Trash clash

Council can get its act together to save sharks and elephants, but city workers aren’t so lucky

On the eve of the anniversary of his first year in office, it’s all come full circle for Rob Ford.

The mayor spent Monday (October 24) basking in the glow of another major victory: council’s decision to privatize garbage collection from Yonge to the Humber River. Another election promise delivered, another great day for the taxpayers of Toronto. Where have we heard that one before?

So moved by the moment was the mayor that he took the photo opportunity to mention he’d be seeking a second term in office, in case anybody had any doubts that he’s in this for the long haul. “I’ve already started campaigning,” he said. Well, at least now we know how the mayor’s been spending his ample time away from City Hall.

If not for a little episode earlier that morning, by which I mean Ford’s calling the cops on the comedy TV crew of CBC’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes, it might have been accurate to say all was well in Rob Ford’s world.

When asked about the incident Monday, the mayor said he was “ambushed” and stammered something about its being dark. He raised, again, the death threats he’s received. And mentioned that his daughter was frightened.

The video evidence suggests that the mayor’s version of events doesn’t quite mesh with reality. Crossing the privacy line? Whatever happened to the self-proclaimed 300 pounds of fun?

Should we believe anything Ford says? Not that it matters. The game he’s playing is politics, after all. And on the garbage front, the slipping and sliding has already begun.

The mayor tried to allay fears about winning bidder Green for Life Environmental’s quote for the job being too good to be true and about concerns, even among those who voted for private pickup, that the city would end up holding the bag.

Ford lauded the great job Turtle Island is doing of private garbage pickup in his backyard in Etobicoke. Interesting that he should mention Turtle Island. In fact, that company wasn’t even among the final five contenders for the $186 million contract.

Indeed, a few of the bigger players in the garbage biz were conspicuous by their absence from the short list. The fact that major players in refuse weren’t in the running should tell us something about how out of whack the winning bid may be. (More on those particulars here)

But as long as no one’s calling the mayor out, he can keep reprising his role as the candy maker in Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, offering us not-so-sweet nothings in that soothing baritone of his.

Easy to blame Ford. And certainly he deserves a large share of the blame for the current state of affairs at City Hall. But he’s only part of the problem, arguably just a symptom of these challenging times.

Many taking in the action on the council floor during garbage deliberations Monday would have come away disheartened. The usual suspects in the mushy middle shattered our illusions again and voted right along with Ford and Co., while the mayor strutted his stuff in a Tiger-Cats football jersey, the upshot of a lost bet with the mayor of Hamilton, a city that is coincidentally looking at bringing its recycling operations back in-house after a dalliance with private garbage pickup.

But back to the mushy-middlers. It seems clear that apart from some symbolic matters, they’re throwing in their lot with the mayor for the long haul.

If they were going to chart a different course, it was on private garbage pickup that they would have announced their coming-out party. Three of Ford allies, in fact, weren’t in attendance. Still, the mayor won. It wasn’t even close, passing easily by a vote of 26-16. The die was cast on this one, of course, back in May, in a nifty bit of procedural fuckupedness when council decided to ask for a Request for Quotation as opposed to a more evaluative Request for Proposal on the garbage contract. Lots of questions about that slippery bit of business. The chamber was reminded that it was precisely an RFQ process as opposed to an RFP that got the city into that computer leasing scandal a few years back. You remember – the one that saw costs for a software contract balloon to the tune of tens of millions.

But the mushies and Fordists weren’t hearing any of that. They were eager to get on with the business of getting on with business, killing a motion put forward by Ana Bailão to defer the garbage decision so councillors left out of briefings with staff (and there were a lot) could have their questions on the particulars of the deal answered.

Where most people come from,  that would be called due diligence. In Ford’s Toronto it’s an inconvenience, even if the garbage deal in question has enough holes in it to drive the proverbial truck through.

The wish of those in council’s middle to stay above the polarizing debate between left and right is understandable. But as Councillor Raymond Cho pointed out as only he can, something quite different is happening: members are putting their own political interests ahead of those of Torontonians. Then he turned right around and voted for private pickup.

Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised, but it’s still a shame. In case you’re counting, 18 of the 26 who voted for private garbage pickup don’t represent the wards involved in the scheme. In whose interest were those councillors voting? The mayor’s or the affected residents’?

I won’t name the culprits, because you’ve read about them here before. Maybe they didn’t notice the garbage worker sitting a few rows up in the chamber, but it was hard to miss him. He was wearing an orange jumpsuit and feeding his daughter a banana. His other kid was in a Spider-Man suit. With great power comes great responsibility? (Spidey fans will understand.)

I know – we shouldn’t be sentimental about such matters. Let’s not start factoring in the human costs of the Ford agenda. That’s too messy. After all, there are a few pennies to save for the other 2.5 million taxpayers out there, David Shiner reminds us. I’m glad he won’t be losing any sleep over the fact that some more unemployed people won’t know where their next mortgage payment is coming from. Or that those lucky enough to cop a job with the new private contractor will have to make due with 30 per cent less. Not sure how it helps the economy that those folks no longer have disposable income to spend at the local grocer’s or to take the family out for dinner. You know, the kinds of things that keep life livable.

In a nifty bit of doublespeak, Public Works and Infrastructure Committee chair Denzil Minnan-Wong called the deal a win-win for all involved. But what it’s really about is revenge: punishing the union for daring to exercise its right to strike back in 2009 – the “tipping point,” the mayor called it.

Seems this council can get its act together to take a principled position to save sharks from ending up as shark fin soup, another item on this week’s agenda; to keep cats and dogs out of questionable storefront operations; and even to find sanctuary for zoo elephants in their forlorn final days.

But city workers? Not so lucky.

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