Tag Archives: Vehicle registration tax

The Mammoliti Meter

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I’ve written Rob Ford off before. Often and with a great deal of certainty. Gleefully, I’ll admit. As a mayoral candidate. As a newly installed mayor. He’ll never get elected. He’ll never command a majority of city council.

And I’ve been wrong. Each and every time. So I am hardly in a position to pass any sort of judgment at this juncture, at least not accurately or in a manner that would be deemed noteworthy, worthwhile even.

But I do think it safe to say that May was not the kindest month to Mayor Ford.

Now, that shouldn’t be all that surprising. Politicians have their ups and downs. None are capable of burning as hotly popular over the long haul as this mayor has seen himself since his election last fall. There will be dips, valleys. It’s inevitable. Only an idiot would stand up, just half a year into the mayor’s mandate and declare the man finished, done like dinner, fork sticking in time.

Still, I can’t turn down the opportunity to idiotically divine the near future just a little.

Suddenly last month, Mayor Ford started to lose the occasional vote at council. Nothing monumental or game changing. But the iron grip with which he pushed through the repeal of the vehicle registration tax, have the province declare the TTC an essential service and squeeze out the 2011 budget has clearly loosened a little. Councillors occupying the so-called ‘mushy middle’ weren’t falling in line as pliably and even some right of centre allies were not marching in lockstep.

When the mayor tried to by-pass council in his push to outsource garbage collection, he met some resistance in the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee and was forced to bring the idea before city council. Once there, it squeaked through but not without significant amendments. Getting the matter passed is now no longer the slam dunk Mayor Ford and his people might’ve thought it was a month or so ago.

His head-scratcher of a bid to eliminate all citizens advisory committees hit a bump in the road while in Executive Committee and was further delayed pending a staff report when it went to council. Good buddy Jim Flaherty came to town and essentially thumbed his nose at the Brothers Ford’s dim view of Toronto’s waterfront development. Appointee Gordon Chong openly mused about road tolls and congestion charges as ways of financing the mayor’s Sheppard subway line which the mayor seems to think only needs the power of positive thinking and the private sector to make happen. City Clerk Ulli Watkiss defied the mayor’s wishes to proceed with a by-election in Ward 9, choosing instead to appeal the ruling. Police Services vice-chair Councillor Michael Thompson asked Chief Blair to look at the implications of laying off 400-500 of his people, directly opposite Mayor Ford’s campaign promise of 100 new police officers.

And Transit City, long since pronounced dead and buried, is back, zombie-like to hound the mayor. As Matt Elliott reported a couple days back, in response to inquiries from Councillor Janet Davis, City Manager Joe Pennachetti raised the spectre of multiple votes that might have to go through council before the stake can be officially driven through the heart of Transit City and the mayor’s Transportation City (I still laugh when writing out that lacklustre name) plan anointed its true successor. With the viability of the Sheppard subway coming under closer scrutiny, Mayor Ford might just find that simply clapping his hands and chanting Make It So no longer constitutes a sound method of implementing his agenda.

Let’s not forget the order from the Compliance Audit Committee to examine Mayor Ford’s unorthodox financing of his mayoral campaign last year. All, hey, I’m an open book with nothing to hide, audit away last week, the mayor and his lawyer filed a last minute appeal to have the audit quashed in court. Even if successful, the real outcome may be tarnishing his common guy, I’m just one of you, folksy image that has served him well in the past.

Reality may well be crashing in on the mayor. It had to happen sometime because that’s just the nature of reality. Only the misguided and deluded believe otherwise.

How Mayor Ford deals with this altered landscape will ultimately determine the fate of his term in office. Edward Keenan over at The Grid last week saw the possibility of a softening toward consensus building not in the mayor himself but in his right hand man and older brother, Councillor Doug. Seen as more politically astute, Doug Ford may accept the fact that the winds are a-changing, and trampling over foes and striking fear into the hearts and minds of possible friends may no longer be the best course of action. The far-right territory Team Ford has staked out may not be comfortable enough for a workable majority of councillors, so the mayor is going to have to settle on a more moderate course.

Mayor Ford moderate, you say? Does not compute. C’est impossible. Leopard’s changing their spots and all that.

The thing is, if the mayor wants to avoid being reduced to little more than a sideshow freak as the city governance circus goes about its business around him, he might not have a choice but to reach out to at least some of those he has no natural political affinity toward. Failure to do so could put him into a position of ineffectual isolation many of us stupidly and ignorantly predicted he’d assume from the get-go. It’s adapt or die time.

As an outlying rogue figure of little consequence during his time at council, no doubt adaptation is foreign soil for Mayor Ford. He hasn’t had to play nicely with others before because, well, no one cared what he thought or how he voted. He’s the mayor now, so keeping at least 22 councillors on side matters. That’s been possible so far by power of his perceived popularity and ability to wield it threateningly. Do this or face the wrath of Ford Nation! Those councillors who don’t adhere strictly to his right wing doctrinaire will begin to wander once they feel there will be no consequences in doing so. Moreover, if supporting him starts to adversely affect their popularity, his fair-weather friends will make a point of publicly abandoning him.

Enter the Mammoliti Meter. Perhaps the most nakedly opportunistic member of the current city council, after his failed mayoral bid last fall Giorgio Mammoliti casually tossed aside a career of heated enmity toward Rob Ford and threw his lot in whole-heartedly with his one-time adversary. Seated to the right of the mayor, Councillor Mammoliti now proudly dubs himself Team Ford’s quarterback, helping to whip votes and giving a big thumbs up or down to signal which way his team mates should vote. He basks in the mayor’s status.

But it’s hard to imagine he’d be willing to go down with the ship if it starts taking on water. No, I won’t follow that analogy to speak of rats. As a measure of the tenuous nature of the alliance Mayor Ford has forged through division and intimidation, I’m willing to suggest that as goes Giorgio Mammoliti, so goes the Ford administration. It is a nation built on dodgy landfill.

— prognosticatingly submitted by Cityslikr

Redrawing Toronto

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I chuckled a little bit, reading Patrick White’s Globe article from Friday about Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday’s next task of ‘redrawing Toronto’s dated electoral boundaries.’ “Now that he’s [Holyday] approaching the home stretch of a months-long effort to slash egregious councillor expenses…”, the piece began. Images bounced around my noggin. Rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship. Reducing the number of fiddlers as the city burned. Etc., etc.

Even giving inflated figures, say $30 K cuts in ‘egregious’ councillor spending, that amounts to about $1, 320, 000 million, let’s call it $1.5 million in savings to city coffers. But a small fraction of the lost revenue in eliminating the VRT and freezing property taxes that the Deputy Mayor helped push through. The net effect of adding to Toronto’s ever increasing operating budge hole. Well done, fiscal conservatives. Sound management of the city’s finances.

We here at All Fired Up in the Big Smoke have often been chided, by friends included, of sniffing at Team Ford’s multi-fronted attacks on the Gravy Train. It’s the reason he was elected, we’re told. Cutting taxes and wasteful spending. It’s all about optics, reality be damned.

So, fine. I give the Deputy Mayor and all those slaving away to maintain the mayor’s optics a tip of the hat. Well done, folks. Reality can wait until the fall when the 2012 budget debates begin and you have to struggle to keep up the appearance of Mayor Ford’s other campaign platform of No Major Service Cuts. Guaranteed.

That said if, as the Globe piece also notes, Deputy Mayor Holyday is serious about tackling the thorny issue of ward redistribution, our kudos will be much less facetious. It is a non-partisan concern that cuts to the heart of democracy. Citizens deserve as close to equal representation as is feasible, especially at the municipal level which is so day-to-day service oriented. Wide variations between wards will invariably result in wide variations in how councillors serve their constituents.

And as it stands right now, there are wide variations. Huge, gaping differences in populations between wards, in fact. It’s almost a 35,000 person disparity between the most populous ward (John Filion’s Willowdale 23 at 79,435) and the least (Maria Augimeri’s Ward 9 with just under 45,000 residents). How could Mr. Filion be anywhere near as attentive to the needs of his constituents as Ms. Augimeri is to hers? In fairness, we should really determine councillor’s office budgets on a per head basis.

In the Globe article, Councillor Adam Vaughan suggests that if redistribution were to happen properly, it would swing council to the left. We’d like to see his methodology behind that line of reasoning as many of the suburban ridings (including Ward 23) are the more populous ones. Scarborough especially has more than its share of hugely populated, 60K+ wards. Given that the former municipality is home to some of the current mayor’s most ardent supporters (Councillors Michael Thompson, Norm Kelly, Chin Lee), it’s hard to see how splitting those wards is going to enhance the left at council.

But that’s beside the point. Redrawing ward maps need to transcend political affiliation. Elected officials should have as little hand in the process as possible. If the Deputy Mayor can successfully pull such a feat off, it will be a shiny medal he can rightfully pin to his chest.

A bigger hurdle still will be navigating a new municipal political map with the mayor’s campaign pledge to cut councillor numbers in half. (More meaningless and possibly detrimental optics!) In the Globe article, the Deputy Mayor was already distancing himself from that promise. “That’s the mayor’s office that will have to come up with a plan for that,” Holyday said. “I don’t know that my plan is exactly the same as his.” With some wards already struggling under the weight of a 60, 70K+ population, it’s hard to see how having wards with 100,000 people will be of benefit to anyone.

Except for Mayor Ford’s optics. An ‘I said I would do it. I did it’ claim is an empty boast if the city is the worse for it. And it’s hard to see how it won’t be if we wind up further under-represented even if the pain is more equally shared.

— by the numbersly submitted by Cityslikr

Unreason To Believe

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We’re trying a new approach here in an attempt to fall in line with a wider swath of our fellow electorate. Clearly we are out of step. So very, very out of step.

Our goal is to stop over-analyzing things. Maybe stop analyzing everything altogether. It only leads to despondency and heavy drinking. Let’s just start pretending to take what our politicians tell us at face value. We know they’re all lying to us, so let’s go with the lies we find most agreeable and beneficial to us. That way, when they fail to deliver, it justifies our anger and disillusionment with the entire system. The politicians are the problem not us.

Cut taxes without cutting services? We like it. Stability and non-accountability above compromise and cooperation? Hells yeah! Putting a majority government in place enables us not to have to think about federal politics again for another 4 years or so. That’s what politics is all about, isn’t it? Divesting ourselves of any and all responsibility.

We’ll also try our best to pay attention to what politicians who pander to our worst instincts have to say about their opponents and we’ll poo-poo what these duly smeared politicians say about any sort of ‘hidden agenda’. That’s just conspiracy minded, we’ll tell them. Besides, what do you know? You once lived outside of the country, didn’t you? Let’s set aside policy and platforms for personality. I’m only going to vote for someone I’d like to have a beer with. It’s a whole lot easier that way.

So we’re going to begin by sharing the joy our mayor and his brother have expressed with the outcome of Monday’s federal election. Finally. After nearly 25 years in exile, we have Conservatives MPs in 416 Toronto. The Liberal Fortress GTA has been breached and this can only mean good things for the city and region.

After years of being neglected and taken for granted by successive Liberal governments in Ottawa, left to our own devices to build transit, affordable housing and upgrade infrastructure, we have elected a party that will listen to our needs and set those things right. It’s true. Technically speaking, the Conservatives have been in power for 5 years now and haven’t really ever talked about any of that except for stimulus spending that the dreaded near-coalition forced them into when the world’s economy was heading off the cliff in 2008.

But you see, their hands were tied in a minority situation. Now freed from those merciless bonds, not with a little help from Toronto and the GTA, they can finally be themselves which, I think, if you didn’t look too closely at how they’ve operated as a government, could be seen as magnanimous. Caring, accommodating, law-abiding and magnanimous.

And since our mayor and his brain trust helped push them over the top, we should expect a little payback in return. Only Liberals ignore those who vote for them. While Conservatives focus mostly on their enemies, they do know who their friends are and reward them accordingly.

What from the mayor’s wish list should we look to be granted first? And by ‘wish list’, I mean not an actual list of priorities that Mayor Ford set down early on in the campaign for the federal politicians to agree or disagree with. That would be getting involved, politically speaking. The mayor didn’t want to get involved. At least, until he publicly endorsed the Conservatives and started sending out robo-calls to voters in various 416 ridings. But now that he’s rolled the dice and come up 7s, what would he wish for if he had any wishes?

There’s money for subways through P3s. So the mayor can finally administer the death blow to Transit City. Check that one off the list. Then there’s… there’s…

For this to work, we’re going to have to ignore the fact that all throughout last year’s municipal campaign, then candidate Rob Ford told us that the city didn’t have a revenue problem. It was all about over-spending and profligate waste. So it makes it a little awkward to go to the federal government now, cap in hand as the mayor referred to it when someone else was doing it, and ask for money that the mayor claims we don’t need.

The difference is, we’re coming at this from a position of strength now. Not only did we help give the Conservatives a majority government, so they owe us, but we don’t really need the money in the first place. If we did, the mayor and his people at City Hall wouldn’t have cut and frozen taxes. So let’s look at it more as a Demand rather than Wish List. We are in the driver’s seat. All it took was electing government MPs. Conservative government MPs. Conservative majority government MPs.

Who knew life could be this simple and easy? Aside from the 40% of voters who cast Conservative ballots on Monday. They’re clearly on to something. Set aside reason and logic and things become very clear, very straight-forward. It’s what we’re all looking for in the long run, isn’t it?

— new me-ly submitted by Cityslikr