Tag Archives: Kelly Grant

What Part Of Having A Mandate Don’t You Understand?

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On a Thursday afternoon the mayor of the country’s largest city is out of the office, engaged in unofficial business, coaching football. It’s the second anniversary of his winning election. He’s spent much of the morning talking up his accomplishments that are all far less impressive than he or the Toronto Sun make them out to be. The rest of the day he’s had to fend off two new reports from two of Toronto’s Accountability Officers, suggesting that he’s (once again) violated council Code of Conduct as well as politically interfered with civic appointments process. There’s now a list to prove it.

Taking time from that busy schedule, Mayor Ford let it be known just what he thinks about Accountability Offices who are breathing down his neck.

“You don’t need a lobbyist register [sic], an ombudsman and an integrity commissioner. They have 20 people, they’re tripping over themselves. They’re trying to make themselves look busy. I’ve never voted in favour of it and never would.”

Then as if to prove he really hasn’t the slightest fucking clue about any stinkin’ Code of Conduct violation or why the Integrity Commissioner rang him up this time, he proceeds to quite possibly (question: are the Accountability Officers considered ‘staff’?) violate the Code of Conduct (Article XII) one more time for good measure.

“It’s all just political,” he tells reporters, referring to the Integrity Commissioner’s report while standing on the sidelines. “It’s just nonsense if you ask me.” Asked if he thought the report was politically driven, he agrees “absolutely”. The Ombudsman’s report too.

Article XII of the Code of Conduct requires members of Council to “be respectful of the role of staff to provide advice based on political neutrality and objectivity and without undue influence from any individual member or faction of the Council. Accordingly, no member shall maliciously or falsely injure the professional or ethical reputation of the prospects or practice of staff, and all members shall show respect for the professional capacities of staff.”

I guess it’s as easy to believe that the mayor hasn’t read the Code of Conduct as it is to imagine he just doesn’t understand it. Cold comfort either way. And let’s not forget that he’s spouting off about the political nature of the Integrity Commissioner while getting ready to coach a football game on a Thursday afternoon during the course of a normal working week. It’s almost picture perfect in irony. The mayor, taking yet another Thursday afternoon off from the job he’s being paid to do, views any and all criticism of his actions as nothing but political.

Why aren’t you at work, Mayor Ford?

Why are you being so political, asking me that question?

We can talk all night and into the weekend about the blatant hypocrisy of the mayor’s musing about axing the city’s Accountability Offices, having run on a platform of cleaning up City Hall and overseeing a transparent and.. ahem, ahem.. transparent administration. But it doesn’t really matter since it’s a non-starter. The Ombudsman and Integrity Commissioner are provincially mandated as part of the City of Toronto Act, another document I assume the mayor hasn’t read.

The huffing and puffing and pouting is simply an attempt to vilify the Accountability Officers and discredit in the court of public opinion any report that criticizes the mayor. That approach is simply more palatable to Team Ford than ever, ever admitting to any wrong doing. History has shown that they only do that under extreme duress and when there’s no other way to weasel out from accepting the responsibility of their words and/or actions.

Comments about getting rid the Integrity Commissioner, Ombudsman and Lobbyist Registrar (or anyone with any idea they disagree with – “Why does he still have a job?” Councillor Doug Ford said with his outside voice about the Medical Officer of Health on their radio show) have a slight Stalinist whiff. The former Soviet tyrant apparently stated that dealing with an opponent was easy. “Death solves all problems. No man, no problem.”

The mayor is suggesting we kill the positions that hold our municipally elected officials accountable.

Which is why even his most ardent supporters should be running for the hills on this one, for fear of getting coated with the grease from such a self-serving statement. Even the Deputy Mayor can see that.

“It almost seems that if there weren’t any Fords, you wouldn’t need any accountability officers at all,” said Councillor Doug Holyday. “You certainly wouldn’t need them to the extent that you have them, because half of what they do seems to be revolving around complaints made about the Fords.”

Exactly, Mr. Deputy Mayor. End stop. Let’s move on, shall we?

No, wait. What? No. No! Stop talking now!

“Well, that’s just the opposition’s way of trying to put pressure on Ford and knock us off our agenda.”

**sigh**

Look. (Awkward analogy alert!) Accountability is like pregnancy. You can’t be in favour of a little accountability.

To continue to defend the mayor by brushing off the damning reports as nothing more than cheap politics is to wrap yourself in an increasingly thick cape of tin foil. Sure, some of the complaints lodged might be politically motivated but to suggest the findings of the Ombudsman and Integrity Commissioner that come down unfavourably against Mayor Ford are politically driven is nothing more than twisted partisan logic. It is as reckless an attitude toward our democracy as the mayor’s seems to be.

As they say, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and looks like a duck, it must be a duck. The simplest explanation for why Mayor Ford and his brother, Councillor Doug, constantly find themselves in trouble with the Accountability Officers is because they’re doing something wrong. How be we just insist they start playing by the rules and if that’s not possible for them, let them live with the consequences.

— frankly submitted by Cityslikr

A Mayor In Major Minor

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Today marks the start of what is, I believe, the 4000th city council meeting Mayor Rob Ford has presided over since taking office back in 2010. (I use the mayor’s own arithmetical tools to arrive at that number.) Looking through the meeting’s agenda the thing that immediately jumps out at me is the complete and utter lack of positive input coming from the mayor and his Executive Committee. It’s almost as if he’s mayor in title only.

Where are the major initiatives? The bold going-forwards that will set out directions to deal with the city’s pressing problems? Mayor Ford? Oh right. It’s high school football season.

Anyone else? Councillor Ford? Deputy Mayor? QB Mammoliti? Anyone, anyone? Bueller?

Instead, this is what’s shaping up to be the defining moment of this week’s council meeting. “When Toronto city council kicks off its fall session this week,” Kelly Grant wrote in the Globe and Mail yesterday, “Mayor Rob Ford will have a real shot at a real win on a real issue. If the mayor’s allies succeed in postponing or reversing a plastic-bag ban that Mr. Ford has derided as ‘outright stupid,’ he will have something to celebrate after this summer’s gaffes.”

That, folks, is what you call setting the bar really, really low.

Reversing a vote which was the result of a vote that should’ve never happened in the first place as the key to rebuilding Mayor Ford’s relevance? Halting a ban on single-use plastic bags after successfully nixing the 5 cent fee that had been imposed and which many major retailers still charge can really be classified as ‘a real win on a real issue’? What next, maestro? Watch as our mayor drinks a glass of water while his dummy talks.

Read a list of the examples Mayor Ford will cite as his administration’s major accomplishments to date – cutting councillors’ office budgets, removing the VRT, contracting out waste collection, getting the TTC deemed an essential service, setting city workers’ contracts and avoiding any threat of a strike for 4 years – a pattern emerges. Under the guise of restoring fiscal sanity and respecting the taxpayers, it’s all been about cutting, reducing, eliminating. Getting government out of the business of governing.

I Cut, Therefore I Am.

Of course, none of this comes as much of surprise to anyone who watched Rob Ford during the decade he spent as a city councillor or crunched the numbers he casually tossed around as part of his mayoral election campaign platform. However else he tried to couch it in terms palatable enough to lure a plurality of Toronto voters to back him in 2010, it was always just about less. Less government. Less spending. Less taxes.

Then he ran smack dab into the hard, cold reality of municipal governance as set out in KPMG’s Core Services Review. It wasn’t really all that gravy laden down at City Hall. Efficiencies could be found certainly but nowhere near enough to offset the loss in revenues that Mayor Ford demanded in tax cuts and freezes. No matter how many different ways you tried to do the math, the answer was always the same.

Now comes the report from the outgoing Deputy City Manager and CFO, Cam Weldon, outlining a transit funding strategy. Requested in March by city council, it is chock full of ideas on revenue generation to pay for the massive investment in public transit that the city and region must undertake, and undertake ASAP. ‘Revenue generation’ you say? You mean, taxes!

Yep. It’s going to take a whole lot more than reversing the plastic bag ban for Mayor Ford to become relevant again. Transit is but the tip of the iceberg of infrastructure investment cities are facing. Ducking your head and clutching your wallet is no longer a viable option. More is the new less, and being the mayor of small things won’t be worth one lousy nickel.

— generously submitted by Cityslikr

The Deputy Mayor’s Got Those Far Away Eyes

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I’ve often wondered what goes on behind those blue eyes of our Deputy Mayor, Doug Holyday, as he sits and stares off at the horizon during city council meetings. Lunch? Ava Gardner? Lunch? Lunch? Dirty filthy unions? Lunch? René Descartes dualism? Lunch? Ooo! Tuna salad!

These days, I would imagine, it wouldn’t be surprising if the good councillor from Ward 3, Etobicoke Centre sits silently ruminating about the possible folly of getting those Ford boys involved in municipal politics. It seemed like a good idea at the time. A couple like-minded tax-hating kids from the neighbourhood. Sure, they seemed a little boisterous but chalk it up to youthful exuberance. Besides, their daddy’s company sold election campaign signs!

Like almost everyone else, it’s unlikely the last mayor of Etobicoke ever imagined that Rob would scale the heights of amalgamated Toronto politics and become the city’s chief magistrate. An improbable outcome, let’s call it. But what the hay. Somebody had to come along and clean up the profligacy of the left wing downtowners. Why not Rob Ford?

Why not indeed.

How did it become so unseemly? What ugliness had Doug Holyday wrought as political mentor to Rob and Doug Ford, I imagine Doug Holyday thinking as he gazes into the distance.

That the Deputy Mayor essentially suggested that the mayor’s brother shut his trap for a bit gives voice to the dilemma all council conservatives must be facing at the moment. How do you solve a problem like Mayor Ford and his most vocal supporter/nemesis, Brother-Councillor Doug? Or more specifically, how do continue with the mayor’s message of frugality while not getting any of the messy taint of scandal and bad behaviour on you?

They don’t come much more rock solid conservative than the deputy mayor. His ideology is as rabid and unbending as any on Team Ford including the mayor and his brother. Councillor Holyday has been known to step in it himself with the ‘it’ being headline grabbing outbursts like the one we saw earlier this year with the mythical Little Ginny, held against her innocent little will by her morally bankrupt parents in a downtown high rise.

The difference being that was said during the heat of council debate which doesn’t make it any less reactionarily anti-urban but, hell, we all say dumb things if we talk long enough. By all accounts, the deputy mayor is courteous and accommodating to anyone who asks of his time. Even certain publications that represent the polar opposite of his political leanings. You clearly don’t last as long in politics as Holyday has by drawing up an enemies list comprising of those who cover the work you do on a daily basis.

Obviously his patience is waning with the administration’s off-field antics. “We have important work to do,” the deputy mayor said, “the taxpayers expect certain things from us and these distractions don’t make it any easier. To have a public fight on the radio with all media isn’t really helpful.”

That’s not to suggest there’s an imminent breaking of ranks of the far right wingers at council but when your staunchest compatriot in the ideological wars openly chastises you… And this after another devout defender of the faith, Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong told the CBC that the mayor needed to “smarten up” with all the appearances of conflict swirling around him. It’s kind of hard to lead, I bet, when you’re constantly looking back over your shoulder.

Only the budget chief, Mike Del Grande, appears prepared to go to the mat for the mayor. “People will find ghosts where there are no ghosts,” he said. Del Grande has even lobbed a budget broadside at the Integrity Commissioner who will inevitably be dragged further into the mayoral mess over the next little while, demanding a line-by-line audit of the city’s accountability offices. All this for the mayor and what’s he have to show for it? Lousy bedbug bites. That’s devotion.

If they’re not openly criticizing the mayor, other conservative and right leaning councillors are either keeping quiet, hoping no one will notice them or they’ve publicly walked away on certain issues. The highest profile, obviously, is TTC Chair Karen Stintz who served up notice that Mayor Ford could be openly defied with no repercussions. Councillor John Parker followed along with her. Councillor Michelle Berardinetti quit her position on the budget committee and word is Councillor Jaye Robinson will do similarly at the end of year with her position on the executive committee. Councillors Michael Thompson and David Shiner have at times had little trouble disagreeing with the mayor, the latter the architect of the proposed plastic bag ban that slipped through council in the spring.

There may be no bigger sign of a realignment of the informal council conservative caucus than the silence of Mayor Ford’s other official mouthpiece, Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti. Having effortlessly and spectacularly flip-flopped in joining forces with his long time adversary, no one could be surprised if there’s a full 360 pulled off if the fortunes of the mayor continue to plummet. I’m sorry. Did you call me Gino-boy?! Hey everybody. The mayor called me Gino-boy again!

This commotion should strike a positive chord for all but the hardest of hardcore right wing conservatives. With one of the polarized ends collapsing under the weight of its own obstinacy and incompetence, the atmosphere at City Hall can only moderate. Poisonous partisanship – so pronounced right from the beginning of Mayor Ford’s time in office – will die down to just a dull roar and maybe, just maybe, we’ll actually start to see some constructive governance again.

— hopefully submitted by Cityslikr