Tag Archives: Ford For Toronto

A Winning Strategy Through Losing

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I’ve really got to hand it to right wingers these days. In terms of public perception they’ve somehow managed to square the circle tightly. On one hand, they are the tough crowd. Tough on crime. Tough on unions. Tough on any issue it’s easy to be tough on. In the next breath, they do self-pity, persecution and abject whining like nobody’s business.

Exhibit A: yesterday’s Toronto Sun (the bible of whinging chest-beaters) editorial, Hypocrites mock Ford over weight. Shrill, off point, chock full of false equivalencies and feet-stompingly paroxysmal, it symbolizes Ford Nation in less than 400 words. “… hypocrites who would be horrified by the ridiculing of someone over their gender, sexual orientation, race or disability, but think it’s fair game to attack a politician they don’t like over his weight… It was simply a vicious way to attack him… Ford doesn’t need or deserve this grief… As for those who should know better, who are ridiculing Ford over his weight, cut the crap.”

Oh, boo hoo. Boo fucking hoo hoo. Politics is a nasty, take no prisoners business. Don’t believe me? Why don’t you ask somebody who helped put the mayor in office. “We’re in the business of getting Conservatives elected and ending Liberal careers. We’re good at it.”

Not to dwell too long on the issue, having argued the point yesterday, but this was never about ridiculing the mayor over his weight. And don’t go pointing out examples of online comments or tweets calling him whatever variation of fat. That’s not a road Ford supporters really want to travel down, is it? What with him having announced yesterday that he won’t be attending the Pride Parade again this year, and all the hate-filled, homophobic vitriol that filled up those spaces in his defence. We’re not going to attribute those sensibilities to the mayor himself, are we? We don’t want to go around suggesting that’s the base he doesn’t want to offend by attending the event, do we?

Despite the Sun trying to wish the fact away (“Spare us the phony defence in some quarters that since the mayor publicly pledged to lose 50 pounds…mocking him about going into a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet is fair game”), Mayor Ford made the question of his weight political. His Cut The Waste Waist idea was nothing more than an attempt to curry public favour during a time when he was taking a beating at City Hall. He stuck his gut in our noses and dared us to say anything about it.

That he appeared to be taking the ‘challenge’ as seriously as the gimmick it actually was by stopping into a fast food joint should serve as a reminder of all the half-cocked, ill-conceived, on-the-fly schemes that make up most of his policies. Sheppard subway anyone? How about a side order of monorails and megamalls on the waterfront?

In an offline conversation with a friend yesterday, we wondered if the weight loss schtick was part of a more long term approach that had worked during the 2010 campaign. It was a win-win for the mayor. If he actually accomplished his goal, he’d be seen as a determined and resolute guy who could see things through. If he didn’t and people started pointing that out, he’d score political points because he was being attacked for his weight. It helped him the first time around. Let’s go to that well again. Failing all the way to re-election.

A Forum Research poll out today certainly suggests it could be a winning strategy for the mayor. “He’s going to have a lot of issues I think he can run on [in an election],” Mr. Bozinoff [Forum Research president] said. “Saying, ‘Look, I want to build the subway, I wanted more outsourcing, I want to get rid of the land transfer tax… and I couldn’t because of council.’ That’s ideal to run on.”

Really? Setting aside the fact an election is still two and a half years off – generations in political time – Mr. Bozinoff is actually suggesting the surest way for Mayor Ford to get re-elected is to continue losing votes. Be the underdog mayor and trumpet loudly and proudly his failure to lead this city on important and vital files. Accept no responsibility and blame others for his glaring inability to forge a democratic consensus and get on with the business of serving the city positively.

Well, that is the right wing way, of course.

I think we’re being conned here, folks. A bump in support for the mayor (shall we compare the numbers for David Miller at the same time of his mayoralty?), at a time when, as Ford for Toronto’s Matt Elliott points out, the mayor’s “…not trying to achieve anything substantial. His attempts to implement major policy and budget changes through 2011 resulted only in battered and sinking poll numbers. The quieter, less divisive tone he’s struck since the end of March has him on a better track with his soft-supporters” now translates into a winning gambit in 2014?

A Through the Looking Glass tweak in strategy. From the initial triumphalism of vote against me at your electoral peril to vote against me because voters love it when I’m a loser. Wait, what?

The more high minded (not the 4/20 high minded types) of us have suggested we pay no attention to the whole Mayor Ford-KFC kerfuffle. It just plays into his strengths, garners him unwarranted sympathy as one of the little guys being ridiculed by downtown elites, blah, blah, blah. Let’s just get on with talking about the real issues that affect the city. Transit, waterfront development, affordable housing.

That’s all well and good if everybody’s on the same page and looking to have an open and honest debate at that level. But it seems that doesn’t work much in the mayor’s favour, so you’ll have to excuse him if he chooses not to participate and stands on the sidelines, blowing raspberries and colour commenting from behind the microphone of his radio show every Sunday. He’s more interested in his own political future than he of the city he was elected to lead.

But I think deliberately ignoring his personality politics and letting him play alone in that sandbox is dangerous. It allows him to polish up his image away from the rough and tumble of governance and further cultivate his cult following. Attention should be called to the fact he’s failing to live up to his weight loss pledge just like he’s failed to live up to so many of the promises he made to the people of Toronto when he asked them for their votes in 2010.

— curiously submitted by Cityslikr

Who Wouldn’t Want A Casino?

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I joked about this on the Twitter last week. Probably wasn’t the first one. Definitely not the last.

But now it seems to deserve more than the 140 character treatment as, zombie-like, it’s an idea, a dumb idea, a highly unoriginal idea that just won’t die. A waterfront casino cash cow. Ching-ching!

It reminds me of one of my favourite movie lines from one of my favourite 80s movie, Prizzi’s Honor. “If Marxie Heller’s so fucking smart, how come he’s so fucking dead?”

If a casino’s so fucking smart, how come suburban councillors are so fucking dead set against having one in their ward? Never does a council or committee meeting go by when we don’t hear the whine from the likes of councillor Mammoliti or Nunziata or Ford about how downtown gets everything and the suburbs get stiffed. Hey, folks. Here’s your chance. Step right up and claim your casino.

Remember The Great Sheppard Subway Struggle of 2012? Sure you do. Scarborough councillors Ainslie, Berardinetti, Crawford, Del Grande, Kelly and Thompson all demanded that Scarborough residents get what downtown had, subways not no stinkin’ streetcars. They weren’t second class citizens. They deserved first class transit.

Well, where  are they all now? You want something downtown doesn’t have? Here, take the casino. Please. There’s some waterfront out there in your neck of the woods, isn’t there? Stick the casino there, why don’t you.

That's NIMBY not GUMBY

I heard Budget Chief Del Grande on the news this morning, suggesting that the old city of Toronto’s inability to say no is a source of the city’s money woes. Well, here you go, Mr. Budget Chief. Downtown’s finally saying no to a casino. Maybe Ward 39 would like to take it off our hands.

For the casinos biggest supporters, it’s a really good idea in someone else’s ward.

Just like transit planning. As John McGrath wrote about the commissioner of Los Angeles transit, Richard Katz’s seminar yesterday, “…everyone wants a transit solution that other people use.” Or development planning. John tweeted from today’s Toronto-East York Community Council meeting (he’s everywhere, that John McGrath): Councillor [Pam] McConnell, speaking for every deputant against height ever: “This is a beautiful design, for somewhere else.”

Everybody wants the upside — Yeah, whatever. That’s for another post — of a casino, the benefits but none of the headaches. Parking and congestion. Down-and-out gamblers. A Jeff Foxworthy crowd streaming out into the streets, looking for a post-show nosh at a Cracker Barrel.

If I wanted a fucking casino in my neighbourhood, I’d move fucking downtown!

It’s almost as if these councillors all know a casino is little more than a dog and pony show, it’s not really going to contribute much to city’s bottom line but it’s a great way to stick to downtowners. Ohhh, they’re gonna hate this! Like they did tearing up the Jarvis bike lanes, de-fancifying the Fort York bridge and making threatening noises about the Portlands.

In his Metro article today, Matt Elliott pointed out that one of the mayoral campaign platforms of Rob Ford was to give “…more power to local community councils to make neighbourhood decisions.” Instead, we’ve seen a whole lot of imposing their will upon others by Team Ford. Might I suggest that for some of the more vocal, pushy ones, they take a little more time to tend to their own garden, gussy up their own respective wards. That way, perhaps, in the future we won’t have to listen to their bellyaching, complaining how they never get anything.

How about starting with a casino?

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

— generously submitted by Cityslikr

We Really Going Down This Path?

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Watching The Bottom Line segment last night on the CBC’s National a day before the federal budget was coming down and one of the panelists Patricia Croft said, and I’m paraphrasing here, that the private sector experienced a serious recession a few years back and now it was time for the public sector to face its own recession.

???

So the divide is complete. Those not lapping it up at the public sector trough for these past 3, 4 years, the unlucky sods stuck toiling away heroically in the private sector trenches have seen tough times, buddy. They’ve endured while their lazy counterparts in government, most all unioned up, have been picking the pockets of hardworking taxpayers, living large on our dime.

Now it’s time for a little payback, err, comeuppance, I mean, yeah, OK, payback. Enough is enough. We all know what caused the recession. Wildly inflated public sector wages, benefits, pensions and sick days. Those damn teachers brought us to the edge of financial apocalypse! We demand restitution! We demand a day of reckoning!

It’s remarkable, really, just how effective this bait and switch has been performed. That all this government debt, from the federal right down to the municipal level, has been due to reckless spending out of the public purse. None of it came from a mania for slashing taxes or a lack of oversight of financial institution that believed in their own corrective powers and that greed was indeed good – bankers gone wild!

And here we are, anemically digging ourselves out from under the wreckage, no serious questions asked or answered about how we really got into this particular mess, and now it’s time to gut our way back to prosperity. Trust us, we’re instructed by the same people who led us off the cliff in the first place, this is how it’s done. Have we ever steered you wrong before?

We’ve asked this question more than a few times before but in light of this week’s budget madness it bears repeating. How exactly does it work, this cutting your way to growth? You keep wages stagnant, remove benefits, reduce pensions, making people more vulnerable to the vagaries of the market. They respond either by piling on more personal debt or tucking what money is left under a mattress. That expands the economy how exactly?

I don’t know why I even bother asking, frankly. No actual answer is ever forthcoming. We cut our debt and debt payments and, voila, there’s more money in the bank to spend on those things people really want. Except, point me to an example where that’s actually happened. Don’t talk to me about the Chretien/Martin Mid-90s Miracle where, in fact, the pain wasn’t short but sweet. Instead it was just passed along, downloaded if you will, to the provinces who, if they aren’t resource extracting the shit out of their economies, are mired down in debt and dislocation, themselves having offloaded as much of the fiscal difficulties onto their municipalities.

As Trish Hennessy pointed out earlier this week at Framed in Canada, this austerity model has so far proven to be hypothetical, illusory, nice and neat on the blackboard but not the proven panacea its adherents claim. With each cut and reduction Greece makes, more bailout money is needed to keep it from collapsing. Great Britain is travelling down a similar path. Austerity, along with its philosophical tax cut soul mate, aren’t really driving economies in the direction their proponents tout.

Rahm Emanuel, that staunch fiscal conservative according to Councillor Doug Ford, is looking at “a ‘major new infrastructure program’ to create tens of thousands of jobs across Chicago by ‘coordinating the revitalization of Chicago’s infrastructure.” What? Government spending in Chicago?! But Mayor Rahm. Everybody knows governments don’t create jobs. Governments just get in the way of the real job creators in the private sector. Unless they don’t.

Our friend Matt Elliott over at Ford For Toronto today wrote about how Mayor Ford should be luxuriating in the spotlight (our words not his) with his handling of Toronto’s labour situation. Deals signed with very little disruption so far, ‘phenomenal news’, according to the mayor, that gives the city flexibility. Flexibility to reduce the work force, to outsource jobs to the private sector, to start respecting the taxpayers.

No doubt this is exactly what Mayor Ford campaigned on, probably even more so than his promise to build subways. He was elected to bring unionized city workers to heel. Punch them in the face, bust their unions preferably. So that we would never have to endure the horrors of another summer garbage strike. Ever.

They need to get a taste of what the real world’s like out there. They need their own recession. Recovery starts from the bottom and our public workers haven’t hit there yet.

— questioningly submitted by Cityslikr