Better Know a Ward: Sarah Doucette

So I'm doing a series for the good people at OpenFile to get to know councillors and their wards better. This is a repost of it. 

Welcome to Better Know a Ward. Taking a cue from Stephen T. Colbert, we’re taking a look at City Councillors and how they connect to the wards they represent.

We’re fortunate to kick this off with Sarah Doucette, (Ward 13, Parkdale-High Park) one of Toronto’s newbie councillors. Born in Winchester, England and raised on the Isle of Wight, Doucette moved to the Swansea area of her ward 15 years ago. Since then she’s been engaged in building playgrounds, volunteering to protect school pools and local libraries and promoting various environmental programs.

We spoke with her by phone last week.

What’s unique about your ward?

Where do I start? My ward has a diverse selection of people living in it. We have the Swansea area, we have the Bloor West area, we have High Park, we have the Junction, we’ve got Baby Point and we’ve got an area in the middle which we need to find a name for.

We’re all kind of slightly different, slightly unique, but we all kind of blend together so beautifully. One of the things I do love about my ward is its determination; they’re so dedicated—to not necessarily preserve their neighbourhood—but to keep an eye on the neighbourhood so that if it is changing, it’s changing for the better.

What are the challenges that come with that diversity?

Certain areas of our ward are quite capable of doing private sports, other areas of our ward go to community centres and other areas of our ward need subsidies for the community centre. So you have different areas of the ward that need different things from the City and for their family lives... So the diversity in the area is also financial but we try not to let that make a difference as to what children and families can do and participate with.

Your mom and grandfather also showed leadership in their communities [as mayors in England of the Isle of Wight and Winchester, respectively]. What did you learn from them?

Well my mother is my main inspiration. My mother brought my brother and myself up. My parents did separate when we were quite young. Still had a great relationship with my father but we lived with my mother.

And she always put other people first. Just an example, she started a group called the Gingerbread Group. It was for one-parent families. So Sunday afternoon everyone would get together somewhere, normally it was a park or somewhere that didn’t cost any money. And we would all just do a picnic or go for a walk in the woods or take someone’s dog for a walk. She brought people together, and I learned so much from her. She was absolutely dedicated to her community.

We were asked as incoming city councillors to bring something to City Hall that represents how we want to be seen as a councillor. I brought my mother’s wedding ring, which actually, I still wear. Because it’s a circle, to me it means that everyone is included, no one is left out, no one can hide in a corner.

One thing you spoke about in your campaign platform was trying to prioritize youth engagement. What kinds of avenues have you explored to promote this?

Well, to be completely honest, during the campaign I was under the impression I would have a constituency office. Not having a constituency office does change things a bit because you’re not actually there every day to bring youth in, to get to know the youth.

My idea was to bring the youth in to get to know the seniors to get them to work with each other. It’s a bit harder when you’re not in the ward, but we are trying to work with the schools to get them to help seniors. Seniors will contact us and say, “They’re brilliant at shovelling the sidewalk but they don’t do the pathway from the sidewalk to the front door,” so that’s where I want to get the youth involved.

Now in connection to that, your ward, for instance, has High Park—and you’ve done a flash mob before. What role can public space play in building community?

In our ward we’re quite fortunate. Up in the Junction, we have what’s called the Train Station. It’s a property where the owner has not developed it yet, and they built a platform there. And he’s very good at letting the community use it. So [yesterday] we used it for pumpkin carving, we used it during Earth Hour, we used it for Farm Fest, to show the sustainability of vegetables. It’s a place where the community can gather and do events; we show movies there...
So I think community space is vital. We have the Baby Point Gate BIA, brand new just this year, and they don’t actually have a space like that, so you have to work in different ways.

Speaking of youth engagement and public space and pumpkin carving, your family loves Halloween, doesn’t it?

Ah, yes... Well actually, it’s my husband’s love of Halloween. We were the first house in the neighbourhood to have a smoke machine. Because I’m in a valley, and we would fill up the valley with smoke, we were called "The Smoke House".

Swansea Public School takes the children up on a walk at Halloween in their costumes, 600 to 700 kids walking around the neighbourhood, to see the decorated houses so I would always make sure we were decorated. We do a graveyard... We have lights, we have music. We had a metal monster, we had a recyclable robot made out of produce. And we had a microphone and speaker in him at one point so my son would be sitting on the front porch and he knew the kids’s names from school and so he would freak them out completely.

Thank you, councillor, you have a very happy Halloween.

Oh thank you, and you too.

Rob Ford's Fiscal Illusion

In the 169 deputations at the recent Executive Committee all night, citations ranged from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Winston Churchill and… Naomi Klein. The latter was mentioned at least twice in reference to her ‘shock doctrine’ argument as deputants drew parallels between the budget process and the 2007 book. In it, Klein argues unpopular free-market Milton Friedman-type policies are implemented in third world countries through artificial crisis points. Other deputants echoed this sentiment, alleging that the KPMG report was an exercise in empowering private industry. While that may be a secondary benefit, the primary target seems to be an animosity towards the idea of government, as David Rider argues.

The strategy that best fits here isn’t the shock doctrine but the unfortunately named ‘starve the beast’ doctrine (I say unfortunately for the reasons this Shameless article rightfully points out). The doctrine, also supported by Milton Friedman, didn’t have the name applied to it until a 1985 Wall Street Journal Article but was first developed by Republicans in the late 1970s. The underlying idea is to reduce government revenues in order to force it to lower spending in turn. Or, as Ronald Reagan famously put it, “Well, you know, we can lecture our children about extravagance until we run out of voice and breath. Or we can cure their extravagance by simply reducing their allowance”. 

Starve the beast with cookie cutter ideologies

 The policy was enacted with Reagan’s historic 1981 tax cuts. Operative Grover Norquist made sure as many Republicans as possible signed a tax pledge to sustain the idea and threw under the bus those who did not. George W. Bush’s landmark tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 capped off the starve the beast idea. But during these times, deficits soared and government spending was unrestrained—in fact it grew to record levels. Even conservative Bruce Bartlett, an originator of the starve the beast argument when he was an aide for Republican Senator Jack Kemp disavowed it given its negative effects. 

And yet City Hall looks to continue failed ideological policies that are politically popular.  

It's not just the ideologues either. Recently on Twitter left-leaning Councillor Sarah Doucette criticized ultra-centrist Councillor Josh Matlow for voting to repeal the Vehicle Registration Tax (VRT), arguing that it was more prudent to wait until the next budget to do so. Matlow somewhat conceded this but also hedged that he had no regrets for his vote either (how Matlowvian!).

At the same time, a property tax freeze that was not a campaign promise was enacted and Mayor Ford has mused about phasing out the Land Transfer Tax over the next three years despite the hesitation from Budget Chief Mike del Grande. In other words, all of the principal sources of tax revenue have had attempts to be decreased as the city faces a large budget deficit.

Ideological illusions of progress

 But wait, it gets worse. Not only is there a failure to find evidence that decreasing taxes decreases the size of the government in parallel but there are also some findings that it actually increases spending. Berkeley economists Christina and David Romer published an overview of the starve the beast approach and explained the gap with two hypotheses, the first being the ‘fiscal illusion’. This illusion is caused when a tax cut without an associated spending cut weakens the psychological link between spending and taxes and voters demand greater spending. Its opposite is ‘shared fiscal irresponsibility’, where politicians who want higher spending, like those who want lower taxes, don’t pay attention to the deficit and lose control of it. That is, without taxes and spending being addressed in tandem budgets spiral out of control regardless of whether it is a spending increase or tax decrease.

It is the fiscal illusion risk that is most pressing with Team Ford. By separating tax cuts from spending cuts, value from gross costs and rhetoric from reality, Team Ford presents an illusory image of fiscal Toronto. Like the smoke and mirrors of their campaign promises, there is not any planning or co-ordination. The motivation isn’t good policy, it’s strict adherence to resentment of government. Resentment alone isn’t enough to balance the budget as the failure of starve the beast as shown. Instead, the psychological ideology of Team Ford is imbalanced and so too will be the fiscal legacy of this administration.