Tag Archives: Toronto Star

Meet A Mayoral Candidate — Part V

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It’s Friday, folks. Time to Meet A Mayoral Candidate.

This week: Mark Cidade for Mayor!

Right off the bat we like this candidate for 3 reasons, one of which isn’t totally frivolous. That being, Cidade seems to hate cars as much as we do here at All Fired Up in the Big Smoke. The other two, well, not as important to the health of Toronto certainly, but nothing to sneeze at either. 1) A guy running for mayor has the last name Cidade which is the Portuguese word for town or city. Mayor Cidade. Mayor City. City mayor. It’s tough to deny the appeal of that. 2) Mr. Cidade invited us out for lunch so he could explain in more detail his plans for Toronto if elected mayor in October. To maintain our journalistic integrity (such as it is), we had to decline. Still, he invited us to lunch. Props out for that.

Mr. Cidade is a candidate with a full-to-bursting campaign platform. Scrolling through his Facebook page, he expresses interest in a wide range of topics, from Suicide and Mental Health through to the City’s Economy, Real Estate, Water and even Robots. No stone is left unturned when it comes to the politics of the city.

Yet, so far at least, Mr. Cidade reveals himself to be a candidate more full of questions than answers. In many of the issues he raises, he leaves us with nothing more than musings followed by ???s. How is the transit situation now, do you think? Do we need so many expensive condos, shopping malls, and office buildings? Did you know that some of Toronto’s urban planners are also budding roboticists? I don’t want to see another garbage strike and I want to see Toronto’s streets to be clean again. What do we do? A mayor can’t do it all by themself. That’s why they need a council! Or do they? Toronto’s water is better-tested than anything you buy in a bottle. Of course, the pipes sort of ruin everything. New pipes maybe?

To be fair, Mr. Cidade does counter many of his inquiries with links to articles that talk about the particular matter in question but I’d like to know what the candidate thinks about them. I can read the National Post, Toronto Star or Spacing magazine to see what they think. They aren’t asking for my vote. Mark Cidade is and it’s his answers I want to know.

This leads to a bigger question I have about the Mark Cidade for Mayor candidacy. While his heart is in the right place – he is outraged that homeless people are still dying in the street, thinks more money should be in place to help with mental illness, believes immigration plays a vital role in the development of Toronto – it’s tough to figure out how he as mayor would deal with all these. Mr. Cidade refers to himself as an independent moderate yet he seems dubious of the role municipal government plays in our lives. Police, courts, lawyers, standards and licensing. Who needs them?, Mr. Cidade asks. Do we even NEED property taxes? I don’t want to raise taxes. In fact, I want to LOWER them until there are NO TAXES.

This sounds a lot less moderate and far more libertarian and leaves me to ask Mr. Cidade how we as a city can tend to the less fortunate and newcomers who have arrived looking for a better life without money coming in to pay for it and a human infrastructure in place to oversee it?

Still, his is not the only mayoral campaign in this year’s election to have its aspirations and plans for achieving them out of sync. Despite the uncertainty that underlines candidate Cidade at this point, he holds a very positive view of the city. When asked our empty-headed question that we’re posing to all the hopefuls for mayor, If the present mayor would like his legacy to be that of the Transit Mayor, how would a Mayor Cidade like to see his legacy written?, he answered: The mayor that makes Toronto “The Good” into Toronto “The Great”.

That’s one response that’s hard to argue with.

— dutifully submitted by Cityslikr

The Politics Of Parking

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So I ducked out from my studies for a late lunch last week, squeezing the last hint of surprising warmth from the day’s winter sunshine on a downtown restaurant patio. With me is a scholarly friend of mine, employed at a much more august institution of higher learning than I am presently but I don’t hold it against him. We talked city politics over pitchers of beer and stodgy Italian food.

Covering a wide range of topics, we eventually arrived at the inevitable subject of cars and traffic, situated as we were at a busy-ish corner, chock full of private vehicles, streetcars, bikes and pedestrians. While both occasional drivers, we share a preference for other modes of transport to get around the city. “An evil necessity,” I said in terms of our car usage. “How about a largely unnecessary indulgence?” my drinking-and-dining companion countered.

A few days later, he sent me this from the Toronto Star. It’s worth taking a moment to read through it but for our purposes here, it introduced me to one Dr. Donald Shoup, “America’s parking guru”. A professor at UCLA’s Department of Urban Planning, Prof. Shoup is also a bestselling author of the 2005 book, The High Cost of Free Parking. In a nutshell, he believes cities set aside too much land use for parking and that the price to park a car does not accurately reflect fair market value. This simply causes unnecessary congestion as cars that do find spots, tend to stay for long periods because it is cheap to do so. Other prospective parkers are then forced to spend inordinate amounts of time, circling, looking for an open spot or they throw out the anchors and illegally double park, adding further to life draining congestion.

Hear it directly (and much more thoroughly) from the horse’s mouth here.  While at the Streetfilms.org site, take some time to browse and check out their other films especially Fixing the Great Mistake: Autocentric Development. There are viable solutions being discussed to combat urban gridlock and our unhealthy car dependency. Unfortunately, not here in Toronto. Certainly not during this election campaign.

In fact, what’s being spewed forth from our major (and some minor) mayoral candidates is little more than knuckle-dragging, backward looking, boned tired rhetoric. Despite articles like this in seemingly car friendly sites like Parking Today (who knew?), all we hear about is some alleged War on Cars. But if we’re truly want to usher Toronto into a prosperous, life affirming 21st-century, the debate really needs to be reframed as The Car’s War on Livability.

— pastaly submitted by Acaphelgmic

A Surplus Of Ill Will

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Mayor David Miller. At this stage, you’re either with him or a’gin him. Never, it seems, shall the twain meet.

His big announcement this week of an additional $100 million surplus (on top of the $250 million surplus already in the books earlier in the budget process) had many in the press scratching their heads while others pulled their hair from it in outrage. “Mismanagement,” screeched the Toronto Sun’s Sue-Ann Levy during Wednesday’s press conference. ‘Overblown’ in the minds of some, and not worth the trip to City Hall. We thought it was going to be something really important like the mayor’s early resignation or re-entry into the race, seemed to be the only thing anyone could agree on.

The Toronto Star’s Royson James tried out the dichotomy of it being either good news or a cheap political stunt. But, I ask, why can’t it be both, Royson?

Mayor Miller and his minions on the budget committee aren’t the first politicians to play politics with budget information, dampening down expectations of good news or heightening worst case scenarios in the hopes of a soft landing when the budget finally arrives. Spinning, I believe it’s been referred to. Massaging the message.

Do I wish it wouldn’t happen? Absolutely. A straight forward and transparent rendering of the city’s revenues and expenditures would go along way to restoring the public’s confidence in their elected officials. Money monkey business gives the impression that we’re being played and elevates our resentment at paying taxes to contribute to the running of the city.

Still, why are we surprised by Miller’s moves or so irate at the fact that the city has more money at its disposal than it originally believed? It is good news, Royson James, and much, much better than the alternative of having less money than expected. Good news delivered in the form of purely partisan political theatre. That isn’t too difficult to get one’s head around if one really wants to.

But for James and all the other media type megaphones trumpeting the hymn from the right wing songbook about a financially out of control administration at City Hall, this pricks a hole in their balloon. In Thursday’s article, James does a little message massaging himself, pointing out that under Miller, spending has gone up by a billion dollars in the last two years. A billion dollars! That’s crazy. That’s out of control. That’s.. let’s see 1 billion of 9.2 billion is about.. just under 11% divided by 2, gives us a 5.5% increase/year in the last two years. During which, we had one of those, what do you call it… major recessions. A global economic meltdown the likes of which we hadn’t seen since the 1930s. Between bailouts and increases in social spending, all governments saw expenditure spikes, Royson. How about giving us that kind of perspective in your role as a member of the fourth estate?

Alas it seems, when it comes to covering Mayor David Miller these days, perspective is the last thing that we should expect. At least of the objective, just-the-facts-ma’am kind of perspective we need in able to make informed decisions.

— unbiasedly submitted by Cityslikr