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. 

Defending the Toronto Youth Cabinet

Two days ago, Councillor Shelley Carroll led a discussion at City Hall about the role of social media in engaging citizens. Yesterday at OCAD the city’s economic development department held a forum about getting citizens to engage in events and their city through unconventional ways. But in a twist of fate, today the Toronto Youth Cabinet (TYC) will have to justify their existence to the city’s Budget Committee.

The TYC, like the Toronto Seniors Forum which will also be debated today, is one of many potential cuts in the city’s measures to balance its operating budget. According to its website, the TYC is a youth driven advocacy organization which strives to improve the quality of life for Toronto’s youth. Among other things, the cabinet has:

• ·         Developed strategies to liaise with squeegee kids in the Mel Lastman years
• ·         Independently conducted a review of graffiti in the David Miller-Rob Ford years
• ·         Provided financial literacy workshops for youth
• ·         Taught hundreds of individuals of how to use City Hall avenues to have their voices heard, like giving deputations.

In fact, they’re goals that Rob Ford largely campaigned on. Speaking about youth engagement at the Scarborough Mayor’s debate in March 2010, Ford said, 

“[We need to] go across the city to talk to principals, to talk to youth, to see what they want...if it gets them an education, if it gets kids out of the gangs, off the street, off the drugs and puts them on a positive pursuit [it’s good].” 

Despite this, there are three main challenges that the ~300 member Youth Cabinet faces in justifying themselves to the Budget Committee.

Value

Currently the Youth Cabinet has an annual budget of just under $27,000. Executive Cabinet members have indicated a willingness to decline their stipends or to seek private funding if it means keeping the Cabinet. In fact, a 2007 study by planner Rachelle Ricotta suggested that one of the principal obstacles in the cabinet’s effort to expand outreach was a lack of funding and permanent staff, not poor management or wasteful spending.

It’s difficult in defining the real value the city derives from the Youth Cabinet, whose positive outcomes are mostly intangibles. After all, what’s the value of an engaged citizen? But another 2007 report, this one by Brenda O’Neill for the Canadian Policy Research Networks, sheds some light on that. 

O’Neill points to the abysmally low voter turnout (federally) among 18-24 year-olds in 2000 and 2004 (25 and 37%, respectively). At the same time, this same age-group has relatively high participation in other direct-action political activities, like petitions, boycotts, protests and volunteering. This suggests that there’s a gap between embracing politics and working within institutions.

It’s one that was a chief discussion point at the ICE economic development conference at OCAD yesterday. The room full of city bureaucrats, most of whom want to incorporate innovative techniques to involve more youth, is juxtaposed by the Budget Committee today, showing that dissonance isn’t limited to 18-24 year-olds.  

Purpose

A criticism of the youth cabinet that goes beyond the value argument asks, ‘why have a youth cabinet in the first place? Why can’t they work within the same means as any other citizen?’

It’s a fair question; what makes youth (and seniors) special in their need for representation? For one, the sociological research indicates that youth are disaffected by and disconnected from traditional institutions. In turn, they require a bridge to connect them to these institutions and to realize their value.

It’s a challenge that Ange Kinnear, Adam Vaughan’s Executive Assistant, knows from her first-hand involvement with the Metro version of the youth cabinet. “With the Youth Cabinet you’ll have people who join when they’re 17 or join when they’re 21, and check out when they go to university or turn 24. People’s life situation at that stage changes drastically and sometimes they have time to give and sometimes they don’t.” 

Kinnear adds that youth are often in the process of finding their voice in this period and their priorities change over time. These various challenges highlight the importance of a stable liaison like the TYC for individuals to come back and re-connect with.

Cutting it would make it more difficult for the city to achieve its aims of connecting youth to its representation and getting them involved. That’s not a small constituency either; youth (13-24) are 300,000 of the least represented people in Toronto.

Politics

But there’s another argument against the Youth Cabinet, one that is more insidious. It’s an accusation nicely represented by a September Sue-Ann Levy column in which she says that, “...the TYC- a pet project of NDPer Olivia Chow initiated in 2001- is nothing more than a breeding ground for left-wing activists who hang around City Hall like Adam Chaleff-Freudenthaler.” (Note: It was re-introduced by Chow in 1998, not 2001 and a metro version had existed) 

This argument states that the Youth Cabinet is too political and that it’s essentially a recruiting grounds for the NDP. Executive member Keegan Henry-Mathieu and Claire McWatt reject this outright, “If any councillor, no matter their political background, asks us for advice, we’re not going to say no...we serve at the pleasure of council.” Adds Mathieu-Henry, “It’s unfair to paint the youth cabinet with one brush when so many people pass through it.”

While it’s true that there has been left-wing representation from people like Kinnear or Kristyn Wong-Tam, there have also been many conservatives who have come through the cabinet, including a Cesar Palacio staffer, a number of people who have since run for the Conservative party, and various conservative bankers and lawyers.

Kinnear agrees that Levy’s criticism of the Youth Cabinet being manipulated is misplaced. She shares a story of going into a Youth Cabinet meeting just after becoming too old to participate and being shooed away by Chaleff-Freudenthaler, who feared the meeting would be controlled by non-members, “I’ve never met a youth cabinet who was willing to say yes to outsiders. They’ve always been very independent and committed to telling their own story.” Kinnear goes on to explain that it’s one of the strengths of the Cabinet, that their combination of independence and proximity to Council allows for the complementary growth of the participants and valuable advice for Councillors.

Meaning

Two days from now, the Youth Cabinet connects with other institutions in their annual celebration The Cause. It’s their biggest event of the year, with workshops on advocacy, a chance to meet councillors and learn about art. But moreso than that for Henry-Mathieu, working on things like The Cause for the TYC has taught him larger lessons about identifying values and learning to fight for them, “For me, the Youth Cabinet has instilled a sense of service. That sense that if I really have an issue with the way the city is being run then I actually have to make the time to do something about it.”

McWatt has had a similar experience. She went from someone who was apathetic and withdrawn in high school to a fully engaged and informed citizen due to the Youth Cabinet, the kind politicians want more of. But the challenges and frustration of defending a tool that offers institutional access to that very institution has caused some disappointment, “The TYC is a good thing, it’s a teaching tool. And degrading it just seems ignorant.”  

So the questions for the budget committee today become, ‘what connections can we make between the questions city staff try to solve and the solutions the Youth Cabinet offers,’ ‘is the Youth Cabinet a cause worth fighting for,’ ‘What price and value do we put on youth engagement,’ and, most importantly, ‘what kind of institution is City Hall?’      

A Tip of the Hat to Mike Del Grande, John Parker and Peter Milczyn?

So I was going to make a post about Rob Ford taking questions on Jack Layton. The video is a revealing and sensitive portrait of Ford as he is genuinely saddened by the news and shares memories of the NDP leader who used to be his seatmate in Toronto City Council. But Cityslickr over at All Fired Up in the Big Smoke did a nice write up first and anything I put into it is just duplication of his fine effort. 


To add just a few small words, it's nice that we're able to transcend partisanship in the spirit of honouring an individual who was passionate about policies, people and connecting the two. 

*****
Speaking of bypassing partisanship, there was a budget meeting on Tuesday notable for its contradiction of a June decision. Back in June, Ford surprisingly opposed a provincially-funded offer of two public nurses over a concern the money would not be there on an ongoing basis and that there were enough health workers already. Rather than attaching a motion stating that if funding was pulled so too would the nurse positions, Ford deferred it indefinitely at the Executive Committee.


He was opposed at committee by Council veterans and Ford allies Norm Kelly, Mike Del Grande, Denzil Minnan-Wong and Peter Milczyn. At the time Minnan-Wong said, "The province is paying for two nurses full-time. Why would you say no to additional public health nurses to help out? Why would you say no?” 


When the issue was brought to a council vote to re-open it (2/3rds majority needed), Kelly, Del Grande, Minnan-Wong and Milczyn fell in line and supported the Fords and the funding didn't go through. 


This sets up the context for Tuesday's budget meeting where there was a debate about whether to accept the province's offer of three public nurses dedicated to helping combat bedbug issues. Doug Ford asked some questions about the value of nurses ("shouldn't we just hire more exterminators, since they get rid of the bugs?") and worried that the Toronto Star would make the city look bad if the funding was cancelled and the nurses were released. But there was a pushback. John Parker, Mike Del Grande and Peter Milzczyn, among others, strongly pushed back and argued for the need for more health support in fighting bedbugs. A- wait for it- compromise was reached, with Doug Ford putting forward a motion stating that the nurse positions will be tied to ongoing provincial funding. The motion passed. As Doug quickly ducked out from press questions, Mike Del Grande spoke for a couple of minutes, saying that he was inundated with 3000 emails on the issue and adding:

I think if one is politically astute, when one is asking maybe for other things in the future, that you'd want to be on more friendly terms with the province

This quotation is as scathing an indictment of the administration's tactics as you'll find within the inner circle. The situation provides a few useful lessons too. 

An about face on nurses.

1. Ford allies are willing to admit mistakes. 
This is clearly a strong reversal from the Council vote in July and demonstrates that some individuals are willing to point the mayor in the right direction on these issues. While it may seem like a no-brainer, it's not always politically easy and should be commended when it happens. 


2. Ford allies can listen to public engagement.
Not always of course, but to receive 3000 emails on a relatively small (although illustrative) issue like the two nixed nurses is massive. Del Grande took that overwhelming support into account when he voted. So this gives room for optimism; engagement can make a difference. 


3. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. 
Ordinarily an issue like the public nurses would gain little public attention. (Granted, ordinarily there would be a 44-1 vote to approve them).This is a case where the access to information and attention paid to City Hall proved enormously successful in ensuring sensible policies are adopted. The crowd had left from the Jarvis Bike Lanes Debate when this was originally debated in Council but thanks to the follow-up from various journalists and bloggers (the Toronto Star's Daniel Dale did a great job on this one) the issue rightly didn't fade away. 


So kudos to Ford allies for standing up for what was right and hopefully with diligent attention paid to them this can be often enough to not be exceptional.