Preville on Politics

Welcome back. Now gird yourself

Posted on September 4, 2007 by Philip Preville

I had a nice holiday. You too? Peachy! Just don’t ask anyone who works for either Mayor Miller or his close allies how their vacations were. Many had to cancel their travel plans this summer, so they could help strategize and organize what will be an all-out push this fall in support of the proposed new land-transfer and vehicle-registration taxes. Expect a hustings-style campaign that will, in effect, amount to a referendum on David Miller’s plan for the city. By my reckoning, this is very good news.

Word in the corridors of City Hall is that Miller and the 21 councillors who voted with him on the taxes back in July will be very visible and very vocal in their defense of the taxes, which they intend to start calling “taxes,” effectively giving up on their preferred euphemism of “revenue tools.” Back in the summer, the only councillor who hit the talk-radio circuit to defend the taxes was Trinity-Spadina’s Adam Vaughan, who has been equally vocal in his criticism of the mayor’s ostrich-style handling of the issue. The objective of the fall campaign is to pressure the opposition faction on council, led in public by Don Valley East’s Denzil Minnan-Wong and in backrooms by Toronto Danforth’s Case Ootes, (deputy mayor during the Lastman era), to articulate a viable alternative.

Thus far, council’s opposition has floated a bunch of half-baked ideas (Rae days for council employees, no more golf perks, stop forcing private contractors to adhere to the city’s pay scale), but no coherent package of alternatives that would carry a block of votes. This doesn’t mean they can’t come up with one—I believe that a well-crafted package of cutbacks could actually gain widespread popular support (more on that in future posts)—but they’ll need to cobble it together in a hurry. E-Day for this campaign is October 22, when City Council will once again vote on the Mayor’s tax package. It could also end up being doomsday. If Miller loses, he can pretty much throw his entire election platform from last November into the recycling bin.

Comments

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Adam September 5, 2007 at 12:44 p.m.

If the right-wing of Council hasn't been able to put a substantial budget alternative on the table for four years, what makes you think they can get a credible list of cuts together now? It's not as if long-time councillors like Minnan-Wong, Ootes and Shiner, who controlled the purse strings under Lastman, have just found out what the books look like recently.

Matt September 6, 2007 at 4:50 p.m.

Philip, I have a question for you as someone who knows city hall far better than I. Is it really possible that 23 councillors would vote against the new, erm, taxes in a straight up-or-down vote? It seems like a lot of the 'opposition' was quite soft, and included people (like Perruzza) who supported the taxes in principle but wanted to try to wring something out of Queen's Park. Given that a 'no' vote essentially means apocalypse for city services, could things really, conceivably go that way? After the deferral vote most commentators seemed to characterize it as a dumb stunt, and that implementation of the taxes was inevitable in the long run. Is this really the case?

I sure hope so.

Philip Preville September 7, 2007 at 9:01 a.m.

Belated response to Matt's query: I can't imagine the Mayor and his allies losing the next vote on the new taxes. Many councillors, including Suzan Hall, said they'd support the taxes if they could not wring any more money out of Queen's Park with the deferral. That said, the Mayor heads into this fall in a very weak political position, and his allies are taking nothing for granted. What's more, even if he's sure to win the vote, he needs it to not be close: he needs the biggest majority he can muster to prove that he is right and to regain control of council's agenda.

Matt September 7, 2007 at 4:04 p.m.

Thanks--that clears it up significantly.

Cheers
M


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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.


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