Tag Archives: KPMG

Toronto Is Speaking

Posted on by
6

Having missed the marathon Executive Committee meeting a couple weeks back, I’ve been following Matt Elliott’s Toronto Spoke series at Ford For Toronto. The impression that immediately springs to mind is that this city is full of intelligent, well-spoken, engaged citizens who are very concerned about the direction we’re headed. Yes, ideologues like Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong may write them off as statistically invalid or whatever other nonsense comes from his gob and not part of the hardworking, taxpaying Ford Nation Councillors Doug Ford and Giorgio Mammoliti assure us are fully behind their ongoing experiment in de-governmenting. But they came. They spoke. They delivered their part of the bargain in what is called participatory democracy.

One such deputatant was Henry Faber. A self-described small business owner, Mr. Faber delivered a thorough thrashing of KPMG’s Core Services Review. The numbers. The methodology. The whole enchilada. In about 2 and a half minutes. Watch it and cheer wildly.

The key point for me came when, after the deputation was done, councillors were allowed to ask questions of the deputant. It is a familiar pattern to those who follow such things regularly. Visiting councillors are almost exclusively not part of the mayor’s crew go first and their task seems to be to assist deputants in navigating the process and further explain their views after the original 3 minutes has expired. (Usually 5 minutes but shortened during this particular Executive Committee meeting to accommodate the demand if you’re looking at the glass being half full). Then it is the turn of councillors sitting on the committee to rise from their slumber and make an effort to dismiss, diminish or discredit a deputant if they’re perceived to be speaking against the mayor’s plans.

With Mr. Faber it was Councillor Norm Kelly speaking up to do Mayor Ford’s bidding. At the 8’46” mark Councillor Kelly piped up with the question: “Do you believe that there is a systemic indebtedness in the budget process for the city of Toronto of between a half billion to three-quarters of a billion dollars per year. Do you believe that?” the councillor asked. “I’m confused by the number…” Mr. Faber answered.

Ain’t we all, Henry. Ain’t we all.

Let’s grant Councillor Kelly that notion. It does seem that come every budget cycle, the city must grapple with a shortfall that is initially in that range. So yes, Toronto does face an annual ‘systemic indebtedness’. As does every other city in this province, country, continent. Municipalities are woefully underfunded, the majority of our tax dollars going in an inversely proportional degree to where they are needed to be spent. They then come, trickling down, from the feds and provinces in discretionary dribs and drabs in wholly inadequate amounts. If fiscal conservatives truly wanted to deliver taxpayers bang for their bucks, this would be where they’d start. Fixing an antiquated and broken system of taxation.

Instead, what the likes of Councillor Kelly seem to be intent on is using this ‘systemic indebtedness’ to scale back municipal governance to its barest of bones and beyond. To pretend that our ‘systemic indebtedness’ is the result of profligacy on the part of previous administrations at City Hall. This, despite the fact that the very report Team Ford commissioned from KPMG points to the exact opposite of that make believe scenario. Toronto is run in a highly efficient manner and is already — for anyone looking for real answers – a lean operation.

No matter. The likes of Councillor Kelly want to make it more lean, more efficient even if it means starving the city. Enforced ideological anorexia where the poorest and most vulnerable amongst us bear the heaviest burden and the real culprits get off untouched. If the radical right wingers on council were really as tough and hardnosed as they claim, they’d be taking our fight to the true bullies. Our elected representatives at Queen’s Park and in Ottawa. But they couldn’t do that to their new fishing buddies. BFFs. Best Fishing Friends.

What’s even more galling about all this is that Team Ford keeps spouting its Government Run Like A Business mantra. Would they really run a business like they’re attempting to run this government? Cutting revenue streams? Cutting services? What kind of business does that? A business that doesn’t plan on staying in business for too long, I’m thinking. Which is becoming glaringly apparent as we head toward the budget battles of 2012. Like true neoconservatives everywhere, Mayor Ford and his gang are determined only to drive the city of Toronto into the ground.

— spoken wordily submitted by Cityslikr

Return To Civilization. Such As It Is.

Posted on by
4

I am the first to re-emerge from the woods.

It was an eventful few days, full of surprises, undercooked food and questionably cooked alcohol. The blindness, mercifully, turned out to be only temporary. The holes in the mind, I fear, may be longer to diagnose and repair.

Arriving at the homestead/hunting cabin/inherited family real estate/squatting place, Cityslikr and I were surprised by the presence of our long lost colleague Acaphlegmic who, judging by the lived in look and smell of the place, had been camped out there for some time. As regular readers of this site know, Acaphlegmic self embedded into Ford Nation just after election night last October to try and understand the heart of the beast we had just installed as our next mayor. To what end was never quite clear as his irregular posts (here and here) bordered on the, if not delusional, let’s call it fantastical. Instructional would not be an adjective I’d attach to his correspondence.

But there he was, in all his feral splendor, awaiting our appearance. How long he’d been there, he wouldn’t say. Why he was there, also left unanswered. He was sphinx-like with any information, saying that what he saw, what he learned, all the knowledge he’d gleaned from his time in Ford Nation was not going to be handed over to some nowhere blog without adequate recompense. There was a book to be written and he was just the person to write it. Any evidence suggesting that’s what he’d been doing out in the wilderness was scant.

What was evident was Acaphlegmic had been rolling around contentedly in his own approbation along with, as our noses hinted at, many fish carcasses that had washed ashore. The reason for such sentiment was pasted to the inside of the cabin. Copy after copy of his mayoral endorsement last year covered every inch of the walls. Standing in the centre of the room, it wasn’t as spooky as, say, Shelley Duvall discovering pages and pages of her husband typing out All Work And No Play Makes Jack A Dull Boy. Still, it was somewhat unsettling. We were miles away from anything resembling civilization and it was an awfully deep lake we had just crossed. It would take months to discover our bodies.

Fortunately, Acaphlegmic wasn’t in a killing kind of mood. Mostly. It was all about the crowing, the chest beating, the I-Told-You-Sos. “I was right, wasn’t I, chaps. Bulls-eye. Correctamundo. Fucking dead on.” Agreeing with him, even heartily, didn’t seem to lessen his demands that we agree with him.

Admittedly, given the last few months, it’s difficult not to concede he’d been accurate in his assessment of how a Mayor Ford scenario would play out. Who amongst us didn’t see that train wreck coming? Who amongst us, that is, who didn’t vote for the man. It’s all been as grisly, divisive and dispiriting as we feared it would be if such a thing came to pass. The difference is, very few of us were reveling in the situation to any degree. Certainly not to the degree Acaphlegmic appeared to be.

“It is as how I prophesized!” Acaphlegmic bellowed at us intermittently throughout the weekend. Not meaning to draw any comparisons between either Cityslikr or myself to Jesus but it did feel a little like we were in the presence of crazy John the Baptist. “Our time is soon at hand.” Yes, he did actually say that. On more than one occasion.

I will distill Acaphlegmic because I don’t think, at this point, you could handle pure Acaphlegmic.

What we are witnessing now in Toronto is the radical right wing, neoconservative, small government, anti-tax, deranged Ayn Randian libertarianism end game of the radical right wing, neoconservative, small government, anti-tax, deranged Ayn Randian libertarians. From Margaret Thatcher to Ronald Reagan to Mike Harris to George W. Bush to the Tea Party to Stephen Harper to Tim Hudak to Rob Ford with some willing and conciliatory liberals (both small and big ‘L’) thrown in for good measure. The slashing and burning, vilifying and demonizing has all trickled down to where the rubber meets the road, municipalities. This is where we all discover exactly what they mean by ‘small government’, ‘finding efficiencies’ and ‘respect for the taxpayer’.

It all sounds so reasonable and mainstream when it’s stated hypothetically. Who doesn’t want to find efficiencies? I’m a taxpayer. Hells yeah, I want respect. A leaner, meaner, smaller government? You betcha. Go right ahead. Cut our libraries. Reduce public transit. Gut environment—

No, wait. What?

At the municipal level, we’re getting all close up and personal with what these people mean when they talk about small government. It’s really all about less government. Reduce. Eliminate. Obliterate. Fewer helping hands. Less shared sacrifice. Watching the men of KPMG present their Core Services Review over the last couple weeks, the realization sunk in that it’s only about throwing citizens to the wolves of privatization and free marketeers. No guarantees we’d be paying less or services improved. And absolutely no word on any negative social impacts of guts and cuts. Not in our purview.

Trickle down neoliberalism, offloading and downloading costs and responsibilities from the feds to the provinces to the municipalities. Now with a mayor and his administration in place as willing waterboys, poised to do the dirty work, Toronto is realizing the implications and consequences of such radical ideology where everything is on the table. Everything, that is, that makes a city livable, desirable and place which encourages its citizens to reach their fullest potential. There’s no more hiding from that fact.

Acaphlegmic called it back in October. We wrote it off as the rantings of a crank and alarmist. It’s hard not to admit he may’ve been barking up the right tree.

— contritely submitted by Urban Sophisticat

Our Summer Farce

Posted on by
2

(Since summer is the season for repeats, a rebroadcast of our post at the Torontoist, looking at the Core Services Review of the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee. Re-enjoy.)

*  *  *

The good news emerging from yesterday’s Public Works and Infrastructure Committee meeting was that there was no last minute, duplicitous motion put forward by any of the mayor’s men to derail or erase projects in other councillors’ wards. In May, Councillor David Shiner (Ward 24, Willowdale) nixed the Fort York bridge, pulling the rug from out under Councillor Mike Layton (Ward 19, Trinity-Spadina). Last month, it was Councillor John Parker (Ward 26, Don Valley West) blindsiding Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam (Ward 27, Toronto Centre-Rosedale) with the news that plans were afoot to remove the Jarvis bike lanes.

The bad news, however, was three-fold.

First, the KPMG core services review report was revealed to be wholly unsatisfactory in addressing our alleged budget crisis. Under questioning from committee members, councillors Layton and Gord Perks (Ward 14, Parkdale-High Park), as well as visting (i.e. non-committee member) councillors like Shelley Carroll (Ward 33, Don Valley East) and Adam Vaughan (Ward 20, Trinity-Spadina), the report and its corporate authors (along with City staff) went limp. It quickly became clear just how narrow the report actually is, offering only the broadest strokes of possible “savings opportunities” (a.k.a. cuts), with little to no examination of the impact or implications of taking such opportunities. (For instance, the health impacts—and subsequent economic burdens—of rolling back fluoridation in the water or scaling back environmental programs were not included in the report that recommended those cuts.) The validity of the report’s comparative analysis with other cities came under question too. Aside from size, why Melbourne, Australia? An entirely different beast, structurally and governmentally; where were the instructive comparisons? And why were no other municipalities in Ontario examined in the report? They suffer under the exact same provincial handcuffs as Toronto does. Wouldn’t that be more helpful?

Even worse was how the subject of waste diversion was handled. The report clearly ignored key relevant numbers—such as the amount of money the city receives from recycling, which brings down the actual cost to us of collection—in assessing the financial benefits of potential cuts. Additionally, KPMG’s suggestion that our target rates were too ambitious was questioned by a deputant who claimed, in fact, the city of Toronto lagged behind almost ever other municipality in the GTA and was still below a proposed provincial target of 60 per cent.

Such deficiencies just begin to scratch the surface of the problems with the KPMG report. After nearly eight hours of listening to presentations, deputations, questions, and answers, it was hard not to come to the conclusion that the report is little more than a big ol’ softball for the mayor to hammer for extra bases. Big, scary cuts will be dangled out at us with no intention of ever implementing them, so that other cuts will actually happen and we’ll all breathe a heavy sigh of relief, telling ourselves that, well, it could’ve been a whole lot worse.

Bringing us to problem number two. The right wing on the Public Works Committee doesn’t give a shit about any of that. To a man (and they were all men) they couldn’t have looked less interested in yesterday’s proceedings if they’d pulled out blankies and pillows and taken a nap right on their desks. At one point of time, three of them—councillors Grimes (Ward 6, Etobicoke-Lakeshore), Parker, and Shiner—left the room entirely, bringing things to a halt due to a lack of quorum. The questions they asked of staff, KPMG, and deputants were few and far between. Committee chair Denzil Minnan-Wong’s (Ward 34, Don Valley East) sole purpose, it seemed, was to run interference for staff and the KPMG representatives when the line of questioning from other councillors got a little too aggressive or demanding.

All of which leads to the third and most damning problem of the committee meeting. After all was said and done—reports given, deputations made, questions asked—the councillors on Public Works voted to punt the report to the stacked-with-mayoral-allies Executive Committee. Except for seeking further information on snow removal (a big item in places like Shiner’s North York ward), street cleaning, and water fluoridation, the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee decided to make no decisions or even recommendations on the KPMG report, leaving it entirely in the hands of Mayor Ford and his executive. It is a move that will quite likely get repeated at every committee meeting over the course of the next 10 days or so. There will be much posturing and posing, ignoring of deputations, blowing smoke and spinning narrative, sound and fury signifying nothing, only to have each and every decision handed meekly over to the mayor to deal with as he sees fit. A complete and utter abrogation of responsibility by the majority members of the City’s standing committees.

Perhaps, that’s overly harsh. Maybe it’s a gambit on some councillors’ part to try and make the mayor show his hand, to be the first to go on record saying what he wants cut. Either way, it seems that the committees are telling us that tough decisions have to be made. Just not by them.

— resubmitted by Cityslikr