driving private vehicles. Then hey, it’s all for one and one for all. Mi camino es su camino, si hermano?

Yet Mayor Ford flinched on this one. Along with his brother, the deputy mayor, budget chief and all the other fiscal conservatives who screamed bloody murder back only two months ago that such profligacy at City Hall was a thing of the past. We were dangling at the end of our spendthrift rope. Financial wrack and ruin were awaiting us if we didn’t zip up our pockets and start looking after our pennies, every single dime, yaddie, yaddie, yaddie.

We’d burned down the banana stand, folks.

So we needed to step back, take some time for careful consideration and reflection. Unlike during the full court budget process press when it was all hands on deck, grab the pails and start baling because the good ship SS Toronto was sinking into a sea of red. Everybody, and we meant everybody, needed to start pulling their weight. There would be no more freeloading under this mayor’s watch.

Yesterday’s change of course altered the dire landscape, it seems. Mayor Ford claimed that there was new money from all the sweetheart labour deals he’d swung with city workers. However much that might be putting the cart before the horse, even if true, what happened to all the talk of paying down our oppressive debt with any extra cash we found under the cushions? Isn’t the $1.5 million that’s now being waived for kids to use our sports field ‘gravy’ according to the Frugal Times dictionary?

And how will this decision affect budget debates going forward from here? It’ll be difficult for the administration to cry poor when other ‘special interests’ step up, Oliver Twist like, mewling for more. Please… sir… you found $1.5 million for them. What about us?

Of course, with the mayor already heading into campaign mode, it probably means that we’ve turned the corner on this. It’ll be all good news for us from here on in. We slayed the debt dragon, folks. Broke its proverbial back. Everybody said it couldn’t be done. We did it.

Re-elect Mayor Ford in 2014.

— belatedly submitted by Cityslikr

Slumps Can Be Contagious

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It feels a little passé to call a major setback for Mayor Rob Ford at city council historic since it’s become fairly routine, but to lose complete and utter control of the TTC, the number 1 operating budget outlay for the city, is well, kinda, sorta historic. Sure, with enough support at council the mayor can dictate the amount of money the city hands over to the TTC, but even that kind of backing should be considered highly tentative in light of yesterday’s vote. How the commission decides to spend the money the city gives it is entirely out of the mayor’s hands. LRTs, subways, bus route cuts, all are now up to a commission he has almost no sway over.

Imagine former mayor, David Miller, flush with provincial government money, claiming a mandate to build Transit City and his TTC commission members say, m’eh. You know what? We’re going a different route.

You can scream mandate, mandate, mandate all you want but it won’t mask the fact you’ve lost control of the agenda.

If the size of victory for ex-but-now-still TTC Chair Karen Stintz’s motion to dissolve the commission’s configuration from an all councillor board of 9 to a 7 councillor plus 4 appointed `civilian’ board, an eye-poppingly large, 29-15, twenty-nine to fifteen — a photo-finish shy of 2/3s of council voting against the mayor, two-thirds, a number that if replicated regularly would render him largely irrelevant in the running of this city – was not bad news enough for Mayor Ford, the composition of the new board made for an iceberg striking catastrophe.

He doesn’t have an ally on it. Of 14 ears, three could be considered sympathetic. Four of the councillors might take a call from him but probably 2 would keep him on hold for a couple minutes.

Politically, the commission is now as balanced as you could get. There are three right-of-centre members, Chair Karen Stintz, former vice-chair Peter Milczyn and Councillor John Parker. All survivors of the previous commission but none, save perhaps Councillor Milczyn, whose relationship with the mayor made it through the last month or so intact, let’s say.

Councillor Maria Augimeri is the other holdover and was never an ally of the mayor. She is now joined in that corner by councillors Glenn De Baeremaeker and Raymond Cho, both vocal critics of Mayor Ford and both, not coincidentally, representing Scarborough wards. This has been designated the key battleground by the administration and now it’s represented on the TTC by two non-subway proponents.

And right smack in dab in the middle is first term councillor, Josh Colle. As one of the newcomers on the commission, Councillor Colle doesn’t bring as much baggage to the fray except for that minor budget amendment he brought forth in January that snatched back $19 million in cuts from the mayor’s hands, and we all know that Mayor Ford rarely bears a grudge when it comes to perceived disloyalty and betrayal. If Councillor Colle was looking to grow his profile at council, he probably couldn’t have found himself in a brighter spotlight.

The geographic make up of the new commission is also very telling. As much as the Ford Brothers are trying to depict this transit fight as an urban/suburban one, downtown, subway riding elitists bound and determined to deny the rest of the city their underground transit riding right, there’s nary a corist on the commission. Councillors Colle, Parker and Stintz could be considered midtowners, and all three will see the Eglinton LRT being built through their respective wards. In fact, in Councillor Parker’s case, it will emerge from below about a third of the way through his ward 26 at Laird Drive.

The rest of the 4 are all from the inner suburbs. So if anyone could complain about being left out and ignored, it should be the residents of the old cities of Toronto and East York. But we have our subways and streetcars running down the middle of the street to comfort us.

Lest we get too smug however, this fight is far from over. The Sheppard subway/LRT question is not settled although, given yesterday’s lopsided vote, the wounded Team Ford has quite a formidable climb ahead of it. Seven of the twenty-nine councillors who voted in favour of Councillor Stintz’s motion will have to be peeled away back to the mayor’s camp and in favour of building the subway. Mayor Ford has made that doubly difficult on himself by refusing to come up with a viable plan to pay for it. No new evil taxes or fees to be considered while anything off the top of Councillor Doug Ford’s head including building new toll lanes to raise money for public transit, casinos, lotteries is on the table. In other words, a wing and a prayer that only the ideologically hidebound, power mad sycophants and just the plain ol’ scaredy cats could mindlessly embrace.

It’s almost as if Team Ford wants to be defied, wants to be relegated to the sidelines, wants to be the outsider, once more railing against those politicians down at City Hall, the very ones who’ve taken over according to Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti. Sound familiar? Mayor Ford morphs into candidate for mayor Ford and plays up the looking out for the little guy schtick, persecution complex on high alert. They didn’t accept my mandate, folks. You need to elect more councillors who respect the taxpayers as much as me, so that I can really turn this city around, stop the gravy train and… more talking points and stunt sloganeering.

The long game, they’re looking at, using the setbacks of 2011 and 2012 as the platforms for a re-election run in 2014. Losing the battles to win a war. Misgoverning in order to campaign.

Yes, we should remain alert to that nakedly obvious ploy but today, after a day like yesterday, it’s hard to give the benefit of the doubt to Mayor Ford and his brain trust in their ability to execute any sort of long game. Besides, lightning seldom strikes twice, and 32 months is a very long time in politics. The question voters may be asking themselves come October 2014 is if Mayor Ford couldn’t/wouldn’t figure how to run council, why he should be trusted in trying to run a city.

— on the ballly submitted by Cityslikr

Waning of the Thumb

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(A repost of our Friday Torontoist piece. Title is all theirs.)

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A two day meeting dragged into three. As the third day ground to its inconclusive conclusion, participants voted to defer all remaining items to the next regularly scheduled meeting in February. Decisions put off. The business of municipal governance delayed.

Perhaps it was because council members were looking ahead to the big game, the 2012 budget battle. Beginning almost immediately, today in fact, as the Budget Committee kicks off the first of seven meetings over the course of the next eleven days, including two for public deputations, to hash out a budget for city council to consider and implement next month. That’s the big fish to fry, where energy needs to be expended. This week’s council meeting was simply the warm up session, getting loose, stretching the body into fighting shape.

Or it simply could be seen as the precursor to how things are going to happen over the next little while. A war of attrition. Gone are the early, glorious days of shock and awe that saw quick and surprisingly decisive victories for the Ford administration. The VRT gone! Councillor office budgets slashed! Transit City mauled in its infancy. The mayor is still pushing ahead but it’s now become a tough slog, a slow grind. Some of the more egregious intentions are being picked off by sniper fire, some even coming from friends and allies. His opponents’ Maginot line is still holding.

Councillor Shelley Carroll amended out the possibility of large industrial water users being given carte blanche to ignore city sewer by-laws in the Rate Supported Water and Waste Water budget. It reserved the city’s right to monitor ‘effluent’ – essentially waste water dumping – and to keep aiming for water conservation targets. The mayor found himself on the losing side of what turned out to be a drubbing on that one, abandoned even by his brother and budget chief.

Mayor Ford also took it on the chin (even if symbolically) on the Rate Supported Solid Waste Management budget when Councillor David Shiner, a usual Ford loyalist, maintained the current 44 environmental days that Public Works and Infrastructure Committee wanted to chop back to 11. Certainly, Councillor Shiner’s amendment scales back the events and doesn’t threaten the mayor’s desired 0% increase in waste collection rates. It was, however, a definitive poke in the eye of those looking to do away with remnants of green initiatives in the city.

Councillor Shiner was also front-and-centre in negotiating a compromise with noted foes of the mayor, Councillors Adam Vaughan and Mike Layton on the relocation of the youth shelter, Eva’s Phoenix. It was sitting on property Team Ford has its eyes on selling as part of the revised Fort York bridge plan. The shelter poised an obstacle in the march to ‘monetize city assets’ and in finding it a new home, Shiner brokered a deal that kept both sides, if not happy, at least content.

It could also be that what we’re witnessing is the formation of a consensus building model at city council. The hitherto unuttered word since Rob Ford took office, ‘compromise’ is becoming part of the vernacular. Many of the mayor’s most ardent opponents including Janet Davis, Joe Mihevc, Kristyn Wong-Tam, Paula Fletcher and Raymond Cho made amendments to the direction of child care services in the city. Mihevc managed to get everyone present at council except for Councillor Minnan-Wong to agree to work at not closing any day care centres until hearing what the provincial government, who has been slow and unsteady holding up its part of the funding formula, will say about the matter in next year’s budget.

Compromise may be a word the mayor has to come to terms with. Winter is indeed blowing in, issuing a serious threat to further bog down his troops and heavy artillery in the muck and goo of the 2012 budget process. (Yeah, I wasn’t going to let go of the military metaphors that easily.) Talks of cuts to services at the TTC, elimination of pools and programs, reduction in library hours, all are emboldening the opposition outside council to set up and stand their ground. Within council, allies are exerting their independence and not bending to the mayor’s bully tactics. Witness just how far the moderate, small c conservative, Councillor Chin Lee has drifted from the Ford fold.

The mayor has expended on awful lot of political capital in his first year, tilting at long standing pet peeves of his that represent the worst excesses of tax and spend governing. Non-automobile forms of transit. Community engagement and outreach. The arts. The environment. Anything that smacks of ‘nice to haves’. All before it truly gets ugly for him. When that bus doesn’t arrive for that little old lady going out grocery shopping in Scarborough. When that library is closed on Sunday for that little girl looking for some quiet study time. When the family has to go even further afield to find affordable swimming lessons.

The battles are going to get more intense over the next 6 weeks, the pushback stronger and terrain more treacherous. Already besieged, it’s hard to see how Mayor Ford can simply bludgeon ahead in that damn the torpedoes fashion that has been his governing style to date. His arsenal has been severely depleted. While hardly a spent force, Mayor Ford is not the indomitable powerhouse he was earlier this year. The one that caught everybody flat-footed, surprised and easily overwhelmed. It’s now trench warfare (you know I had to go there) and any gains will come with great cost. If he fails to adapt to the new reality, the mayor may find that the 2012 budget is the hill he will die on.

— repeatedly submitted by Cityslikr