All Fried Up In The Big Smoke

Less political. More fictional.

Comfort In Career Politicians

Posted on March 10, 2014 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

There’s a political slur that can be slung, usually to beef up the slinger’s populist cred, in order to denigrate an opponent. Career politician. A trough feeder. A sucker of the public teat. Only in it for themselves.

Some politicians will accuse other politicians of being career politicians. Councillor Doug Ford likes to toss it around in defense of his brother the mayor, a guy who’s been at City Hall for coming on 14 years now. Nearly a third of his life.

The term must have some perceived impact with enough of the voting public to be useful to the politicians using it. Yet, when all is said and done, we sure do love our incumbents. Given every opportunity to throw the bums out, more often than not, we stay with the tried and true. Change is risky. It could turn out worse. The devil you know, and all that.

Look at our current race for mayor here in Toronto. The designated front runners include the above-mentioned mayor, a councillor who’s been in office for a decade now, another candidate’s been flirting off and on with political office for ten years and a former city councillor and budget chief out of the game for eight years. If this gaggle doesn’t represent career politicians, then the term is utterly meaningless.

In all likelihood, these are going to be the candidates we’re talking about well into the fall, leading up to the 0ctober 27^th election. If any unknown challenger tosses their hat into the ring, a political outsider that apparently voters so love, they’re pretty much going to immediately be considered fringe. The unfortunate but necessary detritus of a free and open election process.

You got $200? Step right up and register. Nobody’s going to pay you much heed, though. Thanks for coming out.

Unless of course you’re an 18 year-old high school student who raised your entry fee with babysitting money. You may have heard of Morgan Baskin already? AM talk radio certainly has.

Yeah, I know. Everybody rolls their eyes, shrugs their shoulders and automatically writes her off as a novelty candidate. Come on. She’s 18. What could she possibly know about running a city?

And just like that, we dismiss the outsider and jettison our demand for change. We talk a big game about term limits and new blood but when the chips are down? Fingers crossed! Let’s hope John Tory runs again.

Listening to Ms. Baskin’s radio interview last week, she came across as articulate, passionate and pretty tuned in to what’s been going on in the city. While her embryonic website is full of broad stroke ideals and a little short on details right now, it is still only March and is hardly out of place with many of the other mayoral candidates’ on-line efforts so far. I mean, have you taken a look at Mayor Ford’s re-election website?

You get the feeling that if Morgan Baskin was subject to a weekend municipal governance and policy boot camp, she would be right at home with the current front runners. Arguably, she’s already capable of keeping up with the non-Soknackian pap coming from all the other big names. I mean, I haven’t heard her say anything resembling Growing A Better Tomorrow yet, have you?

During the last municipal campaign in 2010, we here at All Fired Up in the Big Smoke spent much time covering the “other” mayoral candidates. In fact, one of us ended up endorsing Himy Syed. Trust us, there are plenty out there fully deserving of the fringe label. There’s no discernible reason why they’re in the race other than vying for whatever public attention they receive. Public attention they wouldn’t get otherwise.

Still, who am I to judge their motivations?

Again this time around, amidst all the truly eyebrow raising candidates in the race, there are a couple, in addition to Morgan Baskin, who deserve more than a cursory glance. Robb Johannes made a very good impression at a Scarborough mayoral forum in February. Matt Mernagh seems to be more dimensional than just a medical marijuana advocate. Richard Underhill has a very thorough and thoughtful campaign platform at this early stage of the race.

All of these candidates, I’d have to ask why their interest in civic affairs starts at the top job. It is a complex position, the 6^th largest government in the country, overseeing an institution that delivers services and programs to over 2.5 million people. Why would we possibly trust you to manage a $14 billion annual budget? Babysitting money’s cute but maybe you could explain to me that nature of debt servicing, and the trade-off between less money for stuff now and having more stuff later.

That said, we gleefully handed the keys to the mayor’s office to a man-child based on 10 years of spotty city councillor performance and a vague attachment to a family business. How’d that work out for us?

We love the concept of political newcomers in theory but seem to shrink from acting on it when we ultimately mark our ballots. All talk, no action. If we were really serious, we’d at least hear the neophytes and fringe candidates out and give them significant consideration before retreating back to known territory. At the very least, we’d modify what we mean by being on the fringe.

— outsiderly submitted by Cityslikr

Didn’t You Use To Be… ?

Posted on January 31, 2014 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

The final budget of the Ford administration has now been signed and sealed, marking a full circle for the mayor. Full circle? Half circle?

He came in like a lion and went out like a lamb, is what I’m trying to say. A bleating, scruffy, possibly orf ridden lamb. Nothing you’d want to cuddle up to (unless, of course, you’re Budget Chief Frank Di Giorgio) or use the wool to make a hat and scarf set with, but generally harmless.

However, don’t let the mayor convince you he had nothing to do with the 2014 budget. His mutton smeared fingerprints are all over it, evidence of a time not long ago when he was fearsome enough a force to… a-hem, a-hem… ram his will through that of city council. Echoes of days gone by when he was a man with a mandate.

This is a budget still with lower than needed property tax increases (or other revenue sources) to meet the demands of growth in Toronto. This is a budget still where the soft services like youth initiatives, student nutritional programs, shelter, support and housing, all vie for the crumbs left behind after the big ticket items such as the TPS and TTC have had their fill of the shrinking pie. This is a budget where tax revenue starts being diverted to build a Scarborough subway.

Let’s call budget 2014 a Ford-lite document. Not too tax-y and with a slight hint, a whiff really, of compassion. Something, if not for everyone, only the zealots and numerically challenged could be indignant about. A true election year budget, living as we are in the Ford era.

(I highly recommend you link over to Social Planning Toronto for a much more thorough analysis of the budget fallout than I could possibly give.)

Getting there was not without its bumps and outbursts and histrionic hissy fits. Mostly from the usual suspects. The mayor. His councillor-brother. Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti. Oh, Giorgio. Knucklehead, knuckle-dragger, numbskull and the scourge of good governance everywhere.

After all his time as the local representative, it’s amazing frankly that Ward 7 is anything but a crater in the ground. To hear Councillor Mammoliti bitch and moan, it may well be. A crater filled with impoverished senior citizens, transport trucks and a flag pole. He got his ward that flag pole, right?

Despite his best efforts to be the biggest bane of reasonable, civil debate over the course of the last couple days, I can honestly tell you that at about 6 p.m. last night he was upstaged in spectacular fashion. Nope. Not by the mayor. Not by Councillor Ford. Not even by Councillor David Shiner’s Bullshit Bag.

Nope.

All that paled in comparison to the real warrior of division, newly minted in the intense heat of battle known as the struggle for a Scarborough subway.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker, Ward 38 Scarborough Centre (courtesy of Graphic Matt):

No, but wait. It gets better. From March 2012, less than 2 years ago. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker, Ward 38 Scarborough Centre (courtesy of Himy Syed):

I don’t know the language but I’m beginning to think De Baeremaeker is Dutch for ‘fucking hypocrite’.

Set aside the craven 180 performed in just over a year. What politician hasn’t done an utter about-face when they think it politically expedient? In the face of a fearsome Ford Nation back in 2010, how many councillors voted to eliminate a source of revenue with the Vehicle Registration Tax, only to openly regret it a couple budget cycles later?

What about fellow Scarborough councillor Paul Ainslie Ward 43 Scarborough East? During the great transit debate of 2012, the one where Councillor De Baeremaeker spoke so lovingly of LRTs, Councillor Ainslie was all about subways, burying the Eglinton crosstown for the entire route. Even in the early stages of the latest Scarborough subway skirmish, while De Baeremaeker was tucking his tail between his legs, worrying about some Ford Nation backlash that would turf him from office in 2014, Ainslie appeared to be falling in line with the otherwise unanimous demand of the other 9 councillors from Scarborough for a subway extension of the Bloor-Danforth line.

But he didn’t. Instead, he stood up at council last year and said that after examining all the facts available to him, he’d decided on both fiscal and transit planning grounds, an LRT was the way to go.

How did Councillor De Baeremaeker explain his conversion in the opposite direction?

Deserve.

Scarborough deserves a subway. Anything less, including those sleek, iPad-esque LRTs, would be an insult. A slap in the face of Scarborough residents who’d been waiting out in the cold for too long, waiting for their fair share of 1^st-class, world class transit technology.

Deserve.

It’s the last refuge of scoundrels. At least when it comes to transit planning.

When you don’t have the numbers, when the facts and figures really don’t make a case for your demands, reach back into the bag of resentment, deep down into that parochial pit and left fly with the sword of petulant division. You have one! Why don’t we? It’s unfair! We pay and pay and pay, and get nothing in return. We deserve a subway!

Or else.

We’ll de-amalgamate. We’ll take our ball and go home. We’ll hold our breath until we turn blue and get our way.

This kind of divisive, two year-old temper tantrum approach to politics I expect from the Fords. It is, after all, their bread and butter. Consensus is not part of their repertoire. Divisiveness is all they have.

But honestly, there’s a kind of unprincipled principled…ness to how the Ford’s go about doing their business. Everybody knows what they’re doing. They know what they’re doing in sowing the seeds of division throughout the city in the hopes of manufacturing enough of an us-versus-them base to keep them in power. Most of the time, I actually think they believe what comes out of their mouths.

The likes of Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker? Not so much. He apparently has no principles past getting himself re-elected. That’s pure Giorgio Mammoliti territory. Remember how much he hated Rob Ford before it became apparent he was going to be Mayor Rob Ford? Now, they’re inseparable, attached at the thumb almost.

Whichever way the wind’s blowing, right?

Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker has become a hollow politician. A destructive shell of a councillor who is putting his own interests before those of the city he was elected to represent. The whole city not just Scarborough, not just Ward 38.

Scarborough doesn’t deserve a subway. It deserves better representation than the likes of Glenn De Baeremaeker.

— indignantly submitted by Cityslikr

There’s No Getting Around The Urban-Suburban Divide

Posted on January 24, 2014 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

Point 5*.

We come in peace.

Despite the many concrete challenges Toronto faces — transit building negligence, aging infrastructure, affordable housing crisis – I think there’s a much less tangible but more powerful force at work on the politics of this city. Existential even. Existential? Perhaps. It’s a slippery word, that.

The urban-suburban divide.

Perhaps more than anything else, the urban-suburban divide has been shaping how, why and what things get done here. These past 3 years have certainly heightened the divisive dynamic but it’s been there, lurking in the shadows pretty much since amalgamation in 1997. We have been a city at war with itself.

The best thing a candidate could do in this year’s election campaign is to undertake a study, getting to the bottom of a favourite trope of many current members of city council that in this uneasy alliance between the inner and outer cores, downtown gets everything. Former suburban municipalities point to some new gleaming edifice or piece of green space downtown and scream, Why isn’t there one of those in my ward?! Of course, this overlooks what everyone takes for granted. The difference in road space, the amount of additional infrastructure needed to service more dispersed communities.

Etc., etc.

I’m not saying there isn’t a discrepancy between how money, services and programs are doled out across the city. It’s just that nobody seems to know the answer to that. Wouldn’t it be good to sort that out, one way or the other, so we could begin to address any possible disparity based on some sort of fact based debate instead of just unfounded emotional outbursts?

The amalgamated city lurches from one decision to the next, one policy pursuit to another based almost exclusively on unfounded emotional outbursts.

Downtowners are imposing their LRTs and bike lane lifestyles on the suburbs! Surburbanites are inflicting their car-centricity on the downtown! Low taxes before everything else! Keep your user fees to yourself!

We are frozen to almost the point of petrifaction, unable to push forward for fear of somebody yelling and stomping their feet in disagreement. But what about me! Why am I paying for something you get?!

No better example exists than the 3 year fight we’ve had over that fucking Scarborough subway.

Oh, look! Petty downtowner doesn’t like it when the suburbs get what he’s already got. Unfair much?

It was a debate based on parochial resentment and irrationality. One equating fairness and equality to sameness. If you have one, why don’t we?

Because we’re not the same. Our built forms are entirely different, our needs in terms of infrastructure distinct. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to running a city like Toronto.

Now, I’d argue that the challenges we face in terms of growing and evolving as a city come down harder on those living in the inner suburbs. No doubt the onus to adapt weighs more heavily on those parts than it does on downtown. We here are used to intensification, with more than a few head-shaking exceptions. We have more choices in terms of how we move around the city. But this is the way it’s playing out in most cities across the globe. We are being squeezed in closer and closer with increasing demand for more public spaces not less.

So naturally it feels like the suburban lifestyle is under attack. It is under attack if it remains resistant to anything other than a 1950s version of it. That doesn’t mean the suburbs have to become like downtown. They can’t. They just can’t remain the suburbs of our childhood memories.

This would still be the case if Toronto had remained un-amalgamated. These pressures to change and adapt aren’t coming from some nefarious downtown elite cabal. It’s simply necessity, simply economic and demographic necessity.

Friend of the site, Himy Syed, gave us a theory of municipal governance a while back about the real damage inflicted upon the 416 by amalgamation. Before that time, every former municipality had a similar target of derision when they were unhappy with how the big ticket items like transit were being run. Metro Hall. Metro Council. Damn you! cursed Etobicoke. Why I oughta! threatened Scarborough. Up yours! shouted East York.

With amalgamation, the metro level of government was gone, removed. In its place? City Hall. Downtown.

As the new whipping boy, it was exploited for cheap political gain by those with nothing else to offer but division and antagonism. For sure, too many residents throughout this city were being ignored, left out and overlooked. But that was happening long before amalgamation and by players far bigger than those at City Hall at Queen’s Park and in Ottawa.

That’s not an excuse or rationalization. It’s just candidates running for local office need to explain that City Hall isn’t the enemy. That downtowners aren’t living large at the expense of hardworking suburban taxpayers. That suburbanites aren’t unrepentant anti-urbanists only wanting to pave over everything so they can park their cars everywhere.

We need municipal leaders who see City Hall as a unifying force not some death star that must be blown from space.

Wring our hands and nash our teeth all we want over this:

Not that very long ago, the picture went like this:

Ignore the colours. This is the map anyone running for city council this year must endeavour to bring about. They’ll certainly have my vote.

* Points 1, 2, 3 and 4.

— numerically submitted by Cityslikr