"Bad news for Ford: it gets harder" (Toronto Star, Oct 24th)
From the Star opinion page today. I know the Fords don't bother with The Star but they might want to wise up and pay a bit of attention to it.
This op-ed piece is not the best of writing, but the content is good.
I appreciate the author's use of the expression "The Fords" over and over again.
http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/article/1074221--bad-news-for-ford-it-gets-harder?bn=1
Bad news for Ford: it gets harder
Love him or hate him, there’s no denying that after being elected just one year ago Mayor Rob Ford has made a mark on Toronto. He’s kept some promises while breaking many others and along the way delivered concrete change — both good and bad.
Let’s start with the good. He cracked down on city councillors’ office expenses, ending official tolerance for wasting taxpayers’ money on costumes, parade beads and other rubbish. Ford drove a stake through the heart of some dubious proposals, like tearing down the Gardiner Expressway and building an arena with four ice rinks stacked one above the other. And he ended transit workers’ right to strike — a measure the Star had urged since the 1990s.
It’s too early to add some other initiatives to the “plus†side of Ford’s ledger although they, too, might turn out well. The mayor’s push to privatize garbage collection for 165,000 homes between Yonge St. and the Humber River has resulted in a promising bid from a Pickering company. That might eventually save the city as much as $100 million. But the winning bid is so low there’s some doubt over the firm’s reliability. It will take a while to see if Toronto’s garbage actually ends up in good hands.
Also unknown is the outcome of Ford’s drive to privatize three city-owned performance centres and the Toronto Zoo. This could pump some welcome cash into the city’s cobwebbed coffers but a successful result depends on finding suitable buyers and a worthwhile price. Neither might be available. Still, Ford has done well to at least investigate such sales.
If that’s all he had accomplished in his first year, Ford could well be described as a promising and prudent mayor. Sadly, neither word applies. There’s more — much more — to his record.
One of his first acts was to foolishly kill Transit City. Displaying staggering short-sightedness, Ford axed a fully funded light-rail expansion in favour of building an unnecessary subway costing $4.2 billion. It’s money the city doesn’t have.
Indeed, managing money has been Ford’s downfall. And no wonder. A year ago he thought balancing the books simply involved finding bureaucratic “gravy.†Ford’s education in the real world has come at a cost. In his first budget he froze the city’s property tax when he didn’t have to, since he hadn’t promised any such relief. He squandered much of a $367 million surplus left by his predecessor David Miller, and lifted Toronto’s much-hated vehicle tax in such a clumsy fashion that it needlessly cost the city $36 million.
Those missteps only aggravated a budget shortfall that Ford puts at $774 million, although, in fact, it’s considerably smaller. Now he’s demanding service cuts despite promising a year ago that there wouldn’t be any. And ordering all city departments to cut their budgets by 10 per cent — except the police, of course, who managed to nab a $6 million increase.
The Ford administration’s budget process is still ongoing but so far it has been characterized by faulty numbers, mixed messages, needless threats to valued services, and capitulation to Toronto’s men and women in blue. It hasn’t been pretty. And it’s about to get worse, with a report yet to come outlining huge user fee increases that will set even Ford Nation to howling.
As far as Ford is concerned, perhaps the worst development in recent weeks has been the rise of a successful resistance movement to his agenda. It coalesced in response to a brazen attack on Toronto’s waterfront plans by Ford and his brother, Councillor Doug Ford. Hoping to ease their budget woes by selling off prime shoreline property to international developers, they attempted to seize control of the city’s Port Lands from Waterfront Toronto.
The Fords’ ludicrous vision for the future — complete with a megamall, monorail and giant Ferris wheel — was so abysmal that a tide of Torontonians rose up in protest. Most city councillors broke with the mayor’s program and quashed the takeover. As they do with every defeat, the Fords declared victory.
One thing seems certain: with his poll numbers dropping and opposition solidifying on city council, Ford will have a much harder time imposing his agenda in coming years than he did in his first. That’s a good thing.
One telling impact of his year in office has been psychological. Torontonians don’t view their city quite the same way as before. An old complacency is gone. And, in some ways, that’s welcome. It’s evident in the move to save the waterfront, and in how hundreds of people (some waiting all night) spoke up to support city services. It can also be seen in the way Toronto is now working with a community group to find alternate funding for Riverdale Farm. People are taking action.
The Fords, no doubt, hope to see a shift in attitude in which cost-cutting, a shrinking public service and higher private-sector involvement become business-as-usual at city hall. That may happen if they stop bumbling and find a more efficient way to deliver on their agenda. As it stands, the mayor’s sinking popularity testifies to his failure to deliver what he promised and what the public expected.
It’s just as likely that the Fords’ excesses will inspire a backlash against bullying and cuts, and restore people’s appreciation of public services. Just as Ford supplanted a free-spending, government-activist mayor, he might well be replaced by his opposite. It’s too early to predict the outcome. But one year in, a backlash is rising.