Council Snack (sized news)- Photoshop Edition

Reddit had lots of fun with its Ford photoshop challenge. 

City Hall may have banned council snacks for its elected officials, but that doesn't mean us plebians should suffer. So here are your City Hall (news) snacks for Day 2 of the November session:


The big news of the day is the information coming out on the previously announced layoffs. Sue-Ann Levy feels the elimination of 2,338 positions including 1,190 firings is overdue, citing the struggles in the auto sector and media over the past few years as a parallel. If you follow that logic, you probably don't read this blog anyway. For bonus fun, see if you can find the glaring error/typo in her article (which has been part of the article for far too long). 


These layoffs and vacancies will have a direct impact on service and that's particularly bad for a mayor who has promised to improve 'customer service' so much. When they change the dispatch target times for emergency personnel and have a looming crisis with a firefighter shortage you're prioritizing your numbers over reality (more on this later).


Now also might be a useful time to remind Rob Ford of his campaign promise for no layoffs. 


In response, Adam Vaughan said these cuts are entirely avoidable and represent voodoo economics being driven not by reality but ideology. 


The other big news of the day was the proposal for a private-public partnership on the Eglinton crosstown LRT. There would be no problem for that on the construction side, but this includes looking at the operational side too. That is, that a private company would run the Eglinton line while the TTC would be publicly run. This sounds like it would have a lot of problems (Same pricing? Tickets? How to transfer? What about standards for employees?) It might also be worth mentioning that Ford's top strategist and policy adviser argued on his personal blog during the campaign to sell the TTC entirely.


Late last night the Toronto Star's chairman announced via an editorial that the paper intends to lodge a complaint with the integrity commissioner for the mayor's refusal to include them on press briefings and notifications of conferences. As they should. The administration's Star freezeout is juvenile, embarrassing and wrong. In spite of this, the Star provides the best coverage of City Hall of the four dailies and good on them for it. 


At council there were some key items. Most notable was a late-night vote to sell Enwave, which passed handily. It's a profitable city-owned enterprise but it makes sense to sell it. It's well positioned for growth but is under-capitalized, making it a good opportunity for an outside investor. Additionally, further expansion could help with providing strong environmental options for downtown tower energy use. The debate for Toronto Hydro is a different story and that will come up in January. 


There was debate on the city's naming rights policy and there are significant changes to it. Most importantly, city staff have discretion for naming rights on contracts up to $500,000 whereas previously it was a tenth of that, $50,000. Little to no naming rights go for more than $500,000 so it looked like it was intended to be a way for the Mayor's office to take power from council by having 'staff' make all the decisions. 


But a motion from Paul Ainslie nixed that and likely unintentionally. His motion expands the policy to city agencies, boards and committees, meaning that they will eventually go to Council. We all know from Ainslie's Twitter account how much he loves corporate ads, so this has to be unintentional. But there were some bad items too. Adam Vaughan motions to not sell sponsorship targeted towards children (a position Public Health supports) and not selling naming rights on heritage properties both failed. 


Mary Margaret McMahon's motion to allow backyard hens was referred to the Licensing and Standards Committee meeting on January 25, where I'm guessing it will be voted down. Twitter produced many successful puns on the subject though.


Council also voted to support sideguards on trucks in principle. I say in principle because they have no authority on this. Rob Ford was one of three votes against. Ford was also one of three votes against another Lawrence Heights project vote. 


My vote for worst vote of the day goes to Denzil Minnan-Wong, who was the sole vote against receiving a petition from 20,000 people in support of arts funding. Voting against receiving a petition? What the fuck is that? 


I don't really give many hat tips to Speakers Frances Nunziata and John Parker because they have been aggressively partisan in their rulings and the former consistently loses control and or track of the meeting. But both rightly admonished Ford ally Giorgio Mammoliti for abusing points of order and unfairly berating staff for not producing a document on short notice (Layton was criticized for this yesterday). So good on them. 


And good on Giorgio Mammoliti (weird sentence is weird). After a couple councillors, particularly Gloria Lindsay Luby, worried that some street names might be 'too ethnic' for people to pronounce, Mammoliti hammered this argument. To paraphrase, he argued: This is who we are and if these people are part of our history then they deserve to be represented. Have trouble pronouncing their names? Then learn them. Failing that is a slap in the face to immigrants. 


I don't get to write this much so I will- right on, Giorgio.  


I don't follow the theatre community, but I'm told a big-name producer was in attendance this morning and is looking at doing a production based on City Hall, which is great theatre in and of itself. It sounds good if this is better than the reportedly lousy fringe plays produced on Ford this past summer. Goldsbie, Nicholas Hune-Brown and Cityslikr are all much bigger theatre buffs than myself and seemed excited.


Over at Reddit, the hivemind went to work on photoshopping our Worship in a thread that has more than 500 comments and the results are pretty great. I posted my favourites on Twitter, but here they are again. 

The Customer Service of Governance

In addition to John Lorinc’s excellent Walrus article, there’s another piece of good city writing this week, this time from The Grid’s EdwardKeenan. Keenan’s article offers suggestions for how Team Ford can right their ship, from focusing on customer service to having meaningful dialogue with critical councillors and the general public.

The advice is really good; it plays into ways that Ford has branded himself in the past, fulfills campaign promises and appeals to individuals who want to give the mayor the benefit of the doubt. Above all, it’s just good governance.

Yesterday morning TTC chair Karen Stintz took up Keenan’s advice by coincidence. She and some of the TTC brass (Gary Webster, Chris Upfold) held a press conference at Bathurst Station to make an announcement on improving customer service, including engaging the public through town halls, a customer service liaison panel and extending service centre hours (see more details at Torontoist here). 

As much as I bristle at the term ‘customer service’ when it comes to government (as it reduces citizens to a one-sided business-style relationship), this is the good stuff. The TTC operates very efficiently from a technical standpoint but could stand improvement in how transit riders use it on a day-to-day basis. It’s also a cheap means for the agency to improve; costs (labour, infrastructure support) are rising faster than fare increases can feasibly be passed, and without changes to the operating subsidy any improvements will have to come from within.

This would have been a good platform to frame the next step for Ford to sell his ideas to the public, where he could say things like, ‘one thing that’s not gravy is treating people with respect.’ He could say that good customer service involves going beyond the minimum requirements and seeking ways to make sure everyone is involved in an open and transparent process that reasonably considers their opinions, needs and wants and he's a man of his word out to meet his mandate.

Here’s how his campaign literature spoke of these issues in his Taxpayer Protection Plan Backgrounder:

These three promises are important as they speak to the values of Ford as a candidate and the values he heard Toronto wanted for its governance. Clearly, transparency, access and real consideration were priorities for both.

But then Giorgio Mammoliti spoke last night. In an incident later related by Kristyn Wong-Tam and Janet Davis’ Twitter streams, the two councillors tried to attend a child care task force meeting chaired by Giorgio Mammoliti. Although they are on the Community Development and Recreation committee, they were refused entry. They were not notified of the meeting (although a sign was posted outside of committee room three), and were told by Mammoliti that he didn’t want the meeting to be ‘political’.

Wong-Tam responded with an open letter on Twitter criticizing the lack of inclusion and going so far as to say that the process contravened the City of Toronto Act. It doesn’t, as Goldsbie pointed out in early morning tweets, as the task force is not bound by the rules of committees since it has less than half of its membership from councillors (there was Mammoliti and six child care operators).

Mammoliti and Wong-Tam at July Executive Meeting. Photo by friendlyfeathers.blogspot.com

So Mammoliti was technically able to restrict Davis and Wong-Tam from participating, but that doesn’t mean 1) he did it in the best, most respectful way possible 2) he should have done it at all.

Maybe he could have recognized there was a strong desire for Davis and Wong-Tam to contribute, and, as per Keenan’s suggestion, given them a meaningful role in future sessions or aspects. Or maybe he could have asked the meeting attendees if they would like to have them come in the room for some or all of the meeting. Or maybe he could have said that he would be happy to brief them afterwards.

Just like customer service has to go beyond the bare essentials to be effective and valued, openness and transparency go beyond checking the City of Toronto Act to see if any laws have been broken.

This isn’t an isolated incident either. It’s a hostile attitude that’s been represented at all night executive committee meetings and in how various motions have been passed or brought up from the Jarvis bike lanes to the Fort York Bridge to the Dundas pedestrian scramble to the port lands fiasco or the citizen advisory committees that were supposed to be brought back to council for a vote (twice!) but have been forgotten or deemed unimportant. It’s this track record that sows distrust into the discourse.

Ultimately, this marks a failure of Team Ford. Sure, they haven’t kept their promises to have openness and transparency (real transparency isn’t voting on every speaking extension) but there’s a larger implication.

Good governance involves connecting people- opposition councillors, regular citizens- to the institutions that represent them. It’s not always easy to be respectful, transparent and open, but if there’s any ‘customer service’ that government should provide, it’s that.

Ford Allies: Choose Your Archetype

"Politics is a matter of choices, and a man doesn't set up the choices himself. And there is always a price to make a choice. You know that. You've made a choice, and you know how much it cost you. There is always a price."

-Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men

Choices make or break politicians. Those decisions can be purely based on policies, politics or a mix of the two. For Ford allies at City Hall their choices are becoming more clear and stark, and we may soon arrive at a juncture with the upcoming budget.

There are two different paths for Ford allies, embodied by Giorgio Mammoliti and Karen Stintz.

Giorgio Mammoliti

Mammoliti is the id of the Ford administration. To use Freud’s definition, he is a chaotic cauldron of seething excitations filled with instinctual energy but has no organization, produces no collective will and contrary impulses exist side by side without cancelling each other out.

There’s no shortage of examples to choose from to illustrate this (including red-baiting, dyke march video-taping and proposing a brothel on the island and North America’s largest flagpole as a tourist attraction). Mammoliti is so ridiculous that some people I respect suggest it’s counter-productive to focus attention on him. After all, energy expended on him is energy that could be focused on Ford’s agenda or persuading the mushy middle. I follow the ‘don’t feed the troll’ logic; after all no  one is going to shame Mammoliti into changing his position, criticism of him has the unfortunate side effect of legitimizing his authority and attention is exactly what he wants.

I think that would be a fine response if he was a fringe councillor but he's not. He is Ford’s voice (and thumb), given full license to articulate positions and policies and the leadership of various reports. He is a principal spokesperson for the administration not due to his nuanced understanding of policies and challenges but because he is fiercely loyal to Team Ford.

As a chosen proxy for the administration, Mammoliti represents who they are. In that way, Mammoliti provides a useful shorthand for the distempered desires of Team Ford. He is worth focusing on if it is to link his messages and style as a distillation of the administration at large. Councillors should question whether they want to support his antics by extension or follow a different route.

Karen Stintz 

That different route is embodied by TTC chair Karen Stintz. Stintz, a competent conservative elected in a ward that overwhelmingly went for George Smitherman, is in a difficult spot (read this Marcus Gee piece for more).

 

Stintz has strong reservations about the viability and wisdom of Ford’s promised Sheppard extension. Since the beginning of the project, Stintz has insisted she has nothing to do with it and is seldom in contact with Rob Ford (in contrast to Mammoliti with Ford or then-TTC Chair Adam Giambrone with David Miller).

Doug Ford in particular has a cold relationship with Stintz to the extent that he has explored a wholesale change at the TTC to oust her and TTC General Manager Gary Webster in one fell swoop. Stintz has publicly declared her support for Webster, a 30-year TTC veteran who also opposes the Sheppard subway plan.  

Stintz is widely seen as competent, thoughtful and capable- the ego to Mammoliti’s id. Unfortunately, it’s precisely these qualities that have got in the way of expressing the loyalty that Team Ford values so highly. Her opposition to the foolish Sheppard subway line, grounded in a belief that it does not make sense from a fiscal or transit building perspective highlights that Stintz is willing to value policy decisions over politics.     

Defined by Choices 

But this is punished. While Mammoliti is given more rope by Team Ford—he was assigned a host of different reports to deliver to Council (on homelessness, childcare, ice rinks), Stintz is frozen out. It sends a clear message to other Ford allies to not argue against priorities and to support the talking points.

But these Ford allies should ask what kind of councillor they want to be. Do they want to be like Mammoliti, whose unconditional loyalty and silly antics are rewarded with power from Ford? Or are they willing to be like Karen Stintz, a thoughtful and competent councillor willing to question ideas and policies when she feels it’s necessary?

As cracks within the Ford administration appear councillors will have to choose whether they are more like Mammoliti or Stintz. Hopefully more people like Stintz are willing to stand up for what they think is right  despite the Mammolitiesque rhetoric and cold shoulder from Ford that they will receive.  

Mammoliti, Rob Ford Threat and Toronto's Idiocracy

Given the current political climate in Toronto, perhaps the most prescient movie of the past few years was Mike Judge's Idiocracy, where the everyman can excel in a dumbed down culture. 


First there was Giorgio Mammoliti going on about the communists in Toronto (kudos to the Toronto Star's young Daniel Dale) dominating City Hall deputations and how he created a Facebook page (sample here!) where they'll be kicked off if they espouse those views. But as Meg Campbell points out on Torontoist, isn't it problematic hosting a forum where only some people have access to it and undesirable viewpoints are deleted? Isn't that a bit undemocratic? Aren't the deputations supposed to be a formal forum to exercise this process, but that was duly ignored by Mammoliti?   

Mammoliti being super classy at City Hall in 1999. Toronto Star

And then the Toronto Sun continued to run with the idea of banning panhandlers from city streets. Columnist Joe Warmington covered the idea after reporter Don Peat included it in a list of things to improve the city (including licensing all cyclists over the age of 16). Of course, Sue-Ann Levy has covered the idea before too.  While Doug Holyday has spoken about this, it was Mammoliti's turn to get attention and so he happily said that he was in favour of a ban and that homeless people should be sent to hospitals and shelters should be decreased (Mammoliti is preparing a report on homelessness for September). I mean sure, hospitals are far more expensive and more poorly equipped to deal with the underlying issues, but it feels right to stock it to the 'poverty pimps', right? 


Getting rid of homelessness is a worthy goal, but not for the reason that it's a blight on a pristine sidewalk. Rather, the goal should be improving people's lives and acknowledging that communities need to look after their least fortunate members and seek opportunities for them. Framing the issue as something that impacts the middle class through being a nuisance after coming out of a theatrical play (as Levy's article is framed) misses the point that addressing homelessness is a complex health and social problem that should be driven by a moral imperative. 


But Mammoliti managed to be outdone by an even bigger idiot. Because no matter how dumb your arguments are, they're not deserving of a death threat. So the individual (the second one to be arrested) who threatened Rob Ford deserves the distinction of Idiot of the Day, a tall feat when Mammoliti is talking about social policy. No matter how much you may dislike Ford, attack his ideas- it's easy!- rather than resorting to violent threats. Unless you want to join the race to lead the Idiocracy, be the better person.  

Behind the Scenes with Rob, Giorgio and Bill Blair

Rob Ford has said of his secrecy and press availability that you ‘can’t hide 300 pounds of fun’, but questions remain as to who he is meeting during his regular duties. David Miller released a basic meeting schedule to the media each week but so far Team Ford has not chosen to do so.

Yesterday Toronto Star reporter Daniel Dale published the results of a Freedom of Information request for Rob Ford’s meeting schedule. It was predictable, with the majority of meetings being with allies and community supporters. A question remains though, what actually goes on in these meetings?

In the absence of more transparency than necessary, I’ve taken a wild guess as to what a meeting might look like by looking at the June 7 meeting between Rob Ford, Giorgio Mammoliti, and Police Chief Bill Blair. I also took the liberty to add in Ford’s guardian angel/spokeswoman Adrienne Batra.

Toronto Star

 FORD:               Hey guys, sorry I’m late. You know, caught in traffic.

BLAIR:               Good to see you Mr. Mayor.

MAMMOLITI:     Friggin’ traffic. It’s the worst. Where’d you get stuck?

FORD:               Jarvis and Gerrard. Some Prius was taking forever making a turn, but I flipped them off good—

BATRA:           --How about we start the meeting boys? You know, huddle around and talk strategy?

FORD:             I love it when you speak Football Adrienne. That’s why you’re the word person, haha.

BATRA:           Yeah, so the budget pressures…

BLAIR:             Thank you Adrienne. My team has prepared the materials you see on the table. I know they’re complicated and detailed but we’ll be happy to walk you through them.

MAMMOLITI:   You have everything you need in there?

BLAIR:             Yes, we feel this best balances the needs of—

FORD:             Aw, you’re good Billy. I know I can trust you with the details.

BLAIR:             Thank you Mr. Mayor, that means a lot to me.

MAMMOLITI:  Wait, something is missing.

FORD:             What’s that? Are you telling me there are no choppers in there?

MAMMOLITI:  Yeah, you wanted those, right?

FORD:            C’mon Bill, you don’t need to get modest with us.

BLAIR:            Well it’s not really a priority Mr. Mayor. We’re trying our best to only fill our needs.

FORD:            Will you look at this guy Georgie? What a team player.

MAMMOLITI:  Oh, he gets the thumbs up from me.

FORD:             I’ve seen The Wire Bill, and it’s obvious that we need choppers. We just can’t be taken seriously otherwise.

BLAIR:             I appreciate the concern Mr. Mayor and I’ll look into it.

FORD:             Do you see this guy Adrienne? That’s a good brush off, isn’t it?

BATRA:           Very good. Even Denzil could learn from him.

FORD:             That’s high praise Bill.

MAMMOLITI:   It is. But really, look into it. Think creatively—you could attach extra sound cannons to them!

BLAIR:             That’s an interesting idea. Say, you have quite the tan Giorgio, did you travel recently?

MAMMOLITI:  Yeah, I was in Halifax for a city conference thing. Oh man, the hot chicks there are amazing.

BATRA:          Ahem.

MAMMOLITI: Sorry. Broads? Anyway, I’ll have some great photos when they’re developed.

FORD:            He kept calling me during his trip and mentioning this, haha.

MAMMOLITI:  I mostly talked business! You would mention the Halifaxians too.

BATRA:          Haligonians.

FORD:            No, no no. Don’t misrepresent me here.

MAMMOLITI:  Haligonians?

FORD:            I’m a family man.

BLAIR:            I think I should get going.

MAMMOLITI: Haligonians? That’s a thing?

FORD:            I have kids. I respect women. Right Adrienne?

BATRA:          Yes sir.

FORD:            See Bill, I’m a good guy, despite what Georgie might say.

BLAIR:            I can see that Mr. Mayor.

BATRA:          Ok gentlemen, this meeting is over.