Another Toronto Star columnist tries out the whole civic government thing

In a column in yesterday’s Toronto Star, Fiorito chronicles his experiences during a recent outing with a public outreach nurse:

Her first patient was a woman who lives alone, is frail and tiny and developmentally delayed. The woman is in her 80s; so was the temperature in her apartment, and there was no relief from the heat or from her age.

The woman had been sitting in front of her building, holding a doll, when Anne Marie first noticed her; she became a patient not long after she was diagnosed with bedbug anaemia.

Yikes. Fiorito notes that the nurse had invited Rob Ford to accompany her on a day in the life of public nurse, but he declined her invitation. So Fiorito accepted the offer in his stead. His point in all this (there’s another piece coming later in the week) seems to be that the city could have had more nurses doing exactly what he describes, but the mayor (through a deferral at the city’s Executive Committee) basically refused the money that the province offered—for free!—to hire them.

Of course, we don’t expect writing like this to change the mayor’s mind (it is in the Star, after all). But this kind of outsourcing to the private sector is just the kind of thing the mayor should support, right? In that case, perhaps the Toronto Public Library could be offloaded to the Globe and Mail’s Saturday book section and transit could be split between the Star’s two giant weekend Wheels sections.

• Fiorito: A tour with the nurse the mayor turned down [Toronto Star]

Images: Joe Fiorito—Toronto Star; crown—K Sandberg; Rosie DiManno—Toronto Star; police hat—Steve Punter