Tag Archives: Joe Pantalone

On The Plus Side

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Lest anyone be dejected that no good came out of this month’s clusterfuck shitshow of a council meeting, take heart. I can think of two things. Or people, as it were.

A couple rookie councillors emerged as genuine, forceful bona fides on the council scene. Both faced their own respective trials by fire over the last few months and stepped up from being hopeful prospects and into full time positions in the majors. While tough to celebrate given the circumstances, it should still be cause for at least a brief round of applause.

As any long time follower of this blog will know, way back when in the summer and fall of 2010, we were not supporters of then candidate Michael Layton here in Ward 19. In fact, we heartily endorsed one of his opponents in the race to replace Joe Pantalone, Karen Sun. Having watched a couple of the debates and briefly chatting with Mr. Layton when he came knocking at our door, nothing about him jumped out favourably at us. Like many constituents in this ward, we looked at the baggage/advantage he carried being the son of a former city councillor and now leader of the federal NDP and stepson (we think) of another former city councillor and current NDP MP with a certain degree of disdain. There was talk of needing a fresh start without any attachments to the past.

That said, having him an elected as councillor was not the worst thing that happened on election night. Rob Ford’s now mayor?! Cesar Palacio was re-elected!?

Certainly Mr. Layton did not assume office with any air of entitlement. I think I’d even go as far to call him tentative, not an immediate presence in council chambers. He seemed to go for the slow rollout, getting his sea legs, learning the ropes. I softened toward him when he hosted a town hall gathering during the lead up to the budget battles. Admitting that he was new to the process and didn’t have all the answers, he brought in former budget chief Shelley Carroll to help explain to the gathered residents what to expect when council began debating the budget.

Councillor Layton’s first mini-splash came during a subsequent council meeting when, in the middle of speaking on something or other, he was set upon by Councillor Doug Ford who took a rare turn to actually speak out loud, blustering and burping the usual nonsense that flows forth from his gob. Layton held his ground, effectively counter-punching until Brother Doug ran out of steam and plopped himself back down to his seat.

The feistiness flared up again Wednesday when Layton attempted to get Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong to commit to tearing up the Jarvis Street bike lanes only after the alleged protected lanes on Sherbourne Street were functioning. As is his way, Minnan-Wong avoided addressing the issue by spuriously accusing Layton of spearheading the building of the Fort York bridge, in place years before Layton was elected. Layton angrily called Minnan-Wong on his crap and demanded a retraction. Minnan-Wong complied in his typical weasel fashion to which we have become accustomed.

Ah, yes. The Fort York bridge. Councillor Layton’s nasty introduction into the politics of the Ford era. At last month’s Public Works and Infrastructure committee meeting, Ford loyalist, David Shiner, greasily sandbagged Layton with scant advance notice, that they were taking the bridge back to the drawing board and the issue was as good as dead. Layton scrambled to get the necessary 2/3s majority vote to bring it to council for debate but, unsurprisingly, fell short. Tough lesson learned but battle stripes earned.

The Public Works and Infrastructure committee also initiated Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam into the rough and tumble, oily manner of city politics, Ford style. Like Mike Layton, she too was blindsided at the very last minute about a project under threat in her ward. You might’ve heard about it. The Jarvis bike lanes? Mousy but obedient councillor, John Parker gave her about a 5 minute heads-up, after all the deputations had been heard, that plans were in the works to remove the lanes. You don’t have any problems with that, do you councillor?

Like Layton, Councillor Wong-Tam fought an uphill, losing battle in defense of the well-being of her ward but in so doing helped expose the members of the Ford team as mean-spirited, small-minded and categorically unable to defend their positions. When she submitted her 3 motions to save the bike lanes on Jarvis or to ensure they were not removed before the promised Sherbourne lanes had, in fact, been established, Wong-Tam simply embarrassed Councillor Karen Stintz who stood up to try and poke holes in the motions. I don’t know if Stintz didn’t do her homework or was simply performing a half-hearted gesture of solidarity with the mayor but she ended up doing herself or her side no favours. With each hard return from Wong-Tam of Stintz’s goofball queries, it became painfully obvious that, despite being the veteran in the exchange, Councillor Stintz was simply out of her depth and out her league.

So what, you’ll say. At the end of the day, the ill-informed and malignantly intentioned won out. Hoo-rah for the losing side and their hopeless causes. But I happen to think strong character is best forged in defeat. Winning is easy especially if it’s achieved through deceit and, let’s call it what it was, treachery. It’s how you handle yourself and what you learn when you come up short that ultimately counts. Councillors Layton and Wong-Tam were tested and met the challenge. I think we got a couple of keepers on our hands.

— happily submitted by Cityslikr

Boxstore Aesthetic

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There’s not much I can add to the discussion about this week’s decision by the Public Works Committee to kill the Fort York pedestrian bridge that hasn’t been already said more fully and completely by Derek Flack at blogTO and Ford For Toronto’s Matt Elliott. Except maybe to introduce a new word to the English language. Derived from a combination of despair and anger that has become the prevalent mood here in Toronto during the Mayor Rob Ford era. Angair? Desger? Despanger? (Try it with a French pronunciation. Day-PAN-jay.)

How many times and ways can we talk about myopia and short-sightedness? Pennywise and poundfoolishness. The stunted notion of ‘core services’ being seen as little more than roads and sewers and not the wider, longer view of all round liveability.

That the public face of the move to kill the bridge is Councillor David Shiner comes as no surprise. He is part of the core group of Team Ford whose prime motivating factor seems to be, even more than simple political ideology, exacting revenge on anyone or anything from the Miller administration for excluding them from positions of power or influence. Once the mighty budget chief under Mel Lastman, Councillor Shiner was reduced to outsider status during the David Miller years, and somebody has to pay for that slight.

He couldn’t really have bagged a bigger prize, either, than the Fort York bridge. Not a big ticket item money-wise (less than the revenue the city won’t see from the decision to repeal the VRT), it was the baby of Ward 19’s former councillor and Miller’s Deputy Mayor, Joe Pantalone.  ‘An attack on taxpayers’, Councillor Shiner called the bridge and its ‘fancy’ design. Fancy’s the old way of doing things at City Hall. Austerity (in both mind and matter) is the new fancy.

What’s especially rich about Councillor Shiner’s demand for more financial accountability in somebody else’s ward is that he’s one of the beneficiaries of perhaps the biggest boondoggle… I mean, investment in future development… in recent memory:  the Sheppard subway line. Running through a bottom slice of his Ward 24, we have recently heard the councillor get up and defend the mayor’s plan to extend the subway, extolling ‘the subway to nowhere’’s contribution to a construction boom along its corridor. An argument some have made about the Fort York bridge. Its fancy design would help spur interesting investment around it much more than a Gardiner Expressway version of it might.

It’s also interesting to note that in justifying his decision Councillor Shiner said, “… just think about what that $23 million could do for bridge rehab, for road repair; think of the community centres it could fix up, of the children’s services and child care centres it could provide.” I believe that this is the same councillor who back a few months during the budget debate, grilled a representative from the Toronto Public Library about switching projects after money had been specifically allocated even if timelines and preparedness dictated a strategic change. Doesn’t his rationale about using possible savings from a scaled back version of the bridge on more pressing needs use the same kind of reasoning he dismissed on the part of TPL?

While I’m sure impossible to track, it would be interesting to see how much of any savings that might arise from a new, modified bridge construction Councillor Shriner will then fight to spend on infrastructure upgrades, community centres and child care. Colour me sceptical (which is more or less teal-like) that’ll be the case. Instead, I see whatever money there is being flushed down the sinkhole created by tax cuts and freezes, and the fundamental ill-will the conservative faction at City Hall bear toward generating revenue.

The fate of the Fort York bridge is the inevitable outcome that arises when politicians elected on a platform of respecting taxpayers not citizens gain power. There’s no bigger picture outside the bottom line. Why do anything special or fancy when it can be done for less money? Imagine the oodles of dough saved for Paris way back when if Napolean III told Baron Haussmann that his plans were all pretty and such but let’s scale it back a little, shall we. Why build a stage with a Frank Gehry proscenium arch (to use an example from one of the mayor’s favourite cities, Chicago) when a concrete band shell would work just as well?

— despangerly submitted by Cityslikr

Harmonic Convergence

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This irony cannot pass quietly without us taking an opportunity to kick it around for a moment. At least, I hope it’s ironic. I’ve never been able to get a good grasp on the word and whenever I attempt to use it, I think I might be coming across a little Alanis Morisette-y. (Not to mention repetitive. Almost a year to the day. We here at All Fired Up in the Big Smoke are nothing if not annually consistent.)

Last night our mayor participated in a fundraising dinner with 3 of his opponents from last year’s election to bring attention to the horrors wrought by campaign debt. The Harmony Dinner it was dubbed, and for anywhere from $250-$2500 a pop, you could pitch in and help put George Smitherman, Sarah Thompson, Rocco Rossi and the mayor back into the black. Or at least, less out of the red. Joe Pantalone, bless his red, white and green heart, inharmoniously held his own fundraiser earlier in hopes of burying a $30,000 debt because he still cannot bring himself to be in the same room as former premier Mike Harris who served as the Harmony Dinner’s co-host and who, the ex-councillor feels, inflicted untold damage on the is city. Talk about carrying a grudge. Although, remember when we almost had that subway running along Eglinton?

For his part, George Smitherman doesn’t owe any money but apparently participated in the event to help Sarah Thompson who wound up $80,000 in the hole before she ended her campaign and threw her weight behind Smitherman, helping the longtime frontrunner finish in an unspectacular second place. Personally, I would’ve let her dangle. Rocco Rossi, first in and first out of the “big” names in last year’s race, came to the dinner hoping to erase the last half of the $60,000 he was on the hook for.

The mayor… the mayor… and here’s where the irony kicks in. (We think.) Our mayor, the boastful tightwad, the budget buster, the Gravy Train stopping, little guy looking out for-ing, riding the rail of populist outrage at City Hall profligacy, yes that mayor, spent $1.7 million to get himself elected while raising almost, and I’d stretch it out a little with the playful TV catchphrase `wait for it, wait for it’ but everybody already knows where I’m going with this, almost one million dollars. 900 K to be exact which left him the biggest panhandler at last night’s event.

Mayor Rob Ford has $800,000 in campaign debt. How is that not ironic? And if it is (and I really do think it is), add another irony layer to it because, like most political donations, people giving money get partial tax rebates. So this mayor, preparing to gut the city back to its skeletal remains, first wants City Hall to help pay off the debt he accumulated campaigning for the job that would put him in the position to do the gutting.

The fuck is that?!

And why hasn’t there been a much larger public excoriation of him?

I have nothing against public financing of election campaigns. In fact, I’d be all for full public funding if there was some way to portion out money equitably and sensibly. But something about Mayor Ford wanting a piece of it just doesn’t sit well with me. And the fact that he dug a significantly bigger hole, we’re not just talking degrees but by orders of magnitude, makes me believe that we’ve elected a mayor who thinks austerity is for other people.

So those 10 years of office budgets the mayor never used while he was a councillor and saved the city, let’s call it half a million dollars? The mayor now wants some of that back. To pay his own personal campaign debt. Let’s remember that, shall we, when we’re standing out in the cold, waiting for a bus that no longer runs on Sundays.

— ironically (I think) submitted by Cityslikr