Tag Archives: Rocco Rossi

And In Other News

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… meanwhile, over at Metrolinx…

Funny how in the midst of a tempestuous election campaign, the business of actual governance gets pushed off deep into the background. So much so that some candidates out there on the hustings go as far as to suggest that elected officials should not be making any decisions that may outlive their time in office. Election year lame ducking, you might call it.

Still, the odd piece of business can pop up that does impose itself on the campaign. Take, for example, the minor brouhaha last week over the almost completed construction of the so-called Dufferin Jog. This is the long overdue reconnecting of Dufferin Street at Queen. For the past century or so, weary travelers making their way along Dufferin Street in either direction had to jut around the railway bridge at Queen to continue their sojourn north or south. This minor diversion has long caused traffic chaos along that section of Queen Street.

But as of sometime in the early fall, we’ll be able to breeze up and down Dufferin Street like it’s PCH 1, zipping effortlessly beneath the rail underpass on our way to the Home and Garden Show or… for whatever reason it is people go north on Dufferin Street.

But wait, not so fast. Metrolinx – the vaguely provincial government transit agency in charge of orchestrating the entire GTA’s Big Move — has asked the city to delay wrapping up construction for a couple months, maybe 4 or 6, so they can lay down another track for trains operating on the Georgetown corridor. Why this is only being brought up now, who knows? For our purposes here, let’s just chalk it up to another example of problematic overlapping governmental jurisdictions.

As of now it seems the city will ignore Metrolinx’s request and go ahead to complete construction, leaving the question of additional tracks for a later date. This decision imposed itself on the council race in Ward 18 where the Dufferin Jog is located and which is the seat of power for outgoing TTC chair, Adam Giambrone. Ana Bailão, a candidate to replace Giambrone as councillor in Ward 18 and whom Giambrone defeated for the spot in 2003, suggests her former opponent is setting common sense aside and proceeding with completion simply in order “… to cut the ribbon for the project” before he leaves office. She contends it would be cheaper and less hassle to finish the whole thing up now rather than having to restart construction at a later date.

Kevin Beaulieu, another candidate competing for the Ward 18 council seat and former Giambrone executive assistant, thinks there’s more to it than that. He contends Metrolinx is trying to covertly expand the railway in order to accommodate their diesel engine technology at the expense of electrifying the corridor, a sentiment shared by at least in part by some at council including Councillor Gord Perks. We leave it to those better informed about transit and that particular issue to try and disentangle it but a couple Metrolinx matters – and the gist of this actual post — did jump to our attention while we were reading through the minutae of the imbroglio.

News filtered out late last month that the Metrolinx-SNC Lavalin private-public partnership deal to build and operate the Union Station-Pearson Airport rail link was dead. According to John Lorinc in the Globe and Mail, “… SNC Lavalin and its lenders pulled out because Ontario refused to provide operating subsidies for the 46-year deal, meaning the private sector consortium would rely only on fare revenues to meet its profit targets.”

Huh. Imagine that. The fearless private sector got cold feet at plunging into the public transit game because the provincial government “refused to provide operating subsidies”.

“Naturally, we are disappointed by the outcome of the Toronto Air Rail Link Project. Given the state of financial markets over the past few years, lenders, both in Canada and elsewhere, are reluctant to lend money for full revenue-risk projects.  As a result, an agreement that met our own standards of risk tolerance could not be reached with interested lenders,” SNC Lavalin said in an official statement [bolding ours].

Attention should be paid, you candidates bellowing about how the private sector will eagerly sign on to build all those subways we want. Apparently a little cost analysis reveals that making money from public transit ain’t that easy. At least not without some stinky government cheese thrown in, and if that’s what it takes to get PPPs up and running, why bother? If the Ontario government isn’t going “to provide operating subsidies” to, say, the TTC, they shouldn’t be expected to do so with private companies.

Of a second Metrolinx related note, outgoing President and CEO of the organization, Robert Pritchard who is moving up to become its chair of the board, will be replaced by Deputy Minster of Transportation, Bruce McCuaig. McCuaig is a veteran bureaucrat and his appointment puts a politician in charge of Metrolinx. That is, if spending 26 years in bureaucracy qualifies him as a politician. And if it does, that means a ‘career politician’ now has his fingers in the pie of public transit planning which appears to be an about-face of professionalization of such matters that the government’s been touting for the last little while.

Again, we’re not well enough informed about public transit policy to debate the merits or lack of them in such moves. We point them out only because they seem to be running contrary to the voices of debate going on during this municipal campaign in Toronto. The private sector should not be counted on to build public transit. SNC Lavalin’s exit from the airport rail link table serves as yet another example of this failed experiment. Secondly, we cannot entirely de-politician the public transit planning. As strong as that appeal is especially when anti-incumbency is as thick in the air as it is this year, it seems neither sensible nor workable.

Anyone running for office who advocates such ideas (Mssrs. Ford and Rossi are merely the most extreme cases) must be vigorously challenged on these points. They are pushing theories and ideas that don’t seem to be viable and certainly are not working out there in the real world. It would be negligent on our part to put such baseless dreamers in a position of power that well might undermine public transit planning into the foreseeable future.

The Great Divide

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If campaign 2010 continues on its present trajectory, come around Oct. 23rd, 24th, we’ll be preparing to head to the polls believing we live somewhere like Londonerry or Belfast. Beirut or Jerusalem. Kirkuk. (Plug in the divided city of your choice).

Thirteen years into amalgamation and this election has finally blown the lid off the pressure cooker of simmering hostilities between the old downtown core and its inner suburban brethren. Us coristas have milked the `burbs dry with our bike lanes, waterfront developments and faggy artistic pursuits. In turn, the proverbial Wayne and Garths have pinched off a couple political turds named Mel Lastman and Rob Ford smack dap into our skinny café lattes.

Or so the story goes.

Last week, the Toronto Star’s Urban Affairs reporter, Robyn Doolitte, delved into the city’s schism. A dirty job but someone had to do it. What did she discover? The divisions separating us are as much imaginary as they are real. All those questions of who has and gets what is – surprise, surpise – a lot more complicated than we’re hearing in the media and on the campaign trail.

Former mayoral candidate and former York city councillor and now Toronto city councillor Giorgio Mammoliti insists the city’s inner suburbs have been getting short shrift since amalgamation. His staff analyzed the “numbers” and left him with “no doubt that the majority of spending goes downtown”. Just look at the money being splurged on Union Station, the waterfront, Bloor Street, G20 security. Imagine what the suburbs could’ve done with that billion dollars or so.

However, other “numbers” suggest that residents of the old city of Toronto receive less funding from the city on a per person basis than those dwelling in the former burgs of North York, Etobicoke and York. After the last election, Scarborough councillor Norm Kelly commissioned a study to examine allocation of city resources which came back with the not entirely rock solid conclusion that, in fact, Scarberians were not being hosed on half the services that were assessed while on the other half, it was hard to tell.

From all this, we’re now in the midst of a ‘culture war’ as Ms. Doolittle suggests?

It wouldn’t be the first time that misinformation and the power of perceived persecutional exclusion drives a debate especially during a political campaign. A wedge is a much easier tool to use when digging for support. Even more so when you lack an uplifting, unifying theme. I know candidate Rob Ford immediately springs to mind but Rocco Rossi was the first to employ the method this time around with his war on cars schtick. Ford simply sniffed which way the wind was blowing and realized he could do it so much better than Rossi. And he has.

That is not to say gaps and inequalities don’t exist throughout the city. They most certainly do. But to try and suggest that they are the result of an uneven financial flow since amalgamation is playing fast and loose with the facts for the purpose of pure divisiveness. All 6 of the cities that were forced against their choice into one by the Harris government each brought their own respective pros and baggage to the table. As many of the now 13 high priority neighbourhoods were located outside the old city of Toronto as were within its boundaries. Now money is being spent by all of us trying to deal with the disparities in those parts of the new, bigger city of Toronto.

Of course, that’s awfully murky grey and nuanced. Easier to point fingers and wax nostalgic about the good ol’ days before we had to deal with those leftist downtowners or dumbfuck suburbanites. Remember when those nice people from the city used to come and de-weed the boulevard, Betsy? I got an idea, pops. Why don’t you weed your own boulevard and we’ll spend that money building a community centre next door in the old city of York. Hey, North York. How be you try shoveling snow off your sidewalks like we do down here in the core and we’ll toss a little money your way to fix all those pipes you neglected to deal with?

Like it or not everyone, we’re all one big, happy family now here in the megacity, and that spending spree all of you are talking about, that gravy train, may just be the price we’re paying for trying to make one size fit all. Only the willfully ignorant or blindly ideological truly believed the cost of amalgamation would be otherwise. Economies of scale don’t always apply if that was, in fact, ever actually the intention of all this at the provincial level. So, here we are, 13 years later, in an unproductive pissing match with each other.

There’s nothing territorial about this. I’d be very happy voting for a suburban candidate running for mayor. Isn’t Shelley Carroll from North York? Why won’t she run? It’s just that, instead, what keeps rising up from the inner ring are monstrosities of dumbness, intolerance and irrationality. If you truly believe that Mayor David Miller has made a bigger mess of this city than did his predecessor, Mel Lastman, than you are simply unwilling to engage in constructive dialogue and are determined to see that this project called amalgamation fails.

And if that’s the very definition of a ‘culture war’, I guess we are in the middle of one.

— miffedly submitted by Cityslikr

Going To Pot

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Frankly, I’m skeptical about the whole Rob Ford Caught With Pot in Florida story. It stinks to high heaven and not at all in the good way. That nice deep earthy, skunky way.

Firstly, I am not unfamiliar with the weed and have known my share of folks who are regular partakers. Never have I encountered someone of Ford’s personality trait who likes pot. At a party, they’ll wave an extended hand off, saying it doesn’t do much for them except make them sleepy.

Now, maybe there’s a laidback side to the man that very few of us get to see. Relaxin’ Rob, kickin’ it old school in FLA, wearing nothing but a speedo, blowing a doob and scarfing back pounds and pounds of shrimp cocktail.  Maybe, but I just can’t picture it. I just don’t want to picture it.

As has already been stated all over the interwebs, if Rob Ford were an illegal drug user, it would be a drug like coke. Crystal meth. Amyl nitrate poppers. OK, maybe not amyl nitrate. But then again, maybe. Whatever drugs it was that killed Chris Farley, those would be Rob Ford’s drugs of choice. If he were an illegal drug user.

Secondly, who broke the story and the timing of it are both highly, highly suspicious. Like the previous drug related pseudo-scandal involving Rob allegedly offering to illegally buy oxycontin for his new gay best friend, it was the Toronto Sun bringing us the pot tale. (Note the paper playfully chiding him as a Bad Boy.) By breaking this story now, the pro-Ford rag helped their candidate get out ahead of it, call himself yet another press conference to clear up yet another misstep, all well before election day when, hopefully, voters will have long since forgotten it.

More importantly, this minor blip of a controversy comes just 48 hours after Ford took his first real hit of the campaign during Tuesday night’s televised mayoral debate. When the topic of the Tamil “migrants” was raised, Ford stated that until we got our house in order and took care of the people who already live here we shouldn’t be going out of our way to welcome newcomers. Maybe it just came out the wrong way but no amount of spinning by the Ford people could totally obscure the fact that their guy might be a little bit of a xenophobic bigot.

Now, to his rock solid base — the Ford Army — his view on this was not just inconsequential but probably bang on. Everything the man says is bang on. In their eyes, Rob Ford can do or say no wrong. He could be caught strangling a baby while anally penetrating himself with a fuzzy puppy and they wouldn’t so much as blanch. That would just be Rob being Rob. What are you going to do? THE CITY DOESN’T HAVE A REVENUE PROBLEM! THE CITY HAS A SPENDING PROBLEM!! STOP THE GRAVY TRAIN!!!

The question is, however, is his base large enough to elect Rob Ford mayor on its own? One would hope in 2010 Toronto that wouldn’t be the case. Although we may be caught off-guard at just how many hillbillies we live amongst, they still aren’t plentiful enough to sweep Ford into office single-handedly.

So he has to reach out a little toward the right of centre. Not much, especially if the race continues as it is with these 5 front runners and 4 of them not having the devoted following that Ford has. Just 5-10% of those somewhat disaffected uncommitteds who feel overtaxed and underserviced and possess a streak of libertarianism in them. Those people still angry about having had to deal with their own garbage for 6 weeks last summer.

But when they hear Rob Ford being labeled as a mean-spirited bigot, they recoil. Ewww. That’s not right. John Tory would never say anything like that. And suddenly Rocco Rossi and Sarah Thomson begin to look like viable alternatives.

That is the sheer genius of the sudden appearance of the Rob Ford busted for pot and refusing a breathalyzer test in Florida more than 10 years ago story. It wipes the immigration gaffe right off the map and helps no one but Rob Ford. Given his history of boorish behaviour, it wouldn’t surprise me for a minute that he’s got hundreds of these things in his back pocket to use every time he says or does something that could seriously jeopardize his candidacy. With still 7 weeks to go in the election, he’ll probably have to use all of them.

I have now stopped thinking of the brain trust of Rob Ford’s campaign as mouth-breathing dunderheads who hold their daily meetings over hundreds of chicken wings at some Hooters. Whoever they are – and I still don’t see it being the candidate himself – they are proving themselves to be pure evil masterminds and should no longer be underestimated. For those who do not want to see Rob Ford as our next mayor, they have to ignore these insignificant diversionary tactics and continue to focus on all the real reasons he is unfit for the office.

— mellowly submitted by Urban Sophisticat