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link — Comments Off on Does vote on public health nurses reveal the real Rob Ford?
22
Jun 11

Does vote on public health nurses reveal the real Rob Ford?

The Toronto Star’s Daniel Dale has more on Monday’s totally baffling Executive Committee decision to defer indefinitely a recommendation that the city accept, at no cost, two additional public health nurses, courtesy of the provincial government:

Council’s budget committee had recommended that the city accommodate the nurses by increasing the health budget by $170,000, all of which would come from the province. At Monday’s executive committee meeting, Ford asked, “How are we going to pay for these two public health nurses on an ongoing basis?”

Told by a health official that the provincial funding would continue on an ongoing basis, Ford said only, “I just want to defer this indefinitely, then.”

via Health minister criticizes Ford’s rejection of nurses – thestar.com.

Ontario Minister of Health Deb Matthews criticized the decision, noting that Toronto is the only municipality thus far to reject the province’s offer for more public health funding.

Despite sticking to a promise to record every vote made at City Council — including routine motions to provide extensions on speaking time — votes at Executive Committee are not recorded. So far, and to their credit, it’s been reported that Councillors Denzil Minnan-Wong, Mike Del Grande, Norm Kelly and Peter Milczyn voted against the mayor’s deferral motion.

Since Ford’s taken office, there’s been an effort to soften his image, portraying him less as a curmudgeon with extreme libertarian tendencies and more as a curmudgeon who, sure, is conservative but who also loves this city and if council would just join hands and work with the mayor maybe we’d all be better off.

But what if this vote — and his similar negative vote on a motion that saw the city accept $100,000 of provincial money for STI screening — reveals the real Rob Ford? Did voters really elect this mayor in the hopes that he would reject needed funds for things like public health, all in the name of ideology?

link — Comments Off on Executive committee moves to cut out the private sector
22
Jun 11

Executive committee moves to cut out the private sector

The Toronto Sun’s Sue-Ann Levy writes about a decision made by the Executive Committee on Monday following an amendment by Councillor Mike Del Grande:

[Del Grande] proposed that city officials start to phase out the capital loan guarantees once they expire — and not continue to roll them over again. He also suggested once the Waterfront’s Corus building sells and their $128 million outstanding loan is repaid, the maximum of capital loans given out be limited to $125 million in total. Both motions were approved by executive committee.

“We’re not in the business of providing loan guarantees,” Del Grande said. “It is not a core activity… simple as that.”

Added Mayor Rob Ford: “I don’t think we should be in the business of loaning money … we’re here to deliver services, I think that’s what banks are for, to loan money.”

via Toronto’s $449-million loan groan | Toronto & GTA | News | Toronto Sun.

Phasing out loan guarantees would impact the financial situation of institutions like the Evergreen Brickworks, Artscape Wychwood Barns, Ricoh Coliseum and, after 2020, BIXI.

Ford says that the city should not be in the business of loaning money which, actually, is true. The city shouldn’t and is not in the business of loaning money. What the city does is guarantee loans taken out by private companies. It’s like your parents cosigning your apartment lease when you were in college — they’re not giving you any money, but they’re on the hook if, for whatever reason, you skip town and stop paying your landlord.

That Ford and Del Grande are railing against this practice at the same time they have people working on a deal to get the private sector to pay for the Sheppard Subway is a massive contradiction. If the city isn’t going to provide capital loan assistance for a subway project, the prospects of such a plan actual coming to fruition are even dimmer than we thought.

link — Comments Off on Public Health Nurses? No fun
20
Jun 11

Public Health Nurses? No fun

The Toronto Star kicked off the week with a bizarre article by Robyn Doolittle, grouping together a collection of existing city bylaws that Ford is seeking to repeal and positing that the ultimate outcome might be a city that’s more fun:

Toronto: The Town of No Fun. The City of Rules.

Well, that might be changing thanks to Rob Ford, “Mayor of Fun,” as Councillor Michael Thompson jokingly dubbed him during a recent interview.

Before Ford came to office in December, this was the city that sent you a bill for $60 on your birthday.

Since repealing that vehicle registration fee, the mayor has talked about scrapping numerous regulations, which critics of the previous city hall regime would claim represent a nanny-state mentality.

via Will Mayor Ford put some fun into rule-obsessed Toronto? – thestar.com.

Among other things, Doolittle lists the following as things that might get in the way of fun:

  • Vehicle Registration Fee
  • Rules against cutting down trees
  • Obstructing sidewalks
  • Ban on bottled water sales in city buildings
  • The five cent plastic bag fee

The city certainly has some bylaws in place that are too restrictive — the requirement to have a paid duty police officer at a neighbourhood barbecue, for example — but it seems quite the reach to equate Rob Ford’s lazy libertarian approach to government with any kind of policy that might lead to fun.

Rob Ford dismantles government because he dislikes government. Most of the restrictions Doolittle lists were put in place as environmental safeguards. If a more fun city is the end result of their elimination, it’s not by design. It’s just collateral.

Case in point: Soon after this article was published, Rob Ford’s Executive Committee voted to defer indefinitely item BU12.7. The small item would have made an net-zero adjustment to the 2011 Approved Operating Budget of Toronto Public Health to account for the addition of two permanent public health nurses, paid for entirely by the provincial Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care.

Free nurses working in the city! No cost to the Toronto taxpayer! Not happening, says the Mayor. Because nurses and public health are, I guess, not fun.

link — Comments Off on Proud of Levy
20
Jun 11

Proud of Levy

From Sue-Ann Levy’s latest, discussing Councillor James Pasternak’s desire to rewrite Toronto’s anti-discrimination policy:

Pasternak said he’s asked the new anti-discrimination policy ensures “no public funds or city-permitted space” is given to a group involved in Israeli Apartheid.

via No hatred at Pride this year | Columnists | Opinion | Toronto Sun.

I would think Queers Against Israeli Apartheid would very much support such a policy.

On a serious note: Levy’s column is problematic — it always is — echoing the repeated falsehood that the City of Toronto could withhold this year’s Pride funding if QuAIA did march (on what grounds?), and pushing the viewpoint that it would be simple for Toronto to craft an anti-discrimination policy that would rule out groups like QuAIA.

But she ends with a quick appeal to Mayor Rob Ford, asking him to march in this year’s Pride parade. To “be the mayor of all the people.”

Levy is never more sympathetic than when she does stuff like that. That she does so while followed by a Toronto Sun comment section that tells her to “Keep convincing yourself’s your normal and one day you’ll believe it but it won’t make it true [sic]”  and to “Give it a rest, dyke” makes her stand all the more appealing.

Still, though, she’s wrong about almost everything else almost all of the time.

link — Comments Off on You get what you pay for
20
Jun 11

You get what you pay for

The Toronto Star’s Paul Moloney reported on the weekend that one in five respondents quit before completing the survey regarding the city’s core service review.

That’s not a crazy bad level of non-completition, but when added to the damning criticism the survey has received elsewhere, it doesn’t really do much to bolster confidence that the results gleaned from this exercise will be worth much.

Considering the importance of the work being done as part of this service review, why does the survey feel so flimsy? Turn out, as Moloney reports, that the city went for the bargain basement cheapest option:

Rather than use one of the better-known Canadian polling/survey companies, the city hired Utah-based Qualtrics.

City spokeswoman Deborah Brown said staff reviewed 15 online consultation tools and asked for quotes from Canadian polling firms but chose Qualtrics because it could meet the tight timelines and “the total cost was just 10-20 per cent of the quotes we received from the other companies.

via 1 in 5 gave up on city’s online survey before completing it – thestar.com.

A bid that comes in 80 to 90 per cent below your other comparables seems almost destined to be junk, doesn’t it?

Mark it: “You get what you pay for” is one of those phrases that will come around again and again through the Rob Ford years.

link — Comments Off on Whistle Blower Protection Policy a small victory for Ford
16
Jun 11

Whistle Blower Protection Policy a small victory for Ford

Let’s give the mayor his due: he fulfilled an election promise Tuesday when council unanimously voted to approve a new Whistle Blower Protection Policy that ensures city employees will not fear for their jobs after reporting department waste or mismanagement.

The National Post’s Natalie Alcoba:

“Every single one of us in this council chamber has received an email or phone call from an employee of the city saying something is wrong, or we can do this better, but they’re afraid to give their name because they’re afraid to lose their job,” Mayor Ford said at the top of this month’s council meeting. “Starting today that will end.”

Mr. Ford, a proponent of smaller government, also lauded the 56,000 civic employees as the “backbone” of how the city is run. “We need them to come forward and say this is a better way of delivering the service, or this is where taxpayers money is being wasted.”

via Council approves ‘whistle blower protection policy’ | Posted Toronto | National Post.

Believing that this policy will make a significant difference requires a pretty significant leap of faith — are there really scores of employees out there aware of negligent use of city funds but won’t come forward? — but it’s a harmless addition to the Fraud Prevention Policy that could ultimately result in a positive outcome.

The new policy defines “waste” as “the gross mismanagement of City resources in a wilful, intentional or negligent manner that contravenes a City policy or direction by Council.”

link — Comments Off on Our socialist roads and highways
13
Jun 11

Our socialist roads and highways

Responding to a Bob Hepburn editorial in the Toronto Star that called road tolls “nuts,” Hamilton-area blogger Nicholas Kevlahan has pulled together some numbers on the cost of maintaining infrastructure for car drivers:

Although motorists feel they pay too much in fees and taxes (and we do pay a lot), a very careful Federal Department of Transport study shows that federal and provincial net road fuel tax revenues and provincial fees cover only 50% to 78% of the total cost of the nation’s roads.

via Ford Wrong About Toll Roads – Raise the Hammer.

In other words, we subsidize roads and highways through general revenues.

For comparison, roughly 70% of the operating costs of the TTC fall directly on the shoulders of its users.

link — Comments Off on The mayor who once mused about selling public housing to pay operating costs
13
Jun 11

The mayor who once mused about selling public housing to pay operating costs

So remember when Rob Ford told the media he thought it might be a good idea to sell some existing units of public housing and use the revenues to pay down this year’s budget gap? He was, apparently, just kidding around.

The Toronto Star Editorial Board has more on this:

Even if Ford could somehow find a way over these hurdles, selling almost 1,000 homes in various states of repair would likely take years. It wouldn’t be much help in dealing with the city’s shortfall now.

So we ask again, “Where’s the gravy?” Ford failed to find it in time for the 2011 budget, which was to drop by 2.5 per cent thanks to all the fat he would drain from the system. He ended up spending more to run the city, not less. Never mind, said Ford, 2012 will be different. If so there’s no sign of it yet. Gutting public housing shouldn’t be an option.

via Public housing: Ford’s futile cash grab – thestar.com.

That the mayor mused even briefly about using revenue from the sale of public housing to plug a gap in the operating budget is deeply disturbing. That sort of strategy doesn’t even pass muster as fiscally conservative. It’s just plain fiscally irresponsible.

For the record, there’s nothing wrong with looking at selling vacant or badly-damaged TCHC units (many of them are very old homes that would be very expensive to fix up) but it needs to be done as part of an overarching plan to improve the state of public housing in the city.

Lurking under a lot of the rhetoric we hear about the TCHC — Sue-Ann Levy’s criticism of some TCHC residents who live in “prime beachfront property,” for example — is the suggestion that we could do housing more cheaply if we packed residents into dense towers, concentrated in a few low-value areas across the city. This is a bad idea for so many obvious reasons that it hurts to even think about.

link — Comments Off on Transparent government locked down
13
Jun 11

Transparent government locked down

Councillor Josh Matlow’s most recent weekly column for the Toronto Star looks at the issue of access and security at City Hall. Apparently some councillors have access cards that allow them to freely enter the mayor’s office while others, like Matlow, do not:

However, when I recently tried to enter the mayor’s office, my pass didn’t work. I might as well have been holding a Diners’ Club card.

In contrast, the mayor’s staff walks undeterred through every corridor of city hall and often makes unscheduled visits to councillors’ offices. At first, I didn’t think twice about Mr. Ford’s locked door, as I know he has a lot of requests for his time. And it’s his office, after all.

But then last week, I witnessed another councillor, who sits on the executive committee, receive a green light when he waved his pass. I began to wonder why Ford Nation granted visas to some councillors and not to others.

via City Hall Diary: A visit to the inner sanctum – thestar.com.

Via Twitter, City Hall Watcher and Day-of-Reckoner Adam Chaleff-Freudenthaler notes that David Miller’s office was never locked during business hours.

Zealously controlling access to your office — and having staff that immediately get suspicious when visitors start taking photos — indicates a kind of paranoia that seems to undermine Ford’s goal to increase transparency and accountability at City Hall.

You can’t only be transparent and accountable to people who like you.

link — Comments Off on Ford to skip another Pride event
12
Jun 11

Ford to skip another Pride event

Xtra’s Rob Salerno:

Toronto city councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam told the audience at the Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans Youth Line Community Youth Awards Gala Friday night that Mayor Rob Ford’s office has confirmed that he will not attend the ceremonial raising of the pride flag at City Hall on June 27.

Ford will be sending council speaker Frances Nunziata in his stead, Wong-Tam says.

Wong-Tam did not give a reason for the Mayor’s absence.

via Ford won’t attend Pride flag ceremony.

I think any narrative that says Rob Ford is a homophobe is overly simplistic and mostly wrong, but he’s sure making it easy for opponents to tag him with the label.

To be fair, the mayor skips a lot of public events compared to his predecessor. But given Pride’s importance to city tourism and its status as a marquee event for Toronto, the continued lack of action seems troubling.

As mayor, he’s found time to attend numerous events relating to football.

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