To hear Mayor Rob Ford tell it, Toronto’s finances were a disaster before he came to office. But by running government like a business, and saving $1 billion, he managed to pull city hall from the brink and “fix the mess I inherited.”
There’s a problem with this narrative: it’s just not true. Toronto’s top financial managers shuffled their papers on Monday, cleared their throats, and explained how the boss is wrong.
Ford’s claim to have saved $1 billion is “misleading,” said city manager Joe Pennachetti. Ford, in fact, didn’t find that much.
For the record, every Toronto mayor has used efficiencies and cost reductions to help balance the books. Ford’s immediate predecessor, David Miller, found $545 million during his last four-year term. Ford has done even better, managing to save about $890 million, but it’s still well shy of his $1 billion-plus boast. As the Miller era savings show, it’s also not that special.
This comes straight from the people who do the city’s accounting and who watch the books. But, of course, it isn’t stopping Ford from repeating his bogus budget claim. The man who lied for months about smoking crack cocaine appears determined to maintain his billion-dollar falsehood right up until election day.
“I’ve saved over $1 billion,” Ford said again on Monday, contradicting financial staff. Sadly for his campaign, even repeating this a thousand times doesn’t make it true.
Equally false is Ford’s claim to have saved Toronto from impending financial ruin due to the Miller administration’s profligacy. Rather than undoing what his left-wing predecessor had wrought, it’s more accurate to say Ford built upon it.
Consider property tax increases. They’re certainly rising less quickly under Ford than during Miller’s last four years. Ford has boosted the residential property tax by an average of 1.7 per cent each year while Miller raised it an average 3.6 per cent.
But — and this is key — Ford’s tax increases come on top of Miller’s. Despite eliminating Toronto’s $60 car tax, Ford is spending (and taxing) more than Miller ever did.
That’s not what Ford promised on the campaign trail back in 2010. He assured voters there was so much bureaucratic “gravy” at city hall he would lower the operating budget by more than $1 billion while guaranteeing no cuts to city services.
Chalk that up as two broken Ford promises. This year’s budget stands at $9.6 billion, well above the $9.2 billion spent by Miller in his last year in office. And services have been reduced, including cuts to public transit.
Instead of criticism, Ford should be thanking his predecessor for making it easier to balance Toronto’s books than in the past. The city’s financial experts noted that Miller was operating at a time when the municipality was under severe fiscal pressure, due in part to unfair downloading of provincial costs.
He responded, along with other mayors, by successfully pressuring Queen’s Park into picking up some of those expenses. And to ease the city’s restrictive reliance on property taxes, Miller introduced the controversial land transfer tax. Ford has benefited from both measures. The land transfer tax, which he rashly promised to kill, currently pumps about $350 million a year into the budget. And the uploading of provincial services, engineered by Miller, has saved Ford millions more.
In short, the current mayor has a lot more money to spend than Miller did. Ford’s failure to eliminate the land transfer tax constitutes yet another broken promise, but it has spared this city a financial crisis. And that goes a long way in explaining why property tax increases have risen at a slower rate over the past four years. It has nothing to do with Ford’s self-proclaimed business acumen or his exaggerated claim of saving $1 billion.
Source: thestar.com
Author: Editorial
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