The Ford administration is not going to blink

Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti vowed to forge ahead with the mayor’s budget-slashing agenda Wednesday, even as a committee he chairs voted to reject the KPMG core service review in its entirety.

“The Ford administration is not going to blink,” said Mammoliti, a key Ford lieutenant. “The Ford administration is going to continue to tell the population the truth about City Hall and where funds can be saved.”

Mammoliti was presiding over a meeting of the community development and recreation committee that debated recommendations from KPMG that include considering selling off nine of the city’s ten long term care homes, merging paramedic and firefighting services, scrapping the Christmas bureau that coordinates gifts to needy children, and eliminating 2,000 subsidized childcare spaces in the hopes the province will pay for them.

At the end of the seven-hour meeting, the committee voted to recommend the mayor spare those services from the axe on budget day.

Councillor Josh Matlow introduced a separate motion advising Ford to tell KPMG to go back to the drawing board and submit a more detailed report on the city budget. The motion passed with Mammoliti as the sole dissenting vote.

“This core service review, in my view, was important to do, but sadly it was done so poorly,” Matlow said. “It doesn’t give me any understanding of how people will be affected by these decisions. It doesn’t substantiate or give any real evidence to support the claims it makes.”

Both the committee’s decisions were symbolic, and are expected to be overturned next week by Ford’s executive committee.

The community development committee’s rejection of the controversial core service review came as no surprise. Although Mammoliti chairs the body, he is the only Ford ally on the six-person committee. The other five members are either outspoken Ford critics or centrists. However, the loss of Matlow’s support could be a significant blow to the mayor because he’s among the so-called “mushy middle” group of centrists whose support Ford will need to get his budget passed at city council.

In rejecting the core service review, community development and recreation became the first committee to officially condemn the mayor’s budget process. All other committees, which are stacked with Ford allies, rubber stamped the review and sent it on to the mayor’s executive committee, which will debate the proposed cuts at a highly-anticipated meeting on September 19, before sending them on to city council on September 26.

There are growing signs that Torontonians are angry at Ford’s budget process, which has seen sweeping cuts proposed in nearly every area of the city’s budget. In the wake of Monday’s release of a city manager’s report suggesting, among other things, reducing TTC service while hiking fares, closing museums, selling the zoo, and scaling back community grants, a new poll says Ford’s support is plummeting as the mayor appears poised to backtrack on his campaign guarantee of no service cuts. The poll, published by the Toronto Star, found the mayor's popularity has nosedived to 42 per cent, down from 57 per cent on June 1.

The mayor isn’t fazed by his poor showing however, and told reporters Wednesday that the only poll that matters is the one on election day.

Mammoliti echoed that sentiment, yet again dismissing the of people who have showed up to meetings at City Hall in droves to speak against service cuts as unrepresentative of the wider population.

“People that are consistently here are special interest groups, they have something to gain by these programs,” he said. “There are 2.5 million people in this city, and we’ve heard from 400 people or so. Four hundred people are determining what programs they would like to keep, and which ones they don’t want to keep, for 2.5 million people. To me that doesn’t make sense.”

And yet many of the people who turned out Wednesday were hardly the professional activists or “communists” that Mammoliti insists are driving opposition to Ford’s agenda. Mothers showed up to express concern about the decline of quality childcare in the city, and residents and frontline workers at long term care homes warned that privatizing the facilities would substantially reduce the quality of life for some of Toronto’s most vulnerable citizens.

Councillor Janet Davis, who co-chairs the community development committee, is hoping Wednesday’s vote sets a tone for the showdown at city council in two weeks.

“At the end of the day council will decide whether they want to cut 2,000 childcare spaces, sell off our homes for the aged, privatize our childcare centres, cut the Christmas fund,” she said. “What we said today was, we reject those options, and I believe that when councillors actually consider them they will too.”

Origin
Source: NOW