Tag Archives: Vehicle registration tax

Core Services Review Review Two

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Imagine if Mayor Ford and his Merry Band of Yes Men spent nearly the time and energy managing reality as they do trying to wrestle it into submission. Or conversely, simply came out and honestly said, this is how we see things and this is what we’re going to do about it. We’d either have a functioning city council or they all would’ve been blown out of the water last October and, well, we’d have a functioning city council.

Instead we have the circus side show that was yesterday’s unveiling of the outside consultant group KPMG’s assessment of the city’s core services review. First up, Public Works. If I’m understanding it correctly, this one was a complete and utter waste of time and money, examining services 96% of which “… are core municipal services, either mandatory as a result of provincial legislative requirements or essential to the continued operation of the City as an urban area.” In other words that MC Hammer sang, can’t touch this.

Even if council were willing or able to enact all the cuts KPMG offered up as options, it would amount to a whopping grand total of $10-15 million according to the Torontoist. Take that, next year’s $774 million operating budget shortfall. You’ve been reduced a whopping 1.93%. A hill of beans is what I’m suggesting.

Dutifully, like an organ-grinder’s pair of monkeys, Budget Chief Del Grande and Public Works and Infrastructure Committee chair Minnan-Wong performed at the press conference ‘technical briefing’ in the mayor’s continued absence, blowing smoke for media consumption, in turns embracing and distancing themselves from the report. Cherry picking, some might say. Jettisoning water fluoridation probably wasn’t on the table, according to Councillor Minnan-Wong but, hey, even if the city scaled back work on cycling infrastructure, they’d still be doing more than the previous administration ever did. So we should rest easy in the knowledge that if we’re knocked down off our bikes and smash in our teeth, they will have been perfectly healthy teeth.

Phee-ew!

When reporters started asking questions, Minnan-Wong ratcheted up the double-speak to even greater heights. Hearing that a majority of people involved in the core services review consultation process expressed a preference for paying higher taxes in order to maintain current services, the councillor pronounced such views statistically invalid because those participating were ‘self-selected’. I’m not up on my statistic-ese but isn’t everyone who chooses to take part in the online surveys and public consultations ‘self-selected’?

In other words, they are active and engaged citizens. To hear the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee chair tell it, anyone choosing to participate in public consultations is self-selected and therefore statistically invalid. Bringing up that whole thorny issue of the usefulness of elections, I guess.

Not to be undone for sheer chutzpah in terms of ignoring the reality swirling around him the budget chief swung for the fences when he allowed himself to be quoted saying, “We have the lowest taxes in the GTA, with the greatest services provided.” I says, what now?! Can you run that by me again, Budget Chief To The Mayor Who Says We Don’t Have A Revenue Problem We Have A Spending Problem? We have the lowest taxes in the GTA and yet you voted to repeal the Vehicle Registration Tax and freeze property taxes right before starting to run around Chicken Little-ish warning us of an oncoming budget tsunami?

Don’t fear though, Councillor Del Grande assured the gathered media throng, he’s a chartered accountant. Leading one to assume that they let just about anybody into those professional schools including folks without a seeming grasp of basic arithmetic. Exactly what course is it that teaches cutting taxes and revenues doesn’t lead to some sort of budget crunch?

But apparently the budget chief, the PWI chair and all the others gathered around Mayor Ford are completely at home with cognitive dissonance. Commission a report that fundamentally undercuts everything you stand for politically, no problem. There’ll be the odd word or phrase or bullet point that, if spun correctly, will fully support your argument. Those you can’t? Pronounce them statistically invalid. Playing with facts is fun. Playing with reality is even better because it is what you make it and nobody can take it away from you. We have a spending problem, dammit. I don’t care what anybody says, even high-priced consultants we paid to tell us we have a spending problem and who may be suggesting that, in fact, we don’t.

The fun is only beginning, too. Carefully stage managed to present the more untouchable services first, the rollout is heading toward what’s thought of as the ‘soft’ services. The real source of gravy like libraries, parks, recreation, community centres, public transit. That way, the reality will be that they’ve got no choice. Their hands were tied by the province or political reality (you can’t be cutting sidewalk snow shoveling in your Ford Nation base) in Public Works and the other ‘hard services’. So sorry, folks. You can always sit around Chapters when we close your library branch on the Sundays.

From a strategy point of view, it’s nothing short of top notch. Tactical shock and awe, dropping the possibility of big ticket cuts first that you have no plans whatsoever of enacting. So when you take them off the table, it’s greeted with a sigh of relief and we’re then prepared to accept cuts to easier targets. Bike lanes. Libraries. After school programs.

You know, the usual suspects.

Just imagine, though, the possibilities if such PR ingenuity was put into something actually concrete, beneficial, constructive.

Oh, the city we would have.

— matter of factly submitted by Cityslikr

An Open Letter To Councillor Josh Matlow

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Dear Councillor Matlow,

I am desperately trying to like you. Or, if not like you, to respect and understand your point of view and manner for navigating the very partisan grounds upon which City Hall currently sits. You seem like a nice enough fellow, open-minded, wanting to understand both sides of an issue, a consensus seeker.

Yet, you oftentimes give me cause to pause. Fence-sitter, I find myself thinking regularly. Ass-coverer when I’m feeling less generous. Going whichever way the political winds are blowing.

Most recently it’s been your indulging our budget chief’s moronically empty symbolism of his little red piggy bank that’s put a burr up my ass. Do you really think it brings anything substantive to the city’s budget problems? Councillor Del Grande himself has referred to the situation as a threatening ‘tsunami’. How is a child’s piggy bank going to help us in the face of such an onslaught?

Stop being so humourless, I’m sure you’re saying to me. It’s just a gag, a little joke to lighten the mood. Hell, maybe I’m missing your point altogether. Your constant referencing and social media photo sharing of the cute little plastic porcine is actually a subversive method of mocking the budget chief. If so, apologies and my hat is off to you. I probably would’ve just ignored the stupid pig altogether, and left it to the likes of the Toronto Sun to treat with the significance it doesn’t deserve.

More troublesome to me, however, is your habit of invoking the phrase, the truth lies somewhere in the middle on issues that divide city council largely on its right-left axis. That axiom is only meaningful if both sides are equidistant from the truth you are seeking. Do you actually believe that to be the case in many of the matters that come before you at council? That truth and good governance can always be found by finding some middle ground? It kind of makes you a patsy for those who have little interest in seeking compromise or even honestly debating issues.

By giving serious or legitimate weight to ideas or opinions that don’t necessarily warrant any seriousness or legitimacy, you skew the so-called middle in an unreasonable direction and distance it from the apparent ‘truth’ you are seeking. If one side claims that black is white while the other says, no, in fact, black is black, what colour do you arrive at? Greyish? Surely that can’t be the truth or consensus you’re aiming for.

Thus you find yourself having voted to repeal the vehicle registration tax and make the TTC an essential service (both money losing propositions for the city) and a few short months later, standing up to defend the selling off of TCHC homes out of fiscal necessity. As we have said here many times previously to the likes of Budget Chief Del Grande, you can’t cut sources of revenue and then sorrowfully plead being broke later as a reason to not to live up to your responsibilities. Well I mean, you can. It just looks a little fishy. Disingenuous. Hypocritical, even. Not really the appearance of someone looking to find the truth.

It doesn’t make you a hardcore, intransigent ideologue to hold strong opinions if they are based on well-informed reasoning peppered with facts and data. You’re only a hardcore, intransigent ideologue if your strongly held opinions aren’t based on those things. Giving equal bearing to these two very different approaches lends credence to prevarication and legitimizes what is otherwise pure propaganda. You enable those who are intent on distorting the truth you so desperately seek to find.

After some six months on the job at City Hall, surely you don’t still believe that the city’s fiscal problems are due to spending excesses rather than a lack of revenue, do you? Or are you going to fall back on the notion of it being somewhere between the two? Look at all those chocolates the former TCHC board bought for themselves versus the maw still gaping wide open by the refusal of the province to resume funding their portion of the TTC’s operational budget. You see what I’m getting at here? Those two situations do not carry equal weight. They shouldn’t, at any rate. One represents, perhaps, a culture of entitlement amounting to thousands of dollars while the other displays a complete and utter abrogation of responsibility to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars that has helped render our transit but a sad shadow of its former self.

Spending problem small, revenue problem HUGE. Suggesting that the two have equal significance to our fiscal problems, that the truth lies somewhere in the middle between the two does nothing more than aid and abet those whose main goal is to gut and shrink the size and scope our local government. That isn’t a show of bi-partisanship. It’s encouraging reflexive ideology to run roughshod over reasoned political debate.

Your predecessor as councillor in Ward 22, Michael Walker, was thought of as being a true independent voice at City Hall during his 28 years there. A maverick even, Mr. Walker never seemed to cater to the pressures from those in power, choosing instead to represent ‘the needs and aspirations’ of his constituents. More often than not, this designated him an outsider regardless of the political stripe of the administration that was in charge. “I have actively promoted community organization,” Walker notes, “and input in the development of a fiscally sound and socially progressive city”.

So far, Councillor Matlow, your performance has been one of the courtier rather than a maverick, seeking not to step on the toes of the mayor and his crew on important issues. You’ve led the charge in staking out the middle ground, the so-called mushy middle, ultimately transforming it into the pliable middle more prone to siding with political expediency instead of principle. As the old saying goes, you’ve got to stand for something or you’ll fall for anything. I’ve yet to see exactly what it is you stand for, councillor.

 

Yours truly,

 

Cityslikr

How About That Infrastructure Deficit?

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Do you want to leave our grandchildren our deficit to deal with?

It is a mantra often sited by deficit hawks to guilt us into cutting government spending. An iteration of it was pronounced in the U.S. by former Senator Alan Simpson when he was appointed Republican deficit commissioner last year. “If you don’t want your grandkids picking grit with the chickens, better ignore soundbite politics and get lawmakers to find real solutions to the deficit,”  so said Simpson who seemed unaware of the irony of using a soundbite to criticize ‘soundbite politics’.

Two can play at that game, Senator Simpson. What if we plug one word into that phrase? Do you want to leave our grandchildren our infrastructure deficit to deal with? How does that change the equation?

I came across an article last week in my Kawartha.com via the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. In it was a laundry list of infrastructure needs for Ontario cities, towns and communities that amounted to $100 billion of unfunded ‘unrepaired and unbuilt’ infrastructure according to the provincial government’s own estimates. “… delaying upgrades means higher costs in the long run,” according to the FCM’s Gabriel Miller.

‘Higher costs in the long run’. Try using that phrase with fiscal conservatives and watch their heads explode. We don’t have the money, they’ll yowl. But if we don’t find the money now it will end up costing more later. Thus, the infrastructure deficit is born.

What’s doubly interesting in this debate is that it is not simply we here in ‘tax and spend’ Toronto facing such a dilemma. Places big and small, conservative and liberal are under similar pressures. According to myKawartha, every Toronto resident would have to pay more than $1,000 extra on their property tax bill to deal with its infrastructure gap while residents of wee places like Prince Edward County and Perth face closer to $2,000 per person. Even the Fords’ favourite frugal city, Mississauga, is looking at nearly $450 million of debt in the next decade needed to fund infrastructure projects.

Clearly, it is a situation beyond the control of municipalities to deal with on their own. The revenue tools necessary to grapple with it are not at their disposal. So the internecine, right-left battles we’re now witnessing here at city council are fruitless. We can slash and burn all we want but we’ll still have an infrastructure deficit. Probably even more so. Since our ability to generate more revenue is severely limited, neither can we tax our way to better infrastructure health because the costs would be too unbearable for most households to carry. Although claiming we are over-taxed as a way to cut and freeze taxes is fallacious at best, highly destructive at worst.

This is a fight that needs to be re-directed at so-called ‘senior’ levels of government. Their coffers are where our tax money goes (90%+ by most estimates). They, both Liberal and Conservative, have been the laggards on this issue, dating back to the 1980s. For the past 3 decades, successive federal and provincial governments have been able to ignore this coming perfect infrastructure storm as it manifests itself mostly at the local level. Disintegrating roads and sewer systems. Dilapidated community centres. Diminishing social housing.

In fact, one could argue that both Ottawa and Queen’s Park have attempted to balance their books on the backs of cities. We need to start calling them out on that. Municipal politicians who don’t are simply doing the dirty work of their provincial and federal masters. They are the ones burdening our grandchildren with an infrastructure deficit and should be judged accordingly.

— judgmentally submitted by Cityslikr