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Toronto Mayoral Debate 8pm (RIGHT NOW!) (pg. 4)
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| gmorrison |
| I can't wait for him to start firing the city council members. Our city is amazing and I love Toronto but the people who run it currently blow my nuts. Miller is a ing gimp & don't even get me started on good old Dalton |
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| gummybear |
| quote: | Originally posted by 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 |
good read..thanks for posting,, |
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| hardcore trancer |
I came across this article today on Ford:
| quote: |
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news...article1719778/
Can we trust Rob Ford, a guy who gets his numbers wrong?
his week’s opinion poll showed that Rob Ford is not only the most popular candidate for mayor, he is also the most trusted. But can you really trust a guy who says so much that is wrong and untrue? Consider just a few examples.
- When he talks about overspending at city hall, Mr. Ford often cites the controversial new bike lane on Jarvis Street. He says it cost $6-million. The actual cost was $59,000, $6,000 less than the city’s $65,000 estimate. The money was used to install bike-lane signs, paint new lines on the pavement and remove the overhead signals for Jarvis’s old reversing traffic lane.
- Mr. Ford says city council voted to spend $360-million to tear down the Gardiner Expressway. No such decision has been made. City council voted in July, 2008, only to launch a study into the future of the elevated expressway. The study was expected to cost about $8-million. Mayor David Miller has made it clear he would like to take down the Gardiner east of Jarvis and one city estimate put the cost at about $360-million, but that is only one option under study and council has never voted to approve it.
- Mr. Ford says that under Toronto’s “tax, tax, tax, spend, spend, spend” government, “residents of this city have been hit with a property-tax increase of 5 per cent every year.” After all the waste that taxpayers see, he said at a debate on Tuesday night, “it just infuriates them when they turn around and have to pay a 5-per-cent property tax.” In fact, homeowners’ property taxes went up 2.9 per cent this year, 4 per cent last year and 3.75 per cent in 2008. There has never been a property tax increase of 5 per cent since Mr. Ford was first elected in 2000.
- Mr. Ford said on CBC Radio’s Metro Morning this week that in 2000 the city had a $6.5-billion budget and “now we have almost a $12-billion budget.” In fact, the city’s operating budget has risen from about $6-billion in 2000 to $9.2-billion today. It reaches almost $12-billion only if you add in the capital budget, which pays for road repairs, transit expansion and other projects. Capital spending was not included in Mr. Ford’s 2000 figure, so his comparison exaggerates the growth in spending.
- In controversial remarks about immigration last month, Mr. Ford said that Toronto’s official plan forecasts that a million new people will flood into the city over the next 10 years. “I think it’s more important that we take care of the people now before we start bringing in more,” he said. In fact, the plan says that Toronto will grow by 537,000 residents by 2031. Greater Toronto is expected to grow by 2.7 million people in that same period, but that includes the whole region, including Halton, Peel, Durham and York.
These are not just sloppy mistakes or slips of the tongue. Mr. Ford makes these untrue statements over and over at debates and campaign appearances. His rivals for mayor have corrected him repeatedly in public, but he keeps on trotting them out as fact. Much of what he says falls into the category of “truthiness,” defined by television comedian Stephen Colbert as what you want the truth to be, not what it actually is.
The rise of Rob Ford to the leading spot in the opinion polls is, sadly, no joke. The Etobicoke councillor is just weeks away from becoming mayor of Canada’s biggest city. When a man who says he would run the city like a business repeatedly gets his figures wrong, you have to wonder about his fitness for the job. When he brazenly repeats his errors, you have to wonder about his judgment.
If we say we trust public figures, we usually mean that we believe what they say is true. By that measure, Mr. Ford is the most untrustworthy candidate for mayor. |
Why is he just making up numbers? Sounds like yet another desperate politician trying to get elected by lying out of his teeth.. |
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| 1dawoman |
| quote: | Originally posted by Special K
"derrrrrr I push the nitro button at guv derrrrrr" |
| quote: | Originally posted by VDub
Would you care to tell me what you've done to make ppl enjoy themselves?? |
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| Jayx1 |
Rob Ford has all the self deserved and self important people on the run. I love it!
The self serving can only poke the sleepy silent majority dragon for so long before it wakes up and stomps on them! |
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| Skipper |
| quote: | Originally posted by gummybear
good read..thanks for posting,, |
I stopped reading at "armageddon"
That kind of sensationalist writing does nothing but energize people already on side and turn off the undecided. |
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| The Highroller |
| quote: | Originally posted by Jayx1
Rob Ford has all the self deserved and self important people on the run. I love it!
The self serving can only poke the sleepy silent majority dragon for so long before it wakes up and stomps on them! |
From where do you draw the conclusion that Ford is not going to cater to these people? |
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| FunkyCrew |
| quote: | Originally posted by Skipper
I stopped reading at "armageddon"
That kind of sensationalist writing does nothing but energize people already on side and turn off the undecided. |
hardly sensationalist, more straight to the point
I'd suggest you finish reading it |
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| smuncky |
| quote: | Originally posted by hardcore trancer
I came across this article today on Ford:
Why is he just making up numbers? Sounds like yet another desperate politician trying to get elected by lying out of his teeth.. |
i'm looking forward to hearing an explanation from jay so he can clear up the mistakes for us. |
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| FunkyCrew |
| quote: | Originally posted by smuncky
i'm looking forward to hearing an explanation from jay so he can clear it up mistakes for us. |
:stongue: |
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| Skipper |
| quote: | Originally posted by FunkyCrew
hardly sensationalist, more straight to the point
I'd suggest you finish reading it |
lol. Why? I'm trying to actually find a neutral source that summarizes each candidates' platform on the major issues. That's how I'll make my decision on how to vote...not by some left wing article in a third tier local news publication. |
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| FunkyCrew |
| quote: | Originally posted by Skipper
lol. Why? I'm trying to actually find a neutral source that summarizes each candidates' platform on the major issues. That's how I'll make my decision on how to vote...not by some left wing article in a third tier local news publication. |
since you didn't finish reading it, you didn't see how the author proceeds to discuss Ford's somewhat positive side as well - he's hardly just bashing the dude
lol @ third tier local news publication - I guess the only "reputable" source would be The Star? |
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