The province’s ‘top doc’, the Chief Medical Officer of Health, Doctor Kiernan Moore’s response this morning in quotes at the bottom. Indoor masking ‘strongly recommended’.
Strongly recommended. Deep in the midst of an “extreme surge”, an earlier than usual surge, with a “triple threat” of respiratory viruses, omicron Covid variants, a severe flu strain and RSV, where pediatric wards are beyond capacity, more surgeries being postponed to open up beds for respiratory emergencies, 15-20 people still dying weekly from Covid, etc. & etc., Fade to Bleak. Continue reading →
I tried my best to back off, relax and go oblivious for a couple of weeks during this past holiday season. It was largely successfully, I’d say. I paid scant attention to what was going on around these parts, politically speaking.
But then came these on New Year’s Day from Mayor Tory’s office:
In #TO2015Budget we’ll spend on programs that help you: from child nutrition programs, to youth jobs and better transit.
Pure paint-by-numbers messaging, carefully checking off each box of high profile issues. Public transit. Affordable housing. Efficiencies and the family budget trope. And topping the list, of course, low taxes. Always keeping the taxes low.
Pure calculation rather than inspiration. Bot wishes for the New Year. Thirteen months in office, twenty-four before the next election and Mayor Tory campaigns not governs.
For Mayor John Tory, it’s business as usual but done in a business-like manner. He’s pursuing little change in direction. Just a change in tone.
But will 2016 allow him the luxury of such continued pretense? It’s hard to imagine how. City staff has already presented an unbalanced budget with unfunded liabilities on the operating side including, among other promises, a shortfall for the early Sunday subway opening the mayor has championed. SmartTrack and Scarborough subway reports are coming due with balloon popping possibilities very probable. There’s the final TCHC report on the $2.6 billion repair backlog from the mayor’s Task Force to come and the new Task Force to look at the Toronto Police Services $1 billion annual budget.
Judging from the mayor’s New Year’s resolutions, he’s totally unprepared and unwilling to realistically face any of these challenges. “On the verge of great things” indeed. Unlocking Toronto’s potential through more wishful thinking and failed ideological posturing.
It’s no longer enough to be content with the idea that, if nothing else, John Tory has chased the clown show from City Hall. In fact, he hasn’t at all. The clown character has simply changed.
Gone is the borscht belt tinged vaudeville act with its hilarious, lowdown slapstick, replaced by a far older tradition. Il Dottorre. The unimaginative pedant who believes himself to be everything he isn’t, a man in love with the sound of his own voice, an obstacle to actual progress.
Mayor Tory believes he can help. He wants to help. He’s simply incapable of doing so, locked into a mindset that permits little outside opinion that doesn’t confirm what he already believes.
Unfortunately, that may not be enough to move him out of the way. Already, many observers have conceded him 2018, imagining another Ford-Tory showdown with no other candidate daring to split the vote for fear of putting a reinvigorated Rob Ford back into the mayor’s office. Pure bogeyman politics.
So be it. Too early for too much to happen, in my opinion, but, whatever. I’ll leave that strategizing for others more attuned to fret over.
How about instead, we not think about who to replace Tory but what to replace him with? He has no vision aside from plastering over cracks in the foundation. He cannot imagine a Toronto that is not his Toronto, the city that made him all he is. What kind of city do we want this one to be and how can we achieve that? Mayor Tory and the sclerotic band of city councillors who unwaveringly back him either because political expediency, similar paucity of ideas or in the misplaced idea of avoiding the perception of dysfunction, are devoid of vision. They’re suited merely to pushback not push forward.
That creates a governance gap, filled with all that we can’t do not what we can. We’ve got two years to create and enact a viable and inspiring alternative to the current retrenchment too many city councillors (and this mayor) try to pass off as leadership. Prudent, sensible, workable, modest, yaddie, yaddie, yaddie. It’s none of those things. It’s dereliction and abstention, dressed up in nicer attire.
Mayor Tory and his council colleagues following closely in his footsteps need to run against something in 2018 not someone. We need to start putting that something in place and nail it up on the front doors of City Hall. Toronto is being stymied by the politics of personality. It’s time to offer up the politics of ideas.
It will come as no surprise to anyone reading this that I hate the Scarborough subway planpacificationvote getter plan. Nothing more than, what do those politician-hating politicians call it? A boondoggle. If this monstrosity actually comes to be, and there’s no guarantee it will, folks. There’s no deal signed. No money in the bank. Just malleable promises, pandering politicians and one big novelty cheque.
But let’s say the political winds don’t change and sometime down the line, off there on the horizon, at a distant point in the distant future, 3 new stops get slapped onto the eastern end of the Bloor-Danforth subway. Hurrah! Scarborough gets more of a subway, civic pride is restored and… well, nothing much else will change. It’s all just questions after that. Will the ridership numbers live up to the pie-in-the-sky estimates or will there be more of a drain on the TTC’s operational budget? What about all those other residents of Scarborough who can’t easily walk to one of the three subway stops and are once more relying on bus service for their commutes? How come I’m still paying property taxes for this fucking subway?
What’s so particularly galling about this nonsense is that it’s all so unnecessary, unnecessary and counter-productive.
In a discussion paper released this week, Build Regional Transit Now, the Toronto Region Board of Trade, among other things, called for an end to political interference in transit planning. This being 2014, it is something of a sad irony such a plea had to be made since the provincial transit planning body, Metrolinx, was established just for that very reason. David Hains does a great job in the Torontoist, running down the rocky not so non-political history of Metrolinx.
I want to take you to page 17 of the TRBOT’s report. Under the subheading, “Decison-Making and Project Execution a Struggle”, it speaks directly to the Scarborough LRT/subway debacle. Or ‘standoff’ as the report calls it.
At the heart of any sound governance structure is accountability and efficient decision-making. These elements were clearly not in place with the on-going Scarborough subway versus LRT standoff. Indeed, it demonstrated much confusion around the roles and responsibilities of Metrolinx and who exactly was accountable for driving regional transportation expansion. Despite Metrolinx’s transportation planners recommending an LRT line, including close to $100 million in sunk costs associated with environmental assessments and other preparatory work, Metrolinx’s advice was, in the end, ignored by both the Province and the City of Toronto. Over the span of several weeks, the agency was compelled to first endorse a subway proposal from the then provincial Transportation Minister and later Toronto Council’s approved subway route.
In a paragraph nutshell. Expert advice was ignored. Money burned. Political pressure brought to bear on an apparently non-political agency.
The question, of course, is why? And the simple answer is politics. The conventional wisdom went that Scarborough residents wanted a subway, so Scarborough politicians bent over backwards to give them a subway, good governance and a cool hundred mil be damned.
But here’s what really burns my ass about that line of non-reasoning. When did that become conventional wisdom? Rob Ford’s election and his Subways Everywhere mantra, perhaps. The minority Liberals, running scared and willing to do anything in order to keep seats in Toronto.
A good theory, I guess. I don’t have a better one. The problem is, I’m not convinced the very premise lying at the heart of all this holds water.
As a Forum poll showed this week, 56% of Scarborough residents asked stated a preference for subways over LRTs. Here’s the catch. It was a completely loaded and skewed question. Essentially it went, subway or LRT, “if costs for building both were the same”?
The costs aren’t the same. Not even close. Subways are more expensive. End stop. Moreover, the Scarborough LRT wouldn’t have cost Toronto residents any additional money. The subway has its own property tax increase.
So it was a stupid question, for sure, of the all things being equal type when clearly they’re not but even so, even with a pro-subway angle to the question, only 56% of respondents in Scarborough favoured building a subway.
That is hardly an overwhelming majority. Nowhere near the 100% support the mayor and other subway proponents tout. Given a proper shaping of the question, it would be even less.
In fact, earlier this year, a Leger poll found 56% of Scarborough residents wanted to revert back to the originally planned Scarborough LRT. “I think we’re starting to see a shift now as people become more aware of the cost to build subways,” said a Leger researcher. Yet, here we are, being told the exact opposite by the politicians we elected to represent our best interests.
The confounding thing to me is why. If voters can be convinced of the folly of building a subway extension into Scarborough with little more than a money argument, how come politicians aren’t willing to do just that? To recommend the advice of the non-political experts who tell us that a Scarborough LRT is really our best option. How has this debate become so fucking convoluted and divisive?
I have no answer. It’s one thing to chalk up politicians’ motives as doing whatever it is they need to do to get elected, and re-elected, and re-elected. Putting their interests before the interests of the voting public. A time-honoured, tried and true formula.
But the decision-making process for the Scarborough subway doesn’t seem to be that. It’s not about some failure to lead. It’s about the desire to mislead.
When all the factors point in the direction of one decision, and the public appears prepared to accept that decision, what politician would opt not to make it? That’s not crass and craven politics. It’s flat-out idiocy.
Essentially it went, subway or LRT, “if costs for building both were the same”?
