Preville on Politics
October 2007 Archive
Transit's Gaping Maw
You know how Queen’s Parkies like to observe that health care costs eat up more and more of its budget, to the point where they may become nothing more than a group-insurance administrator? The same thing is happening in Toronto, in this case with the TTC. City Hall is no longer a city hall; it’s the most beautiful and elaborate transit agency headquarters ever.
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Uploading the TTC
Persistent rumour holds that Queen’s Park is willing to take over all or part of the TTC. At least one councillor favours the idea. No one knows for sure what the plan is, though certainly Adam Giambrone is not treating the idea like a rumour, and nor should you. If you’re Dalton McGuinty, you are probably looking at the situation like so:
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This tax debate brought to you by MasterCard
Those among you with Globe access should read John Barber’s column this morning. He’s right on the mark. The only way to paint a picture of what has been lost in this debate is to consider what might have been. Pretend for just a moment that David Miller had won the vote on his new taxes back in July:
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Today’s Tax Vote: Five unanswered questions
Today city council holds a final vote on whether to adopt Mayor David Miller’s proposal for a land-transfer tax and a vehicle-registration fee. Hopefully. Anything is possible. Now that Miller has announced a panel of experts to review city finances, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone moved a motion to defer a final vote yet again, pending the experts’ report in February. Even if the taxes are adopted today, it will only signal the beginning of a fresh round of teeth gnashing and garment rending among bickering councillors. To get us started on the post-vote chatter, here are my top five still-unanswered questions from Toronto’s Great Tax Debacle of 2007.
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Why a panel of experts?
Today’s big city hall news is that Mayor David Miller has named an independent fiscal review panel, comprised of six well-reputed Torontonians, to look over the city’s finances. The mayor wishes to counter his critics who complain about “wasteful spending at city hall” but who are never more specific in their criticism than that. And the ultimate measure of the panel’s success will lie not in what it finds or what recommendations it makes but in whether or not it shuts those people up.
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Balance-sheet junkie alert!
Nerd cage match: The Toronto Sun’s Sue-Ann Levy proposes an alternative city budget which she claims could save the city $440 million. Spacing Wire’s Adam Chaleff-Freudenthaler, clearly peeved, tries to take her down line item by line item. None of it is all that enlightening, but the snippiness sure is fun. Continue...
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Architecture junkie alert!
This week’s edition of The New Yorker—arguably the world’s best magazine, especially for cultural criticism—features an essay by architecture critic Paul Goldberger on Will Alsop’s Tabletop building for OCAD. His praise is effusive. And the accompanying watercolour image, by Jean-Philippe Delhomme, is a delight.
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The incredible disappearing budget cuts
First police. Then TTC. Then community centres and ice rinks. Now the Sunday closures of libraries have become phantom budget cuts too. Good thing the city is only facing pretend bankruptcy.
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Up Your MMP
Today’s newspaper punditry is insisting that the issue of electoral reform is dead. Fine. I’ll shut up about it too, after these last words.
Continue...How Rude
On TVO last night Steve Paikin asked me for my take on the election results, but before I could answer I was pre-empted by Dalton McGuinty’s victory speech. I wish the premier would not jump the queue like that. Anyway, what I was trying to tell Paikin was this: for all the constant conflict between Toronto’s downtown and its inner suburbs, or between the 416 and the 905 regions, last night the entire GTA spoke with one voice and voted overwhelmingly Liberal. And they did so despite the fact that the Liberals basically promised them nothing—no new commitments on uploading, no money for social housing or transit operating costs, nothing. The Liberals have been given carte blanche a mandate to do whatever they want in the GTA and with the GTA—to treat the GTA as its plaything or, more likely, as some kind of massive urban experiment. Which could actually be good news, because the GTA’s prosperity has become far too important to be entrusted to its small, petty local governments.
Continue...Risky Business
NDP Leader Howard Hampton began today’s final day of campaigning in Toronto with two stops at two subway stations along the TTC’s Bloor line. In both locations he stumped briefly with local candidates and shook a minimum number of hands before hopping back on his bus; rather than ride the rocket, he chose to clog up downtown streets on his way from one subway station to another. Why? Because in the subway he’d have to meet real voters, which, in the language of campaign strategists, is called a “high-risk situation.”
Continue...Last day campaign tidbits
A few final thoughts as election day approaches:
• Howard Hampton made consecutive campaign stops this morning at two TTC stations on the same line—Chester and High Park—but didn’t ride the subway to get from one to the other. Continue...
Hampton’s tirade
NDP leader Howard Hampton lashed out at the media yesterday for paying too much attention to faith-based schooling at the expense of the real issues. This blog stands guilty as charged but unrepentant. The real issues, according to Hampton, are seniors in soiled diapers. Leaving aside the fact that soiled diapers are not the kind of thing anyone wants to talk about, ever—not to mention the fact that other “real” issues of poverty, schooling and seniors’ care have received quite a lot of attention in the newspapers, on the Web and on public-affairs programs like TVO’s The Agenda, where I will be helping with election-night coverage—there’s a perfectly good reason why such issues haven’t been as prominent: they’re a wash with voters.
Continue...Voodoo news to me
Last night on TVO’s The Agenda, Stephen Maynard, the NDP candidate in London-Fanshawe, told Steve Paikin that the NDP would create a “Bank of Ontario” that would set its own interest rate. As policy ideas go, it is a surefire award winner for Voodoo Economics. Not even a separate Quebec envisions having its own central bank.
Continue...Political wars on the Web
A curious bit of breaking news: the excellent political blog DemocraticSpace, a favourite of political junkies that also serves as a massive compendium of riding-by-riding information, exposed its own case of online political fraud yesterday. It appears that some Liberal Party hacks are logging on to the site and posting comments under multiple pseudonyms, in order to stack the site with Liberal-friendly spin. (It is with stunning conviction that such Liberals agree with themselves and their alter egos. “You are so right Ron!!!” writes Mark, even though both happen to be the same person.) Yet this is just one of many hot spots along the political battlefront of the World Wide Web, which is riddled with two-bit spies and vandals. And the best cat fights are often to be found amid Wikipedia’s political biographies.
Continue...The five stages of tax grief
It was the psychologist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross who first mapped out the five stages of grief, which we experience with the death of a loved one: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. As with death, so it goes with taxes. The loss of disposable income is its own trauma. When a new tax is introduced, citizens would rather pretend it’s not happening; when forced to confront it, we get angry, and we’ll rage, rage against any new tax until someone calmly ushers us through the rest of the grieving process. That, in a nutshell, is what Mayor David Miller did last night.
Continue...What’s up John Tory’s sleeve now?
Shortly after I wrote Friday afternoon’s post, the dam broke. Within an hour I was handed the results of a poll that showed the Liberals at 43 per cent—their highest level of support all year—and the Tories down to 33 per cent and bleeding. So what looked like a stalemate on Friday now looks like a runaway Liberal majority. At noon today, John Tory will make an announcement designed to make the issue of faith-based schools go away. Good luck.
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Philip Preville
Veteran freelance writer Philip Preville lived much of his life in Montreal and Edmonton before he was lured, like so many Torontonians before him, by the promise of more work and a better living. A National Magazine Award winner and former Canadian Journalism Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Massey College, Preville writes Toronto Life’s politics column. He lives with his wife and one-year-old son in Riverdale, just close enough to the Don Valley Parkway that he can hear it when he steps outside his house—but just far enough away that it doesn’t keep him awake at night. On his office wall hangs a 1938–39 press pass belonging to his grandfather, Elias Gannon, who wrote for the Montreal Star.
Latest blog entries:
- Toronto: A nice place to live, but I wouldn’t want to visit
- The Eglinton Avenue East death trap
- Privatizing the TTC—how could it be any worse than what we’ve got?
- Toronto incomes are on the decline (or, The Friday Pessimist, Thursday edition)
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Postings by date:
- May, 2008
- April, 2008
- March, 2008
- February, 2008
- January, 2008
- December, 2007
- November, 2007
- October, 2007
- September, 2007
- August, 2007
- July, 2007
- June, 2007
- May, 2007
- April, 2007
- March, 2007
