Toronto Life: Preville on Politics

Preville on Politics

Posts with category ‘City Hall’

I have a new home

Posted on May 29, 2008 by Philip Preville

For those of you not yet in the know, this blog “Preville on Politics” goes dormant as of this post. From this point forward, you can find my scribblings at “City State,” an expanded Toronto Life blog that, I am glad to announce, features some beautiful graphic banner by Evan Munday in lieu of a smirking me in the right-hand column. (Never liked that photo.) Henceforth, all smirking will be done exclusively through prose. Come join the newly-rebranded hijinx over here. Continue...


I salivate at the prospect of a Miller-Smitherman-Ford cage match

Posted on May 26, 2008 by Philip Preville

Who will run for mayor in November 2010? Most people don’t care, but the city’s political operatives, apparatchiks and henchmen—they keep a low profile these days, but they are many—definitely do. They are currently busy playing the angles and looking for the ideal candidate. Rob Ford, freshly exonerated…innocent, whatever terminology you want to use, of his domestic abuse case, said he was considering a run at the job. On Saturday, John Barber addressed the open rumours of a George Smitherman campaign, as well as Ford’s musings. What Barber forgot to say was: “Whee! Gird yourself for a mean and nasty fight.” Continue...


Rob Ford: I’m innocent! Whatever! Make me mayor!

Posted on May 22, 2008 by Philip Preville

Of all today’s news reports on the withdrawal of domestic abuse charges against city councillor Rob Ford, only the Globe’s Jeff Gray gracefully captures Ford’s trademark ineloquence. Continue...


Politicians, bureaucrats or the general public: Whose ass would you rather kick?

Posted on May 22, 2008 by Philip Preville

Enjoy wielding authority and lording it over others in full public view? Then head straight to the city hall job board, because it’s chockablock with career opportunities for you. Continue...


The Eglinton Avenue East death trap

Posted on May 14, 2008 by Philip Preville

When I interviewed Councillor Adrian Heaps, who heads the city’s cycling committee, for my column in the current issue of Toronto Life, I asked him if there was anywhere in the city where he thought bike lanes would not work. His answer: Eglinton East, where the cars move so fast at such high volumes that the street might as well be a highway. “I would not put them there right now,” he told me. This morning’s news (“2 dead, 8 hurt”) shows us why. Incidentally, that’s the second median-jumping multi-vehicle crash along that stretch in less than a month (the first didn’t result in any deaths, despite involving multiple cars).

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Privatizing the TTC—how could it be any worse than what we’ve got?

Posted on May 5, 2008 by Philip Preville

I’m gone for the rest of this week, and when I come back we’ll have a brand-spanking-new, totally redesigned—and renamed!—blog to launch in this space. But before I go, I need to point out two items. First, go peek at the very funny separated-at-birth photos of Toronto Mayor David Miller and London Mayor Boris Johnson over on Doug Bell’s blog, Spectator. Second, read Dr. Gridlock’s column in this morning’s Globe, in which he examines the possibility of privatizing part of the TTC, and in which he gets a key component of the logic backwards. Continue...


Transit Riders of Toronto, Unite!

Posted on April 28, 2008 by Philip Preville

I found myself having an unexpected reaction to this past weekend’s transit strike: I was glad there was no sign of the TTC anywhere. No buses, no streetcars, no workers, no management. Over the course of the past four weeks, everything about the negotiations—the demands, the strike threats, the nail-biting, the coverage, the frequent Bob Kinnear appearances on CP24, the rare, pale and ghostly Gary Webster sightings—has left me hot under my white collar. Some commentators, most notably this one, felt that Friday night’s hasty job action represented the moment the TTC employees’ inner kettle finally hit the boiling point. It was the moment mine boiled dry. I was happy to have it all disappear for a couple of days. Continue...


Why not let the kids redesign Leslieville?

Posted on April 23, 2008 by Philip Preville

The battle over big-box retail is heating up in the city’s east end. SmartCentres is planning a 650,000-square-foot retail development on Eastern Avenue near Leslie Street that may include a Wal-Mart. The city has vetoed the plan. The developer has appealed to the Ontario Municipal Board. Asked to declare a provincial interest in the matter, Queen’s Park declined. The matter goes before the OMB next month. We’ve seen this before. Continue...


The magic number for city labour negotiations: $240 million

Posted on April 22, 2008 by Philip Preville

The last time I ran into Bob Kinnear, head of the Amalgamated Transit Union, was last October at city hall, on the occasion of the council meeting to ratify the mayor’s new land-transfer tax. There were lots of union folks in the bleachers that day, including Brian Cochrane of the outside workers’ union and John Cartwright of the Toronto and York Region Labour Council. Now that the city has completed its bargaining with Kinnear and his TTC employees, it can look forward to negotiations with Cochrane and its other unions in the months ahead. One wonders if, after all is said and done, there will be any money left over from the new taxes for anything other than salaries.

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Top two reasons the TTC won’t go on strike (plus one reason why they might)

Posted on April 18, 2008 by Philip Preville

By now, you are either busy making alternate commuting plans for next week or you still have your head buried in the sand about Sunday’s looming 4 p.m. TTC strike deadline. Me, I got my bike tuned up last week. Nevertheless, I see two compelling reasons why a strike will be averted, one for each side of the bargaining table.

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Enough from Bob Kinnear. It’s time for the TTC to speak up

Posted on April 16, 2008 by Philip Preville

Is it just me, or is anyone else being driven batty by the progress of negotiations between the Toronto Transit Commission and its union? It’s not so much the anxiety of a looming strike—any day now, apparently—that gets under my skin as the entire public relations battle surrounding it. In this, the TTC is being totally owned by union head Bob Kinnear, who nonchalantly drops bombs every time he saunters up to the microphone. Among them, the TTC is playing hardball; the TTC doesn’t want to pay workers their full salary when they take time off due to on-the-job injuries; the presence of provincial mediators won’t solve anything; the TTC wants newly hired maintenance workers to take a 25 per cent pay cut; the negotiations are being undermined by the intransigence of TTC general manager Gary Webster. Clearly, the TTC is an evil empire. And what does the TTC have to say for itself in all this? Nothing. Continue...


Is the city throwing vacuum waste into the trash?

Posted on April 14, 2008 by Philip Preville

If you read the stories last week about the Toronto city staff report on vacuum waste, you might have gotten the impression that the idea had been given the green light in the West Don Lands, where Waterfront Toronto would like to proceed with it. Here’s how Geoff Rathbone, the city’s general manager of solid waste, put it to the National Post: “Should they wish to proceed with that, it’s really their decision, not ours…. If something like that was built, we could pick up the material at the end of the pipe. So the decision would be Waterfront Toronto’s or the developer’s.” Continue...


David Miller and the politics of YouTube

Posted on April 8, 2008 by Philip Preville

David Miller has taken his campaign for a Canada-wide handgun ban to YouTube. He is asking people from across Canada to sign a petition that he will personally deliver to Parliament Hill. It’s a fine and worthy objective. It’s also nice to see someone other than John Tory take the lead on the issue of gun violence in the city. Still, I can’t help but notice that our mayor is full of bold initiatives for governments other than his own.

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Schadenford: The arrest of Rob Ford, city hall hoser

Posted on March 28, 2008 by Philip Preville

Poor Rob Ford. If only he’d slept beside a machine all his life like those Orientals from the Orient, he probably wouldn’t be in this pickle. As you surely know by now, Ford was arrested Wednesday on charges of assault and threatening death in a domestic dispute involving his wife. When you heard the news, did you have that weird paradoxical reaction of being simultaneously surprised and not surprised? Shocked and blasé? You know, the kind of vaguely self-aware reaction that would make for a passable media studies paper or maybe, if you’re Lynn Crosbie, another tortured column in the Globe? Because when you think about it, didn’t the latest circus seem inevitable?

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Make the mayor accountable—give him a political party

Posted on March 19, 2008 by Philip Preville

The Globe scored an exclusive with Mayor David Miller, and the result is a headline plucked from a 2005 time capsule: the mayor wants more powers from the province. Nowhere does the story raise the issue of municipal political parties, even though it quotes one councillor—Brian Ashton—at length who supports them. Reading the Globe and Star on this issue is starting to feel awkward. You have to work hard to write around a growing blind spot.

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The genius of Dwight Duncan

Posted on March 13, 2008 by Philip Preville

Mayor David Miller has, for years, repeated that cities need “revenues that grow with the economy.” The unfortunate reality is that the economy doesn’t always grow. A bad year can leave tax coffers dry, and an unexpectedly good year can leave them nice and flush. So Ontario Finance Minister Dwight Duncan’s announcement yesterday was a clever way of sharing both risk and reward: if Queen’s Park has a good year, the city will share in the surplus, but if it has a bad year or a just-OK year, the city gets nothing. Continue...


Pricing Toronto’s roads: Looks like I have some ’splainin’ to do

Posted on March 10, 2008 by Philip Preville

Toronto Life’s April issue is now on newsstands and includes a column by me that lays out the case for road tolls in the GTA—a surprise, perhaps, to anyone who’s been reading this blog long enough to remember when I used to rail against the idea. Among those smirking with satisfaction will be fellow Toronto freelancer John Lorinc, a long-time proponent of road pricing who once challenged me to a blogger’s debate on the issue. I said I’d take him up on it, then never did; I preferred to change my mind without being hectored into it. Except that I haven’t really been converted to the idea. I’ve just become resigned to it.

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Rob Ford insults while the rest of the council wastes time

Posted on March 7, 2008 by Philip Preville

City council met this week. The highlights: half a dozen members of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty stormed the council floor in support of the city’s homeless, and Rob Ford managed to insult the majority of the world’s population when he stepped back in time and announced that “Oriental people work like dogs.” He later stated that he never meant to offend “anybody from any community.” In other words: the highlights were the freaky circus sideshows. As far as the actual business of council is concerned, the only thing worth mentioning is how long it took to accomplish so little.

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The elephant in the room is a party animal

Posted on February 25, 2008 by Philip Preville

This blog will be on hiatus for the rest of this week. This means that there’s no point in checking out my take on tomorrow’s federal budget, because I won’t have one (and we will all be better off as a result). Nor will I bother having an opinion on what John Tory did for those three hours on Saturday, except to say that I hope he had a nice nap and that I’m not surprised by his final decision because I think he has a messiah complex: he believes his party needs him (apparently more than anyone else does). But before I go, I do want to sound off, briefly, on the rejuvenation of the “strong mayor” hullabaloo at city hall.

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Flaherty v. McGuinty: Many cans of whoop-ass later

Posted on February 22, 2008 by Philip Preville

Hot on the heels of Wednesday’s melancholy post about the rotten economy comes the news that federal finance minister Jim Flaherty and Premier Dalton McGuinty are going toe-to-toe over who is responsible for it. There are many conclusions to draw from this spat. The first is that the economy must be pretty bad for two government leaders to be so eager to pin blame. The second is that a federal election must be just around the corner. The third is that the stakes are high, particularly for the entire automobile industry and, in a roundabout way, my old pal Richard Florida.

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Toronto road toll report day

Posted on February 22, 2008 by Philip Preville

The board of Metrolinx meets today. Among the issues sure to be discussed: road tolls, which are discussed in Green Paper #4, which went online for public comments just this week. Mark my words, this one isn’t going away.

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A (vague) new plan for Toronto’s future

Posted on February 21, 2008 by Philip Preville

Ask a panel for unanimity and you get vagueness. The mayor’s fiscal review panel—made up of blue-chip businessmen, academics and labour—released its report at a packed press conference this morning. It’s an 86-page opus full of recommendations, the most concrete—and contentious—of which is a proposal to toll the city’s highways (more on that later.) Contrary to widespread rumour, it does not recommend the privatization of Toronto Hydro, although, to judge from what the panelists had to say this morning, I got the sense that at least some of them wish it did.

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Five reasons Queen’s Park should take over the TTC

Posted on February 15, 2008 by Philip Preville

Councillor Karen Stintz must be enjoying the catbird seat today. Back in October, she was the first to say that the city should hand over the TTC’s subway routes to Queen’s Park. Now Premier Dalton McGuinty has pronounced himself in favour of the Stintz Doctrine. It would be unwise to underestimate the premier’s will on this one, because this is about more than just transit. Here are my top five reasons why Queen’s Park should—and probably will—take over all or part of the TTC.

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In Toronto, users pay—but for what?

Posted on February 13, 2008 by Philip Preville

Now that the hysteria over recreation fees has subsided—a 21 per cent increase for city programs reduced to eight per cent, which is still more than quadruple the inflation rate—perhaps we can now have a sanguine discussion about the philosophical ramifications of user fees. Whether it’s for recreation or trash collection or anything else, the more the city charges for individual services, the more demanding residents will become, and the less sympathetic they will be when the city cries poor, as it so often does these days.

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Raise property taxes all you want…

Posted on February 6, 2008 by Philip Preville

…but don’t mess with hockey. I am at home recovering from the flu, so I missed yesterday’s storm at city hall—but even from my recovery bed I could hear disaster brewing. Tuesday morning’s news of a proposed 18 per cent fee hike for ice time at city rinks was the main topic on The Fan 590. I urge you to pause and digest that information: the all-sports talk radio station—normally devoted to hockey, basketball, football, soccer, fighting, lacrosse and on down to tiddlywinks—was doing a call-in show about municipal user fee policy, and the lines were lit up like the ACC Jumbotron.

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Municipal parties: cast your vote!

Posted on February 1, 2008 by Philip Preville

My column in the February issue of Toronto Life argued that it was time to introduce a party system to city hall. You gotta buy the magazine to read my take, but there are other talented and insightful people besides me writing about it, too. Now the Spacing Wire is polling people on it. Go vote. Continue...


A call from Shelley Carroll

Posted on February 1, 2008 by Philip Preville

I got a call from Shelley Carroll’s office earlier this week, telling me I overlooked some key items in this year’s budget, specifically on issues I have raised previously. Here are two tasty points of crow for me to eat.

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Remember the toilet (or, Changing the budget tune)

Posted on January 28, 2008 by Philip Preville

Mayor David Miller and Budget Chief Shelley Carroll—whose name is increasingly whispered whenever talk turns to the issue of potential Miller successors—today announced what they called the first balanced budget since amalgamation. The truth is that every budget since amalgamation has been balanced; what sets this one apart is that Queen’s Park delivered the bailout in advance, so there was no squabbling over the shortfall. Follow this link to see the city’s platitude-filled, stock-photography-laden budget propaganda: updates on all the same pie charts and bar graphs they issue every year, now unfolding in real-time Technicolor, yet still failing to provide any year-over-year comparisons or, subsequently, any detailed indication of how they managed to pull it off.

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Rating Toronto’s Daycares

Posted on January 25, 2008 by Philip Preville

Earlier this week, the city posted quality ratings on their Web site for 650 daycare centres across the city. The ratings are based not on user reviews, but on inspections by city staff. Every centre is graded on a scale of one to four, with three being the city’s acceptable minimum—and nearly everyone’s acceptable: 96 per cent of all centres scored at least a three. Alas, the ratings are actually quite difficult to find: programmers have buried the scores deep in the site’s architecture (here’s an alphabetical list, but you still have to click through a profile to get to the number), and they haven’t made it easy to compare scores. Which kind of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?

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Transportopia! (or, For whom the road tolls)

Posted on January 21, 2008 by Philip Preville

You can skip tomorrow’s Toronto Star, because here’s what will surely be its front page story: a report recommending every possible road and vehicle tax you can think of—an additional fuel tax of six cents a litre, a vehicle registration fee (which Toronto already has, but which the report says other municipalities should charge too), a $25 annual tax on non-residential parking spaces, and tolls of seven cents per kilometre on all the 400-series highways, as well as the Gardiner, the DVP, and the Red Hill Creek and Lincoln Alexander Parkways.

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Scarlem Scarlem nyah nyah nyah

Posted on January 17, 2008 by Philip Preville

I missed Tuesday’s meeting of the Scarborough Community Council, which means I also missed the tongue lashing they gave Toronto Life over this. Thankfully, the Star was there to cover it for me, though they neglected to mention that the article’s author, Don Gillmor, was in attendance to take his licks. Anyway, Norm Kelly can give me a shin-kicking ‘til my legs turn blue, for all the good it’ll do for his home town. The media is hardly his borough’s biggest problem.

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The top five political miscalculations of 2007

Posted on December 27, 2007 by Philip Preville

A look back at the year that was, through the lens of failure:

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Toilet trouble

Posted on December 21, 2007 by Philip Preville

It suddenly occurs to me that, since I previously linked readers to Shirley Hoy’s memo on the toilet-bowl story, I should also link to the city’s official list of everything they say I got wrong. I could deconstruct it just as I did with Hoy’s memo, but this has gone on long enough. Besides, not one but two press gallery wags have waded in as arbiters anyway. Wouldn’t want to pile on. Continue...


Suck my waste, Toronto

Posted on December 18, 2007 by Philip Preville

Trash collection is one of those basic city services that seems impervious to new technology: you put your trash out at the curb and a truck hauls it away. But what if, like water, sewage and gas, you could collect it all underground? Vacuum-waste collection—which gets a brief mention in the toilet-bowl cover story of Toronto Life’s January issue—is being touted as the future of waste management, and it is part of WaterfronToronto’s vision for its new residential communities in the West Don Lands and East Bayfront areas. Unfortunately, that vision clashes with city hall’s own idea of a bold, trashy future.

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A different kind of review

Posted on December 17, 2007 by Philip Preville

A task force found that staffers have “deep pride” but also face “despair, disillusionment and anger with an organization that is failing them.”

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Dwight Duncan: the Santa of Queen's Park

Posted on December 14, 2007 by Philip Preville

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Someone had to bring Christmas to city hall this year, and, since it sure wasn’t going to be me, thank heaven for jolly Dwight Duncan. His transit funding announcement has lifted everyone’s spirits, including the press gallery staff at the Globe and Mail, who’ve written an unprecedentedly sunny story. Continue...


Shirley Hoy’s small potatoes

Posted on December 13, 2007 by Philip Preville

That’s one hum-dinger of a memo City Manager Shirley Hoy sent to city staff in response to my January toilet-bowl cover story. It paints a far bleaker picture of what’s going on inside city hall than anything I wrote. The cupboard has to be pretty bare if the greatest success she can point to is amalgamation, which everyone else agrees was a scorched-earth disaster, and which lies at the heart of everything that’s gone wrong since.

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The Hoy memo

Posted on December 13, 2007 by Philip Preville

Shirley Hoy, City Manager, circulated the below memo as a response to Toronto Life's cover story about the challenges facing Toronto's municipal government.

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The Street Food Furniture Program

Posted on November 27, 2007 by Philip Preville

Who knew Toronto’s hot dog carts were such an eyesore of non-conformity? Yesterday, Mayor Miller put the kibosh to councillor John Filion’s proposal to borrow $700,000 to build 35 new-fangled street-food carts. The carts are part of the Filion-led charge to diversify Toronto’s street eats: different foods need different gear, so the hot dog carts won’t do. Now that Filion has lost out on the $700,000 loan, he’s looking for alternative financing. He’s determined to maintain control over the 35 prototypes. As he told the Star’s Vanessa Lu: “We don’t want a repeat with what happened with hot dog carts. We want a uniform look. We want something that’s good for branding the city as a food destination.” Continue...


I wouldn’t mind an increase in my water bill…

Posted on November 13, 2007 by Philip Preville

… such as the 9 per cent hike proposed by council’s executive committee yesterday, if Toronto Water was not in the habit of frittering the money away. Back in September, the city’s auditor general pointed out that, in addition to overtime scams of various kinds, Toronto Water’s emergency repair contracts were so badly managed that cost overruns had become the department’s new normal. Now comes another audit of Toronto Water, which goes before audit committee later this week. It doesn’t paint a pretty picture.

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This tax debate brought to you by MasterCard

Posted on October 23, 2007 by Philip Preville

Those among you with Globe access should read John Barber’s column this morning. He’s right on the mark. The only way to paint a picture of what has been lost in this debate is to consider what might have been. Pretend for just a moment that David Miller had won the vote on his new taxes back in July:

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Today’s Tax Vote: Five unanswered questions

Posted on October 22, 2007 by Philip Preville

Today city council holds a final vote on whether to adopt Mayor David Miller’s proposal for a land-transfer tax and a vehicle-registration fee. Hopefully. Anything is possible. Now that Miller has announced a panel of experts to review city finances, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone moved a motion to defer a final vote yet again, pending the experts’ report in February. Even if the taxes are adopted today, it will only signal the beginning of a fresh round of teeth gnashing and garment rending among bickering councillors. To get us started on the post-vote chatter, here are my top five still-unanswered questions from Toronto’s Great Tax Debacle of 2007.

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Why a panel of experts?

Posted on October 19, 2007 by Philip Preville

Today’s big city hall news is that Mayor David Miller has named an independent fiscal review panel, comprised of six well-reputed Torontonians, to look over the city’s finances. The mayor wishes to counter his critics who complain about “wasteful spending at city hall” but who are never more specific in their criticism than that. And the ultimate measure of the panel’s success will lie not in what it finds or what recommendations it makes but in whether or not it shuts those people up.

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The incredible disappearing budget cuts

Posted on October 15, 2007 by Philip Preville

First police. Then TTC. Then community centres and ice rinks. Now the Sunday closures of libraries have become phantom budget cuts too. Good thing the city is only facing pretend bankruptcy.

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The five stages of tax grief

Posted on October 2, 2007 by Philip Preville

It was the psychologist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross who first mapped out the five stages of grief, which we experience with the death of a loved one: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. As with death, so it goes with taxes. The loss of disposable income is its own trauma. When a new tax is introduced, citizens would rather pretend it’s not happening; when forced to confront it, we get angry, and we’ll rage, rage against any new tax until someone calmly ushers us through the rest of the grieving process. That, in a nutshell, is what Mayor David Miller did last night.

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Councillor Stintz wants you to apologize

Posted on September 28, 2007 by Philip Preville

Karen Stintz is among the most effective performers in the political theatre of city council. She is smart and quick witted. She is a forceful orator with a vocal intonation and timbre that resonate clearly in the chamber, as opposed to the monotone, adenoidal blubberings of so many others men and women on council. She is a deft communicator, able to quickly define an issue, ask pointed questions and back her opponents into a rhetorical corner. And she is really, really good at appearing and sounding really, really insulted.

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Dartboard Miller

Posted on September 28, 2007 by Philip Preville

On Wednesday, Mayor David Miller rose in council chambers and introduced a motion to reverse the Monday closings of community centres. For his actions, his opponents—who have been fighting for weeks to get the centres reopened—tried to beat him senseless. It was an entertaining show, the kind you’d never see in Ottawa or at Queen’s Park, where Question Period is limited to 40 minutes a day and each question and answer is limited to less than 60 seconds. Under the clamshell’s rules, every councillor had the right to grill the mayor for a full five minutes, and all those who oppose Miller’s tax plan signed up to take their shots.

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Quoth the mayor: a two-month synopsis

Posted on September 20, 2007 by Philip Preville

I’ve been perfectly clear. The city is facing a crisis. We cannot run a deficit. We need these new revenue tools. Everyone understands that. Torontonians understand that. Members of council understand that. Without new revenue tools, there will be cuts to city services. Council has spoken. I respect the will of council. I will now cut services. These cuts are necessary. There will be cuts to police services. No, there will not be cuts to police services. I have been perfectly clear.

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UPDATE: Councillors inundated with pro-tax emails

Posted on September 14, 2007 by Philip Preville

The Web site launched yesterday at a rally led by Mayor David Miller, www.fairtaxes.ca, encourages people to “click here to write to your city councillor” and tell them you support Miller’s Fair Tax plan. Click on the link, and what you get is a form letter that goes not to your councillor, but to all councillors. The site barely been up for one day—it’s only noon as I write this—but already every councillor’s inbox is overflowing with more than 1,300 emails.

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The tax debate meets the race for Queen's Park

Posted on September 13, 2007 by Philip Preville

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This morning Mayor David Miller, flanked by a bevy of city councillors and surrounded by a supportive audience, launched a public education campaign on his taxation proposal—now called the Fair Tax Plan. Anyone who’s been reading this blog for the last four months knows that this initiative comes about four months too late, but oh well. Better now than never. And yet, it could end before it has barely begun: council is not scheduled to vote on the tax plan before October 22, but Miller is now calling for a special meeting of council to vote on the new taxes before the end of September.

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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.

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The things I’ll miss while on vacation

Posted on August 10, 2007 by Philip Preville

I’m off on vacation, so this blog will go dormant until after Labour Day, at which time I’ll be sinking my teeth into the provincial election campaign. Two things before I go. One: if the heat gets so bad that the province is forced to implement rolling blackouts, then John Tory will be Premier on October 11. Two: I’m glad I will miss out on City Manager Shirley Hoy’s much-anticipated press conference today, in which she will explain how she will cut $100 million from the city’s budget. The budget shortfall is so big that it has become a political issue, not an administrative one. The sooner she gets out of the way and lets the slings and arrows fly between the rival factions at city hall, the better.

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Kicking some Ashton

Posted on August 8, 2007 by Philip Preville

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Updated: Old news: Mayor Miller asked Brian Ashton for his resignation and got it. Not so old news: even though Councillor Gord Perks apologized for calling Ashton a weasel, many in the commentariat are essentially calling him that. Today's news: Ashton is busy defending himself. Tomorrow’s news, today: in the three weeks since the vote, Ashton’s decision to cast his lot against the Mayor has done far more good than harm, and in the long term it will do still more good and even less harm. In about a year’s time we’ll all be thanking him.

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The Bermuda Triangle in West Queen West

Posted on August 3, 2007 by Philip Preville

Lots of developments in the WQW Triangle file the last two weeks. The most recent development is that the city is being given a grand opportunity to really, really stick it to the Ontario Municipal Board, which, astonishingly, it might just decline.

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Good news for sports radio junkies

Posted on August 3, 2007 by Philip Preville

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It’s been a slow week, but this is news to shake up the Toronto sports-media scene: AM640 is going to turn their Leafs Lunch show with Bill Watters into Leafs Drive Home, an effort to steal some numbers from Bob McCown’s Prime Time Sports on The Fan 590, which rules the roost in this town. If, like me, you’ve ever found youself listening to McCown’s in the afternoon show in frustration—listening, and waiting, and wondering when the hell he’ll ever stop with the pregnant pauses and the pointless chitchat and calling Nick Kypreos a Greek (har har) and finally get around to actually saying something interesting, which is the job he’s paid so handsomely to do—then you’ll welcome this news. Maybe McCown will shape up.

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The great tax debate heats up

Posted on August 1, 2007 by Philip Preville

Ever since he lost that vote on the vehicle-registration and land-transfer taxes, mayor David Miller has been saying all the right things. Today comes news that Premier Dalton McGuinty and Miller have already mapped out a path to their preferred happy ending. Not so fast: today Ontario Progressive Conservative party leader John Tory meets with a select group of city councillors regarding the city’s fiscal situation. Council’s right-wingers still think they can defeat the new taxes when the issue comes up for a vote again in October. Tory will no doubt announce his party’s intention to upload costs. He will also probably do a favour for his Conservative councillor friends and expound on the city’s need to be more frugal. Hopefully Tory will do us all a favour and compel council’s opposition to pull together a coherent alternative, which they have yet to do.

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How Toronto will eventually tax cigarettes

Posted on July 27, 2007 by Philip Preville

Funny thing happened back when the city was still mulling over its many new revenue-taxing power-tools. One of the powers under consideration was a levy on cigarettes. Chatting with Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong in his office, he pointed out just how many small, independently-owned convenience stores there are in the city. Bazillions. Some crazy figure. Anyway, Minnan-Wong says to me, these entrepreneurs all depend on selling tobacco to earn their living. “What do I tell them if we tax cigarettes?” he asked. My response: “You tell them you’re going to let them sell beer and wine.” I was only half-joking, but the scenario may yet come true.

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The sound of bureaucrats laughing

Posted on July 23, 2007 by Philip Preville

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When she met with the media on Friday, City Manager Shirley Hoy, city hall’s top bureaucrat, didn’t mince words about the depth of the city’s financial crisis: even if Queen’s Park agreed to upload the cost of social services tomorrow, she explained, Toronto would still need to raise new revenues of its own. When asked what could possibly have been gained, then, by council’s decision to defer a final vote on the matter, she offered a pregnant pause with a purse-lipped smirk—trying hard to conceal a smile, I thought—before saying, simply, “I can’t speculate.” This was a bureaucrat’s sneaky sense of humour shining through: unable to comment on the ineptitude of her political masters, she let the question speak for itself. There was nothing to be gained by a deferral, and councillors would know that if they’d only been paying attention.

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Perfectly clear?

Posted on July 20, 2007 by Philip Preville

Mayor David Miller says he’s been clear all along about the consequences of failing to adopt the proposed new revenue tools. Hmmm. The city’s Web site includes a page full of reports, facts and figures from the last five months here. Nowhere can I find anything that spells out such consequences as the service cuts the city is now contemplating. I point your attention, in particular, to Question #2 of May’s public consultations, which misleadingly asks: “What type of expenditures should the new revenues be used for: Enhanced existing services? City-building type initiatives? To help solve the fiscal imbalance?”

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So like I was saying about manufacturing a crisis

Posted on July 19, 2007 by Philip Preville

The mayor is belatedly with the program.

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The defining issue of our time…

Posted on July 18, 2007 by Philip Preville

… is of course climate change. But I have been sounding alarm bells on this blog about economic prosperity for a while now. And if you read this new report from TD Bank, you might, like me, come to the conclusion that, in this city and in this province, prosperity ought to have at least equal billing with the environment. In fact, prosperity ought to be the driving force behind every initiative at City Hall, and the defining issue of the coming provincial election.

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How not to handle a political hot potato

Posted on July 17, 2007 by Philip Preville

If a government wants to introduce new taxes, it helps to manufacture a crisis. You have to make it seem as if there is no choice but to raise taxes, by poisoning the alternative: voting against new taxes means closing recreation centres and swimming pools, it means trash in the streets, and so on and so on. This is exactly what David Miller said yesterday, the day he lost a crucial vote on the proposed new land transfer and vehicle registration taxes. Too little too late: Miller has been conspicuously silent on this issue up until yesterday, and the voting result amounts to one very badly fumbled hot potato.

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Cesar’s Palacio

Posted on July 16, 2007 by Philip Preville

[UPDATED] What other name could the city possibly give to the casino proposed by the councillor for Ward 17 – Davenport, if they choose to adopt it? Palacio’s proposal to study a casino is just one item on a busy agenda full of high-profile items, including off-leash areas for dogs, official plan amendments for the West Queen West Triangle, a new lawsuit against the city from Porter Airlines (how about that?) and of course the city’s proposed new land-transfer and vehicle-registration taxes. Palacio proposes the casino as a means of avoiding the new taxes. But there’s an odd similarity between the two proposals.

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Two strikes against the bohemian city

Posted on July 12, 2007 by Philip Preville

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Everyone’s been aflutter since the weekend over the news that creative-cities guru Richard Florida, who encourages cities to embrace their bohemians, will soon be living and teaching in the city. It was such good news that it took everyone’s eye off the ball in the West Queen West Triangle, the front line in Toronto’s battle for bohemian ascendancy, where Mayor David Miller has been dealt another blow.

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Yet another argument against congestion pricing

Posted on July 10, 2007 by Philip Preville

…can be found in this report, which will go before Budget Committee today. You can’t price the roads as an incentive to take transit when there’s no room left on the bus.

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Act Up, where are you?

Posted on July 9, 2007 by Philip Preville

Today, when the Board of Health meets at city hall, on the agenda is a report recommending that the city ask Queen’s Park include the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) vaccine as a publicly-funded service for females aged 9 through 26. Excellent news. Now: what about men? More specifically, what about gay men?

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Dogs have no rights

Posted on July 5, 2007 by Philip Preville

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Quick reaction to today’s news: owning a pet in the city is a privilege that comes with many responsibilities and no rights whatsoever. This is not the current reality, but I believe it ought to be, and while I try to be pragmatic in my approach to most things, on this one I take a hard line.

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The Floating Rocket Lives! Maybe!

Posted on July 4, 2007 by Philip Preville

Not along the Don or the Humber, as I foolishly suggested, but on Lake Ontario, from Bluffer’s Park and Humber Bay Park. Just an idea for now, but an appealing one, and one that would go a long way towards making Toronto feel like the waterfront city it’s supposed to be.

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The happy-go-lucky, cycle-commuting councillor

Posted on July 4, 2007 by Philip Preville

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Glenn De Baeremaeker is unfailingly one of the happiest and most ebullient members of city council. I hadn’t met him up close until just last week, but even at the press gallery’s hundred-foot distance to the council chamber floor you can feel the positive energy he radiates. This has bugged me for months now. The guy seemed to me too bloody happy in his job, which is kind of grating. But now that I’ve met him I understand why he carries such a spring in his step: it’s the high endorphin levels that he gets from cycling to work every day. De Baeremaeker is the councillor for Scarborough Centre, and his home is more than 20 kilometres from city hall, or a full hour each way. I accompanied him on his morning commute last Thursday, and believe me, that’s a load of endorphins. (I took a couple of photos on the rare occasions when we paused, including once to call an assistant and once to pet a puppy.)

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Visionary and incendiary

Posted on June 29, 2007 by Philip Preville

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Those of you who read my column in the June issue of Toronto Life already know just how disorganized the city’s planning bureaucracy is, but it appears the politicians in charge of the department are no better: only three members of council’s Planning and Growth Management Committee showed up for Thursday morning’s meeting, leaving it short of quorum. As a result, guest speaker Greg Clark, a British consultant and one of the world’s foremost experts on urban economic growth, said a lot of fascinating, visionary, and incendiary things to a bunch of empty chairs. Here are the highlights:

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Green whine

Posted on June 26, 2007 by Philip Preville

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Council’s executive committee yesterday approved Mayor David Miller’s climate-change plan. But despite the unanimous vote, a few of the suburban councillors in attendance—led by Etobicoke Centre’s Gloria Lindsay Luby—were visibly nervous about the proposal to ban gas-powered two-stroke engines, i.e. lawn mowers and leaf blowers, by 2010. They are clearly worried about votes. And they ought to be. You can make fast enemies of people by outlawing their garden tools.

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Transit City Revisited

Posted on June 26, 2007 by Philip Preville

Back when Toronto’s Transit City proposal for a new network of light-rail transit lines was first announced, I and many others had a bit of a laugh over the fact that it was a plan without money. So here’s a belated update: just before I went away on vacation last week, the McGuinty government announced its transit vision for southern Ontario, which includes a promise to fund two-thirds of the cost of Transit City. So now we know why the city rushed Transit City into being—it wasn’t for the federal or provincial budgets, but because the provincial Liberals wanted a plan they could fund come election time.

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Make mine 75 litres

Posted on June 21, 2007 by Philip Preville

I’ve had to go AWOL this week. Alas for me, I missed out as council adopted the trash-charge trial balloon they’ve been floating for what feels like years now. I’ve never blogged about it, so just for the record: it’s a fine idea. Pay-for-use in garbage makes sense on many levels—far more than I’m willing to delve into during a week off. Away I go now. Back with regular posts next week.

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Taking a toll on the city

Posted on June 15, 2007 by Philip Preville

This morning Toronto City Hall released its Climate Change, Clean Air and Sustainable Action Plan, a truly remarkable policy proposal with many laudable recommendations, including a massive expansion of the bicycle-lane network and a ban on leaf blowers, which, as I argued for in one of my very first posts on this site, is a fine idea. The plan also suggests road tolls, which, as I argued some time ago on this site, are stupid. They’re still stupid, and the mayor knows it, which is why he’s already full of caveats about it.

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Crash course on the Canadian economy

Posted on June 14, 2007 by Philip Preville

If you’ve ever bothered to peek at my blogroll down there on the right, you may have wondered why I bother linking to Statistics Canada. Here’s why: Anyone who’s interested in getting tomorrow’s news today should subscribe to StatsCan’s bulletin, The Daily. At least twice a week you’ll find information in there that will serve as fodder for the next day’s headlines. Like this tidbit from today, from which it’s easy to deduce that income taxes will likely make a comeback as an election issue.

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Michael Thompson, MPP?

Posted on June 11, 2007 by Philip Preville

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City Councillor David Shiner has already announced he will be running for the Ontario John Tory Party in Willowdale, but at this weekend’s convention of the No-Name Party there were whispers that another “veteran Toronto councillor” will also be running provincially come October 10. The identity of said councillor remains under wraps—apparently he or she has yet to make a final decision. I have no idea who it is any more than you do, so let’s have some fun guessing.

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Planning without money

Posted on May 25, 2007 by Philip Preville

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This Saturday, May 24, People Plan Toronto, a coalition of residents’ associations, will be hosting a Neighbourhood Planning Summit at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design. (Their slogan: “Do you think city planning is