Tag Archives: Doug Holyday

The Mayor’s True Colours

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If you’re one of those people who think our city councillors are underworked and overpaid, I highly recommend that you attend a council meeting or two to disabuse you of such inaccurate notions. While just the tip of the iceberg of what their job description, meetings are grinds with as much, if not more, going on behind the scenes as what we see performed out in the open. Yes, you can point to the laggards, those not actively engaged and who would receive failing grades for class participation. I’d be willing to bet that for many of those, the parry and thrust of debate simply is not their forte. They excel in the multitude of other duties councillors are responsible for. And then there’s Cesar Palacio. I kid. I kid. I’m sure every council needs an invisible non-entity taking up space.

Council meetings can also be extraordinarily engrossing to witness. They’re like visual variations on the Pixies song structure. slowslowFASTFASTslowslowFASTslowFASTslowslow. Nothing happens. Nothing happens. Languor and stultifying boredom. Interminable talk about meal breaks. And then, the proposed schedule comes up for a vote and the seemingly innocuous ‘expedited budget process’ lying there within, suddenly mayhem breaks loose. Amendments start flying. Staff is summoned. Councillors scramble to and fro. Points of order demanded. Points of privilege taken. Rhubarb-rhubarb-rhuarb. Rhubarb-rhubarb-rhuarb. And then… calm. Repeat as many times as necessary. Vote. Adjourn.

Now it’s entirely possible that yesterday’s meeting was something of an anomaly. Uncharacteristically fraught with political machinations, the first skirmishes of a new council that has undergone a radical shift from centre-left to far right. Like a couple boxers in the early rounds of a fight, feeling each other out with jabs and some fancy footwork to find weaknesses and vulnerabilities in their opponents.

Opponents? you say. The election is over. City council should be a place where there is a coming together. A meeting of minds to hash out and seek to solve the problems of the city. Leave your partisanship at the door, buckos. Time to roll up your sleeves and get down to the business of building a better Toronto.

Well, no. While City Hall has never been free of politics (especially since amalgamation), this session is shaping up to take the discord to a whole new level. Starting with the executive committee and working down, senior posts in the Ford Administration are exclusively occupied by right wing councillors. More importantly, they are also almost entirely from the suburbs, meaning that on vital, big ticket matters like the police service and budget, there are no voices from downtown at the committee level. No geographic input for voters who didn’t hop aboard the anti-gravy train train.

And no, before you even try blurting it out, David Miller did not do the same thing (exhibit A: his 1st budget chief was a Scarborough councillor from the right of centre who supported Miller’s rival, John Tory in the 2003 election.) Neither did Mel Lastman so nakedly and insecurely pack his committees with such slavish loyalty for that matter.

On day 1, it worked for Mayor Ford. As he crowed to the Globe’s Kelly Grant, “We got everything we wanted.” Yep. Everything came up Ford on Thursday but not without some surprisingly strong pushback from a group of councillors led by Adam Vaughan, Gord Perks and Janet Davis over the ‘expedited budget process’ that the mayor is pushing, hidden within the council schedule proposal. When amendments were offered to give more time for council to sort through budget matters between scheduled meetings and to hear from the public, Team Ford scrambled hard to get just enough votes to send the amendments to the Executive Committee where they will in all likelihood die an ignominious death. A couple squeakers should give pause to the mayor’s machine that it just might not be as invincible as it thinks it is. Although, judging by the 5 hours or so I sat in council chambers, the mayor hasn’t surrounded himself with many of the reflective types.

No, the mayor’s team in council seems to consist of bitter ideologues more interested in exacting revenge for their exclusion from power during the Miller years than they are dealing with the problems of the city. In fact, a noticeable waft of anti-democracy hangs about them. During the debate over public input on the city budget, the Deputy Mayor, Doug Holyday, opined that deputations were largely for those wanting to get their face on cable television. Giorgio Mammoliti chided those councillors fighting for proper and extended public input for representing wards where their constituents were little more than public organizers. “The trouble with processes with lots of time in them, is that they allow people to organize,” the councillor griped. What?! The people organized! Well, that just won’t do.

All of which flies in the face of Mayor Ford’s open and transparent City Hall promise on the campaign trail. His ‘expedited budget process’ seems dodgy and unnecessary. Their claim of merely seeking to eventually shift it to a January 1st-December 31st timeline has as many minuses as it does pluses. The haste in wanting to get the budget wrapped up by the end of February (rather than the usual April) appears to be driven more by stealth than any sort of respect for the taxpayers.

Of course, that seems absolutely preposterous. Rob Ford campaigned on a platform of looking out for the little guy. Surely, his objective now that he’s in office wouldn’t be to exclude them from such an important civic matter as the budget. Because that would mean that within less than one council meeting, he’s already broken one of his main election platforms. Clearly, I must be jumping the gun.

— stealthily submitted by Cityslikr

Despite Its Best Intentions CP24 Delivers The Debate Goods

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In spite of its continued attempts to broadcast yet another substance-free televised debate last night, CP24 might just have inadvertently delivered one of those turning point moments that can define a campaign. Let’s not overlook the fact that it happened in Ben Mulroney’s absence. While not actually hard enough proof of cause and effect, I do think it’s worth conducting the experiment again with the next debate for further evidence. Do Toronto a favour, Ben, and stay home with the kids!

Although to be fair, it was apparently his grade school idea of picking names from a hat that delivered the seminal moment for me. If you haven’t been following along throughout the summer, each candidate picks another candidate’s name from a hat and asks them a question. Yeah, yeah. It is usually as lame as it sounds but last night Rocco Rossi had the great fortune of picking Rob Ford’s name and, surprisingly, he offered up a softball question that Ford, if he possessed an iota of sense amidst all the rage and indignation, could’ve/should’ve taken yard.

Rossi asked Ford to comment on a recent Toronto Sun article that suggested Ford didn’t single-handedly shepherd the Woodbine Live deal through council as he’s been spouting as an example of how he can work well with his colleagues and get votes passed. According to the rabidly pro-Ford rag, fellow Etobicoke councillor, Suzan Hall also had a hand in getting council unanimously on side. Here, Ford was handed the opportunity to reach out, seem collegial and show the city that he can play with others.

Instead, Rob Ford replied: “She had nothing to do with it. I was the one doing all the leg work.”

Yep. For the second time in a week, Ford’s gone out of his way to diminish, dismiss and generally kick in the slats everyone he works with. First, another councillor from Etobicoke and fiscal conservative soulmate, Doug Holyday, was paraded out to dejectedly state that maybe, just maybe, Ford shouldn’t call city council ‘corrupt’, at least not without some proof. And now this big fuck you to Suzan Hall.

So to you fanboys out there, trumpeting the ascension of Rob Ford and crowing about all the ass he’s going to kick and unions he’s going to bash and cyclists he’s going to run over, if your man gets elected, he’s going to be a mayor of one. All red faced and blustery, he’ll spend his time in office, stomping his feet and bellowing how he can’t get anything done, blaming everyone else but himself when the fact is, while pathological assholes who can’t work with others may be an asset when running an inherited business, it simply doesn’t fly at a non-political party municipal government level.

Oh, yeah. And there was that whole keeping newcomers out of Toronto thing that sprung up last night as well.

Now, I’m not going to call the racist card on Ford with this. I won’t even label him xenophobic because none of his followers will understand what the word means. What I will say is that his remarks in response to questions about the Tamil “migrants” on the west coast reveal a level of ignorance about urban demographic flow that no non-illiterate adult should possess. Like it or not, the world is becoming more and more ‘citified’, to use some hillbilly talk that seems highly appropriate, and we can’t or shouldn’t want to call a timeout so that we can make sure the house is all pur-dy for our guests’ arrival.

Spin all you want, Fordites, but it can’t mask the fact that you’re backing a talking horse who spouts Tea Party sentiments and everyone who signs on to the movement are simply porch sitting, AM radio listening, backwards looking Know-Nothings. What’s next? Building a fence around the city?

Despite that, there’s no reason to think that Rob Ford won’t be our next mayor. None of the other front running candidates are rising to match his simple-minded clarion call.

George Smitherman seems to be sharping his elbows and is starting to smother the talk of eHealth scandal and other provincial government nefariousness under his watch with a blanket of facts, figures and examples of positive things he oversaw. Now if somebody would just tell him that he doesn’t always need to use up every second of his allotted time. The more he talks, the more it becomes apparent that he’s not saying anything.

Sarah Thomson is no longer the doe-eyed valedictorian. She now just seems torn between two warring impulses. The more socially progressive Sarah which is the result of having two artist parents and the fiscally conservative Sarah who built a million dollar business by the time she was 30. What emerges is an utterly meaningless ‘Toronto has a management problem’ message. So I guess we should just fire all the managers then?

While being far more eloquent and sounding much more reasonable than, say, Rob Ford, Rocco Rossi is similarly one-note. “Value for Money” may mean something to business school types but to me it just sounds like Rossi’s talking to, well, business school types. We would all like value for money, Mr. Rossi. Sometimes it just doesn’t work out that way especially in government which is not nor should it be a for-profit enterprise.

Leaving us with the most perplexing campaign among the front runners, Joe Pantalone. I do not get what he’s doing at all. With the left side of the spectrum wide open to him, he insists on snuggling up to the cushy but crowded centre along with Smitherman, Thomson and Rossi. I understand with no ideological threat from that angle, he feels free to ignore voters positioned there because where else do they have to go? Still, he’s defining himself as indistinguishable from the other three and getting lost in the shuffle. Their “freshness” makes him seem stale.

Pantalone should just step back and vigorously defend the administration he’s been an integral part of. Despite what his opponents scream and yell, I don’t think there’s nearly the rampant anti-incumbency among voters that the other candidates are counting on. That’s something they have to believe is out there (and stir up) because they’re not offering anything else. Joe just needs to stop giving over to the reality his rivals are trying to create and show us that, despite being in the throes of a nasty economic downturn and the pains that we’re undergoing as we move into a post-manufacturing centre, Toronto remains a vibrant and healthy place to live.

That’s why people will risk their lives to endure an arduous ocean passage to make their way here. For a better life. We have it despite what all the nay-saying contenders for the mayor’s office are trying to tell us.

— dutifully submitted by Cityslikr

The Neverending Summer Silly Season

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Is it just us here at All Fired Up in the Big Smoke or has this mayoral campaign convulsed into a pitiful freak show? An exercise in futility where no one really capable or with even a modicum of imagination appears to want this city’s top political job. What does it say about the trials and tribulations of running this city or, for that matter, what does it say about the city itself?

In the past week a dubious poll put Rob Ford – yes, that Rob Ford – 9 points ahead of his nearest rival, George Smitherman – yes, that George Smitherman. Why ‘dubious’? Well, no one’s really ever heard of the firm that conducted the poll. No one knows who commissioned the poll. And, most importantly, no one’s telling what the question or questions were that the 420-something pollees were asked. For us, that’s the important one.

The question could’ve been something like, If all the other registered candidates other than Rob Ford suddenly died, who would you vote for in the upcoming election for the office of mayor? You see how that could be important for deciphering voter intention? While Ford supporters crow about his 1st place standing with some 37% support, others might look at the nearly 2/3s of the folks who said they would vote for a dead candidate over Rob Ford. Context matters.

Still, media outlets ran with the results and trumpeted Ford as the official presumptive front runner, gaining momentum and threatening to break the race wide open. That is, until the murky polling details began to surface and then they just did a wipe-clean, removing any references to the Pollstra Poll or calling the poll’s integrity into question. But that did not stop them from referring to Mr. Ford’s growing lead in a poll that may lack any validity whatsoever.

And why would they? If they can arbitrarily determine the 5 or so candidates that voters get to choose from, why can’t they arbitrarily pick who’s in the lead and who’s falling behind? Democracy according to media whim.

Embracing his newly anointed mantle of The Man To Beat, Ford proceeded to act the part of Mayor-in-waiting by calling all his council colleagues ‘corrupt’. That’ll build him some bridges down at City Hall if he does indeed become the next mayor (and I can now write that without wetting myself). Somehow Ford’s True Believers think that once they get him into office he’ll change everything. Their taxes will go down. Their services will increase. It will become legal to run down bicyclists on purpose.

By managing to alienate even the very few councillors who share some of his radical ideological views — like Doug Holyday — Ford will be powerless to do a thing as mayor. (Ooops. Peed my pants just a little on that one. It’s OK.) No, Rob Ford supporters, your guy can’t wrestle 22 councillors into toeing his line. No taxes repealed or cuts enacted just because your guy can stuff more hot dogs into his face than anyone else on council.

As for the former front runner and now possible also ran, George Smitherman? Well, he may be just where he wants to be. Now no longer in the lead according to some discredited poll, no one’s asking him pesky questions anymore about what he as mayor would do about public transit or how he’d balance a 9.2 billion dollar operating budget. You know, all that vision thing stuff.

Instead, he gets to just sit back and help direct peoples’ attention to the glaring grotesqueries of Rob Ford the Candidate. To whit, fordonford.com (which is nowhere near as sexy as it sounds), a website set up by the Smitherman campaign, highlighting all the lowlights of Ford’s various contributions to public discourse over the past 10 years. Look at this guy, eh? What a joke? No one in the right mind could possibly vote for him. So vote for me because I’m not that guy.

Next up, may I suggest Hizzonners.com? A montage of the gaffes and guffaws from both Rob Ford and former mayor Mel Lastman, stitched together to show people the horrifying results of electing an incapable boob to the office of mayor. Clearly the Smitherman campaign has nothing else on offer.

You might think that into this gaping leadership void, someone might take the opportunity to step up and present themselves as more suitable mayoral material. You would think. But it’s hard to truly differentiate yourself from the others when you’re essentially singing from the same fiscally conservative songbook à la Sarah Thomson and Rocco Rossi. Cut. Sell off. Privatize.

As for Joe Pantalone, the sole left-of-centre representative? He should be having a field day, yet he insists on laying low, waiting to spring into action after Labour Day. Come September — watch out Toronto — Joe’s going to pounce hard! Here’s hoping but as of right now, you can colour us increasingly skeptical.

It offends our sensibilities to look at all this and wind up saying something trite, like we get the candidates we deserve. But, well, we get the candidates we deserve, right? More disturbing, however, is that in times of crisis, and it’s not too melodramatic to dub the present as one of those, what with serious fiscal pressures, stop gap measures to deal with aging infrastructure, a shitty transportation system, we seem to encourage leaders to pander to our worst instincts. Narrow-mindedness. Short-sightedness. Miserly tribalism.

Just like we did back in 1997 when we were reeling from the enforced amalgamation. Who did we turn to calm our jangled nerves? A dimwit, for no other reason besides his pledge not to raise our taxes, and then who panicked in the face of a blizzard and continued to embarrass this city, time and time again on both national and international stages. It did not reflect well on us then and it will not reflect well on us now if we insist on traveling down that road once again.

If we want our leaders to be bold and undaunted by future challenges, we first have to exhibit a little of those qualities ourselves.

— sadly submitted by Cityslikr