Tag Archives: Vehicle registration tax

To Cut Or Not To Cut

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I don’t think it’s too unreasonable or cynical to call this week’s public deputations before the budget committee political theatre. Deputants stepped into the spotlight to deliver their lines in defence of certain items or programs, or why cuts needed to be enacted (although, to be fair, the number of the latter could be counted on one hand that was missing a finger). Budget committee members performed the role of an attentive and, occasionally, interactive audience, listening to the players strut and fret before them. Visiting councillors acted as the play’s chorus, commenting on and interjecting with the action as it unfolded, filling in any expositional gaps in the narrative that arose.

If you believe in the power of theatre to change things, then all of that is a legitimate and necessary part of the process; something bigger and more compelling than simply a game of pretend.

To dismiss it as little more than an empty show, the mere appearance of listening to the public – that whole open and transparent business – diminishes both the deputants and, frankly, the Ford Administration. Write them off as blundering buffoons at your and the city’s peril. There was much more at work here than simply trying to seem engaged while having every intention to just ram the 2012 budget untouched through to council next month.

The key plotline in all this from Team Ford’s perspective was to get the public, an overwhelming majority of it hostile, everybody knew that would be the case, to come in, plead their case for their cause to be spared the axe and respond by simply asking, well, how are we to pay for it? The city has a spending problem, remember? That’s why we find ourselves in this current fiscal mess.

So heavy praise or sage nods toward anyone coming forward to offer up suggestions of paying higher user fees to save pools, programs, libraries. See? This is what we’re talking about. Thinking outside the box. If you want all these ‘nice to haves’, Toronto, you’re going to have to pay for them not the city.

Ignore the hulking presence lurking just off stage, the buried child. The family secret no one in charge really wants to talk about. That none of this is necessary. No individual sacrifice needed. A collective tweak here and there and everything would be OK even in these dark economic times. There is absolutely no reason we had to start chopping off limbs and tossing weight overboard to stay afloat. If there was any type of crisis it was one of leadership. They didn’t appear to know what they were doing. That, or they were hiding their true intentions.

Only when deputants pointed out this fact, that things weren’t at all like the budget committee claimed they were, did the conflict start. They were met with pure bile and mocking obstreperousness. Raise taxes? Is that all you got? What special interest do you represent? We want real solutions. Solutions that meet our very narrow definition of acceptable responses. Cuts or increased user fees. The only two options. So contestant, I mean, deputant, will it be what’s behind door #1 or door #2?

Clearly having felt they lost the momentum or upper hand after the first day, the mayor’s designated hit men were dispatched to beat back deputants who tried veering off the preferred path. Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti made an early morning, Snidely Whiplash appearance. Councillor Frances Nunziata brought her best Cruella DeVil impression, piping a single note. Gone was solicitous Councillor Doug Ford. Replaced by his braying alter ego. Budget Chief Mike Del Grande was, well, pretty much the same. Grumpy, grim and easy to revert to hectoring mode.

While perfectly happy to hear someone offer to pay higher user fees to stave off cuts, they would not so much as entertain anyone saying they’d accept a tax hike. The fairly regular demand to reinstall the Vehicle Registration Tax was also a non-starter. If there was a method set up that allowed individuals to voluntarily pay a higher tax, hey, have it. There’s one born every minute, right?

How are you going to pay for the service you’re here to defend, was the constant refrain, and no, you can’t say raise taxes. We’re already taxes to death, haven’t you heard?

It was with that approach, however, the fatal flaw was exposed. No one would come right out and say, feed hungry kids? Where the hell’s their parents? Should the city really be in the business of lending out books for free? Culture? What’s culture ever done for us?

That would’ve been the honest route to go. Instead, they pleaded poor. We don’t have the money. Where’s the money going to come from to pay for that? Our hands are tied. We have no choice.

We have a revenue problem.

Ooops.

See, this whole thing, this whole charade was predicated on the campaign claim of Rob Ford that the city had a spending problem not a revenue problem. We didn’t need to increase revenues. We just needed to tighten our belts. Stop spending beyond our means. There was plenty of extraneous stuff we could jettison and nobody would notice. Gravy.

That’s what they call the reveal. Anti-climactic to those of us who been watching and criticizing as this enterprise developed but, I guess, something of a surprise twist to those who didn’t. Not much to cut or excise without people noticing. As the KPMG Core Services Review laid out way back in Act Two, there was a dearth of fat to trim. The city wasn’t a spendthrift. It was revenue starved. That’s what needed to be dealt with.

In fact, not only was the city not looking at a terrifying three-quarters of a billion dollar hole this year, they had something of a modest surplus. It could’ve been bigger had we properly tended to our revenue sources but still, we had a surplus. Big enough to cancel all the cuts and shoe away a little money for a rainy day.

And when the budget chief and his vice-chair quickly went public almost immediately after deputations ended to assure everyone they had heard loud and clear that children’s nutritional programs were to be left alone and pulled them off the table, the gig was up. We did have a choice, it turned out. Across the board cuts were completely arbitrary. You want to feed hungry kids in this city? OK. We can do that. All you had to do was ask.

Of course, they will try and take that pound of flesh from somewhere else. A library, maybe? The TTC remains under very serious threat of rollbacks above and beyond the normal degree perpetrated by neglect by the other levels of government in this country. Community centres and arts funding still have guns pointed to their heads. The treacherous villains of this piece aren’t going to roll over and die that easily.

But the thing to remember is, they blinked. They were forced to come clean about what they were really up to. Austerity was always optional, never compulsory. A choice was made not enforced upon them. In the face of sustained public pressure, they conceded. Just on this one point, mind you. They didn’t throw in their cards. What we witnessed was a tactical retreat on one front. The curtain’s come down but only for intermission. The play continues.

They are on the run, however, having conceded the moral high ground of selfless duty righting previous fiscal wrongs. I mean, the same person who claimed to be only looking out for the little guy lunged at vulnerable children for chrissakes. There’s really no going back on that. The mask slipped. We all saw it.

They will try to continue to play the role of sound fiscal managers. It’s just that we now know that’s what they’re doing, playing a role. They’re not who they claim to be. So, let’s stop pretending they are.

— dramatically submitted by Cityslikr

A Toonie For Your Troubles

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All levels of government have been nickel and diming taxpayers.

— Rob Ford, 2010

$2 proposed fee for a dip in the city’s outdoor swimming pools.

$2 proposed fee for renting a Hollywood type movie from the city’s libraries.

$2 proposed fee for a visit to the city owned Riverdale farm.

Chalk it up to inflation, I guess. Now that he’s mayor, Rob Ford has upped the ante, finding a certain comfort zone toonie-ing Toronto taxpayers to death. Remember back during the salad days of 2010 when we didn’t have a revenue problem?

Never mind the boldfaced about-face on this issue. Never mind the blatant hypocrisy in filling that supposed non-existent revenue gap made gappier with last year’s repeal of the Vehicle Registration Tax and a below inflationary property tax hike with the combined 2011 and 2012 budgets. Never mind that none of these proposed user fees need to be introduced, none of the proposed service cuts need to enacted if Team Ford actually took an even-handed approach to the budget. If the whole process wasn’t gamed from the very beginning, this so-called crisis real instead of manufactured.

I hesitate to call it all-out class warfare, citing the move away from collecting money for city services from those owning homes and cars to those who are less likely to. Sure, lots of people struggling to make ends meet in the city drive cars (many have to, given the sorry state on TTC service in the areas they live). And I am aware renters ultimately pay more when their landlords’ property taxes are increased.

But the items up for consideration to be dinged both with proposed user fees and cuts in service tend to be those that benefit Mayor Ford’s vaunted ‘little guy’. Libraries. City run pools and programs. Public transit. I am open to being corrected on this but it looks an awful lot like a transfer of wealth upward and offloading of responsibility downward. The true face of trickle down economics.

If you’re uncomfortable with that angle, how about this one? The proposed 2012 budget is another step toward a commodification of the public sphere, a penalization of community engagement. Money flows from the public coffers to subsidize private spaces. Cars. Homes. Taxes as a form of payment toward the common good held in check and replaced by user fees which are doled out only for a specific purpose. You don’t use it. You don’t pay for it.

We’re being rewarded for retreating away from each other, back into our little cubby holes of selfishness. Hey. You want to get from point A to point B? Drive your car. Want to read a book? Buy it at Amazon. Watch a movie? Download it. Sweltering hot on a summer day? Head up to your cottage.

Public spaces cost too much to maintain except, of course, when it comes to roads and they’re really just extensions of my home to work personal corridor. Public spaces are ‘nice to haves’, a little too European for our tastes and look what’s going on there right now. Do you want to be another Greece? You want ‘nice to haves’, you pay for them. $ 2 a pop.

Under Mayor Ford, we may not be nickel and diming taxpayers to death in Toronto but we’re sure intent on sticking it to the city’s citizens.

— highway robberly submitted by Cityslikr

Waning of the Thumb

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(A repost of our Friday Torontoist piece. Title is all theirs.)

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A two day meeting dragged into three. As the third day ground to its inconclusive conclusion, participants voted to defer all remaining items to the next regularly scheduled meeting in February. Decisions put off. The business of municipal governance delayed.

Perhaps it was because council members were looking ahead to the big game, the 2012 budget battle. Beginning almost immediately, today in fact, as the Budget Committee kicks off the first of seven meetings over the course of the next eleven days, including two for public deputations, to hash out a budget for city council to consider and implement next month. That’s the big fish to fry, where energy needs to be expended. This week’s council meeting was simply the warm up session, getting loose, stretching the body into fighting shape.

Or it simply could be seen as the precursor to how things are going to happen over the next little while. A war of attrition. Gone are the early, glorious days of shock and awe that saw quick and surprisingly decisive victories for the Ford administration. The VRT gone! Councillor office budgets slashed! Transit City mauled in its infancy. The mayor is still pushing ahead but it’s now become a tough slog, a slow grind. Some of the more egregious intentions are being picked off by sniper fire, some even coming from friends and allies. His opponents’ Maginot line is still holding.

Councillor Shelley Carroll amended out the possibility of large industrial water users being given carte blanche to ignore city sewer by-laws in the Rate Supported Water and Waste Water budget. It reserved the city’s right to monitor ‘effluent’ – essentially waste water dumping – and to keep aiming for water conservation targets. The mayor found himself on the losing side of what turned out to be a drubbing on that one, abandoned even by his brother and budget chief.

Mayor Ford also took it on the chin (even if symbolically) on the Rate Supported Solid Waste Management budget when Councillor David Shiner, a usual Ford loyalist, maintained the current 44 environmental days that Public Works and Infrastructure Committee wanted to chop back to 11. Certainly, Councillor Shiner’s amendment scales back the events and doesn’t threaten the mayor’s desired 0% increase in waste collection rates. It was, however, a definitive poke in the eye of those looking to do away with remnants of green initiatives in the city.

Councillor Shiner was also front-and-centre in negotiating a compromise with noted foes of the mayor, Councillors Adam Vaughan and Mike Layton on the relocation of the youth shelter, Eva’s Phoenix. It was sitting on property Team Ford has its eyes on selling as part of the revised Fort York bridge plan. The shelter poised an obstacle in the march to ‘monetize city assets’ and in finding it a new home, Shiner brokered a deal that kept both sides, if not happy, at least content.

It could also be that what we’re witnessing is the formation of a consensus building model at city council. The hitherto unuttered word since Rob Ford took office, ‘compromise’ is becoming part of the vernacular. Many of the mayor’s most ardent opponents including Janet Davis, Joe Mihevc, Kristyn Wong-Tam, Paula Fletcher and Raymond Cho made amendments to the direction of child care services in the city. Mihevc managed to get everyone present at council except for Councillor Minnan-Wong to agree to work at not closing any day care centres until hearing what the provincial government, who has been slow and unsteady holding up its part of the funding formula, will say about the matter in next year’s budget.

Compromise may be a word the mayor has to come to terms with. Winter is indeed blowing in, issuing a serious threat to further bog down his troops and heavy artillery in the muck and goo of the 2012 budget process. (Yeah, I wasn’t going to let go of the military metaphors that easily.) Talks of cuts to services at the TTC, elimination of pools and programs, reduction in library hours, all are emboldening the opposition outside council to set up and stand their ground. Within council, allies are exerting their independence and not bending to the mayor’s bully tactics. Witness just how far the moderate, small c conservative, Councillor Chin Lee has drifted from the Ford fold.

The mayor has expended on awful lot of political capital in his first year, tilting at long standing pet peeves of his that represent the worst excesses of tax and spend governing. Non-automobile forms of transit. Community engagement and outreach. The arts. The environment. Anything that smacks of ‘nice to haves’. All before it truly gets ugly for him. When that bus doesn’t arrive for that little old lady going out grocery shopping in Scarborough. When that library is closed on Sunday for that little girl looking for some quiet study time. When the family has to go even further afield to find affordable swimming lessons.

The battles are going to get more intense over the next 6 weeks, the pushback stronger and terrain more treacherous. Already besieged, it’s hard to see how Mayor Ford can simply bludgeon ahead in that damn the torpedoes fashion that has been his governing style to date. His arsenal has been severely depleted. While hardly a spent force, Mayor Ford is not the indomitable powerhouse he was earlier this year. The one that caught everybody flat-footed, surprised and easily overwhelmed. It’s now trench warfare (you know I had to go there) and any gains will come with great cost. If he fails to adapt to the new reality, the mayor may find that the 2012 budget is the hill he will die on.

— repeatedly submitted by Cityslikr