Tag Archives: The Gravy Train

Keep Your Seatbelts Fastened

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Politics in Toronto right now is how I imagine it feels to be on an airplane when the engines shut down in midflight. It’s not yet a catastrophic failure. Nothing’s on fire. You can’t smell smoke. You are, in fact, gliding, maintaining enough altitude to convince yourself and the hysterical man sitting beside you that everything’s fine, just a glitch. No need to shit your pants at the moment.

You keep repeating Captain Sully Sullenberger’s name over and over again in your head, and remember Air Transat Flight 236, that fuelless Airbus that landed in one piece in the Azores. Besides, what are the chances of your actually dying in an airplane crash? Infinitesimally low. Don’t panic. Everything’s going to be A-OK.

As everybody’s pointed out by now — the latest observation coming from Matt Elliott — Team Ford has moved beyond autopilot at this juncture, and simply switched the engines off, it would seem. Sitting back to enjoy the view, they appear confident that they can re-engage the system in about 18 months and coast smoothly into re-election mode. In the meantime, it’s all, Look, ma! No hands!!

But I have to say, watching the mayor in inaction lately makes me wonder why on earth he’d want to win again in 2014. He really doesn’t appear to be enjoying the job. Why would he inflict another 4 years on himself?

I know the working theory.

The mayor and his councillor-brother are already hard at it, kicking into campaign mode, and preparing to back a slate of pro-Ford candidates that, once installed, will make governing much easier for Mayor Ford. A simple clapping of the hands and His Worship’s will will be done. Just a few more Vincent Crisantis and a few fewer Gloria Lindsay Lubys and we will be truly a Ford Nation Toronto, united under fealty to the Emperor of Etobicoke.

It’s this kind of magical thinking, I believe, that has suspended the mayor in animation at this point. It was all going to be so easy. City Hall didn’t have a revenue problem, it had a spending problem. Stop the spending. Stop taxing. Everything would be gravy(less). Only some sort of career politician not looking out for the little guy would make it more complicated than that.

“You can’t run a government if you hate government,” John Moore wrote in the National Post a couple months ago. Or, in riff on the old H.L. Mencken nugget, you provide clear, simple and wrong answers to complex problems. This isn’t rocket science, folks. This isn’t the private sector. It’s government. How hard could it possibly be?

As the mayor is discovering, yeah, it’s pretty hard. So he’s retreated back into his own little cocoon, hoping for a more favourable roll of the dice, councillor-wise, in a couple years. Then, you’ll see, it’ll be a snap.

Leaving us to do what?

While Mayor Ford and his brother air their views and policy initiatives on their weekly radio show, their once surprisingly formidable team has dwindled to a few unreliable courtiers. Those who still believe do so in a way that is seldom helpful to the cause. I mean, if your movement depends on the likes of Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong to provide the voice of reason and sound judgement, clearly there’s some sort of engine problems.

For others, it’s now blatantly just a marriage of convenience. No pressing the ejector seat, pulling the ripcord and parachuting to safety because you’re either too lazy, too unsure how this is all still going to play out or too in love with your committee chair position to risk losing it due to mayoral ire. So you quietly go about your business working matters out with councillors Mayor Ford isn’t in the habit of dealing with, hoping that whatever it is you’re working on has long since disappeared down the mayor’s disinterest hole.

The fact is, getting past ‘the mandate’ the mayor got in his ‘landslide’ election in 2010, he was among very few politicians elected municipally to have much of that Tea Party sensibility. The Fords. The Deputy Mayor. The Budget Chief. The Speaker. The afore-mentioned councillors Minnan-Wong and Crisanti.

After that?

As angry as 47% of voters in Toronto were in 2010, few of them hated government as much as they hated the government Rob Ford successfully convinced them had been in control down at City Hall during his time there. Now that the curtain’s been pulled back, revealing nothing more to it than a dyspeptic, dystopian view of government in general that’s fetidly percolated in the psyche of our mayor, his has become a lonely vigil. How exactly do you maintain anti-government momentum toward a government you ostensibly lead? It defies the laws of physics, even electoral physics. (Yes, such a thing exists.)

The best thing councillors could be doing right now, especially those who Team Ford will be targeting in 2014 (and you know who you are), is to govern well. Show your constituents and the city that government is not inherently evil, unhelpful or whatever other term of derision the mayor and his brother will throw at it. Government can only be bad when it governs badly which this administration is doing currently. The surest way to help the mayor now would be to continue to enable him, expending energy propping him up and pretending he’s become anything but political dead weight.

Time to remove the mayor and his brother from the cockpit and switch from auto-pilot over to co-pilot.

— flight attendantly submitted by Cityslikr

The S Word

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“Now, there’s two answers. It’s either there’s corruption down at City Hall or there’s major incompetence at City Hall in budgeting. How do you just find a hundred million dollars?”

— Councillor Rob Ford, John Oakley show, March 2010.

Yeah, Mayor Rob Ford! How do you just find almost three hundred million dollars? Corruption or major incompetence? “It’s a great windfall,” claims Team Ford member, Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong. “It’s a reflection of a new culture.”

Wait. What?

So, surprise surpluses are hunky dory, a-OK, a sign of running a tight ship when they occur in part due to department, service and program cuts. But when there are revenue generating tools involved like property tax increases beyond the rate of inflation? That’s just corrupt incompetence, Johnny. Proof there’s a spending problem.

What I do think we can agree on, though, is that annual budget surpluses, no matter how they come about, cannot be classified as ‘one time savings’. Since municipal governments are legally prohibited from running operating budget deficits, yearly surpluses just come with the territory. As you’ve probably already heard, former mayor David Miller, that roguish, out of control tax-and-spender also delivered annual budget surpluses. In fact, in his last two terms, those surpluses were significantly higher than the one Mayor Ford is touting today. Anyone who insists on calling them ‘one time savings’ should no longer be considered an honest broker in this debate.

The 2011-12 budget surplus also should eliminate the use of the opening pressure number as a bogeyman to scare city council into submitting to the shrill call of arbitrary cutting. Remember last fall and early winter where the mayor and his allies ran around screaming $774 million? We’ve got to slash and burn our way through three-quarter of a billion dollars, folks! So tighten your belts and start throwing excess weight overboard. Women and children first.

By the time the actual budget debate got down to the nitty gritty in January that $774 million red stained hole had magically transformed into a $154 million surplus as it tends to do every year. The opening pressure is merely a starting point made up of all the expenditures the city expects to face in the upcoming budget year. None of the projected revenue streams have been factored in including things like the land transfer tax which has provided a comfortable cushion since its inception due to a continued hot property market in Toronto.

So ignore the man howling about the opening pressure. It’s a tactic meant to scare you. Like the person referring to annual budget surpluses as ‘one time savings’, they should be ignored and dismissed out of hand.

Because of the uncertainty of the exact amount of a surplus in any given year – an uncertainty exacerbated, I believe, by the Ford administration’s insistence on delivering a budget on a calendar year timeline rather than a fiscal year – city council should never blindly allocate where the surplus should go as it did this year in voting to throw it all at capital expenditures. As John Lorinc writes in an article today, spending extra money to pay down capital costs or setting it aside as some sort of rainy day fund is fiscally responsible. The question is, how much, what percentage of any extra cash that appears should be used to pay down debt.

In January, councillors voted to use what they thought was a $154 million surplus this year on capital costs. Throwing the extra $138 million in that pot now comes at the expense of the operating budget. We are cutting services and programs (not just phantom gravy) for the sake of paying down debt without any discussion as to the merits of such a move. Or as Matt Elliot suggested at Ford For Toronto last December, that’s “…trying to work our way out of a capital budget crunch by pruning the operating budget is a losing battle. It’s like trying to dig your way out of a deep hole with a spoon.”

Listening to Budget Chief Del Grande’s interview with Matt Galloway on Metro Morning today, we’re being offered a glimpse of how the administration plans on going forward from here. Today’s budget surplus announcement will deprive them of the spending’s out of control argument. Having been hoodwinked this year, most reasonable councillors will view that approach skeptically.

So the mayor and his allies will trot out the spectre of looming capital costs. Some of that fear is entirely justified but without serious talk of new and increased revenue sources like road tolls that Mayor Ford has dismissed out of hand, it will come at the expense of further cuts on the operational side. More reductions to services and programs, further squeezing of departments; an all out attempt to shrink the size of government based solely on ideology rather than sound economic principles.

Bringing down the city’s capital debt will be this year’s battle cry. It will be a debate worth having but it must move beyond simply a debt is bad dynamic. That’s just another ploy used by those conducting their war on government, and who are willing to sacrifice the quality of life in this city to further reduce the roll of the public sector in keeping Toronto vibrant, competitive and equitable.

— prudently submitted by Cityslikr

An Empty Mandate

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The timing of this is absolutely going to come across as pure sour grapes. Two days after being snubbed, left on the cutting room floor by the Globe and Mail’s Marcus Gee in his article about Toronto’s City Hall bloggers and tweeters, here I go about to attack him. But let me just say in my defence that I think Mr. Gee did me a favour. In hindsight the decision to let fly with my impressions of various councillors during our interview was probably ill-advised.

“I used to beat up twerps like you in high school,” I bellowed at Mr. Gee, bringing my Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti A-game to the table. “Give you wedgies and dunk your head in the toilet bowl.”

Yes, as a matter of fact, I really do need to re-think my PR strategy.

Besides, this won’t be the first time I have disagreed enough with the Globe columnist to write a response. In fact, it was pretty much on this very same issue that I expressed my displeasure with him back in March, long before we ever chatted in person. Just so we’re clear on my motivations here.

On Friday, Marcus was at it again, bemoaning the aimless drift of the city under Mayor Ford’s watch. “After a string of whuppings on transit, Mr. Ford is looking more and more isolated on the council he is supposed to lead,” Mr. Gee wrote on Friday. “With two and a half years left in his four-year term, his ability to implement his agenda is fading. That may strike many Torontonians as a good thing. It’s not. For one thing, a city with as many pressing challenges as this one can’t afford to drift rudderless till 2014.”

OK, again. Just because the mayor appears to be drifting aimlessly does not mean the city is. The mayor is one component of municipal governance, a very important component certainly, the only council member elected city-wide and with slightly better access to the levers of power, but still only one vote of 45 ultimately.

Mr. Gee rightfully characterizes Mayor Ford’s last few months as a display of ‘abysmal leadership’ which should be his story, end stop. A mayor is elected to lead, in Toronto is given some tools to help further an agenda. After a year or so of doing exactly that, this mayor has ceased performing that function. No one has taken it away from him, tied up him ‘with a thousand tiny bonds’. He’s just continually failed to muster the majority of votes needed to win crucial votes at council. There’s nobody to blame but himself and his staff for that.

And yet, the business of the city carries on. While Gee sees last week’s council vote on contracting out cleaners as a victory for those looking “… to handcuff the city’s attempts to get private contractors to take over some cleaning jobs…” and some sort of plot by ‘a resurgent left wing’ on council “…to block any attempt to contract out services to private companies”, that’s an angle seen purely through an ideological lens. Councillor Ana Bailão, who put forth the motion, stated right up front that it wasn’t about stopping the practice of contracting out. She wanted better oversight of how and to whom the contracts were given.

Her motion seemed to be largely in reaction to the mess that emerged back in 2010, before Rob Ford was even elected mayor, with the contracting out of cleaning services for Union Station. The possible use of undocumented workers, not paying them the agreed upon hourly wage and a questionable renewal of the contract all suggested the city needed to be more vigilant in its contracting out process. As we go further down that road, Councillor Bailão’s motion looks more like a strengthening of safeguards rather than merely putting on the brakes to a mayoral initiative.

While Mayor Ford’s former press secretary and now Toronto Sun something or other, Adrienne Batra, sees the same leftist plotting and nefariousness at City Hall as Marcus Gee, she puts the blame for its success squarely where it belongs: in the lap of the mayor. “The mayor — not his staff, not his brother, not his executive, not his unpaid advisors — needs to dig down and find the same passion for the job he had when he was first elected,” Batra writes, “to carry him through the remainder of his first term. That is, if he wants a second one.”

A second term?! What on earth would Mayor Ford do with another 4 years? He doesn’t even know what to do with the next 30 months.

Both Ms. Batra and Mr. Gee miss what, I think, is the major cause of the mayor’s sudden flirtation with irrelevancy. His 2010 election platform was the thinnest of thin gruel. Because it was exclusively based on unfounded rhetoric and almost impossible to implement promises, there was no way it could sustain one term, never mind two. To the city’s fiscal detriment, he pushed through the repeal of the Vehicle Registration Tax and kept property tax increases below the rate of inflation. The savings from his major accomplishments of cutting councillors’ office expenses and securing concessions from city workers without any labour strife don’t appear to cover the loss in revenue from the tax cuts and freezes which doesn’t bode well for another campaign promise of the mayor’s, eliminating the Land Transfer Tax.

Mayor Ford did get the ball rolling with contracting out waste collection and nothing in Councillor Bailão’s successful motion last week threatens that. Hopefully, it will serve to alert not only city council but the public also to the possible problems that come with contracting out. If we’ve learned nothing else from the last 16 months or so, it’s that the easy peazy manner of running a city the mayor promised was pure delusion. We do, in fact, have a revenue problem and the spending problem that was so out of control? Yeah, not so much.

When a politician romps into office based on such out-and-out fantasy, it’s hardly surprising that he, sooner rather than later, gets bogged down in the mire of reality. Marcus Gee implores city councillors to ‘let’ Mayor Ford get ‘at least some things done.’ I’d suggest they already have and are now hard at work trying to mitigate the fallout of having done so.

— not bitterly submitted by Cityslikr