Tag Archives: Toronto Police Services

I Don’t Think Mandate Means What You Think It Means

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Let’s take a brief ride in our time machine, shall we? Step back about a year ago to the very day. Just over three weeks to go in our municipal campaign, Councillor Rob Ford has unexpectedly assumed the lead in the race to replace outgoing mayor David Miller. The battle is still a toss-up, however. Councillor Ford’s to lose.

During a typical stump speech, the councillor tosses out his catch phrase pledging to Stop The Gravy Train. City Hall has a spending problem not a revenue problem, he tells us. If elected mayor, Rob Ford promises to put an end to all the wasteful spending that is drowning the city in red ink.

When questioned how exactly he will do this, what he’ll cut in order to balance the budget without increasing taxes, he steps up and tell us that, well, he’d start with a 10% cut to all departments especially the ones that are bloated with labour costs. Like the police budget, for example. That’s a major money suck on the city’s coffers. Lots of fat to trim there. Sure, the city could afford to lose 500, 650 police officers and we wouldn’t even notice. Guaranteed. Next question?

Repeat that answer, replacing the TPS budget with, reduction of library services, elimination of windrow clearing, reduction of street cleaning to once a month, and I’m going to hazard a guess that Rob Ford would not be the mayor of Toronto today. In fact, I’d guarantee it. He sold us a bill of goods and somehow 47% of those casting their ballots either didn’t care and were happy with the concept of a major slash and burn at City Hall or didn’t bother to read the fine print, eyes unable to see anything past their red hot anger.

So this notion, in the face of dwindling support and outright antipathy to the path Mayor Ford is currently on, that he has a mandate from the people based on his election victory is simply bogus. Anyone who floats it or uses it as a shield to deflect criticism endorses the notion that democracy is about winning and winning only. By any means necessary. No matter how much you obfuscate, fudge facts, distort reality or just outright lie, lie, lie, a win on election night becomes a mandate.  See you in four years, folks.

And to all you out there shrugging your shoulders and saying that’s what politicians do, that anyone with even a lick sense knew that Councillor Ford would never be able to keep his promise of no service cuts, well, that’s the kind of cynicism opportunistic and underhanded politicians feed on. You’re helping to prop up a sick system. You are the heart of the problem.

I’m not here to argue that the TPS budget is sacrosanct and cannot be touched. There may very well be enough bloat that we wouldn’t notice any difference if it underwent a 10% cut. The point is Mayor Ford didn’t run on a platform of reducing the number of police officers. Just the opposite in fact. He said he would increase the number by 100. That was part of his mandate.

Earlier this year, a few months after being elected on his platform of curbing excessive spending, the mayor trumpeted a decision to give the TPS a wage increase, burnishing his pro-police cred. Now he’s demanding a 10% cut in their budget. To match political rhetoric to reality, there has to be a corresponding cut somewhere to balance the equation. Are there the inefficiencies within the TPS that Mayor Ford claimed were rampant at City Hall but has yet to find? If not, cuts, firings, layoffs will have to happen. Surely no one’s going to claim any of that was in the mayor’s mandate.

If a politician possessing lighter right wing stripes than the mayor had campaigned on a promise to buy everyone a house, build them a stable and fill it with a pony family without increasing municipal spending, well, they probably wouldn’t have been elected in the first place. But if they had, if 47% of voters cast bought into the feasibility of such a promise and voted this house-for-everyone, a-pony-in-every-stable politician into office, what would happen when reality settled in and either no one got themselves a new house or pony or everyone’s property taxes increased by 27 billion % to pay for such things? Would we still be saying the mayor had a mandate not to buy everyone a house? His mandate included raising property taxes 27 billion percent to pay for the increase in municipal spending increase he said he wouldn’t need?

Obviously not. So let’s stop allowing the empty claim Mayor Ford has a mandate to do things he was never elected to dot. He promised one thing and is doing the exact opposite. That’s called mendacious not a mandate.

— truthfully submitted by Cityslikr

This Is Your Song, Mike Del Grande

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It’s a little bit funny this feeling inside/I’m not one of those who can easily hide…

… my feelings toward the city’s budget chief, Councillor Mike Del Grande.

And yeah, warm and fuzzy they usually ain’t. I have gone on at some length previously about my general disdain of the man. But this is not going to be a similarly themed diatribe.*

In fact, I have come not to bury the councillor but to praise him. Yes, that’s right. Praise him.

In the game of baseball, players may disagree with a particular umpire on his strike zone but if he’s consistent with it, well, pitchers and hitters both will settle in and deal with it. Yes, Oscar Wilde said, ‘Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.’ Sure, Ralph Waldo Emerson believed ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.’ And I believe it was Aldous Huxley who claimed that ‘Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.’

But I’m actually serious here in commending the budget chief for his consistency in adhering to the notion that if the city is actually facing a fiscal tsunami and money is exceedingly tight, then everyone has to buckle down and tighten their belts. And. I. Said. Everyone. Widows. Orphans. Bridge designers. Everyone.

And the police. Or at least when it comes to paid duty for Toronto’s finest. Now, I don’t know where the councillor came down on the latest contract agreement with the TPS. We know he didn’t send anyone around to try and derail it. But at yesterday’s budget committee meeting, he appeared quite vocal in expressing his view that the cushions on the police couch must be checked under to find all the loose change. Like every other couch at City Hall except for the one that used to be in Adam Giambrone’s office.

“When we talk about the police, everybody’s kind of timid to talk about it,” Del Grande said. “But you know what, right is right and wrong is wrong.”

Ignoring the simplistic, black and white, patently untrue second sentence, stop and marvel at the one preceding it. It’s not a sentiment that tumbled from the mouth of some left wing, pinko kook still smarting from their mistreatment at the hands of the police at last summer’s G20 debacle. This is Mayor Rob Ford’s budget chief telling us what everybody knows but is afraid to talk about.

Certainly the mayor’s mouthpiece, councillor-brother Doug didn’t want to hear it. “It just seems like we’re pounding away on the police here when there’s so many other inefficiencies in the city,” councillor Ford pronounced. Adding, “Keep in mind [paid-duty costs represent] one-half of 1 per cent of the construction projects that we have to pay for.”

I says, what?! This coming from a guy who has spent his 6 months or so in office railing about paltry office budgets, staff chocolates, excessive retirement parties? (Or was that mayor? I keep getting those two mixed up.) Now he wants to talk small potatoes percentages?

That is what I’d call inconsistency. Brushing off the budget committee’s concerns about certain aspects of police pay with an ‘it’s only a fraction of the cost’ shrug while having derided that same rationalization when it came to almost every other city department. Inconsistency bordering on hypocrisy.

At least with Councillor Del Grande, you know he wants to slash anything and everything down to balanced budgetary size. I may not agree with that approach or sentiment but at least it’s a stationery target. The budget chief (appropriately named Mike – see 1970s Life cereal ad) dislikes everyone and wishes they’d all stop asking him for money. It is what it is and you can engage it head-on for whatever merits (next to none) and weaknesses (many) it possesses.

His boss and boss’s brother are far more capricious, far less willing to spread the pain of austerity around equally. Their respect is really only for some of the taxpayers. They play favourites. As we wrote just recently, the Fords are not fiscal conservatives. They’re fiscal ideologues. Happy to spend money, they’re just particular about where and whom they spend it on.

It’s hard to see how such a focused but cavalier attitude will continue to sit well with the actual conservatives like Councillor Del Grande that make up Team Ford. While the lot of them seem very willing to lay waste to services in the name of restraint, many seem less inclined to spare some the rod of discipline, even the usually untouchable Toronto Police Services. With such a determined and inflexible personalities in the mix, it’ll be fun to watch who blinks first.

*(Normally I sound much like this.)

— grudgingly submitted by Cityslikr

Our Profligate Mayor (No, Not That One. The New Guy)

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Hey. All you hard-ass, union haters out there. Where’s the outrage? Where’s the indignation? Yoo-hoo! Why so silent?

The city just rolled over and gave the Toronto Police Services an 11.5% wage increase over the next 4 years. My math is a little fuzzy but that doesn’t exactly work out to the 5% cut the mayor has demanded from all city departments, does it? “The police will give us concessions elsewhere,” Councillor Doug Ford said. Specifics to come, of course, but the TPS isn’t really known for its concessionary tactics.

“Of the thousands and thousands of doors I’ve knocked on,” the brother-councillor went on to tell the Globe, “there was not one complaint of how the police were paid.”

So instead of demanding across the board budget cuts we’re now selectively determining who deserves increases and who doesn’t, based on Councillor Ford’s informal door-to-door polling? The mayor and his team have been rigid in their insistence that any budgetary increase must be balanced with a corresponding cut. If the police services don’t provide such an offset to compensate for these new wage hikes, it’s got to come from somewhere else according to the mayor’s math. Does Doug then go out canvassing neighbourhoods asking folks who they think are overpaid by the city?

Ford scoffed at suggestions by Councillor Adam Vaughan (Councillor Ford regularly scoffs at anything Councillor Vaughan says) that the mayor had caved on the deal. “I find it ironic that the only people [on council] complaining about this deal are the ones responsible for a previous police contract that included a far larger increase than this one,” Mr. Ford said.

If memory serves, the expiring contract was a 3 year deal with a 10% wage increase. ‘A far larger increase’, Councillor Ford? That’s about a .4% difference. You guys are supposed to be the belt tighteners, aren’t you? An increase is an increase.

More to the point, anybody remember the outside workers’ strike in the summer of 2009? The one where Mayor Miller handed the keys to the city vault to the greedy unions and greased the rails for his exit? Yeah, I though you might. The wage settlement went like this: 1.75% in 2009, 2% in 2010 and 2.25% in 2011. That would be 6% over 3 years, nearly half of what Mayor Ford just conceded to the TPS.

So I ask again. Where’s all the chatter and clucking (aside from Councillor Vaughan) about the mayor caving into greedy union demands and breaking the bank? Where’s Budget Chief Mike “There. Is. No. More. Money.” Del Grande yelling and harrumphing about a lack of fiscal discipline? It seems in a Mayor Rob Ford’s Toronto, widows and orphans can get stuffed but the police? How much would you like, guys?

Do these imposters really deserve the dignified name of ‘fiscal conservatives’? Really, it’s more like fiscal ideologues. They are perfectly willing to spend money hand over fist with no regard for the bottom line when it suits their fancy. Just like their federal brethren that the mayor worked so hard to get elected to a majority government on Monday. Last year’s G20. Prisons. Engineless F-35s. Money is no object if it means conservative values are being upheld. Anything else is deemed special interest gravy.

— curiously submitted by Cityslikr