|
Toronto Mayoral Debate 8pm (RIGHT NOW!) (pg. 3)
|
View this Thread in Original format
| VDub |
^^^
Am I incorrect on interpreting that as him wanting the clubs to go elsewhere as well??? |
|
|
| ChemEnhanced |
| quote: | Originally posted by VDub
^^^
Am I incorrect on interpreting that as him wanting the clubs to go elsewhere as well??? |
I think he is suggesting that he doesn't give a rats ass about what young people do for fun and there is a lot of fun things that the majority of the population can do. |
|
|
| Spam |
| quote: | | Originally posted by Skipper Why does everyone on my facebook hate Ford so much, but he has such a wide lead? |
They probably read the Toronto Star. |
|
|
| gmorrison |
| the Toronto Star, it's all about the Globe & Mail |
|
|
| VDub |
I get all of my news from TOTA.....
Oy veyyyyy... |
|
|
| ChemEnhanced |
Ford is going to win this election for one simple reason.....people in toronto are sick and tired of political big heads who think they are better then them. The people could care less about his past and some of the dumb things he says....he seems more down to earth. I guarantee this attitude will carry on in next years provincial election and probably into the next federal election. |
|
|
| MarkT |
| quote: | Originally posted by VDub
^^^
Am I incorrect on interpreting that as him wanting the clubs to go elsewhere as well??? |
I don't think that's what he meant. I interpreted it to mean that he supports people being able to have fun in other areas as well, not just the club district.
His comment on the 'patio ban':
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news...article1695943/
| quote: | "The bylaw puts the kibosh not only on new back patios south of Bloor and Danforth between Victoria Park and the Humber River, it also bids adieu to upper-storey restaurants and eateries larger than 300 square metres of floor space.
To pursue any of these developments, property owners now have to apply for exemptions.
Mayoral candidate Rocco Rossi sees this attitude as stifling. “We have to loosen up a bit,” he says. “We're not sleepy little Toronto of the sixties and seventies.” |
|
|
|
| gummybear |
I just hope he doesn't make me jobless since I work in a city funded agency..
This comment especially worries me..
"People do not want government housing built in the city of Toronto. They want roads fixed, more police presence, but they don't want more government housing that will depreciate the value of their property." - July, 2005
I happen to work in Social Housing so it hits close to home...
ps. Social Housing does not depreciate property values and there have been several studies that show the actual opposite.
Why can't we just have a moderate? Someone not too far left and not too far right..then we can all be happy! :) |
|
|
| ChemEnhanced |
| quote: | Originally posted by gummybear
Why can't we just have a moderate? Someone not too far left and not too far right..then we can all be happy! :) |
unfortunately, we will wouldn't all be happy....the far left and far right would then be pissed.
:D |
|
|
| gummybear |
| quote: | Originally posted by ChemEnhanced
unfortunately, we will wouldn't all be happy....the far left and far right would then be pissed.
:D |
haha true..but we all have to give a little..:)
oh ..I forgot..I live in Maple..lol. I don't get a vote. |
|
|
| smuncky |
When Rob Ford becomes mayor…That’s right: not if, but when. And once he’s Mayor Ford, his view of a city in decline will become a self-fullfilling prophecy
BY Edward Keenan September 16, 2010 00:09
Mayor Rob Ford. Are you used to that idea yet? Can you even fathom it? Or how about this: His Worship, Rob Ford, mayor of Toronto.
These phrases represent a kind of unthinkable Armageddon scenario for the downtown lefties who’ve been Toronto’s ruling political and media class for the past seven years or more. And yet Armageddon is indeed at hand. This year’s mayoral race has made a politically incorrect, bureaucrat-hating, car-loving, cost-cutting, foot-in-mouth-inserting Ford administration not just thinkable but likely. Unless one or more of his opponents drop out of the race and one of the others goes through some kind of SHAZAAM!-like transformation to become the consensus alternative, Rob Ford will be the mayor of Toronto.
What’s more, his opponents from all points on the political spectrum will have no one but themselves to blame. After all, what democrat is going to blame voters? And what thinking person can blame Ford?
More than four years ago, I wrote a cover story for EYE WEEKLY entitled “The Rob Ford Problem,” in which I profiled city council’s most annoying member. “What does it say about Toronto city council that it can be home to such a blustering embarrassment?” I asked, echoing the criticism of Councillor Kyle Rae and the barstool conversations of the Toronto progressive establishment. The 2010 election has turned into The Revenge of the Rob Ford Problem, as the Etobicoke embarrassment has defined the election from the time he registered to run and set the terms of the debate at every turn, growing stronger with each apparently deadly controversy (mugshot on cover of paper, insensitive racial comments repeated, weird drug-related recordings — see the sidebar following this story).
So here’s the updated list of questions: How the hell did we get here? Who can we blame? And what is the city going to look like when this man is actually in charge?
IN DEFENCE OF ROB FORD
Let me get a few things out of the way: having observed Rob Ford’s career for a decade and having actually spoken to him and tried to understand him, I believe him to be phenomenally simple-minded. He has the temperament of a child, with the corresponding tendency to deny any wrongdoing until evidence emerges that he is lying. The number of friends he has made on city council during a decade there is disturbingly close to zero.
This would seem to be a pretty backhanded way to begin defending him, but then I never wanted to be his defender. However, as the campaign has progressed, I’ve found myself having to stop conversations with people I generally agree with to advocate for Ford. Here’s the real defence: Rob Ford is full of passionate intensity.
The ridiculously facile interpretation of city spending he proposes is his genuine understanding of the situation — he is viscerally angered when he perceives money being wasted and actually thinks the budget could be balanced by cutting waste. He does what he says he’ll do when it comes to serving constituents, having spent most of his time as a councillor returning phone calls and personally visiting Torontonians to help them navigate bureaucracy and solve their problems. He believes streetcars and bikes should get off the roads because he thinks like a suburban driver, and is simply incapable of imagining the experience of those hundreds of thousands who commute in other ways. He is no one’s puppet, since he has no friends who are operators of any kind at city hall, and he accepts advice from no one outside his immediate family. Except when childishly denying personal-life indiscretions or poorly thought-out comments, he speaks his simple truth as plainly as he can.
In short, he is incapable of spin and his branding — such as it is — of himself as a plain-spoken, unapologetic truth teller is an honest representation.
Ford has not been playing dirty in this campaign, nor has he wavered or pandered or changed his message one iota. In fact, his message has not changed in a decade. Nothing at all has been surprising about his campaign. Nothing, that is, except his popularity.
In response to that popularity, the main lines of attack are misguided: yes, he is fat, and how is that at all relevant? (Pantalone is short, Rossi is bald, Smitherman is gay — are these things the anti-Ford contingent really wants to consider negatives?) We have no reason to believe he is violent towards women, as the aftermath of his arrest showed. His US pot possession situation over a decade ago: so what? Did you think it disqualifying that Clinton smoked pot? That Belinda Stronach did? That Trudeau did?
Most of all, I think accusations that he is mean-spirited are untrue, and the idea that he’s some kind of malevolent Machiavellian schemer is a feeble and baseless excuse for the incompetence of his opponents.
A CITY ON THE RISE
Ford’s great triumph in this campaign has been to make himself the ballot question. He has set the terms of the debate largely because no one else has presented an alternate vision of the city or a compelling argument to rebut his misrepresentation of Toronto’s fortunes. Instead, his opponents have either failed to show up for the fight (David Miller, John Tory, Shelly Carroll), proved unequal to the task of running a big-league campaign (Adam Giambrone, Joe Pantalone, Sarah Thomson, in very different ways) or spent the campaign trying to be Ford-lite or Ford-plus (Rocco Rossi, George Smitherman and, to a lesser degree, Thomson).
The crime here is that Ford defined the premise of the debate in a way that contradicts reality. Despite his assertions to the contratry, we are not a city in decline.
During an epic worldwide recession, the banks headquartered in Toronto stayed strong and our housing market held its value. The city is densifying and growing vertically every year (just look at the skyline). We’re an innovation hub that’s helping lead the world in pharmaceutical, medical and mobile technology development. We have arts institutions that are stronger than at any point in our history, a growing body of compelling architecture and a slowly growing transit system. Toronto’s property taxes are the lowest in the GTA, yet the operating budget is balanced (if precariously), while services have actually expanded in recent years. We have a population as ethnically diverse as any city in the world and yet we suffer little racial discord. Our crime rate is, by Canadian and international standards, exceedingly low.
By virtually anyone’s standards, we are among the best cities in the world in which to live and do business. We have problems, real ones, with the way the inner suburbs have evolved and failed to evolve, with the way the budgeting is done, with a persistent revenue gap, with labour relations at City Hall. Yes, we have problems. But they are the growing pains of a thriving city in the process of maturing.
And yet from the beginning, Rob Ford’s opponents — especially presumed front-runner George Smitherman — have accepted the Toronto-is-broken trope as the basic premise of the campaign. And yet in contrast to Ford, one senses that Smitherman and Rossi, at least, concede this point not because they believe it to be true, but because they think it will sell.
In fairness, they were thrown for a loop because no one really thought Ford would be a legitimate contender. As recently as this spring, the biggest cheerleaders for Ford’s entry into the race were the leftists who wanted him off council. They thought he’d simply be comic relief in the race.
But then Miller announced he wouldn’t run, Giambrone imploded and Pantalone, the progressive stand-in, consistently polled at only 10 to 12 per cent, which is what a labour-endorsed candidate gets just for showing up. Meanwhile, Ford has spent the past 10 years visiting suburban voters personally, talking with them and hearing what the view looks like dozens of kilo-metres from City Hall. He’s personally tested the message about council expenses and buffets and funding for the Pride parade and the arts. He has experienced suburban (often low-income and “at-risk”) skepticism about transit from the people who are least well-served by the TTC — people whose neighbourhoods make cycling seem like a joke.
Those messages resonate with a big chunk of voters, as Ford knew they would. And rather than taking the points as legitimate and steering the conversation to how to address them inside a much more hopeful and positive big picture, his opponents have dismissed his small grievances as unsophisticated and unworthy of discussion, allowing his big-picture view of things to become mainstream and accepted.
WHEN ROB FORD IS MAYOR
So, deep breath. What will Mayor Rob Ford’s Toronto look like? It’s safe to say the entire plant-watering staff at City Hall will be laid off. And city councillors will be brown-bagging lunches to meetings rather than having them catered. One expects that council would accept the fact that he has a mandate to cut on those two fronts, at least (achieving savings well into the five figures on a $7-billion budget!).
Aside from that, we know what Rob Ford says his Toronto would look like: the mayor would personally return every phone call; streetcars would be decommissioned and subways would be built in the suburbs; council would lose half its members and each councillor lose half his or her office budget; arts and culture spending would be slashed or outright eliminated; more police would be hired and a law-and-order chief would be given carte blanche to be tough on suspects and neighbourhoods; taxes would be cut, the union would be busted or humbled and garbage service would be contracted out.
One could spend a lot of time analyzing the implications of all this. For starters: fewer councillors with fewer resources could not provide the “excellent customer service” Ford promises; eliminating streetcars would increase gridlock rather than alleviating it while suburban subways would doom the TTC to ever larger operating deficits; and tax cuts coupled with an increase in the police budget would destroy the city’s finances.
But here’s the most disturbing truth of all: it’s not worth going into detail about the city Rob Ford promises because it’s pure fantasy. Mayor Rob Ford has absolutely no chance of enacting his agenda and will, as a result, grind the city to a halt, undoing seven or more years of progress and creating a situation much like the one he claims he’s addressing now.
Reality one: basic math
Ford’s numbers simply do not add up. The cuts he proposes to “waste” at City Hall are almost purely symbolic — a footnote to the budget — and are dwarfed by the $250 million a year in revenue that would be lost from his elimination of the vehicle-registration tax and land-transfer tax. That scenario alone would make his expansion of customer service, police service and subway building impossible. Meanwhile, cancelling new streetcar orders and discarding the ones we have while buying fleets of new buses would create hundreds of millions of dollars in new costs and vastly increase the operating shortfall of the TTC. We simply could not afford it.
Reality two: he can’t boss the province around
Much of what Ford wants to do — notably cutting the size of council — would depend on provincial legislation McGuinty or any other premier would never approve. And his great transit scheme? At the moment, the province is paying for $3.7 billion worth of the Transit City plan Ford wants to scrap. Do you think they’ll continue giving him the money to use for his own devices?
Reality three: He can’t really boss anyone around
Finally, even before things get to the provincial level, Ford wouldn’t have the authority to get his ideas past the council level. He could set the agenda and make appointments to committees, but he — as outgoing Councillor Howard Moscoe put it — “could not pass wind” without winning a vote at council.
This is a problem for Ford more than any other candidate because he has shown no history of being able to work with anyone on anything. He proudly told me in 2006 that even council’s right wing hated him (“I don’t want to eat lunch with those guys anyway,” he said). It’s easy to forget now that even Mel Lastman considered Ford an enemy.
So who would accept the kamikaze mission of being his budget chief, charged with making his magical numbers add up? Who would sit on his transit commission, trying to keep the trains running while negotiating the stiff penalties and absurd demands of his platform? No one who knows anything about finance or transit, that’s for sure.
A CITY IN DECLINE
What we’re actually facing is gridlock and regression. Why? Because we’re looking at four years of angry shouting and a loud, probably unproductive argument between Ford and council (and between Ford and the province and between Ford and the city’s labour unions and between Ford and city staff…).
He might well succeed in stopping progress altogether in a few areas: grinding Transit City to a halt, cutting some taxes and slashing spending on arts and cultural programs. The city’s years-in-progress bike plan might be scrapped or halted, environmental progress rolled back. But Ford would replace those with nothing.
The opportunity cost — what we’ll miss out on by taking no action — will be huge. Development will slow as the planning department becomes paralyzed by political deadlock. Transit growth will stop and basic maintenance and service will be cut as the commission endlessly debates how to square financial and contractual circles. Basic infrastructure will be neglected. In short, the city will start to rot.
And, most distressingly for a penny-pincher like Ford, our financial hole will just keep getting bigger following tax cuts while pressing budget and revenue problems go unaddressed, forcing steep tax hikes or drastic service cuts or, most likely, both.
Then by the time the next election rolls around, everyone will be even angrier and perhaps we really will be a city in decline.
http://www.eyeweekly.com/city/mayor.../article/102021 |
|
|
|
|
