All Fried Up In The Big Smoke

Less political. More fictional.

Mayor Nimby

Posted on May 15, 2013 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

For three years now, ever since then-councillor Rob Ford announced his run for mayor, we’ve been clubbed over the head with the urban-suburban divide. The narrative of downtown elites hoarding all the goodness that is living in Toronto, leaving their suburban counterparts with nothing more than the crumbs and scraps. Get out of your cars so we can have bike lanes! No subways for you! Your taxes spent on us.

Rob Ford rode such resentment into office, and the continued suburban support maintains his not impossible chances for re-election next year. He is the self-proclaimed champion of the little guy in places like Scarborough, basing his entire transit policy around getting a new subway out there. Nobody rails about and profits from deriding the self-satisfied, special interest insularity of downtowners like the mayor and the rest of Team Ford.

An accusation I’ve tried to take to heart. Get out there, learn what makes these suburban types tick, their likes, dislikes, their pet peeves, their pet causes. Try and find out why they’re so mad at us and how politicians like Mayor Ford so easily tap into that vein of anger.

The latest leg of that journey outside of my south of Bloor/west of the Don Valley comfort zone took me to the Scarborough Civic Centre yesterday for their monthly Community Council meeting. Here you can see the local councillors and their constituents at work far from the spotlight of City Hall, not dwelling on the Us-versus-Them but instead focusing on pure Scarborough time (or North York or Etobicoke-York or Toronto-East York time depending on which community council meeting you’re attending). Community council concentrates on the minutiae of local governance.

As the agenda for the Scarborough meeting showed, this is the time spent adjudicating neighbours’ fence heights, debating the need for a stop sign or traffic lights, the removal of tree from private property, parking, always parking. It isn’t glorious or sexy. Just the nuts and bolts of the political process at the municipal level.

Perhaps the most charged item I witnessed yesterday was over the fate of the wading pool just outside of the civic centre. Apparently it was a community hub for the forty years of the building’s existence but last summer the This Is Not A Wading Pool sign went up due to the lack of funding to pay for a lifeguard. Scarborough councillors set out to try and rectify that situation.

Most of the time, big ticket, highly contentious, city wide items don’t dominate community council meetings. A casino, tall tower complex or the island airport runway expansion rarely find their way to be debated at North York or Scarborough community councils. The majority of those end up for discussion at Toronto-East York community council.

And Etobicoke-York, apparently.

For the last two months the west-end community council has had to conduct additional meeting time to deal with the public reaction to two developments that are being proposed in their catchment area. In April, there was an evening session at the Etobicoke Civic Centre over the proposed waterfront development in Ward 6, Mimico 20/20. And yesterday for six hours, the public came out to express their unanimous opposition to First Capital Realty’s intention to convert the Humbertown shopping plaza into a mixed up residential-commercial space.

This one was a biggie. As David Hains writes in the Grid, it was held in a 3,200 seat church on the Queensway, was broadcast on TV and streamed online and brought out much of the media as well as the big gun politicians like the mayor and his councillor-brother. (As a member of the Etobicoke-York community council, it’s not unusual that Councillor Ford was in attendance although, it is worth noting that he was absent for the Mimico meeting last month, choosing instead to attend a provincial Progressive Conservative fundraiser.)

Now, I don’t know if the Humbertown development is a good one or not. Certainly the community’s concerns over the increase in traffic caught my attention. It didn’t strike me as the disaster-in-waiting almost every speaker to person claimed it would turn out to be. There are voices living in the area that even think it’s a positive thing for the area.

What I will tell you, however, is that I didn’t care for the tone I heard from the development’s opponents. Like many who spoke out against the Mimico 20/20 plans, we were told the Humber Valley neighbourhood was like a village wrapped inside a big city. A place for families to thrive and grow, away from big city concerns. People were born in Humber Valley. They went to school in Humber Valley. They got married in Humber Valley. They have children of their own who they want to raise in the same Humber Valley they grew up in.

After a couple hours of this, I couldn’t help but think if these people really wanted the village life, they should maybe move to an actual village. Somewhere, I don’t know, in Amish country. Or maybe on the edge of the moors in south-west England. A village village.

Not a pretend one of their imagination, situated 1500 metres from a major east-west subway line. No, what these people want is to enjoy all the amenities a big city offers while keeping the messier aspects like intensification and underground parking (really, underground parking) at bay. This is a wealthy enclave with the time and resources which, as my friend Paisley Rae said, should not determine the outcome of the civic process, trying to keep the 21^st-century from their front door.

And the real kicker is that these are our populist mayor and brother’s people not the poor schlubs having to endure a cold winters rid on the Scarborough SRT or even those living further north in Etobicoke, up in Rexdale. This development is right in both the Fords’ backyards and the little guys they’re looking out for are those who can afford to hire their own architect to draw up alternate plans and find the concept of shopping on a second floor inconceivable. I suppose you’re going to tell me that you’ve invented a moving staircase in which to ascend us to ladies wear.

“We cannot let these developers come in and bully us,” said the mayor who’s all in pushing a waterfront casino. He vowed to fight the Humbertown development ‘tooth and nail’. “Let’s go to the board (Ontario Municipal Board),” he urged if First Capital Realty didn’t back down, presumably with money from the city he often tries to stop at council when other communities faced with unwanted development face appeals at the OMB. Everything Mayor Ford purports to be got completely turned on its head with his strident opposition to the Humbertown development.

Not in my backyard.

The fact is, Mayor Ford doesn’t really represent the aspirations or alienation of suburban Toronto. At least not those of the hard-working little guys in large portions of Scarborough or Etobicoke. It’s a very select few he will go to the mat for, the ones who essentially live in his own neighbourhood. The overwhelming majority of suburban residents are nothing more than votes to him.

— nimbly submitted by Cityslikr

Put Up Or Shut Up

Posted on February 7, 2013 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

Read through Edward Keenan’s article in The Grid yesterday, Troubled by the mayor’s apparent rule bending?, and tell me something there doesn’t ‘stink to high heaven’. I don’t care if you are an ardent supporter of Mayor Ford or not. Something’s just not right with that picture.

…in June 2011, half a year after the election, while Ford was the sitting mayor, he attended a party in the home of Robert DeGasperis, who is president of a development company called Metrus Properties. Doug Ford, the chair of Build Toronto, the city agency that sells public real estate to developers, also attended. We do not know who else was there or what was discussed. The result of that meeting was that an envelope containing $25,000 in cheques from 10 donors was passed from DeGasperis to former premier Mike Harris, and on to Ford’s campaign to help settle his outstanding election debt.

The same week, Paul Golini, an executive with developer Empire Communities, had a Ford fundraiser in his home that was attended by the mayor and about 40 members of BILD, the Toronto developers’ association. The $2,450 catering bill was picked up by a former CEO of BILD. Those at the party gave the mayor’s campaign $19,500.

Earlier that month, yet another private party was held for the mayor at Harbour 60 restaurant. We don’t know who attended, and we don’t know what they discussed. The tab for the 28 people in attendance came to just over $9,000, and was picked up by the owners of the restaurant. After meeting with the mayor, guests at the event saw fit to donate $27,000 to his long-finished campaign.

So in June 2011, as outlined in the audit report, a bunch of unknown people, many of whom appear to be developers, gave a total of $71,500 to retire Rob Ford’s outstanding campaign debt after private meetings with him. That was the same month that Ford proposed a massive selloff of TCHC properties and killed the Jarvis bike lanes. It was during the period when Doug Ford was shaping his proposal to radically change and speed up the plan to develop the Port Lands. It was the same period when Ford was studying how to get the private sector involved in building subways.

As Mr. Keenan points out, no one’s laid a glove on the mayor about this so far, the audit report only suggests ‘apparent violations of rules’. These will be hashed out in further detail at the February 25^th Compliance Audit Committee meeting. The optics, though, scream a Rob Ford scream of outrage.

Trace the pattern.

A candidate mulling over a run for the mayor’s office takes a flyer, goes into debt to finance their campaign with the hope that, once victorious, the hole can be filled by supporters wanting to be helpful. I imagine nothing opens hearts and wallets like access to a newly installed mayor. I would’ve loved to chip in earlier but, you know, I was hedging my bets.

But please. Envelopes stuffed with cheques? $9000 restaurant tabs picked up by the owner? Fundraisers at the home of the executive of a development company?

And before you get all m’eh on me, shrug your shoulders and insist it happens all the time, everybody plays the game, don’t. Just don’t. It’s a fucking cop out.

I am so sick of the response coming from the mayor’s defenders to any accusation made about his seeming nonchalance toward adhering to laws, rules, regulations, guidelines that it’s nothing new. Municipal politicians before him did it. Municipal politicians coming after him will do it. It’s no big deal. It’s the way the world works. Move along, nothing to see here.

David Miller did [fill in alleged wrongdoing here] too.

Well firstly, prove it. You can’t just brush everything off with a wink and a knowing nod of the head signifying that there are lots of bodies buried if you know where to look for them. Casting baseless assertions that sully everyone who’s ever run for office. It’s lazy and it’s cynical. If all politicians are corrupt in one way or the other, why bother trying to change anything, why bother getting involved? A pox on all their houses. I’m going to watch the How I Met Your Mother marathon. (Do we not know the answer to that yet?)

It’s a convenient embrace of apathy that makes no demands on those in public office and even less on citizens.

Regardless of whether or not Mayor Ford violated any campaign financing rules, there has to be a better way for politicians to run for office that precludes accepting envelopes stuffed with legal currency and depending on moneyed special interests to turn your bottom line red to black. How could that not be a corrupting influence? It’s the very definition of backroom deals politicians like the mayor rail about. We should all be irate, and not just at Rob Ford but the whole system that could allow him (and any others who play like that) to operate on such a shady level. It makes every one of their political motives and actions suspect.

And if you don’t find that at all troublesome, you just don’t give a flying fuck about democracy.

— indignantly submitted by Cityslikr

Here’s Your Coat…

Posted on January 18, 2013 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

I will admit to a slight glitch of feeling, a tiny moment of near compunction when I heard the news on Wednesday night of Budget Chief Mike Del Grande’s resignation. Huh? That’s… something, I thought.

Then we proceeded to pop the cork on some bubbly.

I write no note of gratitude or appreciation toward our outgoing budget chief. Like in our post last weekend on Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, I can find no redeeming qualities in the political life of Councillor Mike Del Grande. There’s nothing to respect or applaud. Even if I were to lie just a little bit.

Given enough time and a couple glasses of wine, I probably could byte a few positive words about Mayor Rob Ford. Probably. In a pinch. But increasingly, I have great difficulty coming up with duly appropriate nods of respect for conservative politicians. Those propelled into a life of elected office on the wings of anti-government sentiment and the core conviction that it is nothing but a determinant to be neutralized and dismantled.

Michael Del Grande is one of those types of politicians.

Read through yesterday’s perfectly timed feature in The Grid on the then-but-now-ex budget chief and consider this following passage:

“I grew up poor, so I know what it’s like to make a buck. My attitude is, any dime that’s spent out there, I treat it [like] it’s my own.”

There’s no sense of community, no belief in a greater good. I pay my taxes. I expect results. Certifiable, directly benefiting me, bang-for-my-buck results.

It’s almost as if he wanted to become budget chief in order to be able to track every penny he pays in municipal taxes and make sure he personally was getting something in return.

Of course, I could just say that being the budget chief of Toronto and overseeing billions of dollars must be one hell of a job, thankless in that you can never please everybody and onerous in terms of demands on your and your family’s time. But I don’t need to. The ex-budget chief reminded us of that fact every time he got in front of a microphone. Here. And here. And here.

Yes. A terrible job which, when push comes to shove, pays a paltry amount. (Owing, ironically, at least in part to the penny-pinching attitude held by the likes of Councillor Del Grande). It is not one for the faint of heart or thin of skin.

But nobody forced him to take or keep the job, did they? If you can’t stand the heat and all of that. It seems nothing short of unanimous and uncritical praise is payment enough for him.

So here goes.

Thanks very much, Councillor Del Grande, for the sweat and toil you put in coming up with 3 successive budgets I couldn’t agree less with. I thank you. The widows and orphans thank you.

Over-worked and under-appreciated as budget chief, Mike Del Grande still found time to personally respect my tax dollars.

“Del Grande is so committed to efficient service that he occasionally leaves his office to drop in on city employees unannounced. If he catches them slacking off, there’s hell to pay,” writes Rob Duffy in The Grid. “I’m the kind of guy that will call them over, ask them if they know who I am. Most of the time they’ll say no. I tell them who I am, then they crap their pants. And I basically just tell them, Look, the public wants to see value for their money. They’re working for me. I’m the boss. It’s my money.”

No, wait. It gets better.

“My philosophy? You don’t have to fire everybody. You take the biggest bull, the biggest problem, whatever the heck it is, and you gore it publicly. You make it bleed so bad that it scares the shit out of everybody else, to put them in line if things are going bad.”

Not only does he behave that badly, he seems to brag about it, relish it. I mean, it’s like Donald Trump without the bad hair and money. These are the words and actions of a petty tyrant not a thoughtful city builder.

“I presented an extraordinary budget, an extraordinary turn around with respect to where the city was going. I’ve done my job, the ship was set in the right direction,” the National Post’s Natalie Alcoba quotes him saying after Wednesday’s vote. “Everybody then wanted to be the budget chair on the floor of council and they extracted their individual peeves.”

The startling self- (*a-hem, a-hem*) -delgrandizing aside, it is the statement of a man seemingly unable to experience the sensation of empathy. Everything he does is selfless, for the betterment of the city. Everyone else? Pet peeves, pet projects.

He is an evidence-based decision maker, as he’d taken to pronouncing in the months leading up to the budget debate and vote, rather than one subject to mere ‘whims and emotions’. Which is a rich claim coming from someone absolutely wrapped up in the frenzied fiction that this city was in some sort of out-of-control dire financial straits before he assumed control of the purse strings. Our debt payments especially compared to other levels of governments and municipalities didn’t indicate that. Our lower than other GTA jurisdictions residential property tax rates suggested otherwise. Only in the small-minded, small-government views of conservatives was there some sort of monumental problem that needed to be fixed, a ship in need of righting.

A divisive downtown-suburban warrior (such the fiscal hawk, he beat the drum loudly for the financially dubious Scarborough subway), as much a vilifier as the vilified, Council Del Grande represents the absolute worst instincts of this city. As an elected representative he symbolizes all the reasons we don’t build nice things here. I wish I could find one thing about his service to Toronto I might be gracious about. Unfortunately, I’ve come up empty.

— nothing nice to sayly submitted by Cityslikr