Tag Archives: Vehicle registration tax

An Honest Debate

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At this point, I don’t think it’s at all out of line or libellous to call Mayor Rob Ford a liar. Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker owes the mayor no apology for doing so yesterday as proposed service cuts were made public by city manager Joe Pennachetti. Throughout last year’s mayoral campaign, then Councillor Rob Ford went on and on and on and on about all the wasteful spending at City Hall, and how he, if elected, could cut spending, cut taxes without cutting services. Guaranteed.

We all heard it. Some disputed it. Others bought it. But it is on record and Mayor Ford can’t wiggle out from under it. He lied.

The alternative explanation is that he’s just flat out dumb. After 10 years sitting at council, a decade of experience with the budget process under his belt, and he still didn’t understand how it all worked. Mesmerized by the big numbers being thrown around, numbers that dwarfed anything he’d ever seen or dealt with at his family business, he wrongly assumed it was all so excessive. There’d be no problem trimming the layers of fat without laying a finger on any services. Guaranteed.

With reality’s baleful gaze quickly mocking such thinking, even the dumbest of dummies would eventually reconsider their errant thinking. Ooops. I was wrong, folks. Services are intricately connected to revenue streams. Who knew? I’m going to need a do over on all that campaign rhetoric.

But the mayor and those in his camp are no dummies. They knew all along service cuts were in the offing but saying so out loud during an election campaign was political poison. People like their taxes low, sure. Until you link low taxes to decreased services that many rely on and take for granted. My taxes pay for snow removal? My taxes put police on the streets? That’s an entirely different discussion.

So now we’re hearing that what the mayor actually said during the campaign was that there would be no ‘massive’ service cuts. It’s not cuts. It’s efficiencies. Wait, wait, wait. I especially love this piece of (and I summon the spirit of Allan Fotheringham on this… Fotheringham’s dead, right?) bafflegab: alternative service delivery.

Bam!

Take that, English language. I tie you up like a pretzel and rendered you meaningless.

In an essential Ford For Toronto post yesterday, Matt Elliott linked the $100 million of lost revenue to the city after council froze property taxes and rescinded the vehicle registration tax and the $100 million cuts in services proposed in the Core Services Review report handed over to the Executive Committee. By forgoing the $60 VRT and any property tax increase last year, the city is now facing possible cuts in snow removal, policing, library service, the TTC, Planning and Heritage, Parks and Recreation and so on and son. A direct contradiction of what the mayor promised us on the campaign trail less than a year ago.

Now, if you’re OK with that, if paying as little tax as possible trumps maintaining current service levels that the city provides, fine. Let’s debate that.  But let’s stop pretending this is about anything else. Let’s just be honest and admit tax cuts/freezes=service cuts. Anything else is simply lies, distortion, obfuscation and did I say lies?

And until Mayor Ford is candid enough to come right out and say what his plans have always been, that he doesn’t give a fuck about most of the services the city provides, that everything outside of keeping the streets safe and clean is gravy, he must be treated as a dishonest agent. Everything that comes out of his mouth is suspect. Everyone who steps up to come to his defense, spouting nonsense, claptrap and Six Sigma businessese is equally culpable of making honest discourse impossible.

An honest debate. That’s what we need to proceed.

 

— matter of factly submitted by Cityslikr

Did You Know Our Budget Chief Is A Chartered Accountant?

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Anyone who follows us regularly here at All Fired Up in the Big Smoke knows we possess little good will toward our budget chief, Councillor Mike Del Grande. We don’t care for his politics. His gruff, curmudgeonly demeanour is not in the least bit lovable. On top of that, he’s from Scarborough… That’s a joke. Some of our best friends reside in Scarborough. OK, that’s not true either. Point is, we have nothing against Scarborough. But the axe is huge that we have to grind with Mike Del Grande.

Our dislike of him is not entirely pathological. We are willing to step up and say, hear, hear, councillor, well done. Which is what we do now. According to the Toronto Star’s Royson James, Budget Chief Del Grande admitted freely and openly that the mayor’s move to seize waterfront land through the Toronto Port Lands Corporation is all about the money. “The truth, [Del Grande] said, is he needs revenues from the sale of the Port Lands to fix holes in his budget. In essence, a money grab.”

There it is, up front and out there. Team Ford has turned its beady eyes toward the waterfront in the hopes of a quick cash infusion to plug upcoming budget holes. Simple as that. Kudos, Mr. Budget Chief, for cutting through what amounts to all the other bullshit and pretend rationalizations.

An honest to goodness thanks from us to you.

Our admiration and gratitude is cut short, however, with the knowledge that this course of action is something the budget chief approves of. David Hains of The Clamshell took him to task in our comments section in yesterday’s post and we can’t offer up much of anything further but do think it bears repeating. Over and over and over again.

“But while Del Grande is honest,” Hains writes, “he’s not principled. He frequently mentions his CA — a good asset on council — but any accounting textbook says you don’t solve operating deficits with one-time sales of long-term assets. Where does that leave us next year? Weren’t we promised creative and innovative solutions to make the city more efficient? Didn’t Ford, Holyday, Minnan-Wong, Del Grande, Thompson et al frequently criticize Miller for one-time cash infusions to solve the budget?”

How many public pronouncements does the budget chief make without referring to the fact that he is a chartered accountant? It is a constant refrain. Don’t worry about our budget woes, folks. I am a chartered accountant. The implication being, that anyone who isn’t a C.A. or who deigns to criticize the budget chief doesn’t know what they’re talking about, doesn’t understand the numbers he’s dealing with. Moan about all the ‘widows and orphans’ you want but a chartered accountant is obliged to only see the numbers.

You see, Mike Del Grande C.A. is all about budgetary discipline. We just want our ‘cupcakes’.  He’s the adult in the room. We’re the needy, greedy children. Our budget chief is a chartered accountant. Has he told you that lately?

As soon as he signed on to the reckless ways of the Ford Administration, Councillor Del Grande lost all credibility as a prudent fiscal manager. He voted along with the mayor to repeal the VRT, a small but not insignificant revenue stream for the city’s coffers. He agreed to freeze property taxes. He OK’d using the previous year’s budget surplus to paper over holes that he was part of creating this year. When questioned about such dubious bookkeeping practices, the budget chief, like every other member of Team Ford, blames the previous administration for any and all problems.

Literally, he passes the buck backward and is now threatening to do so forward by sanctioning a quick, cheap sale of valuable city assets for very, very short term gain. I’d like the budget chief to point us all in the direction of any of the books he studied on his way to becoming a chartered accountant (Did you know that our budget chief is a chartered accountant? I hadn’t mentioned that in almost two paragraphs.) teaching that kind of economic approach to building a solid portfolio. Cut revenue. Sell assets. Prosper.

It’s impossible to know if Budget Chief Del Grande is just simply a bad C.A. or if he’s ignoring everything he learned in school for the chance to finally sit near the seat of power or if it’s nothing more than a blind adherence to radical right wing ideology that renders his diploma meaningless. Whatever the reason, chartered accountants everywhere should cringe in embarrassment that he so publicly counts himself as part of their ranks. It gives the entire profession a bad name.

Chartered accountancy, it’ll recover. Unfortunately, I’m not as convinced the city will.

— by the numbersly submitted by Cityslikr

Keeping The Gravy Train From Derailing

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Colour me confused by a couple articles posted over at the Toronto Star yesterday.

In them, we read of improper, sole-sourced contracts being paid out by the city since mid-2009, amounting to some $2.5 million dollars. The headline grabber was $3674 spent on a tai chi instructor. Oh my God! Gravy! Big numbers. Little context. The city has a spending problem!

Except that, except that in the overall scheme of things, nothing could be further from the truth. As the Star itself points out (in paragraph 5) “…the purchases in question constitute a minimal share of the more than $2 billion that the municipality spends each year on various purchases. And the vast majority of sole-source deals, totaling about $154 million last year, are properly authorized.” Moreover, a city spokesperson claimed that “…instances of staff breaking sole-source procedures are rare, totalling just 1.6 per cent of the 1,257 untendered purchases made in 2010.”

Yet the headlines intones: ‘City improperly approved millions in sole-source purchases’ and ‘The more things change…’ You finish that thought. The more they stay the same. Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose.

We hang our heads, throw our hands up in the air. The bureaucracy. It can’t be tamed. Not under the profligate David Miller. Not under the cost cutting Rob Ford.

Or am I misreading the Star’s intentions? Paragraphs rearranged and headlines rewritten, one might garner from the information delivered that, in fact, the city has been doing a remarkably good job in keeping a lid on sole-sourcing contracts. Isn’t a 1.6% compliance rate, even if committed by repeat offenders, very, very low? Where is the comparison to other corporations with billions of dollars in expenditures? How does 1.6% stack up with similar corporations both public and private? That there might be pertinent data to have access to.

Instead, we get Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday teeing off in the school marmish way he does best. “We have rules there because those rules are necessary to protect tax dollars and make sure what we’re buying is done properly and at the best price.” Yes, Deputy Mayor, we have rules and it seems they are followed 98.4% of the time. Are our tax dollars really best used releasing the Auditor General to undercover that last 1.6%?

And Councillor Paul Ainslie doing his best Donald Trump imitation. “If you’re going to continue to flout the rules, break the rules in a substantial way, you’re fired.” In a substantial way? Show us, Councillor Ainslie and the Toronto Star, examples of rules being flouted in a substantial way. Context, please, not just big numbers.

“It’s not chump change,” Councillor Ainslie informs us. No it isn’t, councillor. But neither will this charge to eliminate questionable contracting practices help to substantially (or even significantly for that matter) fill the gaping budgetary gap you insist on hanging over our heads, Damocles-like. $2.5 million is not only a small fraction of the city’s spending over the course of the last couple years, it is even infinitesimally small compared to the revenue lost by getting rid of the vehicle registration tax last year.

While it comes as no surprise that alleged fiscal hawks like Councillor Ainslie and the deputy mayor try and make hay with these findings, I’m just not sure what the Toronto Star is attempting to do with them. I look at their article and think immediately that it goes to show all the gravy the mayor campaigned on is largely in his own mind but is the Star suggesting only that he’s no less able to reign in what there is of it than his predecessor was?

Or is this just another example of what passes for objective journalism these days? Since the Star has been labeled anti-Ford and certainly a couple of their columnists, Christopher Hume and Royson James have emerged as vehement critics of this administration, is this nothing more than a bone thrown to the Ford Nation? See? We’re not biased. We too can find examples of wasteful, improper spending. There’s still gravy, people. Our fiscal house remains in disorder.

It does little to get to the heart of the matter and only serves to give both sides some red meat to beat each other over the heads with. Little learned. Just more heedless noise.

— curiously submitted by Cityslikr