Rob Ford's Toronto

[ttk77]

So whatever he was using it on is probably hidden by the monitor. Any guesses what our mayor would be eating with the Tabasco sauce?

 

[Ice_Burn]

tabasco sauce. That’s what toronto taxpayer’s want, tabasco sauce. Tabasco sauce. Tabasco sauce. Not ketchup. Not hp sauce. Not hollandaise sauce. Not sauce gribiche. Tabasco sauce

we don't want any of this damn sriracha clogging up our arteries!

 

[malvern2]

Man this next election is going to be messy, probably the most divided, smear filled one we’ve had in this city in a long time. Seriously I wonder who will run; I’d love to see Vaughn run…he’d probably get routed. But polls are showing Olivia Chow would get a lot of support and might be able to beat Ford.

 

[k10ery]

Dear Mr. Mayor:

Please publicly release your itinerary regularly, as every mayor within living memory has done. This will help you avoid these dreadful misunderstandings.

Sincerely,
The Citizens Of Toronto.

p.s. - What's with the tabasco?

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

I say we hold a competition to caption this photo:

"No gravy, but clearly on the sauce."

 

[Voltz]

A bit of insider news: I'm told that several of Ford's big election funders are trying to draft Karen Stintz to take his place in 2014. This group is embarrassed by Ford's antics and how quickly he's become irrelevant and unable to move Conservative policy forward.

And how they thought thought things would turn out otherwise is beyond me.

 

[Frankie1984]

No wonder he looks flushed and red all the time, gotta take it easy on the Tabasco Robbie boy.

 

[jje1000]

The city tax base decreases every year due to inflation. Atta boy, Ford, passing the buck to others!

Toronto Mayor asks city manager to budget for property-tax freeze
Kelly Grant City hall bureau chief
The Globe and Mail

Published Thursday, Jul. 05 2012, 5:36 PM EDT
Last updated Thursday, Jul. 05 2012, 7:31 PM EDT

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford has formally asked the city manager for a two-year property-tax freeze starting in 2014, the year he stands for re-election, The Globe and Mail has learned.

In his budget guidance letter to Joe Pennachetti, the mayor instructed Toronto’s top bureaucrat to prepare a three-year budget plan that holds the 2013 residential property-tax increase to 1.75 per cent or less and freezes it in 2014 and 2015.

The letter, which was hand-delivered Thursday to Mr. Pennachetti and members of the executive and budget committees, comes as council prepares to vote next week on studying the OneCity transit plan – a proposal from TTC chair Karen Stintz and TTC vice-chair Glenn De Baeremaeker that would use a “current-value assessment uplift†to significantly increase property taxes to fund 170 kilometres of new subway, bus and streetcar lines.

Mr. Ford has made no secret of his disdain for the OneCity funding model.

The timing of his budget guidance letter only reinforces his desire to hold the line on Toronto’s residential property-tax rates, already the lowest in the Greater Toronto Area.

“We will adopt a philosophy that tax rate increases are the last resort, never the first choice – and, if approved, tax increases should normally be used to enhance the service benefit residents receive,†says the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Globe and Mail.

The final letter is virtually unchanged from a draft The Globe obtained in April.

Asked about the proposed property-tax freeze at that time, Mr. Ford hedged, saying he “never campaigned on that …We were very fortunate to come out with a zero-per-cent tax increase [in 2011], very fortunate that next year we might be able to hold the line on taxes. I’m not quite sure. This is just the beginning of the budget process.â€

However, the final letter, signed by Mr. Ford, shows the mayor has settled on promoting a freeze for 2014 and 2015.

The only major difference is that the earlier copy floated freezing business property-tax rates beginning in 2013.

The new version asks for a cap to the business-rate increase of 0.58 per cent, the traditional one-third of a 1.75-per-cent residential rate hike.

Like the draft, the budget guidance letter calls for building new arenas, pools and community centres in partnership with the private sector; freezing solid waste rates; and ending annual 9-per-cent water rate hikes as scheduled at the end of 2014.

It makes no mention of reducing or killing the land-transfer tax, which the Toronto Real Estate Board on Thursday blamed for a 5.4-per-cent drop in Toronto home sales in June and which Mr. Ford campaigned on scrapping.

There is no guarantee that Mr. Pennachetti and city finance staff will follow Mr. Ford’s instructions. The letter contains advice, not orders.

There’s even less of a guarantee that council would adopt a property-tax freeze as it did in 2011, Mr. Ford’s first full year in office.

Council has since rebelled against Mr. Ford on a slew of issues, and many councillors have expressed reservations in the past about freezing property taxes.

Municipal finance expert Enid Slack warned that holding the line on taxes could put the city in a difficult financial bind.

“I don’t think a property-tax freeze is a good idea because the city’s costs go up every year, at least by the cost of inflation but probably more,†said Dr. Slack, director of the Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre. “By freezing the property tax you’re constraining the budget.â€

The OneCity plan’s current-value assessment uplift model work out to a 1.9 per cent increase to property taxes for four years, after which the increase would level off and continue at that rate for 30 years.

That would be over and above regular property tax increases, the kind Mr. Ford wants to halt in 2014 and 2015.

“I can’t support taxing the hard-working residents of this city for that transit plan,†he told reporters after a tour of a Toronto Community Housing Corp. building Thursday with the agency’s new chief executive officer.

Earlier in the day, members of the mayor’s staff met with Ms. Stintz and Mr. De Baeremaeker to discuss the language of OneCity motions expected to go to council next week.

Ms. Stintz said Thursday that she is “confident†she can drum up enough votes to get approval for the OneCity study, which would come back to council in October.

“People have some questions. It’s important that we answer them,†she said of her council colleagues, many of whom were caught off-guard when she and Mr. De Baeremaeker unveiled their ambitious pitch last week.

“We talked to our colleagues, but there is a sense that we didn’t provide enough detail. We learned from that,†Ms. Stintz said.

With reports from Jane Switzer

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news...udget-for-property-tax-freeze/article4393352/

 

[spider]

Is the "I hate ford " crowd's arsenal so depleted that the presence of a bottle of Tabasco sauce on his desk is to be desperately seized upon as a symbol of something or other that might be spun into a negative?

Much conjecture has been offered of how the vote for Mayor will go next time around assuming the contest will be between Ford and a left wing champion or two or three. What if Ford doesn't run but a strong candidate takes up the right wing flag and campaigns in a statesmanlike fashion? Voters and his detractors on this thread will be faced with this problem, did they hate Ford for his platform or because he didn't exhibit the level of decorum and gravitas many people expect to see in a Mayor. Tough choice.

As some on this thread know I voted for Ford's platform, he came with the package. I understood this but didn't flinch because the message was more important than the messenger, still is. Next election, I predict the same message with a more socially palatable messenger will be a winning combination.

 

[jje1000]

As some on this thread know I voted for Ford's platform, he came with the package. I understood this but didn't flinch because the message was more important than the messenger, still is. Next election, I predict the same message with a more socially palatable messenger will be a winning combination.

The message has no chance of being delivered as long as the messenger is unable to make others see the benefit in it. Furthermore, the message has to be combined with other messages that progress the city and bring in new businesses without the simple cut-taxes/waste message which has failed to deliver on the latter two points. As such, it would be best to move away from a stiff populist like Ford towards a true fiscal conservative (if those still exist in the political sphere).

 

[sarnya]

I say we hold a competition to caption this photo:

Any similarities?

 

[neubilder]

No wonder he looks flushed and red all the time, gotta take it easy on the Tabasco Robbie boy.

The Tabasco is for the pork rinds.

 

[gristle]

As some on this thread know I voted for Ford's platform, he came with the package. I understood this but didn't flinch because the message was more important than the messenger, still is. Next election, I predict the same message with a more socially palatable messenger will be a winning combination.

Do you mean the Ford platform wherein the twinfords squawked about a $700 million shortfall when in the fact we ended up with $290 million surplus? Is that the message? If so, can we say that mayor completely misrepresented the city's budget situation, or that his arithmetic skills are painfully wanting?

It's nice that you support this kind of drivel. You have a right to express your views, but the mayor's thinking in this instance is BS.

 

[taal]

Ha, already rescinded on the commercial property tax freeze ... what a joke ... and I thought finally something positive !

Oh and btw:

The new version asks for a cap to the business-rate increase of 0.58 per cent, the traditional one-third of a 1.75-per-cent residential rate hike.

There's nothing traditional about it, its the law in Ontario ... i.e. commercial tax rates cannot be increased at anything more then 1/3 of the residential rates.

 

[neubilder]

Do you mean the Ford platform wherein the twinfords squawked about a $700 million shortfall when in the fact we ended up with $290 million surplus? Is that the message? If so, can we say that mayor completely misrepresented the city's budget situation, or that his arithmetic skills are painfully wanting?

It's nice that you support this kind of drivel. You have a right to express your views, but the mayor's thinking in this instance is BS.

Agreed.

And what is the word 'conserve' doing in 'Conservative' anyhow?! There is nothing even remotely prudent, mindful, conservative in the conscientious sense about conservatives. It should be renamed bullish-selfservative

 

[insertrealname]

This. Sometimes you need to pass the streetcar when its starting up, and there's never enough room (because of parked cars ahead) if you are starting from behind the streetcar. The sane way to handle this is to stop fully behind the streetcar, then if the rear doors remain closed you creep by them at a speed that would not cause you to hit someone coming off the streetcar.

Arrgh, what's the hurry to save just a couple of seconds of time? Why can't drivers simply follow the rule and avoid any possibility of something going wrong: when the streetcar in front of them begins to slow down and stops for passengers, under no circumstances should cars in the right-hand lane attempt to get ahead of the streetcar! Stop your car well behind the rear-most doors! The number of times I've seen really dangerous acceleration of cars attempting to get past the streetcar just when it is slowing down or has just come to a halt at the stop, not to mention the times when streetcar, descending from the rear doors, I've had to thread my way in front or behind a car practically blocking them!

Please, is it such an insult to car-driving pride to take these precautions?

With the greatest respect, I think it's just good city driving habits...