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

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