All Fried Up In The Big Smoke

Less political. More fictional.

Missed Opportunity

Posted on March 24, 2014 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

It started out on a shaky note and didn’t get a whole lot better from there.

“What was the moment in which you decided to run for mayor?” Metro Morning host Matt Galloway asked candidate Olivia Chow.

“…ummm, it’s not that one moment…”

Oh, god. *sigh*

That is the one question any candidate needs to have a pat answer down for. Why do you want to be mayor? Why should people vote for you? What was the moment you decided to run for mayor?

Campaign school 101.

I was fighting desperately to give Ms. Chow the benefit of the doubt since she was the first one in the series that will be playing throughout the week, featuring the 5 leading mayoral candidates. It’s a tough slog, right out of the gate. Breaking trail. New ground.

She recovered when asked about her pledge to re-institute the long planned Scarborough LRT instead of the new fangled subway council approved last summer. Four more stops in four less years for a lot less money. A nice, precise sound bite that is hard to refute especially by those touting their fiscal cred and business acumen.

And then Mr. Galloway teed one up for her at which point I realized, no, going first could actually work to Chow’s advantage. She’d be able to establish the terms of the debate, at least as far as this one happening this week on Metro Morning. Her answers and responses would serve as the scale by which her opponents’ performances might be measured.

“Do you think tax has become a four letter word?” Galloway asked Chow.

“Of course it has, Matt. To the detriment of this city. We cannot even begin to talk about the things we need, the infrastructure, both physical and social, the services, the programs, without having a rational discussion about taxes. About taxes, user fees and other sources of revenue Toronto needs to access if we hope to build the liveable, affordable, functional city one of my opponents claims to want.”

No, no. That wasn’t what she said at all.

Just a bunch of humming and hawing, refusing to budge any further than her already stated claim of property tax increases of ‘around inflation’.

Galloway even threw her a lifeline, pointing out that the city manager, Joe Pennachetti has gone on record as saying that Toronto cannot hope to continue growing in any sort of healthy fashion without serious consideration of more revenue. We do not have a spending problem. We have a revenue problem. Cover has been provided for all you closeted tax-and-spending politicians.

But Chow didn’t take that path, choosing instead to circle back to the savings that would come from putting the brakes on the Scarborough subway plan. That’s all it’s going to take, Matt. Just better decision making, smart investment, a modest inflationary annual property tax increase and together, we can build a better city.

We know how this movie unfolds.

Olivia Chow plays it safe into the mayor’s office, inevitably to be confronted with worse looking books than the outgoing council will ever admit to. We know they’re going to be worse, worse certainly than the $350 million operating budget surplus the supposed fiscally reckless David Miller administration bequeathed Rob Ford as a mayoral-warming gift. Having just scratched the surface dealing with last year’s announcement from the province that it was shortening the time frame in which it was going to cease its Toronto Pooling Compensation support of social services in the city, the bulk of the nearly $150 million loss is going to be faced by the new council.

And that’s just one example.

Oops, our new mayor will say. We didn’t see this coming. (We did.) We’re going to have to raise taxes more than I pledged in order to deal with this unexpected turn of events.

All followed by cries of ‘I told you so’, ‘tax-and-spender’, and everybody retreats back to their ideological corners. Myths and misconceptions reinforced. She wasn’t given a mandate by the voters of Toronto to raise taxes.

And they’ll be right. By not tackling this issue head-on now, the Olivia Chow team is simply delaying the inevitable battle they will have to have if their candidate is elected in October. Their short term gain will lead to a longer, extended battle that will invariably create fertile ground for another Rob Ford-like assault on the governance of Toronto. Proper, healthy city-building will come under threat once again.

The Chow campaign has ceded ground right off the bat to the anti-taxers, giving more credence to the mindless incantations from the likes of John Tory’s Nick Kouvalis. It is defensively reacting to the terms of the debate laid down by the mayor and all the right wing contenders for his job. There was an opportunity to seize control this morning, redefine the framing. They fumbled it.

It is a long campaign. Plenty of time to re-shape the messaging as you go along. It just gets harder if you pass up chances Olivia Chow was given today to set the agenda in her favour.

— frustratingly submitted by Cityslikr

Carefully Picking Sides

Posted on March 19, 2014 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

Earlier this year I attended a Ward 10 York Centre community town hall meeting hosted by Councillor James Pasternak. It was just pre-2014 city budget and post-ugly holiday season ice storm. Despite the timing, the atmosphere wasn’t hostile or toxic, at least, not initially.

Unsurprisingly, the hot topic was the storm clean-up which, like in many parts of the city, wasn’t happening quickly enough for most folks in the room. Even more than 3 weeks after the weather bomb, swaths of the local area remained unnavigable because of fallen and uncollected foliage. Some branches still hung dangerously from trees.

Transit, traffic and congestion ran a close second, however. While not evenly split certainly, there was a respectful representation from among the attendees of those asking thoughtful and reasonable questions about public transit. Frequency, capacity and route ideas were part of the discussion. These were offset, of course, by demands to widen Bathurst Street for another lane of cars or the possibility of opening a local cemetery road to make it a neighbourhood thoroughfare.

But things didn’t really get out and out zany until about hour three. No elected official should be expected to endure a 3 hour Q and A session. None of us are made of such hardy stuff. It’s too much. Too, too much.

A lady, who earlier in the evening had been gently subdued after her time at the microphone, waving a 3 year old issue of NOW magazine with a nearly nude Rob Ford Photoshopped on its cover, regained control of the floor and began reading from the provincial health act, I believe it was. I’m sure there was a reason for it but it slips my mind at the moment. Suffice to say, it was beyond the jurisdiction of Councillor Pasternak.

That just kicked open the door to crazy. Without the aid of the mic, a gentleman began berating the councillor, accusing him of hording TTC tokens before a fare increase. The man had been fairly aggressive in questioning Councillor Pasternak a couple hours prior but this was just flat out lunacy, as he ended up yelling at anybody approaching him until a poor young staff member of the community centre had to guide him to the exit. “Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me or I’ll have you charged!!”

The meeting petered out after that. I felt compelled to approach the councillor to shake his hand and offer condolences of a sort. Before you run around slagging a city councillor, you really should go to a town hall meeting they hold, see what they have to put up with.

Besides, I personally, as a Ward 10 non-constituent, can think of far bigger issues to yell at Councillor Pasternak about than just making up nutty stuff like token hording.

Three things stand out for from his time at City Hall since 2010. None of them particularly good or inspiring.

One: re-opening (and opening again) the whole Queers United Against Israeli Apartheid marching at Pride hullaballo. Not only was the councillor on the wrong side of a free speech issue, city staff had firmly held that there was nothing hate speech-y involved in the expression and nothing wrong with the group participating in Pride, he helped provide cover for the homophobia the new mayor and the likes of Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti like to indulge in. Why do you want to defund Pride? Because QUAIA. Why won’t you march in the Pride parade? Because QUAIA (and other things).

Two: He possesses a remarkable tone deafness and ward-ccentric view of public transit. What about the North York Relief Line he asked again, just last week. Wondering why everyone running for mayor was stumping for the DRL. What about the North York Relief Line?

What about it, councillor? I don’t even know what it is. Oh right. Connecting the under-used Sheppard subway, from the Yonge Line west to the University-Spadina line. Nobody else thinks it’s necessary at this time, councillor. It’s a parochial distraction. Stop it.

And thirdly, Councillor Pasternak is awfully demanding of city services and programs while towing a fairly fiscal conservative line. By ‘fiscal conservative’, I mean Ford fiscal conservative. Keeping revenues down, low property taxes, eliminate other streams like the VRT, requesting a report for reducing the Land Transfer Tax, all the while not being averse to spending money, most times on very admirable and necessary items. The councillor recently expressed displeasure at possibly losing a priority designation for a neighbourhood in his ward in the proposed staff reshuffling of newly designated Neighbourhood Improvement Areas. “This is not a time to cut back, when you make certain headway,” the councillor said. “You keep the funding to make sure there’s no sliding back.”

You gotta pay for the things you want, Councillor Pasternak. A strong city isn’t built on the cheap.

I guess it’s going to depend on what residents of Ward 10 prioritize in the upcoming election that will determine Councillor Paternak’s political fate in October. He was in one of the tightest races in 2010 in an open ward to replace long time council member, Mike Feldman, winning by under 400 votes with less than 20% of the popular vote. Will voters see his name as a tax fighter or a protector of services and programs they want in their neighbourhoods?

A jaded eye might view the councillor as making sure all the bases were covered. You have to wonder if that’s spread him out too thinly, made him not enough of anything to really have made much of a lasting impression.

— gruelly submitted by Cityslikr

We Have Enough

Posted on March 12, 2014 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

“We have enough.”

And with that, Mayor Rob Ford solved the city’s inequality and social disparity. Just like that. Just three words. We have enough.

The mayor was speaking about the city staff’s report on expanding what used to be referred to as Priority Neighbourhoods and now re-dubbed Neighbourhood Improvement Areas. If OK’d by city council, they’d also grow in number from the current 13 to 31. In short, it means increased investment directed at neighbourhoods, targeting various social, economic and infrastructure factors that contribute (or don’t, as the case may be) to inequities throughout the city.

Of course, the mayor was having none of it. Priorities neighbourhoods are where you go to campaign and show that you’re always looking out for the little guy. As an elected official you don’t actually try and solve any of the problems. That’s what the private sector’s for. Government is just there, to sit back, stay out of the way and keep taxes low.

While Mayor Ford is the poster child on city council for this way of thinking, he’s far from alone. More than a few of his low tax, no spend colleagues represent wards in which these priority neighbourhoods are located and they resent the designation, believing it discourages investment because, I guess, business types don’t care for the poors. Way back in the early days of the Ford administration Matt Elliott summarized the move by the likes of councillors Crisanti, Mammoliti and Nunziati to try and rid their wards of the stigma of neediness designated by such a distasteful moniker.

End inequality by renaming it.

Even doing that, however, hasn’t placated Mayor Ford. Despite staff’s best intention to make their findings more thorough and robust, more inclusive to the hurdles people face living and working in this city, he shrugs it off in three easy-to-remember words. For him, calling it something else only expanded the numbers, made the problems seem worse.

What he refuses to accept, what every adherent to his low tax, spending not a revenue problem political philosophy refuses to accept is that it is this very approach that has exacerbated the problems. Chronic underfunding in both hard and soft services that go toward enhancing everyone’s ability to make the most of the opportunities available to them living in this city – from transit to housing, parks to daycare – have created the unhealthy and insecure situations giving rise to our ballooning priority neighbourhoods. There is no other alternative.

We’ve gone through the pretty much useless exercise of finding efficiencies that helped sweep Ford into power. Take whatever number he wants to throw at you as the number he’s saved while mayor, $400 million, a billion, it doesn’t matter. There’s nothing left to tap. It’s done. No more juice to squeeze.

Don’t believe me? Ask the fiscal hawk of a city manager who’s obediently followed the mayor’s instruction to stop the gravy train. “I believe we’ve gone as far as we can without impacting services,” Joe Pennachetti said in December. While some of us would argue services and programs have already been more than impacted, the statement still stands. We’ve gone as far as we can down this ruinous route of penny-pinching and cheapening of our civic life.

The complaint often heard during Rob Ford’s mayoral run in 2010 was that with all the spending going on under then mayor David Miller (who, it should be noted from the above article, Mr. Pennachetti applauded for beginning the fiscal reforms at City Hall) there was little to show for it. Untrue on a number of points especially with substantial increases in transit services to name one, it was entirely ridiculous to think that 7 years of increased spending was going to immediately reverse decades of under-spending. The first 3 years of property tax freezes under Mel Lastman. The actual costs of amalgamation and provincial downloading. Transformation was not going to happen overnight.

Not to mention the history of low tax and pay-as-you-go services and programs pursued by many of the former municipalities making up Toronto’s inner suburbs.

Now, I know there are multiple factors at play here. The concentration of wealth and businesses in the downtown core. A certain continued disregard emanating from there outward to the city’s perceived hinterlands.

But look at the map. It cannot be a coincidence that many of the former priority neighbourhoods and many of the new additional Neighbourhood Improvement Areas sit in those former municipalities. Etobicoke, Scarborough, York. Traditional home to many of the city’s most anti-tax, small government zealots. Such zealotry continues to be represented on city council today.

The mayor, his brother, the afore-mentioned trio of Crisanti, Mammoliti and Nunziata. Throw in the budget chief, Frank Di Giorgio. The former budget chief, Mike Del Grande. Budget Committee members, councillors Gary Crawford and Ron Moeser.

Councillor James Pasternak, also a member of the Budget Committee and fiscal hawk, bemoaned the loss of a priority neighbourhood, Westminster-Branson, in his ward in the new configuration. “This is not a time to cut back, when you make certain headway,” the councillor said. “You keep the funding to make sure there’s no sliding back.”

Yeah well, Councillor Pasternak. Maybe you should’ve thought about that when you fought to keep our property taxes low, tossed out the vehicle registration tax, put money toward a totally unnecessary subway. Didn’t you ask for a report exploring the possibility of reducing the Land Transfer Tax, another source of city revenue, next year?

So here we are, with the lowest property tax rate in the GTA, under-utilized and always under threat sources of possible revenue, staring at huge infrastructure needs and growing segments of the city woefully under-serviced, isolated and alienated. We’ve tried scaling back our efforts and investment in the hopes of somehow, miraculously, turning things around. We haven’t and we won’t until we accept the fact and responsibility that improvement in our city’s physical environment and quality of life doesn’t just happen, doesn’t come for free or even on the cheap.

We have enough? How about, We’ve had enough? Respect for Taxpayers was a real nice, catchy slogan but it’s done fuck all for an increasing number of residents of this city. It’s time to stop pretending and accepting responsibility to make things better for all of us, not just some of us.

— finally submitted by Cityslikr