Those in council’s mushy middle who’ve been propping up Ford will have to decide if they will take a bullet for the mayor For the life of me, I can’t figure out why the Scarborough Civic Centre was chosen as the venue for the city’s response to consultants KPMG’s cost-cutting exercise known as the Core Services Review.
Perhaps it’s because Scarborough, so instrumental in electing the current mayor, has practically become Rob Ford’s adopted home. Or maybe it was his idea of a joke.
Scarborough, after all, stands to lose most through cuts first outlined by KPMG and now backed holus-bolus by city manager Joe Pennachetti and his staff of Ford-pleasing bureaucrats.
The official reason for the Scarborough locale: budget chair Mike Del Grande was in the house for the regularly scheduled Scarborough community council meeting, so it made sense.
But it also doesn’t hurt to get the press corps away from City Hall, especially now that it’s clear (as if it weren’t before) that the mayor was BSing us during the election when he said there wouldn’t be cuts to city services as a result of his promised tax cuts. Hard not to notice his conspicuous absence from Monday’s highly anticipated presser. The mayor has been reluctant to own up to his cuts lies. Maybe in his mind his no-cuts guarantee wasn’t a lie but just a broken promise, since he never intended to follow through anyway.
So there we were on Monday, September 12, in the wilds of Scarborough, listening to Pennachetti instead of the mayor present staff’s response to KPMG’s recommendations.
But his report was less a response to KPMG’s recommendations than an attempt to sell the Ford administration’s line on city finances – you know, that oft-repeated yarn that we’re facing a structural deficit that there’s no getting out of unless we perform invasive surgery and leave a lot of blood on the tracks of that gravy train.
The list of proposed cuts is a long one (see Firing Line sidebar on page 13). We’ve seen the broad strokes: the proposed closing of library branches, cuts to the arts, rolling back TTC service to 50s levels, removing the lifeline to the most vulnerable. Yup. Christmas gifts for poor kids are on Ford’s hit list, and he was giving out candy at the Santa parade.
But the fine print also disturbs: the cuts to hundreds of groups, arts and others, that get small stipends from the city, a few grand for this or that community project, and contribute much to the welfare of the city. When the cost-benefit analysis is done, it’s difficult to justify. “A disgusting grab bag of right-wing attacks” is how Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker put it.
Mayor Ford looks more and more like a one-term phenom. He’s given the impression for a while that he’s here for a good time, not a long time – one reason he makes himself so scarce. But people in the councillors’ offices on the second floor at 100 Queen West are beginning to talk.
There are more conversations in stairwells, more rolling of eyes, maybe just enough consternation over what Ford might do next to shake a few votes loose in that mushy middle that has been propping him up since day one. Some did stand up to Ford over library cuts. How much longer will these councillors tie their political fortunes to the mayor’s?
Their D-Day, September 26, is fast approaching, when council convenes to decide whether to adopt the cuts Pennachetti’s recommending. They have to decide, to borrow Councillor Joe Mihevc’s words, which hill they want to die on. Do they believe the mayor’s office will protect them and that most of the bloodletting will happen in their opponents’ wards?
But no one is safe. The cuts are across the board. Besides, there’s still a plan on Ford’s back burner, isn’t there, to redistribute ridings and reduce the number of councillors by half?
Come next election, three years down the road, most councillors will be running in wards where the cuts will be felt. Political reputations can be damaged forever.
On the flip side, Ford’s merry band of ideologues is with him, the true believers, so to speak, who hold a majority of seats on council. De Baeremaeker figures they’ll stick with the mayor because they believe Ford Nation will save them in the next election. He says a “group madness” has infected them. They’ve made their political calculations and figured those who’ll be most affected by the cuts – the poor, single mothers on welfare, those working three jobs in the burbs, the nannies and cleaning women and those on late shift riding the all-night buses – don’t vote, so screw them.
There’ve been other controversies in Ford’s year of living dangerously, of course. And the mayor has managed to survive them all so far.
Councillor Adam Vaughan prefers another metaphor – that the big boulder Ford’s opponents have been pushing uphill isn’t rolling backwards any more. It’s getting closer to the top.
Tipping the scales in the current political moment is the provincial election. Some Libs on council (I won’t name names) are beginning to feel the heat. A number of Liberal donors to the arts, I’ve been told, are sitting on the fence, telling McGuinty’s crew at Queen’s Park they’re waiting to see how Grit councillors vote before they decide what provincial party to support.
It’s worth noting the incumbent Grits’ recent rise in the polls. They’ve done it by tying the havoc Ford is wreaking on Toronto to PC leader Tim Hudak’s budget-cutting plans for the province. Hudak has borrowed liberally from the Ford gravy train narrative. That the PCs are now stumbling in the polls suggests that Ford is on the ropes. Indeed, a Forum Research poll released Tuesday (September 13) shows the mayor’s approval rating nose-diving.
Back at Monday’s Core Services Review meet, budget chief Del Grande, who wasn’t carrying that piggy bank he’s been toting to remind us how broke the city is, was singing a slightly different tune than the “tsunami is coming” rhetoric of months past.
Blow me down if he didn’t say the whole Core Services Review process had been a “gut-wrenching” one.
Maybe for staff, sure, but Del Grande’s attempts to frame the Fordists’ government-shrinking hatchet job in kinder, gentler tones is, with respect to the usually plainspoken budget chief, a load of fertilizer.
Adding insult to injury, Del Grande said he won’t support ending windrow clearing, which suggests that members of the mayor’s executive aren’t the only ones who’ve gotten an earful about service cuts on the BBQ circuit this summer.
It’s not clear that KPMG’s report was even necessary. The Fordists continue to use “runaway spending” and a $774 million budget deficit (their figure) as rationales for the cuts. But before the mayor decided to spend the surplus left by the previous administration and raid the reserve fund to deliver on his no-property-tax-hike promise in 2010, there was no deficit. The city had a surplus.
The review found none of that gravy flowing like a river through City Hall either. On the contrary, the consultants concluded that 90 per cent of services provided by the city are core, either mandated by law or essential to the operation of the city. And they found little in the way of waste, determining that overall the city delivers good value for money.
Word is, the mayor’s executive, which meets to discuss Pennachetti’s report Monday (September 19) is considering taking some of the proposed cuts off the table before they get to council.
Either way, Ford’s election is looking more like an anomaly with each new controversy. Those who voted for him may have voted for change, but they didn’t vote for slash-and-burn or for the end of Toronto the Good.
He promised no service cuts. Lying to the electorate pisses off people across party lines.
Perhaps it’s because Scarborough, so instrumental in electing the current mayor, has practically become Rob Ford’s adopted home. Or maybe it was his idea of a joke.
Scarborough, after all, stands to lose most through cuts first outlined by KPMG and now backed holus-bolus by city manager Joe Pennachetti and his staff of Ford-pleasing bureaucrats.
The official reason for the Scarborough locale: budget chair Mike Del Grande was in the house for the regularly scheduled Scarborough community council meeting, so it made sense.
But it also doesn’t hurt to get the press corps away from City Hall, especially now that it’s clear (as if it weren’t before) that the mayor was BSing us during the election when he said there wouldn’t be cuts to city services as a result of his promised tax cuts. Hard not to notice his conspicuous absence from Monday’s highly anticipated presser. The mayor has been reluctant to own up to his cuts lies. Maybe in his mind his no-cuts guarantee wasn’t a lie but just a broken promise, since he never intended to follow through anyway.
So there we were on Monday, September 12, in the wilds of Scarborough, listening to Pennachetti instead of the mayor present staff’s response to KPMG’s recommendations.
But his report was less a response to KPMG’s recommendations than an attempt to sell the Ford administration’s line on city finances – you know, that oft-repeated yarn that we’re facing a structural deficit that there’s no getting out of unless we perform invasive surgery and leave a lot of blood on the tracks of that gravy train.
The list of proposed cuts is a long one (see Firing Line sidebar on page 13). We’ve seen the broad strokes: the proposed closing of library branches, cuts to the arts, rolling back TTC service to 50s levels, removing the lifeline to the most vulnerable. Yup. Christmas gifts for poor kids are on Ford’s hit list, and he was giving out candy at the Santa parade.
But the fine print also disturbs: the cuts to hundreds of groups, arts and others, that get small stipends from the city, a few grand for this or that community project, and contribute much to the welfare of the city. When the cost-benefit analysis is done, it’s difficult to justify. “A disgusting grab bag of right-wing attacks” is how Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker put it.
Mayor Ford looks more and more like a one-term phenom. He’s given the impression for a while that he’s here for a good time, not a long time – one reason he makes himself so scarce. But people in the councillors’ offices on the second floor at 100 Queen West are beginning to talk.
There are more conversations in stairwells, more rolling of eyes, maybe just enough consternation over what Ford might do next to shake a few votes loose in that mushy middle that has been propping him up since day one. Some did stand up to Ford over library cuts. How much longer will these councillors tie their political fortunes to the mayor’s?
Their D-Day, September 26, is fast approaching, when council convenes to decide whether to adopt the cuts Pennachetti’s recommending. They have to decide, to borrow Councillor Joe Mihevc’s words, which hill they want to die on. Do they believe the mayor’s office will protect them and that most of the bloodletting will happen in their opponents’ wards?
But no one is safe. The cuts are across the board. Besides, there’s still a plan on Ford’s back burner, isn’t there, to redistribute ridings and reduce the number of councillors by half?
Come next election, three years down the road, most councillors will be running in wards where the cuts will be felt. Political reputations can be damaged forever.
On the flip side, Ford’s merry band of ideologues is with him, the true believers, so to speak, who hold a majority of seats on council. De Baeremaeker figures they’ll stick with the mayor because they believe Ford Nation will save them in the next election. He says a “group madness” has infected them. They’ve made their political calculations and figured those who’ll be most affected by the cuts – the poor, single mothers on welfare, those working three jobs in the burbs, the nannies and cleaning women and those on late shift riding the all-night buses – don’t vote, so screw them.
There’ve been other controversies in Ford’s year of living dangerously, of course. And the mayor has managed to survive them all so far.
Councillor Adam Vaughan prefers another metaphor – that the big boulder Ford’s opponents have been pushing uphill isn’t rolling backwards any more. It’s getting closer to the top.
Tipping the scales in the current political moment is the provincial election. Some Libs on council (I won’t name names) are beginning to feel the heat. A number of Liberal donors to the arts, I’ve been told, are sitting on the fence, telling McGuinty’s crew at Queen’s Park they’re waiting to see how Grit councillors vote before they decide what provincial party to support.
It’s worth noting the incumbent Grits’ recent rise in the polls. They’ve done it by tying the havoc Ford is wreaking on Toronto to PC leader Tim Hudak’s budget-cutting plans for the province. Hudak has borrowed liberally from the Ford gravy train narrative. That the PCs are now stumbling in the polls suggests that Ford is on the ropes. Indeed, a Forum Research poll released Tuesday (September 13) shows the mayor’s approval rating nose-diving.
Back at Monday’s Core Services Review meet, budget chief Del Grande, who wasn’t carrying that piggy bank he’s been toting to remind us how broke the city is, was singing a slightly different tune than the “tsunami is coming” rhetoric of months past.
Blow me down if he didn’t say the whole Core Services Review process had been a “gut-wrenching” one.
Maybe for staff, sure, but Del Grande’s attempts to frame the Fordists’ government-shrinking hatchet job in kinder, gentler tones is, with respect to the usually plainspoken budget chief, a load of fertilizer.
Adding insult to injury, Del Grande said he won’t support ending windrow clearing, which suggests that members of the mayor’s executive aren’t the only ones who’ve gotten an earful about service cuts on the BBQ circuit this summer.
It’s not clear that KPMG’s report was even necessary. The Fordists continue to use “runaway spending” and a $774 million budget deficit (their figure) as rationales for the cuts. But before the mayor decided to spend the surplus left by the previous administration and raid the reserve fund to deliver on his no-property-tax-hike promise in 2010, there was no deficit. The city had a surplus.
The review found none of that gravy flowing like a river through City Hall either. On the contrary, the consultants concluded that 90 per cent of services provided by the city are core, either mandated by law or essential to the operation of the city. And they found little in the way of waste, determining that overall the city delivers good value for money.
Word is, the mayor’s executive, which meets to discuss Pennachetti’s report Monday (September 19) is considering taking some of the proposed cuts off the table before they get to council.
Either way, Ford’s election is looking more like an anomaly with each new controversy. Those who voted for him may have voted for change, but they didn’t vote for slash-and-burn or for the end of Toronto the Good.
He promised no service cuts. Lying to the electorate pisses off people across party lines.
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Source: NOW
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