All Fried Up In The Big Smoke

Less political. More fictional.

Lost In A Forest Full Of Trees

Posted on January 15, 2016 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

It has come to my attention that, perhaps, I have lost perspective on Mayor John Tory. After reading a couple news items on the 2016 budget process and an upcoming SmartTrack report last night and this morning, I let fly with some intemperate Twitter remarks that weren’t particularly well thought out. In my defence, they only contained one swear word in the lot of them.

“Tory hopes to balance Toronto budget by funding less than half of new commitments,” was the headline in a Metro article by Jessica Smith Cross.

My initial reaction?

Indignation, of course.

How hard is it to balance a budget when you decide to fund only 40% of the commitments, promises and pledges that you and your council colleagues have made? You know that thing we all thought was a really good idea? Well, we still think it’s a good idea but I’m not prepared to pay for it. But props to us for thinking it’s a good idea, right?

It’s about picking priorities, came one response to my outburst. That’s pretty much what every budget is about. That’s what City Manager Peter Wallace put before the budget committee with an unbalanced budget of at least $67 million in unfunded council requests and implementations. The mayor and city council have to choose their priorities. Mayor Tory’s simply choosing his.

“John Tory’s SmartTrack transit plan for Toronto getting smaller, cheaper,” was the headline in Oliver Moore’s Globe and Mail article this morning.

My initial reaction?

Oh, for fuck’s sake.

Millions of dollars on a report that essentially confirms what every critic of SmartTrack thought from the time it was released as a headline grabbing, ill-thought out plan back during the 2014 campaign. My head exploded, and I fired off some of my own headline grabbing, ill-thought opinions, undercutting possible benefits in the report for Scarborough transit users and overplaying the mayor’s embrace of the report. “The issues you reference are still being studied and staff have not yet provided recommendations,” Amanda Galbraith, Mayor Tory’s spokesperson, told the Globe.

So, there’s plenty of time still for the mayor to ignore expert advice and stubbornly insist on doing SmartTrack his way. It was unfair of me to respond in a way that suggested he’d accepted the findings in this new report yet. If he does, it will be a better SmartTrack project, probably, at least the “new” western spur which would become, essentially, a Transit City proposal from way back when. At least, it can’t be worse than the SmartTrack he used to get elected.

@c_9 I’ve tried to make this argument with @cityslikr many times, but he is a stubborn kind of fellow (whom we love nonetheless)

— Tim Falconer (@timfalconer) January 15, 2016

Maybe they have a point. (Except for the ‘love nonetheless’ business. It’s an established fact that Tim Falconer detests me for my youth and rugged good looks.) Maybe I can no longer see the forest for the trees. Better, if not good, policy should always be preferred to bad policy. It’s amazing to me that I actually find myself writing such a sentence. And the politics of budgeting has always been about trade-offs and prioritizing. None of this is anything John Tory has ushered onto the scene.

I guess the source of my frustration and resentment is that while it’s a political landscape John Tory inherited, he’s chosen instead to navigate it rather than challenge it. In the post-Ford scorched earth environment of low-taxes-at-any-cost and non-reality based transit plans, Mayor Tory has played along. Prioritizing that unfunded $67 million in the budget is a whole lot harder because he’s refused to entertain reasonable discussions about property tax rates and other revenue tools. We’re piecemealing together a more acceptable transit approach not because of Mayor Tory’s reasonableness but because, for nearly two years now, he’s also been playing along with his predecessor’s unrealistic belief that transit comes for free and shouldn’t interfere with our ability to drive around the city.

Is that an improvement? Maybe. I’m not entirely convinced, though. What Toronto needs right now is an injection of pure, unadulterated aspiration and methods necessary to achieve that. What we’re getting from Mayor Tory is a placebo.

It might work. There’s scientific evidence suggesting such a positive effect can happen. After 4 years of backsliding on almost every conceivable front, any step forward, no matter how small or circuitous, should be seen as progress. Dampen your expectations and things look a lot less bleak. Always remember. It could be worse, in two words: RobDoug Ford.

I just have to learn that, when drowning my sorrows in a self-pity binge of What Could Bes, my booze filled glass is half full not half empty.

— humbly submitted by Cityslikr

Bully Budgeting

Posted on January 14, 2016 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

It was just a coincidence, I’m sure, that I was reading through Torontoist’s 2015 Heroes and Villains list while listening to the first of the public deputations on the 2016 budget. (Truth be told, I’d held out following the annual Torontoist series as, once again, I’d been snubbed despite my unrelenting and uncompromising work covering the politics of this city. Hero or Villain. It didn’t matter to me. Just a little recognition might be nice, Torontoist.) As it so happened, I was just getting to the final reveal – Superhero of the Year – when the library workers union president, Maureen O’Reilly, sat down to speak to the budget committee.

No, really. That’s exactly how it happened. Sometimes life can be that serendipitous.

Read what Eva Hd wrote about the Toronto Public Library, in nominating it as Superhero of the Year:

The individual branches’ lovingly curated and topical displays, whether tying in to contemporary political issues such as Idle No More or featuring mystery Valentine books wrapped in red tissue paper for February 14, always amaze and amuse. On any given day, TPL’s librarians can be heard giving tips to adolescents on how to find books and movies about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, showing seniors how to use the internet, guiding researchers through the archives, and telling homeless people where to find the bathroom with equal amounts of patience and grace, while the security guards interact respectfully with everyone and will often be seen helping out at kids’ story time.

Now here’s David Nickle writing about Maureen O’Reilly’s budget committee deputation:

“It’s 2016. It’s no longer acceptable to underpay the ladies of the library and to continually cut them.”

O’Reilly was referring to the Toronto Public Library Board’s recommendation to save $250,000 by cutting 6.7 full-time equivalent page positions – a move that would mean between 12 and 14 of the minimum-wage pages would lose their jobs.

The pages, said Reilly, are bearing much of the weight of a cut in library staffing that she said amounts to 25 per cent since 1992. The position of page was traditionally a part-time job for high school students, but currently, the average age of a page at Toronto Public Library is 43. They do the work of reshelving materials and helping at checkouts.

That’s what you call working ‘harder and smarter’ with less. It’s just what budget hawks like our mayor (like so many mayors before him) love to hear, love to tout. See, Toronto. We continue to nick and cut at library services, and they still keep providing exemplary service to residents of this city. It can be done!

Libraries, and those who work so diligently to make them the key community hubs that they are, represent the kind of soft services line-by-line, always searching for efficiencies, nickel-and-dime politicians love to go after. Easy targets. Libraries don’t directly provide life-or-death support to residents. They aren’t grand infrastructure symbols elected officials can cut ribbons at.

Actually, that’s not quite true. Almost any politician who isn’t a Ford – Doug was convinced there were more libraries than Tim Horton’s in his ward and would’ve slashed them ‘in heartbeat’ — loves to oversee the building of a library. The 100^th TPL branch was opened in Scarborough last year. It’s the funding of their operations that’s so tempting to shave, trim and hack at.

So, working at the library for many falls into the precarious employment category. Half of the workers are contracted, meaning benefits, a living wage and the like are but a pipedream. At Tuesday’s budget deputations, library worker Tori MacDonald talked about scrambling to branches all over the city in the search of hours. For Ms. MacDonald, the librarian’s lot in Toronto was not one where she could see buying a home, raising a family.

Bully for them, those of us with plenty of space at home to find a quiet spot to work, with easy access to all the internet we need, with that book we want one Amazon click away, with our own communities already carved out, will say. What’s a librarian’s job anyway? Checking out books. Putting them back on the shelves when they’re returned. Why should we pay a premium for that?

But read the Torontoist piece and realize that our library system represents much more than that to many residents of this city. In fundamentally important ways, our libraries and those (wo)manning the desks, counters and stacks – Yes, 75% of library workers are female. Women and precarious employment. Surprise! — serve as, if not gatekeepers, then the welcoming committee of this city for newcomers and other oftentimes marginalized segments of our community. Libraries provide both a physical as well as social shelter for this city.

How much should that be worth to us?

It’s easy to embrace the big gestures, the grand symbols of our civic well-being. The shiny new transit projects and plans, the high rise office towers, the beautiful, “world class”, outside public spaces. What we always overlook, however, in our seemingly perpetual chest-beating, looking out for the taxpayer push to scrimp toward balanced budgets is the vital element of the human scale. “Finally,” Hd writes in the Torontoist, “TPL locations are also some of the last places in Toronto where you can still get a glass of water and use the bathroom for free, a not insignificant attribute in our increasingly precious metropolis.”

Our libraries and the people working to make them cornerstones of neighbourhoods and communities are indeed significant attributes ‘in our increasingly precious metropolis’. We need to defend them from those intent on only counting costs and ignoring the benefit side of the ledger. A strong library system is not simply a nice-to-have. It is a need-to-have, and we have to start treating it as such, beyond just the easy to spot and promote bricks-and-mortar, to the people inside, working to make it the remarkable enterprise it is.

— bookishly submitted by Cityslikr

Mayor Busy McBusy

Posted on November 30, 2015 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

I couldn’t help rolling my eyes at this Toronto Star file photo of our mayor, John Tory, stepping through the subway turnstiles, all the morning papers in hand. Mayor McBusy. Busy, busy, busy. Off to tend to the city’s business and keeping on top of all necessary and pertinent Toronto information a mayor needs to know.

Relentless PR.

The mayor is everywhere. Mayor Tory is on the job! The era of the absentee mayor is over. Full steam ahead!

But a year into his first term now, what’s really been accomplished? The rollbacks of the previous administration, most specifically on the transit file, have been slowed. The police budget continues to grow. Road repairs have sped up with the corresponding cost increase to getting the job done. A war on rush hour parking infractions has been waged when Mayor Tory’s needed to look like he’s very serious about combating congestion. Then, back to business as usual.

We have a poverty reduction strategy that, at this juncture, is about as valuable as the paper the report’s written on, all good intentions but, as of yet, lacking any serious funding. And Mayor Tory talks of keeping any sort of property tax increase – the city’s biggest source of revenue — for the 2016 budget ‘at or below the rate of inflation’. So yeah, don’t expect the bucks to be flowing in to start fighting poverty.

A short, permeable list of done deeds, amplified by plenty of do-good rhetoric and posturing. Or, more generously, as David Nickle wrote last week in his The City column, “…baby steps are better than none…a very tiny step in the right direction.” Or, more generous still, as now mayor staffer, director of strategic initiatives, Siri Agrell, put it back in March: “I respect @JohnTory approach to governing and think it should be the model: small, tangible actions that add up over time to real progress.”

An argument for incrementalism (h/t @JohnTory_) after 4 years of radical reactionism of the Ford era. Keep Calm and Carry On, and all that.

But what if every, say, 3 tiny, incremental steps forward are countered by one massive cock-up clusterfuck? A horrendous policy pursuit which will invariably set the city back decades? What’s the sum total of that calculation?

Mayor Tory’s continued obstinacy in the face of increased pushback on the Scarborough subway threatens to derail proper transit planning in this city. Never mind his own SmartTrack where all signs point to an equally monumental grievous transit planning setback. Those two backward steps alone overwhelm any incremental gains he may’ve made since taking office.

His pursuit of a Gardiner East hybrid solution flies in the face of any progress he hopes to achieve in attending the climate change conference in Paris later this week. As he coddles car drivers in this city, our chief planner points out that 40% of Toronto’s greenhouse gas emissions come from vehicle use. Forget incrementalism. The mayor’s actions are outright counter-productive and working at cross purposes to his public stance.

Besides, a very strong argument could be made that, at this point of time, municipalities need much more than incremental leadership. Not just in terms of environmental issues but on the governance and financial files as well. If Toronto regressed on those fronts while Rob Ford was mayor, less regression isn’t necessarily a step forward. Bold initiatives need to happen. A boldness Mayor Tory proclaims to be driven by but a boldness not much in evidence in the actions he’s taken.

The mayor and his team spend an awful lot of time carefully crafting the image of a dynamic, energetic man of action, wrestling civic matters into a positive submission. A resolved future-facer, boldly (did they mention ‘bold’?) grappling mightily with our 21^st-century problems and challenges. Yielding ‘baby steps…in the right direction’, leaving crises looming larger, image is everything, the only thing, in fact.

Look busy and everyone will assume things are getting done.

— busily submitted by Cityslikr