Rob Ford asks Queen’s Park for money just days after claiming Toronto has $50 million to spare
It’s never easy for a mayor to wrangle funding from Queen’s Park, but the process is especially tricky when that same mayor spends his days telling the world that his city has cash to spare.
This is exactly Rob Ford’s situation. Right now, at a special city council meeting he called just for the purpose, Ford is leading a campaign to submit a request to the provincial government for help paying off an estimated $106 million in damages related to December’s ice storm. A report from the city manager notes that the province has, in the past, been relatively tight-fisted with disaster-relief money. We suppose it never hurts to ask.
But ice-storm-saviour Rob Ford has a doppelgänger, and his name is I-can-cut-your-taxes Rob Ford. On Wednesday, at a meeting of city council’s budget committee, Ford told reporters that he has a way of cutting $50 million out of the 2014 municipal budget. Savings of that magnitude would enable the city to hike property taxes 1.75 per cent in 2014, as opposed to the staff-recommended hike of 2.5 per cent. Ford has not elaborated on how, exactly, he’d achieve those savings. From what we know of this year’s budget, it seems unlikely that there’s an easy way to do it.
Think about this situation from premier Kathleen Wynne‘s perspective. She may be able to come up with some money for Toronto. Or, she could let Ford be the one on the hook for funding, since he seems so sure he’s up to the task. Why should the province risk a tax hike when Toronto won’t?
Didn’t RoFo say something to the effect that the (Toronto) taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for the ice storm clean-up. He seems to have forgotten his own mantra–that there is only one tax payer. Asking Queen’s Park to help pay just spreads the pain across the entire province.
Why don’t we see this same philosophy from him when it comes to paying for new subways? RoFo favours more of a user-pay model for funding subways yet he favours the use of general tax revenue at the provincial level to help get the city off the hook for the ice-storm costs. But RoFo has never been one to let himself be constrained by politically inconvenient traits such as consistency. He is nothing if not consistently inconsistent.
Rob Ford says a lot of things.
How long before this video plays? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZM8c56P5UA
Not that it’s ever easy to find truth or logic in the words of Rob Ford but this might be a particularly difficult time. This fool would say ANYTHING right now to be reelected, so count on lots more lies and idiocy in the days to come. I wish he’d just go back to hell already.
Queen’s
Park should tell him to suck it up and do the work. For a man who keeps
on harping on how much money he’s saving the City, he can afford to
invest some of the ‘gravy train’ savings into repairing it. Or maybe he
and some of his ‘regular folk’ can get off their fat asses and do the
work themselves.
Then again, he probably should have thought about ‘contingency funds’, when he canned the fully paid-for Scarborough LRT in favour of a tax-increasing subway to nowhere.
Remember, this man cannot think. He can issue catch phrases and mindless sound bites like “stop the gravy”, “I’m the greatest mayor ever” and “no tax increases”. He’s a failure on all accounts. The man is a clueless Cadillac driving, mansion owning, trust fund kid.
“Saving money” by cutting back on maintenance (pruning) of the trees, and other cutbacks got Toronto in this mess. Now its payback time, and its costing Toronto more. Beg away, but put back the money needed in the budget for maintenance.