Our Budgets Tell Us Who We Are: Torontoist Re-post

I contributed this piece to Torontoist on Friday, and seeing as how today is Budgetmas, it seems fit to re-post it here. 

Our Budgets Tell Us Who We Are

The City of Toronto will release its draft budget on Monday. But how can concerned residents respond?

BY DAVID HAINS (GUEST CONTRIBUTOR)

“Ok, put your hands up. Now put your hands down if you live south of Eglinton.” Councillor Shelley Carroll (Ward 33, Don Valley East) was standing at the front of a room on the second floor of OISE. Only a handful of the 100 hands that went up stayed in the air.

“These are the people I need.”

Carroll was participating in an event put on last week by the Wellesley Institute to discuss Toronto’s budget and a recent report by the Institute—Countdown to Zero—arguing that the City could balance the budget without service cuts.

Carroll and the Institute’s director of economic analysis, Sheila Block, each spoke about the technical side of things, like the phony $774 million deficit figure and 34 per cent property tax threat, the structural shortcomings of revenue sources, and the similarity to previous budgets that were solved without across-the-board cuts. But these were facts the audience already knew. They wanted to know how they could they bring together different constituencies. How could they reach that audience north of Eglinton?

It was passionate community engagement that brought about Rob Ford’s biggest defeat since being elected mayor: losing his bid to revamp plans for the Port Lands. A group called CodeBlueTO quickly mobilized long-time activists to gather thousands of petition signatures, create public awareness, and co-ordinate councillors, citizens, and subject experts. Its consistent messaging—that the Waterfront Toronto plan was based on long-term consultation, planning, and community support—was an understandable, authentic, and ultimately winning narrative.

The CodeBlueTO success provides a model for others, like the campaign to save libraries. With tens of thousands of signatures on petitions, overflow attendance at public meetings, and the support of high-profile authors like Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, and Vincent Lam, that campaign (though unnamed) has achieved wide recognition and looks to be heading to substantial successes. Ford has already assured Torontonians that no more branches would be closed, and on Monday night the library board rejected cuts to library hours—including a nay vote by frequent Ford ally Jaye Robinson.

But smaller-scale issues like the Hardship Fund, the Toronto Environment Office, or local museums don’t easily garner the same visibility and resources. It’s a problem that John Campey, executive director of Social Planning Toronto, is well aware of. In response, Campey’s organization has put together a website called Together Toronto, to be launched in the next week or so. We spoke with Campey after the official event wound down, and he explained: “Together Toronto provides a mechanism for people to contact their city councillor automatically…it’s a hoteling site that enables groups passionate about particular issues to get their message across.”

While Together Toronto may prove a useful resource for various constituencies and campaigns, it doesn’t do the legwork of communicating a mass message to those who wouldn’t otherwise hear it. People still need to reach out, like CodeBlue did, with old-fashioned neighbour-to-neighbour legwork.

In addition to Carroll and Block, Trish Hennessy spoke at the Countdown to Zero forum on the need for a unifying narrative, much like CodeBlue’s, to bring together various groups and initiatives in support of city services. A strategist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Hennessy conducted a series of focus groups in September with Ford voters (which she detailed in a must-read blog post) that provided counterintuitive insights into their thinking. Hennessy found that Ford voters admired the mayor’s authentic, “man-of-the-people” style, which wasn’t unexpected, but surprisingly this crossed ideological bounds so much that participants most connected Ford to—of all people—late NDP leader Jack Layton. Ford, like Layton, was deemed trustworthy, possessing the fresh and frank approach needed to shake things up and look after voters’ interests.

But Hennessy also found, for those who are concerned about Ford’s approach to budgeting, that those same voters also value city services. They identified as Torontonians first (as opposed to suburbanites), felt Ford should have represented Toronto at Pride, and voted to get rid of the perceived gravy—such as “chauffeurs”—not slashing services or wages to low-income City workers like building cleaners. In other words, among those voters there was a strong sense of civic pride and hope for the future.

Arguments based on budget details are generally too arcane to be effective. The challenge for engaged Ford critics hoping to affect the course of budget negotiations is to build a narrative around the value of city services that is relevant to the general public—to change the conversation, as Hennessy puts it. Attacks on Ford’s hypocrisy will be far less effective than focusing on the hundreds of seniors who are treated with respect and dignity due to the Hardship Fund, and risk losing safeguards. Instead of talking about debt ratios being artificially high because revenue sources are too limited, those opposed to budget cuts need to tell a story about thousands of low-income children who enjoy gifts thanks to the Christmas Bureau, and Toronto’s collective values.

This focus on the character of the city personalizes issues to make them accessible, visible, and relevant, just as CodeBlue managed to do with the Port Lands. This character-based inclusion also connects traditionally low-information voters to issues based on a general sense of civic pride. Thus, the focus is no longer on downtown vs. the suburbs, or on policy wonks vs. average voters, but on the collective character of the city—a story of what kind of place Toronto wants to be. It’s this conversation—the kind of legacy we want to leave for future generations—that actually underlies the budget.

The draft budget will be released Monday. When it is, newspapers, talk radio, blogs, and Twitter streams will rapidly flood with numbers and statistics. But for Ford critics like Block, Carroll, Campey, and Hennessy, numbers alone don’t determine the strength of the budget, because the budget is also a statement of values and priorities. And whether we live north or south of Eglinton, and no matter where we find ourselves aligned politically, we need to start talking more about those values.

City Hall Hyprocracy

hy·poc·ra·cy  (h-pkr-s)

n. pl. hy·poc·ra·cies

1. The systemic practice of professing beliefs, feelings, or virtues that one does not hold or possess for political purposes; falseness.

2. Exercising principles on an inconsistent basis for political expedience. 

When Rob Ford was elected, voters were promised he was a man of principle who was going to change the workings of City Hall. All it needed was a new sheriff to enforce the new culture fairly and things would change. 


The more that changes, the more that stays the same. 


As detailed in a Toronto Star article, Etobicoke enjoys mechanical leaf pickup that the rest of the city does not. It's the kind of service that Rob Ford and his strongest allies would generally oppose. After all, the Mayor often opposes supporting BIAs on the basis that not every area has them and Mike Del Grande just called the proposal for non-curbside garbage pickup for seniors a 'cadillac premium service,' (the committee was told by city staff that the service already exists). 


The reason the service exists? Windrows (it always comes down to windrows). The idea is that councillors who have windrow clearing support Etobian premium leaf pickup and vice versa. 


In case you're keeping track, this is exactly the gravy and political gamesmanship you're looking for. 


The inconsistency of principles doesn't end there. 


At yesterday's Parks and Environment Committee meeting, councillors voted to institute a $53 fee to use park bake ovens. The ovens are in a handful of parks (Christie Pits, Dufferin Grove) and are used for community events like Friday night pizza nights. It's exactly the kind of thing that Rob Ford would support as a councillor and he would likely oppose the city's nickle and diming for permits, which cover the cost of insurance and cleaning.


The fee would be slightly more understandable if it weren't for the Licensing and Standard Committee last week.


On the agenda was a staff-recommended item (like the ovens) to raise the price of towing vehicles in highway accidents by $60 to $229 (the city does the towing and later bills drivers). This proposed increase was to reflect the cost of towing (it's indexed based) but was soundly criticized and deferred to the spring. 


To be fair, the councillors on this committee aren't the same as the ones on Parks, but they do represent the same city. 


And just because there's a new sheriff in town doesn't mean anything is systemically different when it comes to our preferred system of government passing small motions, hypocracy.   

Will the real conservatives please stand up?

Over in New York magazine, Canadian conservative and former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum has an excellent piece on the Republican party straying from its intellectual roots. Instead, it is now a party that caters to quackery (birthers) and ideologues (no tax increases, ever) and defends itself with name-calling (socialists!). 


Frum points out that when a similar friction occurred in the 1960s between the Goldwater and George Romney Republicans, the moderate Romneys weren't afraid to stand up for their beliefs. That's not the case today in the US, as moderates are either too rare or non-confrontational, and unfortunately it's also what we have in Toronto. 


Frum cites the old adage that, "You're entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts." Sadly, their own facts is what Team Ford conservatives have brought to the table. 


Consider the Twitter conversation that occurred this weekend. First of all, Ford's campaign braintrust (Nick Kouvalis and Mark Towhey) engaged Dave Meslin. This was because Meslin tweeted that Ford ran on a left-wing platform implicitly endorsing Miller because he said 'no service cuts, guaranteed.' Like Edward Keenan in this great article, I'm uneasy about Meslin's 'left-wing' premise but it is a fact that Ford promised no service cuts-guaranteed and that service cuts are deeply unpopular among Torontonians. Ignoring this is at best the selective memory Towhey accuses Meslin of and at worst bringing his own facts to the table that ignore reality. 


The twitter conversation didn't end there. On Sunday, Queens Quay Karen Fraser Macdonald started tweeting about Transit City. Not being able to help myself, I responded. Here's the (slightly edited, for brevity) Storify. In sum, Macdonald- a key part of the Ford campaign- got basic facts wrong about the Eglinton LRT line (lanes of traffic being removed, streetcar v. LRT, where it would run underground) and instead relied on the Fordian campaign rhetoric. 


When Macdonald was asked for underlying evidence for those policy decisions (and assertions that streetcars kill traffic, for instance), none were provided. Nothing on the impact of induced demand, the density requirements for different kinds of development, the terrible planning with the Don Valley or the cost-benefit of burying Eglinton for purely aesthetic reasons at a $2 billion cost (for that money, you could do the Finch LRT twice over. Or rent two chipmunk suits for every Torontonian). Macdonald then finishes with an ad hominem attack, saying that downtowners are not concerned with the suburbs.


The criticism of Team Ford's grasp of the basic facts isn't new, and what they represent is not true conservatism. Like Frum's lamented party, the Towhey/Kouvalis/Macdonald arguments lack evidence-based policy, rely on ideological stereotypes, and either cherry-pick their facts or make them up altogether. It's this kind of process that leads to the complete antithesis of fiscal conservatism with Ford's Folly, the Sheppard and Eglinton lines. 


While Meslin's liberal label might not be accurate to describe the Ford campaign triumverate (or the message to be accurate), they aren't intellectual conservatives either. These policies are the result of what Frum calls the exploitation of conservatives as a market segment (think of Kouvalis' excellent focus groups of which he is proud) rather than a political philosophy.


Shelley Carroll has previously wondered where the Liberals are on council, the likes of Milczyn, Berardinetti and Kelly (who has had his own problems lately) who have ties to the party but don't show it. 


But where are the traditional conservatives, the Bill Davis kind that demand fiscal responsibility with informed, incremental and sustainable planning? 


The likes of Karen Stintz have a responsibility to defend conservatism the way Frum does. If they refuse to stand up for intellectually grounded positions then they, like the increasingly rare moderate Republican, render their ideas to irrelevance. 


And this isn't healthy. It's good to have conservatism in local politics. It improves the dialogue for everyone and challenges the left to strengthen their ideas. 


That tradition is silent right now. It is replaced with the bluster and shallowness of Fordian populism, and everyone is worse off for conservatism's absence. 

Team Ford: Library Edition

Library meeting bingo card created by the always awesome @neville_park at last night's library meeting.  

One important aspect of elections that is frequently forgotten is that voters aren't just choosing who occupies the Mayor's or Premier's or Prime Minister's seat, but an administration and appointees that allow that politician to function. 


So when you elect George W. Bush, you're also getting Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Alberto Gonzalez and Scooter Libby. For the Toronto Library Board, when you elect Rob Ford you get Michael Foderick and Stephen Dulmage. 


The last two library board meetings illustrate the shortcomings of these appointments.


Two meetings ago, Dulmage suggested 38 library closures, the elimination of library computers and the warehousing of books (read Daniel Dale's excellent summary, particularly the last two paragraphs). This meeting, he seemed entirely uninterested in the proceedings, swivelling around in his chair to look at the map behind him and fanning himself furiously (mind you, the room was hot). He even got into a petty argument about Tim Horton's during someone's deputation. All this from a guy who, according to Adam Chaleff-Freudenthaler, was placed on the board at the suggestion of Adrienne Batra, Ford's Press Secretary. 


Which brings us to the more polished Michael Foderick. A lawyer, Foderick has long been in touch with City Hall, from the early days of the Toronto Youth Cabinet (at age 16) to being fellow TPL board member Cesar Palacio's EA. So you would think he brings an understanding of the process that would be beneficial to the board. But, based on last night's meeting, you'd be wrong. 


He put forward a motion that asked to fire the equivalent of up to 60 full-time library employees in spite of City Librarian Jane Pyper's insistence that this would be a safety concern. His motion also called for using $2 million in development charges to fund operating expenses, a policy that would violate provincial law. 


As Janet Davis tried to describe the problems with these motions and how it would hand control to City Hall's budget committee, Foderick argued that she didn't appreciate the subtlety in what he was doing. Which is, if you've ever seen Davis talk about subtlety, like telling the Pope you're more Catholic.


And everyone was exasperated by this. The audience laughed a few times. Visiting councillor Adam Vaughan threw up his arms as he walked out to visit the overflow room. Other board members were unimpressed; it took Dulmage to second Foderick's motion. 


In the end, his requests were referred to library staff for review where they will be turned down at next month's meeting. But you could have seen this coming. After all, this is an individual who, I'm told, is the only person who has ever been banned from speaking on behalf of the Youth Cabinet because he kept speaking out of turn and misrepresenting their interests. 


Rob Ford has his handlers like Mark Towhey and Batra to rein in his more ill-considered words and ideas (or one would like to think). But their appointments do not have that hand-holding, and it's here that we see the out-of-touch (Dulmage) and poorly-thought-out ideas (Foderick) in full force. If these individuals provide an open book to the thinking of Team Ford, then it's not good. 

Quotes of the Day: Norm Kelly and Doug Holyday on Occupy Toronto

Courts make governing in a democratic society quite a challenge

-Norm Kelly in the Toronto Sun, discussing the court's injunction on evicting Occupy Toronto from St. James Park (H/T NOW's Ben Spurr). 


A Trudeau era Liberal MP, perhaps Kelly was wanting to get his war measures act side out. As a Governor-General award winning historian (for research on Pierre Berton's National Dream), he should probably know how the three branches of government work. 


In the same Sun article, Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday comments on the unfair impact the injunction might have on the Santa Claus Day Parade, worrying that it will spoil the day. It's worth remembering that he voted to eliminate the Christmas Bureau (H/T Cityslikr). 

On Occupy Toronto and why Trust Matters

Like the financial system, democracy is predicated on trust in the institutions that serve it and the means by which they're expressed. For finance, that means that people trust banks to protect their money, banks trust each other to reconcile their massive overnight lending, and we all take a leap of faith that money- the tool by which this is expressed- means something.

It's a complicated relationship, one that's easy to take for granted until no one trusts Lehman Brothers or the Icelandic Krona.

And trust is at the root of our democracy, the root of any institution really. It's this characteristic that enables us to defer to authority and consent to be governed. Unfortunately, the public's lack of trust in the Ford administration- and rightly so- erodes the confidence in that institution.

This problem came up today at the City Hall press conference to discuss that confluence of financial and democratic trust, Occupy Toronto's protest at St. James Park.

The story will lead all the papers and trending topics on Twitter, but the Mayor was otherwise occupied and did not speak about it. Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday did an admirable job filling in for the mayor; despite his politics he is a genuine, genial and honest individual and the right replacement for a sensitive subject.

It's a problem that Ford, who often invokes his authority as the elected Mayor, declined to take ownership of an important decision. It's a problem that he wouldn't express himself while limiting the expression of the Occupiers. It's a problem that Holyday cites 'social workers' as the city staff who have had a dialogue with Occupiers, because that misses the point.

It's pretty disrespectful of the Mayor, to both the Occupiers and general citizens. A case can be made that the Occupiers should be moved-Sue-Ann will take care of that- but one can't be made that he should have been there to answer questions. Instead his absence distanced himself from justifying the decision and alienated himself from the democratic process.

The Occupy movement, whatever its flaws and limits may be, is largely built on a mistrust of institutions and the imbalanced power structure provided. It's something we see at City Hall too, where the Mayor's own people don't trust him to speak about the subject and decline the opportunity to build a personal case for why he feels eviction is unfortunate but necessary.

And so confidence in our Mayor erodes once again, but hopefully not the office. We need something to trust, something to believe in, something around which we can build.

We can dislike the Mayor and his actions, but Democracy is too big to fail. So we reform the institution of City Hall with higher expectations, increased vigilance and good ideas. If that can't be done than the currency of our citizenship is further devalued until our democratic deficit becomes a bankruptcy.

Morning Briefing: Memes, Licensing and Standards Meeting, Headlines

So I think I'm going to start providing summaries for the committee meetings each day, both to help in understanding and to better track the decision making process. Although I don't think I'll do headlines and stuff as often, because John McGrath at OpenFile, Stephen Spencer Davis at Toronto Life and Laura McConnell at Spacing do that well already. 
   
Today's meeting is pretty uneventful, it's the Licensing and Standards Committee. There's really only one item that should garner any debate, and that's Paul Ainslie's motion to limit how close ice cream trucks can be to one another. Truck drivers have intense battles over territory and it leads to price wars and vindictiveness. It's a pretty interesting little aspect of the city, as described in this great National Post article by Jane Switzer and on Torontoist by Steve Kupferman and Kelli Korducki.  


My question for Councillor Ainslie is what does he have against the free market for beautiful soft-served swirly goodness? And won't this just mean intense competitions to get there first?


Headlines
Sue-Ann Levy goes for the 'oh, the city shouldn't be investing in silly art when it has a deficit' angle, taking on Noel Harding and his $400,000 project in a priority neighbourhood at Dawes and Victoria. It's an oak bridge structure that contains a stream, native foliage, and solar panels and a wind turbine to provide AC and wifi. It also has a plaza and market square for community events.  


It sounds kind of nice and non-Ferris wheely, and exactly the thing that @HULKMAYOR would want to smash. 

The Toronto Star's top-read story is Mayor Ford standing up to Anonymous, which is exactly what he should say in this spot. A word of warning though, because I doubt Ford lurks 4Chan: they're not Marg Delahunty. 

Liam Lahey's Spacing piece went up Friday and has received less attention than it deserves. It talks about how the development of urban planning as a political force and how visions of Toronto's future have been stunted. 


Generation Meme
Of course, what would a #topoli weekend be without a meme. And this weekend we got two. 


Sunday's was when everyone's favourite smouldering hunk, Ryan Gosling, became a Toronto policy wonk on Tumblr. 


And Saturday's was another hashtag extravaganza- #councilbands- this time started by Youth Cabinet co-chair Claire McWatt, who was featured in this Clamshell article on Thursday. 


Here are some of the best names, in my humble opinion. And yes, I included one of my own.