QUOTED: mild-mannered city manager Joe Pennachetti on Toronto’s financial situation

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“If you hear anyone—I won’t say who—say we’re broke, it’s incorrect.”

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—Toronto city manager Joe Pennachetti, speaking to students and professionals at a talk sponsored by York University’s law and business schools on Friday. The quote is remarkable because Pennachetti, the city’s most senior bureaucrat, has spent the past three and a half years carefully cultivating an air of neutrality around Rob Ford’s political agenda. For him to suggest—even obliquely—that the mayor’s talking points are nonsense would have been unthinkable a few months ago. The statement may mean that Ford’s post-crack-scandal influence over city staff is even weaker than we thought.