All Fried Up In The Big Smoke

Less political. More fictional.

Budget Chief No

Posted on May 29, 2012 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

As we head into today’s abbreviated budget committee meeting with news of a $90 million surplus for the first 3 months of 2012, Budget Chief Mike Del Grande announces what any good, prudent, sane fiscal manager would. Hey, everybody! It’s party time! Let’s roll us back some sources of revenue. Woo-hoo!!

Or, as Elizabeth Church in the Globe and Mail phrases it: “He [budget chief] plans to push for a reduction of the land transfer tax in 5-per-cent increments beginning next year.”

Huh.

What?

Could you elaborate a little further, Mr. Budget Chief?

“He [budget chief] plans to push for a reduction of the land transfer tax in 5-per-cent increments beginning next year, arguing that the city cannot continue to rely on a revenue source that is tied to the fortunes of the real estate market…Mr. Del Grande says the city’s continued reliance on the tax will leave a ‘massive shortfall’ in its budget when the real estate market cools. ‘The land transfer tax is giving us a false sense of security’.”

O… K… Let me see if I follow the budget chief – who is a chartered accountant, don’t you know – follow his logic here. Because Toronto is experiencing a particularly hot real estate market, despite all the fear-mongering that the land transfer tax would kill people’s ability to buy a house, and is thus generating higher than expected revenues for city coffers, we need to start eliminating the source of revenue in order to wean ourselves off the LTT bounty in preparation for the time when we’re making less when the market cools? Sort of a voluntary reduction before the inevitable enforced one sets in?

Hmmm…

We really need to question Budget Chief Del Grande’s motivations. Or his competency.

Regardless of your position in life, whether a public sector budget chief, a private sector financial controller, an individual homeowner, in gazing into the future and spying a possible economic downturn on the horizon, who reacts with the suggestion to cut revenues? Batten down the hatches everyone! We need to start making less money now in order to be used to making less money later!

It makes no sense.

Don’t believe me?

Ask the city manager, Joe Pennachetti, himself a chartered accountant although, evidently, he secured his credentials at an entirely different school (of thought). In a talk delivered a couple weeks ago at the Munk School’s Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance and one we wrote about here and here, and Matt Elliott wrote here (yes, I do think it’s an important enough point to flog over and over until everyone knows it by rote), Mr. Pennachetti suggested that, while there were still efficiencies to be found, it was revenue generation that we needed to be talking about going forward. City building, whether infrastructure, transit, couldn’t be done through cuts or further efficiencies. Toronto, like every other city in this province, country, continent, needs new sources of revenue.

Of course, city building is not part of our current budget chief’s vernacular. I don’t think it too off the mark to suggest he’s more of the Grover Norquist/starve the beast type of politician. Taxation is bad. Therefore government spending is bad. Widows and orphans be damned.

Only hardcore right wing ideologues would suggest that, in this age of austerity, government look to reduce revenues.

Even if the budget chief demanded that any surplus be used to pay down capital debt, he’d gain some traction as trying to have a reasonable argument although not much of one. The city’s debt level is just fine, thank you very much. Credit rating agency Moody’s thinks so. The city manager thinks so (with one caveat: our social housing repair backlog). Any attempt to compare our situation to that of Greece automatically disqualifies you as a serious participant in this discussion.

Instead, Budget Chief Del Grande only raises the spectre of our capital investment debt to argue against both government revenue and spending. This year it’s: “Councillors who want to spend the surplus are forgetting the huge capital costs facing the city,” he [Del Grande] said, “including the multimillion-dollar tab for refurbishing the crumbling Gardiner Expressway.” Last year we had to cut services and programs in order to pay down the debt.

The budget chief needs to start coming clean with us and simply admit that he doesn’t think government should be in the business of governing. That way, we could cease pretending to have a rational debate on this point with him and get on with what we really should be discussing. Mike Del Grande’s unfitness to be overseeing our city’s finances.

— fit of piquely submitted by Cityslikr

Keep Your Seatbelts Fastened

Posted on May 28, 2012 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

Politics in Toronto right now is how I imagine it feels to be on an airplane when the engines shut down in midflight. It’s not yet a catastrophic failure. Nothing’s on fire. You can’t smell smoke. You are, in fact, gliding, maintaining enough altitude to convince yourself and the hysterical man sitting beside you that everything’s fine, just a glitch. No need to shit your pants at the moment.

You keep repeating Captain Sully Sullenberger’s name over and over again in your head, and remember Air Transat Flight 236, that fuelless Airbus that landed in one piece in the Azores. Besides, what are the chances of your actually dying in an airplane crash? Infinitesimally low. Don’t panic. Everything’s going to be A-OK.

As everybody’s pointed out by now — the latest observation coming from Matt Elliott — Team Ford has moved beyond autopilot at this juncture, and simply switched the engines off, it would seem. Sitting back to enjoy the view, they appear confident that they can re-engage the system in about 18 months and coast smoothly into re-election mode. In the meantime, it’s all, Look, ma! No hands!!

But I have to say, watching the mayor in inaction lately makes me wonder why on earth he’d want to win again in 2014. He really doesn’t appear to be enjoying the job. Why would he inflict another 4 years on himself?

I know the working theory.

The mayor and his councillor-brother are already hard at it, kicking into campaign mode, and preparing to back a slate of pro-Ford candidates that, once installed, will make governing much easier for Mayor Ford. A simple clapping of the hands and His Worship’s will will be done. Just a few more Vincent Crisantis and a few fewer Gloria Lindsay Lubys and we will be truly a Ford Nation Toronto, united under fealty to the Emperor of Etobicoke.

It’s this kind of magical thinking, I believe, that has suspended the mayor in animation at this point. It was all going to be so easy. City Hall didn’t have a revenue problem, it had a spending problem. Stop the spending. Stop taxing. Everything would be gravy(less). Only some sort of career politician not looking out for the little guy would make it more complicated than that.

“You can’t run a government if you hate government,” John Moore wrote in the National Post a couple months ago. Or, in riff on the old H.L. Mencken nugget, you provide clear, simple and wrong answers to complex problems. This isn’t rocket science, folks. This isn’t the private sector. It’s government. How hard could it possibly be?

As the mayor is discovering, yeah, it’s pretty hard. So he’s retreated back into his own little cocoon, hoping for a more favourable roll of the dice, councillor-wise, in a couple years. Then, you’ll see, it’ll be a snap.

Leaving us to do what?

While Mayor Ford and his brother air their views and policy initiatives on their weekly radio show, their once surprisingly formidable team has dwindled to a few unreliable courtiers. Those who still believe do so in a way that is seldom helpful to the cause. I mean, if your movement depends on the likes of Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong to provide the voice of reason and sound judgement, clearly there’s some sort of engine problems.

For others, it’s now blatantly just a marriage of convenience. No pressing the ejector seat, pulling the ripcord and parachuting to safety because you’re either too lazy, too unsure how this is all still going to play out or too in love with your committee chair position to risk losing it due to mayoral ire. So you quietly go about your business working matters out with councillors Mayor Ford isn’t in the habit of dealing with, hoping that whatever it is you’re working on has long since disappeared down the mayor’s disinterest hole.

The fact is, getting past ‘the mandate’ the mayor got in his ‘landslide’ election in 2010, he was among very few politicians elected municipally to have much of that Tea Party sensibility. The Fords. The Deputy Mayor. The Budget Chief. The Speaker. The afore-mentioned councillors Minnan-Wong and Crisanti.

After that?

As angry as 47% of voters in Toronto were in 2010, few of them hated government as much as they hated the government Rob Ford successfully convinced them had been in control down at City Hall during his time there. Now that the curtain’s been pulled back, revealing nothing more to it than a dyspeptic, dystopian view of government in general that’s fetidly percolated in the psyche of our mayor, his has become a lonely vigil. How exactly do you maintain anti-government momentum toward a government you ostensibly lead? It defies the laws of physics, even electoral physics. (Yes, such a thing exists.)

The best thing councillors could be doing right now, especially those who Team Ford will be targeting in 2014 (and you know who you are), is to govern well. Show your constituents and the city that government is not inherently evil, unhelpful or whatever other term of derision the mayor and his brother will throw at it. Government can only be bad when it governs badly which this administration is doing currently. The surest way to help the mayor now would be to continue to enable him, expending energy propping him up and pretending he’s become anything but political dead weight.

Time to remove the mayor and his brother from the cockpit and switch from auto-pilot over to co-pilot.

— flight attendantly submitted by Cityslikr

Junk Politics

Posted on May 10, 2012 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

Times being what they are, I find occasionally stepping away from it all beneficial to my mental health. To head off and visit somewhere free of the politics of place and simply enjoy the view. I’m just a tourist, taking in the scenery.

It’s been difficult over the last couple years certainly to tear myself away from Toronto politics. Blink for a minute and you may well miss something extraordinary, something you’d never thought you’d see in your lifetime. When you think it couldn’t get any crazier, nothing could top what you’ve just witnessed, those diminished expectations are easily surpassed.

But I’m discovering that such novelty does have its limits. When the incredible becomes simply routine, it loses significance or much of any newsworthiness. The abnormal sinks into the swamp of the new normal.

So it goes with the mayoralty of Rob Ford.

Much has been written in the last few days about the latest antics of His Worship, his aggressive encounter with the Toronto Star’s Daniel Dale in a public park outside the mayor’s home in Etobicoke, the controversial appearance of Sun News’ David Menzies on the Ford Brothers’ Sunday radio show and Mayor Ford’s declining to attend the PFLAG flag raising next week. None of it flattering for either our city or the chief magistrate we voted to represent us. “Rob Ford’s stupid and offensive radio show demeans us all” from Matt Elliott. “Send in the clowns” by Edward Keenan. And “Rob Ford and the Banality of Excess” by Michael Kolberg in the Toronto Standard.

There’s not much I can add to the growing canon of Rob Ford is really a bad mayor literature except for a hearty but sad agreement. What was once funny and entertaining has now become just sad and worrisome. Who knew that electing a mayor with destructive anti-urbanist views could adversely affect the city?

I remember way back in 2000 with the election of George W. Bush as president, comedian Richard Belzer saying that while as an American he was sad about the result, as a comedian he couldn’t be happier. The jokes essentially wrote themselves but, 12 years on, America has yet to recover from the debacle.

That’s sort of the feeling that’s developing here. Oh, the fun we are having watching such a sad spectacle but at what cost? In fact, that’s not even quite right. The fun was fleeting. “But a story needs an arc,” Kolberg writes, “and Rob Ford’s administration is a flat line.” Pause.. pause.. pause.. indignant mayoral temper tantrum.. pause.. pause.. pause.. indignant mayoral temper tantrum.. pause.. pause.. pause.. Where’s the new beat to push the story forward?

Actually, that’s being supplied by city council. In the face of Mayor Ford’s inability or interest in leading, a majority of councillors is slowly coalescing to fill the void. Normally unaligned players are now finding common ground in developing an agenda without any positive input from the mayor and city business is being conducted. Perhaps more slowly than it would if a mayor participated but proceeding nonetheless. First time councillors are now finding their footing in the wide open space created by the mayor’s truculent intransigence.

Not all is dark and forlorn.

What is most disturbing about all this, however, is Toronto’s descent into what Benjamin DeMott has called ‘Junk Politics’. It’s the politics of anger, resentment and division that appeals to our worst instincts rather than seeks to inspire our better natures. Watching the risible reactions from the mayor’s supporters in defense of his indefensible actions is increasingly disheartening. There is no wrong in anything he does, no justification that isn’t based on some perceived slight or ulterior motive of those who are not seen as being onside or part of the team. The once vaunted Ford Nation, the mayor’s base, sees only threats not opposing opinions. They thrive in a cesspool of negative catch phrase outrage, unable or unwilling to engage in any semblance of adult discourse.

This is Mayor Ford’s Toronto, his bread and butter and only hope in any sort of political future for himself. They are proud in their obstinance and conviction that the way forward is by looking backwards. It’s a tough nut to crack. One that guarantees a continued war of attrition and a threat to Toronto’s ability to develop into a healthy, productive and fair-minded 21^st-century city.

— sadly submitted by Cityslikr