Tag Archives: Shelley Carroll

Laschinger Gets His Man. Finally.

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As news broke last week that John Laschinger would be assuming the chair of Joe Pantalone’s campaign team, the reality started to sink in for left wing and progressive voters that the Deputy Mayor was going to be their standard bearer in the upcoming election this October. Laschinger had guided David Miller to consecutive mayoral victories and was on board the Adam Giambrone Express that spectacularly derailed in lurid technicolour in almost record time. He then mused publicly about a possible run by budget chief Shelley Carroll.

But now he is in Pantalone’s corner and Laschinger’s status is such that it’s hard to imagine a credible candidate stepping in from the left-of-centre to mount a challenge. So it’s all Joe for Mayor in 2K10 and the excitement is, if not palpable, well… let’s just say it’s not palpable. Yet. Remember though, Laschinger took a much more obscure politician in David Miller in 2003 and helped elect him mayor of the city.

Joe Pantalone isn’t a bad candidate. He’s been a very effective councillor for almost 30 years, ably working with both sides of the political spectrum. For the last 6+ years, he’s been the deputy mayor, overseeing a massive reformation of the city as it has stumbled and lurched out of the darkness of the Harris and Lastman years towards a new, more forward looking post-amalgamation identity.

So far, however, Pantalone has been shockingly quiet on the campaign trail. Perhaps he was caught flat-footed by the virulent anti-incumbency atmosphere stirred up by rivals Smitherman and Rossi. Rather than standing up to the invective and insults hurled at the current administration – the administration he’s been an integral part of – Pantalone’s shrugged and bobbed a little, even mumbling thoughts of hiring freezes that only served to feed into his opponents narrative of a fiscally out-of-control City Hall.

It wasn’t until Mayor Miller stepped into the fray a couple weeks back, essentially calling Smitherman and Rossi liars for their deeply disingenuous representations of the city they sought to lead, that there was any perceivable pushback coming from the left. Maybe now, with Laschinger behind him, Pantalone will start being more aggressive in his own defense. He needs to re-invigorate the base who have been doubly sideswiped by Miller’s decision not to seek a third term and then the Giambrone debacle.

Nothing to do with post. Just been in the news lately.

What Pantalone can’t do, especially since it looks like he won’t have to seriously defend the centre-left terrain from another progressive candidate, is to take that vote for granted. It is a constituency that Pantalone must make sure comes out to vote on election day. Complacency is not an option especially with second tier outside candidates like Sarah Thomson lobbing grenades into the arena like she did last week with her proposals to bring in road tolls, replace LRTs with subways and a very elaborate plan for a dedicated bike lane system throughout the downtown core.

Workable or not, what Thomson’s gambit did was to reveal just how superficial and hollow the debate amongst the mayoral candidates has been so far. Sir Bitch-A-Lot and Dudley Do-Nothing have dictated the tone up until now and the razed ground they’ve created has made it difficult for capital I ideas to sprout up. Thomson has endeavoured to alter that. Joe Pantalone must follow suit or else be relegated to the category of Just Another Politician Without A Vision. Teaming up with John Laschinger may be a move in the right direction.

— hopefully submitted by Cityslikr

It’s Miller Time! Again!

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Ooops.

*** sigh. ***

Yes, we here at All Fired Up in the Big Smoke will admit to getting caught up in the hype and conjecture surrounding Mayor Miller’s Big Announcement this morning. Hopes were raised. Dreams dared to dream once more. The big dog was getting back in the race.

All for nought.

On the surface, what we were given amounted to nothing more than a budget update. Since last week, it seems, revised numbers uncovered an additional $100 million in the city coffers, some of which would be used to lower proposed property tax increases for the upcoming year. Another chunk of it would be set aside as a ‘property tax stabilization’ fund for use in future years to keep increases reasonable.

Most importantly for the mayor, what this meant was that not only did his administration deliver a balanced budget for Toronto this year but the opportunity was now in place for a balanced budget again next year as well. The contingency for that to happen is the province reassuming the obligation to pay its portion of the TTC operating cost which, to hear Premier McGuinty aka Dalton Empty Pockets, is not a done deal. But that’s a fight for the next mayor and council to engage in.

The response to Mayor Miller’s Big Announcement split into two camps. One: he told us to bring our satellite truck out for this? Two: another surplus after the first surplus they ‘discovered’ during the initial budgeting process? Clearly, an indication of massive financial mismanagement. (Prediction? Read all about it in Sue-Ann Levy’s next Toronto Sun column. And maybe Royson James in the Star as well.) How can you just ‘discover’ $100 million dollars?!

Let’s put that number into a little perspective. If my Google assisted math is correct, $100 million in terms of an overall $9.2 billion operating budget works out to about 1.1%. To put that in more tangible terms, that would be like you budgeting to make a $9 purchase and ‘discovering’ an extra dime in your pocket. As the mayor said in the press conference, every level of government revises their numbers regularly. Hell, businesses do it too. I was still receiving financial statements from companies last June, a full two months after my taxes were due.

Which takes us back to the first camp. What’s the big deal? Why all the fuss? So what?

Well, I think Mayor Miller hyped the proceedings in the hopes of going wide with this shot across the bow of the campaigns of the two men vying to succeed him. Combined with his pugnacious column in last week’s NOW magazine, Miller stepped into the void on the progressive side of electoral ledger, defending his legacy from the slings and arrows of the Smitherman and Rossi camps.

He defiantly challenged their numbers, claims and promises of solutions. During the press conference he trumpeted this as the start of a multi-year budget planning process (a demand of candidate Rocco Rossi, see Amanda Belzowski). The mayor stated simply that the city’s fiscal condition was in robust enough condition that there would be absolutely no reason to sell off any of Toronto’s assets. For the next mayor to do that would be a choice rather than a necessity.

While it’s great that finally somebody is standing up to the right wing, reactionary bluster of Smitherman and Rossi, it’s unfortunate that it’s the outgoing mayor who’s doing it. Clearly the left wing hasn’t recovered from the Adam Giambrone flameout. He appears to have been the anointed one and no one was prepared to step in and take his place. Deputy Mayor Joe Pantalone, who has spent much of his campaign so far trying to distance himself for the current administration, has been meek in his response to the Chicken Little antics coming from the front runners. Perhaps now Mayor Miller has paved the way for Pantalone to be more aggressive. Or maybe, he’s cleared the deck for another candidate to step up to the plate and proudly bear the flag. Budget Chief Shelley Carroll wasn’t too far from the podium at this morning’s press conference…

Either way, hopefully the Big Annoucement has altered the playing field of the campaign and made it that much more difficult for Smitherman and Rossi and all the other neo-conservative hysterics to tell us the place is going to hell in a handbasket. The bad news is, it won’t be Mayor David Miller capitalizing on that shift. For some of us, that was the news we were really hoping to hear.

— somewhat dejectedly submitted by Cityslikr

Budget Proposal Goes Public

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Hey-ho! Off to City Hall we went for day 2 of public deputations for the council’s budget committee’s proposed 2010 operating budget. Hopefully the sparks will fly like they did the previous evening when councilor Paula Fletcher got into it with one of the deputationees and a heckler from the gallery. Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy!!

Unfortunately upon our arrival, a subdued air hangs over the council chamber. Budget chief Shelley Carroll who is chairing the meeting reads a letter of apology from Councilor Fletcher and then lays down the law to the other councilor’s present about their comportment. This seems to have a chilling effect on the proceedings as the first few deputations come and go with nary a question posed by council.

First up, a representative of a branch of CUPE civic workers with serious questions about transparency. The budget proposal has been drawn up absent public scrutiny and, according to CUPE, contains confidential documents about cuts to staff and services that won’t be released until after the budget has been passed by council in April. For CUPE, this is not participation. It is rear-guard reaction to a done deal.

It’s hard to argue with this point as the afternoon unfolds. What kind of impact will a string of 5 minute presentations before the 7 members of the budget committee and a smattering of other councilors have on the final budget? A cynic might call it little more than an exercise in political theatre. Yet compared to the federal budget coming down at us this week that’s been drawn up in the darkness of a prorogued parliament, these public deputations represent the height of inclusive and participatory democracy.

The comparison is even more apt given what we witnessed during the course of our stay in the chamber’s peanut gallery. Our impression of the proceedings was one of a city council desperately trying to hold together the fraying fabric of the social safety net shredded to pieces by big ticket decisions made at Queen’s Park and in Ottawa. It was no longer a question of attempting to save everyone at risk from falling through the cracks but simply minimizing the number who do.

Child care advocates were out in full force, alarmed by the budget committee’s proposal to end council’s coverage of the rent for child care spaces in Toronto District School Board properties. This would be catastrophic for many low income households, we are told, while also deepening the city’s budget crisis as it would send parents back out of the workforce and onto social welfare rolls. Budget chief Shelley Carroll and councilor Janet Davis tried explaining that their computations were such that only full pay parents would be forced to pay more for their childcare and only then some $2+ per child per day.

Oddly enough (or maybe not) the male councilors present kept silent, asking no questions nor offering any answers on the childcare matter. Or maybe they were still a little gun shy about over-stepping decorum with the budget chief’s instructions still fresh in their minds because they were none too interactive with the other deputations either. Youth at risk programs. Social housing and homelessness. Children’s Aid. Marginalized communities and groups all facing even more dire straits with the inevitable belt tightening that’s in the offing with the proposed budget.

It was unfortunate that we didn’t catch sight of either George Smitherman or Rocco Rossi present while we were there. (Although we will give a shout out to Sonny Yeung, All Fired Up in the Big Smoke’s first Meet A Mayoral Candidate profile, who was dutifully in attendance.) It might’ve been instructive for Mssrs. Smitherman and Rossi to hear firsthand the possible results of their fervent dedication in finding “efficiencies” at City Hall. But this afternoon, clearly, council chamber was not filled with their crowd.

Those folks were out at Monday night’s meeting. Overburdened taxpayers, business owners and radio show host John Tory (doing his schtick from the City Hall rotunda) listeners gave their own deputations, imploring the city to reign in out of control spending or else face capital flight and economic collapse. This was the too much group. Too much was being asked of them to keep the city running. Tuesday afternoon was the too little group. The city was providing too little for them to survive.

This is the balancing act city council’s now attempting to pull off. Appeasing the solid middle and upper classes may lay waste to the growing number of have-nots we share the city with. Caving into the special interests of the less fortunate will send home owners and businesses heading to the hills of more tax friendly jurisdictions. Depending on what tipping point you think we’re poised upon (and every year come budget time, we seem poised on a tipping point) will determine the deputation you want to deliver even if it’s all just for show.

— deputationally submitted by Cityslikr