All Fried Up In The Big Smoke

Less political. More fictional.

The Reflection In The Mirror

Posted on April 23, 2015 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

I have been waging a see-saw battle with myself over the type of public servant John Tory believes himself to be ever since he became mayor. Actually, before that, going right back to when he announced his candidacy last year.

An obtuse political dullard, tone deaf to life in this city beyond the boardrooms, country clubs and philanthropic organizations or a savvy operator, stone cold Frank Underwood, yo, master manipulator, backroom civic strongman stepping out into the spotlight?

His previous foray into politics at the provincial level would suggest the former. He’s given the benefit of the doubt toward the latter as a private sector titan where family and privileged connections only get you so far. No dummy can successfully navigate those treacherous, shark-infested waters, am I right?

This question arises again now because of more ridiculous shenanigans from Mayor Tory’s appointed deputy mayor, the actual deputy mayor, Denzil Minnan-Wong. During yesterday’s Executive Committee meeting (which the deputy mayor vice chairs), Minnan-Wong indignantly tweeted out that he’d been blocked on the Twitter by the city’s chief planner, Jennifer Keesmaat. Social media attention ensues, followed by a boo hoo press conference with the deputy mayor. While city business is being conducted elsewhere, it’s worth mentioning again.

No biggie, in and of itself, except to serve as yet another example of a regular pattern from Deputy Mayor Minnan-Wong of building a grandstand on a foundation of public servant attacks at City Hall. He seems to take pleasure in sandbagging figures like the chief planner whose views on city building he doesn’t share, and his views on the subject are pretty simple. City building = road building.

But this post isn’t about him (and David Hains has already done a great job on the subject of Denzil and the Chief Planner at the Torontoist). This is about Mayor Tory who appointed Minnan-Wong as his deputy mayor, his 2^nd in command, his right-hand man. Just what the fuck was he thinking? (An entirely gratuitous curse just to “haunt” the deputy mayor.)

After winning the election in October and casting his glance about over the member of city council to settle upon the person who’d best suit the job of deputy mayor, how did John Tory settle on Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong? There’s somebody who’s been around, knows the lay of the land. He’s a rock solid conservative voice and will never veer off political course except to the further right. Done, and done!

Did John Tory realize that his choice for deputy mayor had no real base of support at city council, few natural allies? Minnan-Wong’s history at council showed much more of a flare for making enemies than friends. He loved nothing more than to get his business all up in his colleagues’ wards and make life miserable for them. Antagonizil Minnan-Wong, I’ve just nicknamed him.

Tory had to be aware of this reputation, right? Despite running for mayor back in 2003 and then covering the municipal scene for years after his stint in and around Queen’s Park, he likes to play the role of the city political naïf, willing to admit he was ignorant of the stuff he regularly opined on. Still, we’re to believe his people didn’t vet his choice for deputy mayor’s background and standing?

That would be denser than quark-gluon plasma. Team Tory as the gang who couldn’t think straight, unable to collectively put it together to tie one of their shoes. Defies belief.

So is this just a case of, I don’t know, good cop-bad cop? The deputy mayor as henchman – Monsieur Henchman, to you – brass knuckles and sharp elbows, brawling it out in the trenches while the mayor keeps his nose clean and Oxford button down starched? Classic political positioning.

But here’s the thing.

In such a scenario, both the good cop and the bad cop share a common end-game. Busting the criminal. Their approaches are different. Their ultimate goal isn’t.

Last term at city council, while it was more dirty cop-bad cop in terms of Rob Ford and Doug Holyday, there was no question they shared the same vision, sprung from the bowels of our worst instincts. Attack public sector unions, reduce the size of government, keep taxes, low, low, low. Rob Ford may’ve proven to be the wayward political son of Doug Holyday but there was no doubting their shared bond in bringing City Hall to its knees.

What exactly is the vision of the Tory-Minnan-Wong dynamic? Our mayor touts civility, respect, adherence to data-based decision making. His deputy mayor represents small-minded, divisive, petulant undermining of good governance. By unleashing his deputy mayor on the public service, the planning agency like Waterfront Toronto or just in general, Mayor Tory is flashing his own dark underbelly, his simple disregard of his own stated principles.

What’s unclear is whether that proves John Tory to be dumb or cut-throat vicious like a fox.

Neither one is particularly flattering.

— judgingly submitted by Cityslikr

Another Never Ending Story

Posted on March 31, 2015 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

Not having a Plan B, Our Strength.

Mayor John Tory holds yet another press conference to inform us what most of us already know. It’s becoming something of a tiresome pattern, quite frankly. The media gathers. The mayor stands behind a podium that bears a action-denoting placard. He states the obvious. Questions dutifully ensue, invariably winding up with some take on, Yes but, Mayor Tory, what about Plan B?

Or in other words:

Yesterday, the mayor told us about the crisis at Toronto Community Housing. Did you hear? There’s a state of good repair backlog, billions of dollars long, threatening to shutter thousands of units in less than a decade and send that many+ of our most vulnerable residents looking for affordable housing in a squeezed environment where there’s already a waiting list, tens of thousands of people long, lined up to get into the very housing that’s in jeopardy of being board up. (See the start of this paragraph.)

Yaddie, yaddie, yaddie. This is news only if not new news counts as news. Why, during last year’s municipal election campaign, David Hains raised a red flag in his Torontoist article. Betsy Powell painted a similarly grim picture in the Toronto Star. Earlier this year, the mayor established a task force to examine the crisis.

We know all this already. What are you going to do about it, is what we’re waiting to hear. What’s the game plan? What’s the frequency, Kenneth?

To urge the other two levels of government to get back into funding social housing. Mayor Tory has both ‘moral and business’ cases to make why this should be. We can get a return on our investment and feel good about ourselves while doing it. A win-win. What the hell’s everyone waiting for?

He’s not wrong. The problem is, he’s not the first person to make this point, not even the first mayor to make it. As Ed Keenan points out today, this is a thing nearly a quarter of a century in the making. (An irony sidebar: the man named to head the aforementioned TCHC task force, Senator Art Eggleton, a former Toronto mayor and member of the Liberal government that initiated this crisis when it began divesting itself of the social housing file, offloading to the provinces, and as with any shit stream, it continued to make its way downhill to municipalities. The circle remains unbroken.)

If wishes were fishes, and all that. Yes, it would be fantastic if the federal and provincial governments came on board and began pulling their weight on housing, public transit. It’s an easy argument to make, that they should feel morally obligated to do so. Ditto economically prudent, such investments in key factors for better functioning communities and cities.

Unfortunately, here we still are. All the stamping of our feet, holding of our breath, tubthumping, begging, pleading, blustering hasn’t changed the dynamics. We ask. The feds and Queen’s Park shrug.

So, what’s the Plan B, Matt Galloway asked the mayor on Metro Morning.

Ever the savvy negotiator, Mayor Tory said that he’s not going to talk about any ‘Plan B’ because then the other governments would just tell us to get stuffed and proceed with Plan B. A little game of chicken we’re watching play out.

Except that, as Brian Kelcey pointed out on the Twitter, that’s not how things work, there’s no negotiation. Municipalities make demands, or if they are more politely inclined, ‘asks’. Not for nothing, Ottawa and Queen’s Park are referred to as ‘senior’ levels of government. “They either give, or they don’t.”

And if our mayor sees some sort of spirit of giving at either level of government, well, he’s got better eyes than most of us. Just yesterday, in fact, Oliver Moore reported in the Globe and Mail that the province has informed Toronto and Vaughan that the money it pledged to build the Spadina subway extension is going be a tiny bit short, by about $85 million or so. You two make up the difference, would you? And make sure that thing opens up on time or else!

It’s difficult to the point of snapping any optimistic streak in half to see the province pulling out a wad of dough to put in the TCHC pot, moral persuasion and sound business case be damned. Right now they seem much more interested in drawing cash from Toronto rather than make a deposit. The quicker Mayor Tory accepts that fact, the better. Pretending otherwise will only deepen the crisis and make the work that has to be done even more expensive.

It must be difficult for him, this early in to his term, to come to the realization that his influence, his ability to work with the other levels of government might not be as awesome as he thought it was, convinced Toronto voters he possessed. I’m certainly not blaming him for believing that other politicians, regardless of where they plied their trade, would want to do the right thing, the smart thing, the moral thing. Keep. Hope. Alive.

But surely the scales have fallen from the mayor’s eyes by now. The current state of our politics is a dog-eat-dog fight for every public dollar out there. We, cities, the province, the federal government, are not partners. We’re rivals, at best agreeing to a you-scratch-my back and I’ll-scratch-yours relationship, not collaborating but always trying to get the upper hand. Unless Mayor Tory is engaged in a much more elaborate and veiled dance, he’s wasting valuable time, blue-skying it and wishing a wish upon a star.

The mayor’s painted himself into a corner, and I’m trying really hard not to think it was deliberate. Maybe he just believed in the rightness of his cause. If a fine upstanding citizen like himself saw the moral and business case for billions of dollars of reinvestment in the TCHC, who could possibly disagree? It’s simply a question of doing the right thing.

The alternative is more disheartening, with the best case scenario having Mayor Tory claiming his hands are tied, he has no other choice but to raise the necessary revenue for the city to invest in TCHC itself. He’s been pretty adamant that the property tax base can’t afford the hit, and he wouldn’t be entirely wrong except for the fact the property tax base is funding the Scarborough subway extension and somehow the property tax base came up with nearly half a billion dollars to speed up repairs on the Gardiner Expressway. So yeah, priorities.

Taxes are a necessary evil. Don’t blame me. It’s not my fault.

The darker turn, though, is all this being a pretext for yet another assault on TCHC. A firesale. We can’t afford to maintain these homes anymore, and we’ve been left to our own devices by Queen’s Park and Ottawa. Only the private sector can save us now. By turning the stock over, Mayor Tory can later claim he kept true to the pledge he made to Matt Galloway earlier today that TCHC buildings would not be boarded up under his watch.

Probably sooner rather than later, we’re going to see just how much of a moral issue social housing is to Mayor John Tory.

— wearily and warily submitted by Cityslikr

Already Tired Of Tory’s Timid Toryness

Posted on February 18, 2015 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

Two articles written last week underlined the fundamental problem facing this city right now. Simply put, we have a crisis of leadership. It manifests itself in all that isn’t working, people freezing to death in the streets, crumbling infrastructure, substandard public transit. These failures, though, can all be traced back to a consistent failure at the top.

After the spectacular implosion of the radical Rob Ford experiment of misgovernance, Toronto desperately looked around for an upgrade in competence in the mayor’s office. John Tory, we were told, was just the ticket. Competent – no, prudent! – yet bold. He was a successful businessman, top gun at a huge corporation, shortform for possessing a supreme fitness to lead the city from the crack-dazed darkness of the last 4 years.

Career politicians got us into this mess. Only stood to reason that a giant from the private sector was needed to clean it up. Because, that’s how the world works.

Post-election, a flurry of activity signified that business was being tended to, being taken care of. Cars were towed. Bus service increased. Mayor Tory got to work early, got down to busy-ness. Hey. Did you hear? The mayor’s having another press conference.

That’s how you run a city, yo.

Correction:

That’s how you look like you run a city.

In comparison to his predecessor, John Tory just had to show up without soup stains on his tie and having not obviously wet himself to immediately earn the mantle of competency. The bar was that low. Policy ideas were secondary to appearances.

Even beauty pageants, however, consist of more than just the swimsuit competition. Stuff needs getting done. Decisions have to be made, some significant. Like say, budgeting.

As David Hains wrote in the Torontoist Saturday:

There are no good choices in the budget, and it is time to wake up to why that is the case and what that means. There is a much bigger discussion to have here: Toronto needs to talk about the fact that there is a structural deficit, and that it is also willing to acknowledge that things cost money, particularly the cost of making responsible decisions. If we fail that, we will see Toronto go from budget crisis to budget crisis, pulling out its hair until it wonders how it became bald.

Like every other previous mayor of the city, John Tory has numbers to deal with, big numbers. He has to decide what to fund, what to build, what to repair, what programs and services to maintain, expand or cut. Like every other previous mayor of the city, John Tory will be constrained by the fact there’s only so much money to go around, that on the annual operating side of things, he has to balance the books. Like every other previous mayor of the city, John Tory must make some tough choices.

Turns out, Mayor Tory isn’t like every other previous mayor of the city. He’s going to spare himself the trouble of making tough choices. He’s going to pretend like there’s another way of going about business at City Hall. His choices “represent…a methodical, responsible approach to budgeting.” Carve out some cash from capital expenditures to plug the hole on the operating side. Hike user fees to help pay for some of the increases in services. Keep property taxes ‘at or below the rate of inflation’. Nix talk of any new revenues. Demand 2% in efficiencies from city departments.

Done and done.

Responsible. Methodical. Prudent. Competent.

Except, it is none of those things. In a word, as Mr. Hains suggests in his article, ‘wrong’.

Mayor Tory is ducking a systemic fiscal problem in the hopes of some magical appearance of money from the other two levels of government sometime down the road. sweepundertherug Money both Queen’s Park and Ottawa should be handing over in the areas of transit and affordable housing at the very least but money they’ve shown little inclination in handing over for years, decades now. Money the mayor should definitely be pushing for but money he should definitely not be counting on.

It’s like planning your life around the expectation of a relative dying and leaving you some money sometime down the road.

Not what you’d classically consider responsible, methodical, prudent or competent.

And then there’s the mayor’s bold transit plan, SmartTrack.

As John Lorinc pointed out in his Spacing article last week, we’re not even close to knowing what the price tag of that thing’s going to be or what portion the city’s going to have to come up with. Tory’s campaign-driven funding scheme, TIF, is another complete mystery, untested as it is on such a scale. Never mind how much the proposed eastern section of it while overlap with the Scarborough subway extension that he has tried to keep clear of. (Let’s not re-open that debate no matter how dumb and financially onerous it may turn out to be.)

Whatever its merits may be, aside from threatening to blow the city through its debt ceiling limit and, with that, future construction and repairs of, well, pretty much everything else, SmartTrack also looks as if it could further delay much needed transit building in Toronto. What if, in a year’s time when staff reports come back and questions arise about the viability of both SmartTrack and the Scarborough subway, “a kind of supercollider for Toronto’s latest transit ambitions,” Lorinc writes? Imagine that pitched battle at city council.

Subways, subways, subways versus SmartTrack, SmartTrack, SmartTrack!

And the shovels remain firmly unplanted in the ground.

After 4 years of paralytic, farcical uncertainty on the transit file, Mayor Tory has simply upped the ante instead of bringing clarity or even a semblance of sanity to it. In campaigning for the job, he refused to risk any loss of support by coming out against the Scarborough subway while offering up another fanciful transit plan that may well ensure the subway turns out to be nothing more than a costly white elephant. That’s political calculation not leadership.

It isn’t responsible, methodical, competent or prudent either.

In barely under three months, John Tory has fully revealed himself to be nothing more than just another small-time, parochial politician who is using this fiscal crisis (yes, it is a crisis) to diminish the city’s ability to deal with it rather than strengthen its hand. Why? Either he’s a committed small government ideologue or he possesses a steadfast aversion to making hard choices. Probably a healthy dose of both.

Whatever the reason, we need to stop expecting him to be anything other than an obstacle going forward, another failed experiment in the mayor’s office.

— hands wipingly submitted by Cityslikr