Tag Archives: Paul Moloney

Is This Private Sector Transit Funding Councillor Ford Sees Before Him?

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Is there a point of time when we can declare one of our elected officials clinically delusional? (Is there even an actual medical condition called ‘clinically delusional?) If so, what would we need to do to have them examined for their malady? A doctor’s note? Some sort of panel sign off?

Because here we are, a growing number, getting ready to begin an adult discussion on transit, what we need, how we need to fund it. You know. Something that should’ve been happening 30 years ago. 15 years ago. Just some number of years ago. In the past tense.

But wait. Into the debate strolls city council’s own Foghorn Leghorn, Councillor-Brother Doug Ford. Now, now just hold on there, just hold on a second, there folks. Hold on a cotton-pickin’ second. (That’s not racist. It couldn’t be. No one’s done more for black youth in this city than the councillor’s brother, the mayor. Why, some of his best football players are black.)

“Unless you go out and get expressions of interest worldwide and see what the private sector can do,” Councillor Ford said, “then you don’t raise taxes. It’s very simple.”

“We’ve got to keep trying, because it’s the right thing to do. There’s billions of dollars worldwide that want a safe haven for investment. Canada is that safe haven and Toronto is the best place in the world to invest.”

I say, I say.

We’ve got to keep trying, because it’s the right thing to do. It doesn’t matter that the mayor and his brother had over a year to harness the awesomeness of the private sector to build their Sheppard subway and came up empty. Because it’s the right thing to do, you’ve got to go out and root and dig for ‘expressions of interest and see what  the private sector can do’ regardless of the negligible evidence out there showing the private sector rushing in anywhere to fund public transit. No new taxes. The private sector will take care of all our needs.

We’ve. Got to. Keep. Trying. Because. It’s. The. Right. Thing. To. Do. Because. It’s. The. Right. Thing. To. Do. Billions of dollars out there. Safe havens. Billions. Canada’s the greatest investment opportunity in the world.

Does Councillor Ford actually believe in this magical pot of transit gold at the end of the private sector rainbow or does he just hate taxes so much, feels so strongly deep down in his heart of hearts all taxes are so evil, that he will say anything, regardless of how quantifiably disprovable it may be to discredit a conversation about revenue generation before it even gets off the ground?

If he’s just being some cynical circus barker, hell bent on not wanting to pay his share of the city’s infrastructure needs, that’s one thing. There’s an agenda at work. It’s concrete. You can contend with it.

You can point out, as TTC Chair Karen Stintz did at a Scarborough Town Hall meeting back during the LRT-subway debates that the private sector doesn’t just pay for public transit out of the goodness of its heart. Someone has to pay them to do it and that someone is always going to be us, the taxpayers.

We either do it through direct government subsidies or down the road through the farebox. There’s no other miraculous way it works. Those who wave off their obligations to pay for the building and operating of public transit, citing the marvel of the private sector as the panacea to our infrastructure needs, are merely kicking the proverbial can down the road. They’re trading the concept of passing along a fiscal deficit to the next generation to one of an infrastructure deficit. And that number is already staggeringly high.

And if Councillor Ford and his ilk don’t recognize that, if they truly see necessary capital infrastructure plans as little more than ‘unfunded liabilities’, then they clearly don’t understand their role as elected representatives and keepers of the public purse. Saying ‘no’ to big ticket items is fucking easy. You can shrug it off with empty sloganeering. It’s figuring out how to do the things a city needs done that’s the tough slog.

That’s if you’re actually having a rational discussion.

It could be that Councillor Ford has absolute faith in his meaningless private sector cant. A true believer in the perfection of the free market and fully paid member of the Six Sigma cult. He huffs and puffs beyond the realm of reality. Not a participant but a spectre that just spooks the proceedings, distracting everyone from the work and discussion that needs to be done.

Just another ghost from our past, haunting us with previous decisions deferred and similar failures of political will.

— figmently submitted by Cityslikr

Be Coloured Skeptical

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Before we proceed too far down the 2013 budget deliberation path, I really think we need to set up some sort of Budget Comprehension School. Municipal Budgeting For Dummies 101. For anyone seeking to opine on matters related to the budget process they will have to learn a few basics and pass non-multiple choice examination. City councillors (including our budget chief) and staff (including our city manager), journalists, hoity-toity dilettantes who shall remain nameless.

Barely out of the gate this year, and we already seem to be simply throwing numbers, big numbers around. Yesterday the CBC reported that the opening “shortfall” for next year’s budget was $200 million. “It’s nearly $500 million less than the ‘opening pressure’ identified by the city manager at the start of the budget process in 2011 when city departments were asked to cut their budgets by 10 per cent.” Actually, last year’s “opening pressure” was reported to be some $774 million. So that would make the difference closer to nearly $600 million not 500. But, who’s counting?

Apparently, different people with very different types of calculators.

Last week, when Budget Chief Del Grande went to the Toronto Police Services Board to tell them it’d be all belt tightening for realz this time, and not just some pretend spending reduction, we read that, in fact, the opening pressure was going to be some $465 million. Still, substantially less than last year but not $500 or $600 million less. What gives?

How can we possibly have a reasonable discussion about this city’s financial situation, conduct an honest debate about budgeting when we can’t even agree on a starting point? I get that, especially this early on in the proceedings, it’s all about estimates. We’re still, what, 5 months away from the 2013 budget vote? Never mind about 8 months from the end of the 2012 fiscal year when the numbers really solidify. But can’t we at least settle on something resembling a concrete estimate?

The problem with this “opening pressure”, aside from actually understanding what it is – the total costs the city estimates it will have to pay out in the upcoming year? – comes from it being used as a political football. If councillors and senior city staff want to scare Torontonians into favouring cuts to services and programs or have sign off on a tax increase, the “opening pressure” is always big and seemingly on the verge of being unmanageable without a heroic effort to tame it. On the other hand, if their intent is to display their fiscal acumen, the given number is low. See how we’re managing your money, Toronto.

The number we use as the opening pressure should be fairly straightforward, within reasonable limits of variation since it’s based on educated guess work. I would argue that a $265 million difference within a 5 day span does not constitute a ‘reasonable limit of variation’. Somebody’s playing with numbers. Somebody’s not doing their homework.

And, of course, the opening pressure is only half the equation.

It’s all about projected costs. The full picture doesn’t come into focus until revenues are factored in. Crunching numbers solely on costs would be like tallying your mortgage, car, food, utilities, school tuition and all other personal expenses, panicking about the huge number staring up at you from the bottom of the column and deciding the sell your house to pay for all of it. But.. but.. what about your income? Surely, that’ll help offset at least some of those costs, yes?

An opening pressure is just that, a starting point. It should not be a number wielded above your head like an axe. Whether it’s $200, $465 or $774 million, this is not the amount of money we need to find in order to balance our books. And we always have to balance our books. It’s provincially mandated. So when you read or hear that the opening pressure is x millions of dollars and the implication that follows is that we have to make x millions of dollars in cuts (or raise taxes y percent to generate x millions of dollars) in order to reach a zero balance, step back, cross your arms on your chest and ask, And what about the revenues?

But forgive me. It seems I’m getting ahead of myself here. That’s lesson two. First, there’s still the matter of settling on our opening pressure. Without that, it’s all just hepped-up, partisan politicking.

— numerically submitted by Cityslikr

The Mayor’s A Bit Player In This Drama

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Enzo Di Matteo’s NOW article this week, Bill Blair witch hunting, is what the kids today are calling ‘speculative non-fiction’, isn’t it? A sprawling yarn, more episodic police procedural than actual real life, rife with blackmail, intrigue, betrayal with a healthy spicing of violence bringing it all together. It’s not that what he writes couldn’t be possible but the dynamics of the situation just don’t ring true to my ear.

The piece tries to convince us that Mayor Ford retains control of the helm enough to have his way with Chief Blair and/or the Police Services Board. Di Matteo did see what happened with the TTC commission, didn’t he? It’s one thing to want “…to replace Blair-friendly Scarborough councillor Chin Lee…” and another thing entirely to have the political heft to pull the manoeuvre off. If the chief’s grip on the board is ‘tenuous’, the mayor’s would have to be considered tenuous-er.

Di Matteo seems to suggest that Mayor Ford’s ‘point guy on the police file’, TPSB vice-chair Councillor Michael Thompson, is doing the mayor’s bidding in plotting against Chief Blair. I just don’t see it. In fact, one could jump to the exact opposite conclusion.

From the NOW article:

“…[Councillor] Thompson, who’s made no bones about wanting to challenge the status quo at 40 College, or ‘the brotherhood,’ as he likes to call it, since he took over as vice-chair of the Police Services Board.

Ask Thompson if he has confidence in Blair and you’re likely to be met with a long pause followed by the kind of laugh that might be provoked by a trick question.

‘I haven’t thought about it,’ he says.

That’s not the scuttlebutt at police headquarters, where Thompson has been busy inculcating the everybody-challenge-everybody culture.

The two got off on the wrong foot when the Ford administration tried in the early days to strong-arm the chief into a 10 per cent budget cut that would have meant laying off 500 cops.

Thompson was hung out to dry by the mayor on that one, and it’s been mano-a-mano ever since.

While Councillor Thompson may not have confidence in the police chief and has ‘made no bones about wanting to challenge the status quo of the brotherhood’, I’d say that being ‘hung out to dry by the mayor’ with the proposed budget cuts last year makes him an unreliable ally of Mayor Ford. Anyone who is unafraid to say this out loud — “I’m interested in being part of the problem if problems are the way to get to solutions.” – should not be taken for granted by either side. In fact, it suggests to me Councillor Thompson isn’t even sure what he’s up to.

In reality, the mayor’s biggest foe on this issue has to be the mayor himself. There is no easy circling of the square on this for him. If he’s using budget cuts to force a showdown with Chief Blair, it would be a classic case of shooting yourself in the foot, cutting your nose off to spite your face. Any significant cut to the police budget will result in layoffs. It has to since the police budget consists of nearly 90% labour costs. What else is there to cut?

For all the budget chief Mike Del Grande-standing last week in front of the TPSB, it really was just about the long-hanging fruit. Paid duty, overtime pay for court appearances and, of course, the absolute pablum of finding further efficiencies. Of the really big questions, Councillor Del Grande offered little in the way of ideas.

“One of the fundamental questions I ask is: How many police do we need in the city of Toronto?” Del Grande said to the board. “What’s the right number? No one has been able to tell us definitively how many police officers does it take to police the city of Toronto.” The budget chief claimed ‘he has never seen an independent study justifying the current Toronto police uniform complement of about 5,600.’

Fair enough. But there we are. If this administration wants to cut back on police officers shouldn’t the onus be on it to say with confidence that it won’t be detrimental to the safety of the city? Rather than just this blanket across the board budget freeze, shouldn’t the budget chief be the one providing the independent study justifying the number of police he thinks Toronto can get by with?

Any number he can come up with, however, is going to be less than the one Mayor Ford touted a couple years ago while campaigning for the job. He promised 100 more police officers on the street. According to the police union head, Mike McCormack, owing to the budget constraints of the last two years, a hiring freeze has resulted in 178 fewer police officers. If another one is instituted for 2013, Di Matteo suggests the force could be down 400 officers. How does the mayor reconcile his passion for cutting government including the police with his love of never hug-a-thug, law-and-order?

He votes to cut social programs. He votes to cut the number of police officers. It’s kind of his everybody-for-themselves libertarianism laid bare.

More than any 9-1-1 audiotape Police Chief Blair may or may not have under lock and key to use in a political knife fight with the administration, I think Mayor Ford’s main vulnerability is his own glaring lack of credibility. More police=more money. Less money=less police. Try as he might, he can’t make that math work in his favour. His opponents know that. His leverage is almost non-existent. Whatever happens with Chief Blair or the TPSB, my bet is the mayor won’t be the one calling the shots.

— plottingly submitted by Cityslikr