Tag Archives: Deco Labels and Tags

Give Him The Business

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Here was the original plan.

Wait a couple days, insert a few typos and some of my very own grammatical idiosyncrasies and then claim Ed Keenan’s Doug Ford doesn’t understand much about the private sector post from yesterday as mine. I mean, I’m no Margaret Wente. It could take everybody years to discover that kind of sleight of hand.

But my conscience (or whatever that thing is that causes me to have second thoughts, stupid second thoughts) got the better of me. So I decided to just harp on the article instead. Get all up in your faces and demand you read it, and read it now. It’s that important.

Go ahead. I’ll wait. Make myself a cup of tea. Fire off a few emails. Maybe play some Bejewelled, depending on how slow a reader some of you are. What are you waiting for? Chop, chop. Get cracking.

*  *  *

Am I right? Huh? Huh?

Keenan quotes Councillor Doug Ford from last Sunday’s radio show, talking about the $700 million of ‘unfunded liability’ for the new streetcars the city ordered a few years back:

I don’t think the average person… they wouldn’t do it. Do you go out and purchase a house, purchase a business, purchase a big capital piece of equipment for your business, and not have the money?

Correct, Councillor Ford. The ‘average person’ might not be able to purchase $700 million worth of streetcars on credit. But a house? A business? A ‘big capital piece of equipment’? As a matter of fact they do. Every day. It’s kind of what makes the business world go around.

Kennan goes on to eviscerate Councillor Ford’s ludicrous stance in much finer detail than I could, so I’ll leave you to that. (Except, I do need to point out that, according to the article, the mayor’s Cadillac Escalade birthday present is actually leased – “…absolutely the highest cost of borrowing in the market place. Hands down, no exceptions.” — through his family business. So, if it is written off as a Deco Label business expense, technically speaking, we the taxpayers are paying for it. In that case, Happy Birthday, Mayor Ford.)

The thing I want to know about all this is what the fuck is Councillor Ford’s m.o.? What’s the frequency, Kenneth? I ask.

As a business man, even one handed that title by his father, Councillor Ford can’t actually see the world as he purports to in his role as a politician. He’s not wealthy enough to simply buy everything he wants, cash on the barrel head. Deco Labels doesn’t operate that way, does it? Obviously not, what with the leasing of the mayor’s SUV. It doesn’t make any economic sense if he did. And that’s what he’s all about, isn’t it? Making economic sense.

He can’t be that dumb, can he?

If he’s not, if Councillor Ford and his colleagues following him in lockstep – the mayor, the deputy mayor, the budget chief, the speaker, councillors Vincent Crisanti, Denzil Minnan-Wong, Giorgio Mammoliti et al – are fully aware of best business practices, let’s call them, and do know all about manageable debt and capital expenditures, blah, blah, blah, how come they’re not applying that thinking to the finances of the city? How come they’re pretending Toronto’s financial situation is worse than it is? How (and why) does Mayor Ford make the bold-faced claim that the city’s ‘financial foundation is crumbling’ as he did last year in a speech at the Empire Club?

Is it because despite all their bluster, all the harrumphing and rhubarbing we hear from them about Toronto needing to be run like a business, the last thing they want to do is run the city like a business, and a successful one at that? Go back to Keenan’s article and note the rough comparison between Toronto’s debt to income numbers and Rogers. $4.4 to $11 billion versus $10.79 to $12.47 billion. That’s pretty healthy. Or how about the low, low percentage of the city’s annual operating budget goes to servicing Toronto’s debt versus, say, the percent you pay in terms of your annual income to mortgage payments.

Toronto is, and has been despite the ugly economic environment out there and the vagaries of assistance coming to us from senior levels of government, running like a very efficient, strong business. That’s what the likes of Councillor Ford either doesn’t understand or, more likely, wants you not to know. Their whole schtick, he and his brother mayor and all the far right, fiscal hawk councillors, is based on the dubious premise that the city’s finances are being driven into the ground by tax-and-spend politicians who have no respect for taxpayers.

Why would they want you to think such nonsense?

To admit otherwise, to come clean that Toronto’s books should be the envy of many businesses, would be admitting the unthinkable idea that government actually works. That the taxes we pay as residents of this city aren’t inherently evil and bad. It would be an admission that their political philosophy and view is nothing more than empty ideology. It is destructive. It is selfish.

Councillor Doug Ford simply hates the idea of government. He doesn’t believe it should be run as a business because, well, it’s not a business. Businesses should be run like businesses. Government? Taken out to the woodshed and cut down to size.

Unfortunately for the councillor, that’s not really a politically sellable idea. So he bluffs and blusters about Six Sigma principles, finding efficiencies, yaddie, yaddie, yaddie hoping that enough people will come to the same dim conclusion of government as he holds. It’s been working for him so far.

We just have to keep calling him on all his bullshit talk and force him out into the open. Make him run not as some sound, sane businessman but as the unhinged, radical, anti-government ideologue he actually is. Right now, he’s getting away with hiding in the tall grass.

— prudently submitted by Cityslikr

The Unbearable Smugness of Being Doug Ford

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As often is the case when sitting watching the proceedings down at City Hall, I often think of Edward Keenan. No, not in that way. I don’t even know the man. I think about something he’s recently written which is a frank admission that I’m always a couple steps behind what’s going on, playing perpetual catch-up.

The latest example came yesterday at day 2 of the budget committee’s 2012 capital and operating budget review. In walked committee member, Councillor Doug Ford, spouting nonsense and casting groundless aspersions as he questioned staff, this first time exaggerating sick days/holiday time taken by those working in the city’s 3-1-1 department. Later, he asked if the drug prevention program was still buying bottles of wine for patients. It wasn’t. Not yet done, the councillor then questioned procurement processes with the student nutritional program once more based on, what the Star’s Daniel Dale generously tweeted, “wrong info”.

Or as Mr. Keenan called it last Thursday when writing about Councillor Ford’s November 28th performance on LeDrew Live (still not up on the website), “It was either lying or, in the most charitable interpretation, being dead wrong.”

Another day, another blustery blast of misinformation. Whether owing to gross incompetence on the councillor’s part or crass political gamesmanship, it serves only to diminish the political discourse and reduce the budget debate to little more than he said, she said. Working with your ‘own facts’ to paraphrase David Frum as quoted by Edward Keenan.

I’ll let Keenan’s article speak to that particular issue but I have another bone to pick with the mayor’s brother here. After getting his facts a little askew on how much time of service earns how much vacation time and the actual amount of sick days taken over at 3-1-1, Councillor Ford jocularly asked the room where he could hand in his resume to get a job there. Ha, ha. What a cushy gig, eh? See what I’m getting at here?

As a matter of fact, councillor, yeah, I would like you to hand in your resume and get yourself a job answering questions from concerned, confused, distressed and disgruntled Torontonians at 3-1-1. Put in your 20 years or so to accumulate 6 weeks of vacation. Have at it. It might just wipe clean that smug sense of disdain you have for everyone not living the Doug Ford lifestyle.

That’s an open invitation to everyone out there who get their knickers all in a twist about allegedly easy jobs (usually of the union kind), where the living is large and the pay astronomical. Teachers with their summers off. Six digit making TTC fare collectors. Those goldbricking garbage collectors. Get a real job, you teat-sucking bums!

If these really are such great ways of making a living, why isn’t everyone applying for them? Yes, Councillor Ford, there’s an unusually high absentee rate at 3-1-1 because people just love working there. Like they do at call centre situations the whole world over. “In the private sector, call centre workers have the highest level of absence (14.8 days). This is also the highest level of absence for employees across all industries.” Evidently, taking people’s questions and fielding their complaints on the phone or via the interwebs is everybody’s dream job.

Unlike, say, inheriting a successful business from your daddy. Never having gone that occupational route myself, I can’t talk of its pitfalls and pressures but I’m going to assume being a scion comes with a better benefit package than manning the 3-1-1 phones. One of which seems to be an ease of transition into the job of city councillor despite a shocking lack of qualifications (aside from, I’m With Him) and a near debilitating disinterest in the details of the job itself.

And yet Doug Ford would leave all that behind to work at Toronto’s 3-1-1.

No, not really. He just can’t help himself when it comes to mocking and denigrating those he thinks get paid too much or are afforded too much time off. Why? Because of his deep and abiding respect for the taxpayers who just don’t think it’s right that they be forced to pony up to provide services they rarely use or, if they do, pay the actually going rates for. (Hint: roads.) Like his brother mayor, Councillor Ford is simply looking out for the little guy by stripping away their dignity one misinformed question and wisecrack at a time.

— can I help yoully submitted by Cityslikr

The Mayor’s Business

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Please bear with me if my initial points are a little blurry and all the thoughts not strung together in any sort of coherent fashion. No, Sue-Ann Levy is not ghost writing this post. It’s just that I’ve been banging my head repeatedly against the wall, trying to figure out the general m’eh attitude toward Mayor Ford using his own family printing business, Deco Labels and Tags, to whip up he and his staff a batch of gold embossed business cards.

What part of ‘The Mayor Using His Family Business To Print Business Cards’ doesn’t immediately scream ‘Wrong!’ to everyone? I don’t care if he’s been judicious in not sole sourcing the job out or if he paid fair market value for the order or..or..or.. whatever other flimsy justification he, his brother and staff come up with. There’s a point at every council meeting I’ve ever attended where councillors have to stand and declare ‘an interest’ in a particular item that’s coming up for debate. It’s short hand for ‘conflict of interest’, usually entailing some family member working for the department in question or ownership of a property that may benefit (or not) in a decision council is about to make. Declaring a conflict of interest.

So how can the mayor of Toronto using his family run business to print his business cards be anything other than a conflict of interest? How? How?? Oh. Councillor Minnan-Wong? You had something to say about the matter on The Agenda Monday night?

“But I can also tell you that if the mayor had his druthers about this that he would’ve just had Deco Labels do it for free and had it just delivered to City Hall. But the problem is there are other individuals at City Hall that don’t want him to have these free contributions made to save the taxpayers money for some reason beyond me that was made a few years ago. He would’ve just gone to Deco Labels, had them printed and had the city not be expensed at all. But city council won’t let him do it.”

Hmmm. ‘… other individuals at City that don’t want him to have these free contributions to the taxpayers money…’? Could one of those ‘other individuals’ be the city’s Auditor General, Jeffrey Griffiths? Or then Integrity Commissioner, David Mullan? Seems this practice of using his family business to outfit his office with supplies has been an ongoing concern since back in the early days of Mayor Ford’s time as a councillor. (h/t Edward Keenan whose dynamite article I’m just riffing on here). Turns out, it’s a force of habit that’s been frowned upon but Rob Ford just keeps plugging away at it. Somehow.

And yet the mayor’s council colleagues like Denzil Minnan-Wong, presumably without benefit of a similar family business to help him out around the office, can’t see what the problem is. It’s beyond him why anyone could object to Mayor Ford conducting his official business on his own or Deco Labels and Tags’ dime. (Can you say, `corporate donation`, Councillor Minnan-Wong?) Pish-posh. All’s fair as long as it saves the taxpayers money.

Well councillor, if that’s the case, I say why stop at just measly business cards and letterhead? If it’s all about saving the taxpayers money, let’s try and hand the whole shooting’ match over to anyone who can afford it? Surely there’s got to be someone out there with $9 billion/year they’d be happy to part with in order to run the city. Be great if they could match that again to cover off some of our capital costs too. Then it wouldn’t cost us li’l taxpayers a thing to live in the city.

Never mind the darker implications of public service becoming only the domain of those who can afford it. What about oversight and accountability? Personally, I want to know what our elected officials spent and where the money came from. And frankly, I don’t care if the mayor wants some fancy business cards although I do have to agree with Mr. Keenan that coming from Rob Ford, it is a bit, errr, rich with a noxious whiff of hypocrisy to boot. We’re going with the cheapest bid in contracting out waste collection but not for our business cards? And trying to placate the situation with an ‘I’m paying for it out of my own pocket’ doesn’t cut it either. That money may have come out of your pocket but how exactly did it get in there in the first place? That’s the kind of thing I want kept above board and on the table for everyone to see.

Openness and transparency. That’s a concept Councillor Ford promised to usher in to City Hall if elected mayor. Yet, here he is, still playing fast and loose with his office expenses, maintaining ongoing business with his family firm, fighting off a Compliance Audit Committee request to look through his campaign financing books. It’s all so unseemly and smacks more of disrespect for the taxpayers.

— by the numbersly submitted by Cityslikr