Tag Archives: Mayor Naheed Nenshi

The Short Drive From Etobicoke To Brampton

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Fealty to ideology above all else.

What other explanation is there for Mayor Rob Ford finally wading into the federal campaign to endorse Stephen Harper?

“Folks, so many people said: ‘Rob, why are you getting involved, you’re supposed to be non-political,’” said Ford at a Tory rally in Brampton last night. Umm, what? Who ever told the mayor he should be non-political during the federal campaign? In fact, there was an early push to get him to speak up for urban issues like the mayor of Calgary, Naheed Nenshi, was doing. I think what Mayor Ford is mixing up is political with partisan. But that’s pretty well par for the course.

The bigger question though is what the fuck the mayor was doing endorsing Harper in Brampton? I know that in his part of Etobicoke area codes may be 416 but hearts and minds pine for the 905. As Matt Elliott pointed yesterday in Ford For Toronto, Conservatives in 905 “… seem crazy for Rob Ford and the “stop the gravy train” stuff…”. (Think the line in Sweet Home Alabama, ‘In Birmingham they love the guv-ner’ and sing ‘In 905 they love the may-yore’. Kind of creepily fits, doesn’t it?) And federal Conservative hopes are pinned in ridings in that part of the GTA, so it makes sense from their end to have Mayor Ford pimping for them. What exactly does the mayor get in return, though?

So the Conservatives snag some suburban seats, enough even to secure a majority government, and if Mayor Ford is seen to have assisted in it, how is that going to help the city of Toronto? Newly installed 905 MPs, working for a government that has no urban agenda, are going to expend political capital fighting to help an NDP orange/Liberal red Toronto? I see a whole world of animosity not co-operation.

Maybe the mayor does too and that’s part of the motivation on his part to get involved. More anti-government crusading conservatives at the levers of power help create a wave of anti-tax and spending. Hey. If the federal government isn’t going to help out with social housing or immigration settlement costs, there’s nothing we can do. My heart bleeds for you but my hands are tied, folks.

Ideological thinking 1, city issues 0.

And if the mayor’s magic doesn’t work in the 905 like it did last fall in 416, and Ford Nation fails to sweep through the greater GTA? Well, no harm, no foul. I’m mean, he’s the mayor of Toronto after all not Brampton or Mississauga. He pitched in to help, even in the face of giving his own city the finger. So you can’t say he didn’t try.

Which may explain why the mayor didn’t insist on the Conservative leader coming right into town, at least once during the campaign. (A sidebar, yer honour? Wouldn’t you be a little offended if, as a mayor of a city, either offering up help or being asked for help during an election, and you didn’t even get the courtesy of a visit to your city? Might you not take that as a slight?) With apparently a couple seats in play here in Toronto, including Eglinton-Lawrence and right on the mayor’s turf of Etobicoke Centre, you’d think Mayor Ford would rally the troops there, in the alleged heart of Ford Nation. Imagine the coup of handing even one 416 seat to the Conservatives. How could that not count as a solid with expectations for an I Owe You One?

That’s the best case scenario for the mayor however, although perhaps not for the citizens of Toronto. Imagine the possible horror that might be inflicted upon us with a newly elected Stephen Harper owing Mayor Ford a favour. But what if the mayor threw his support for Harper at a gathering in his own backyard and didn’t deliver the goods on election day? The vaunted Ford Nation was powerless to turn the town Conservative blue. Might that be a sign that the Nation is no longer so vaunted? That maybe the mayor’s victory last fall wasn’t so much a trend as it was a one-off; a fluke of timing and circumstance rather than a country embracing its far-right, conservative roots.

Publicly backing the Conservatives right here in Toronto and having voters in the city ignore him might take a little swagger out of the mayor’s step and the mayor is nothing without his swagger. He couldn’t risk losing that but somehow still couldn’t refrain from stepping from the sidelines and wading into the federal fray despite there being no discernible upside for the city he purports to lead. The important takeaway message from that is to realize exactly where Mayor Ford’s interests lay. It’s all about self not about city.

— Alabambaly submitted by Cityslikr

Election? What Election?

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Admittedly, I did not spend much time in Mayor Rob Ford’s head. The discomfort was too bearable. It was all blindingly red, the colour of rage and perpetual indignation. At times so intense as to render me unconscious, only to be revived by the sweet smell of chicken wings.

So, I was never able to figure out just what is going on in the mayor’s mind that keeps him so mum about the ongoing federal election campaign. Here he has this bully pulpit which he’s not been shy to use to come down on his particular pet peeves like councillor spending, social housing, public transit and yet on pushing forth a municipal agenda, Mayor Ford’s been L’il Miss Demure. ‘Respect for Taxpayers’ has been as much as he’s managed to type out, allowing a grand opportunity to pass him, and us – and by ‘us’ I don’t mean just us in Toronto but the overwhelming majority of us who live in metropolitan areas throughout the country — by.

The need for such proactive measures has not been greater. Municipalities in Canada are facing increasingly dire circumstances, symbolized by a four year-old estimate of an accumulated $123 billion infrastructure deficit. This cannot be handled individually by nibbling around at discretionary spending corners and stopping the gravy train. As we heard at yesterday’s Who Cares About 15 Million Voters? (h/t @_john_henry @MartinProsperiT), Canada’s 19th-century governance structure does not enable cities to deal with the problems they face on their own. The numbers simply don’t add up.

And the timing could not be more propitious for our mayor to step up to the plate. His political stripe is no secret. The federal finance minister is a family friend. If polls and opinions are to be believed, there are actually some seats in Ford Nation that are in play for Conservatives. (NOW has 5 possibly up for grabs that could turn blue from red.) These could be the difference between a win and a loss, majority versus minority for Stephen Harper. So why isn’t the mayor leveraging this opportunity to highlight urban issues? More specifically, imagine the oomph behind his ask for help in building the Sheppard subway from the feds if he helped secure the Conservatives even 1 or 2 416 ridings for them. It would go a long way to re-election in 2014.

Could it be his silence is, in fact, very tactical? By pushing an urban agenda is there some concern about alienating the even more important 905 region? That urban-suburban divide that politicians in Ottawa (and Queen’s Park) so love to exploit to their advantage might flare up against them if they’re seen to be catering to the bigger cities. Perhaps the Conservatives have asked the mayor to remain on the sidelines and let them have it in the greater GTA. If things fall their way, then maybe there’ll be a little something in it for him afterwards.

Of course, it may be worth considering that the vaunted Ford Nation that the mayor threatened to unleash on Premier McGuinty earlier this year – and it will be interesting to see if Mayor Ford maintains his disengagement during the provincial election in the fall – may not be as vaunted as he hopes. What would happen if the mayor got all involved in the campaign and had little to no to negative impact on the outcome? It wouldn’t diminish his abilities to run the city certainly but it might poke a hole in the invincibility suit he’s been wearing since his election. And if the Conservative horse he backed didn’t win? His ability to bargain at the federal level might be lessened down the road.

Setting partisan campaigning aside, and wondering why Mayor Ford has refused to pick up the urban banner during this election, it may just be more ideologically based than anything else. To step up and demand federal government action in helping cities meet the burdens put upon them would repudiate everything that brought the mayor to power. Echoing the sentiments made by Calgary’s Mayor Nenshi admits to what the mayor refused to admit to his entire political career. Cities do have a revenue problem. If Mayor Ford gives voice to that idea, then everything he ran on, all the damage he’s inflicted on the city right now under the rubric of fiscal responsibility could be seen as unnecessary, mean-spirited and nothing more than pure politics.If that’s the case, if that’s reason for the mayor’s continued absence from the federal election scene, well, it’s as damaging as anything he could by being more involved. It suggests he’s looking out for his own best interests rather than those of the city. Respect for the taxpayers indeed.

— questioningly submitted by Cityslikr

Muscular Urban Agenda

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The success of our cities in Canada is the success of our nation. And as such, it is time for us to embrace a new muscular urban agenda in this country. To allow our cities the resources, the powers and the authorities that they need in order to do the work we must do everyday for the citizens who live within our boundaries…It’s time to talk about cities. It’s time to really talk about how we make sure that cities have the resources they need to provide the services that Canadians need every single day, every single hour of every single day. And it’s time for us to understand that this 3rd order of government, this order of government that doesn’t exist in the Constitution, is actually the order of government that is most important to our citizens’ lives every single day.

~

Toronto does not have a revenue problem. Toronto has a spending problem.

I promised myself I would not compare Calgary’s mayor with ours. I swore I wouldn’t. Crossed my heart, pointed to god… but… it’s… so… hard. Nenshi’s so… articulate …so informed… so positive… Rob Ford… has… kidney stones.

Muscular Urban Agenda!

(Yes. Did it.)

There are two kinds of people, I believe, in both the political and non-political arenas. On one side you’ve got city folk. On the other, let’s call them I-don’t-care-as-long-as-there’s-a-Homesense-and-a-Jack Astors type. It’s not so much about where you live as it is what you think about where you live. You can live in a city and not be a city folk (see Ford, Rob). You can not live in a city and be a city folk although that seems doubtful. City folks tend to live in cities because they like living in cities. Non-city folks live in cities because they have to and don’t spend much time thinking about the whys-and-wherefores of their urban situation.

By most estimates city folks and non-city folks living in cities make up nearly 80% of the Canadian population. In fact, in and around 45% of us live in urban centres with populatons of 500,000 or more and it’s a percentage that isn’t shrinking. Many city folk like Mayor Nenshi think this is a force that needs to be reckoned with, its ranking elevated beyond mere governmental errand boy and coffee fetcher (I said ‘fetcher’) to that of managing partner.

Our former mayor, David Miller, thought along similar lines but by the time the tax revolters and various other non-city folk chased him from office, his demands for fairer treatment at the hands of what we refer to as senior levels of government were dismissed as nothing short of undignified begging. Much was made during the election campaign to replace him of how the city had to stop going cap in hand to the province or the feds, looking for handouts simply because we couldn’t put our financial house in order. Toronto didn’t have a revenue problem, we were told again and again. Toronto had a spending problem.

Oh, but lookee over there. Mayor Nenshi totes the Milleresque sentiments and the well-heeled audience in attendance at the city’s Canadian Club ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ and applaud him heartily. The same Canadian Club, incidentally, that couldn’t be bothered to go hear David Miller give a farewell speech in the waning days of his mayoralty. I guess the difference is, Mayor Miller taxed many of the club members. Mayor Nenshi didn’t.

It’s all well and good to clap and cheer the concept of increased resources, powers and authority for municipalities. It’s another thing entirely to willingly subject yourself to them. Increased resources, powers and authority almost always mean the ability to tax and we here in Toronto, given such resources, powers and authority with the City of Toronto Act in 2006, seemed far from willing. In fact, we rewarded those who promised to do the exact opposite with our votes.

Gone, vehicle registration tax and millions of dollars of revenue (i.e. resource, power and authority) with it. Let’s freeze our property taxes while we’re at it. Millions more dollars of resources, powers and authority done away with. Next year, we’re eyeing you Land Transfer Tax.

We can’t demand more responsibility if we refuse to exercise the small amount we’ve already been given. Opting not to use the powers of taxation at your disposal and choosing instead to hack away at the services and infrastructure that elevate a city beyond simply the place you live to the place where you thrive and flourish, that’s not only short-sighted and detrimental, it’s the height of folly and reckless governance. It is the opposite of a muscular urban agenda. It’s flabby anti-urban abuse. True city folk would take no part in that. Nor would they stand by idly and watch it happen.

— urbanely submitted by Cityslikr