From Circus To Freak Sideshow

You guys see that too, don’t you? Or I mean, you don’t see it either, right? It’s not just me. It’s not not just me. It’s not just not me. Not just me not. I’m not crazy, am I?

Apparently, there’s this tussle going on between two competing transit plans for the city. One side’s pushing LRT technology that a lot of the world is using, and has full funding in place for 3 new lines and another replacement one. In the other corner sit subway proponents, all juiced about burying any new piece of public transit at the cost of 3 of the LRT lines while still being woefully short of money to complete it.

So you see the problem I’m having here. There really isn’t any sort of battle or war between two equal and viable alternatives. One is currently funded and all ready to go, and was from about 2007 until the plug was pulled a little over a year ago by a mayor who didn’t have a workable alternative as much as he had a mirage, a notion, a flight of fancy untethered to any semblance of reality.

So it’s more of a shadow boxing match. No. It’s like a vampire shadow boxing match. Vampire’s still cast no shadows, right kids? Or is it you can’t see their reflection in a mirror?

What I’m saying is that there is no there there. Mayor Ford is attempting to make something fly that wasn’t designed for flight. And the more he continues to hold out, stamp his feet and demand subways, the more surreal the whole thing becomes.

Yesterday was some sort of esquie-esque combination of Kafka/Fellini/Carnival-esque as Team Ford desperately scrambled around to convince anyone who would listen that everything was good to go. You see, the previous day the mayor, having been rebuffed by city council and let down by his very own Sheppard subway report from Gordon Chong, turned to his much vaunted private sector and huddled together for a little confab with his closest developer peeps, some friendly councillors and sandwiches. Emerging from his office a couple hours later, he announced they were good to go, everybody loves subways, everybody’s going to pony up, problem solved.

Except, as with many of Mayor Ford’s transit claims, there was ample space between the truth and full-fledged fantasy. Newspaper coverage told a slightly different story. “[Toronto Board of Trade president Carol] Wilding indicated support for subways wasn’t unanimous…” On the notion of increased development fees, Councillor Peter Milczyn said “…developers in the meeting weren’t keen on that idea…”

City staff has taken the temperature of private sector interest in laying down some upfront bucks on subways and found it more than a little tepid. “This model doesn’t work. There is a huge (funding) gap,” said one staff. “The private sector want certainties (but) these revenue streams are risky. They are based on a ‘build it and they will come’ view. It’s not a sure thing…And there are huge political risks.”

Gulp.

A more deliberate or reflective politician might take a step back at this point, breathe deeply and go to plan B. But here’s the thing. Mayor Ford doesn’t have a plan B on transit. How can you when your plan A doesn’t even qualify as a plan? It’s nothing more than a loose collection of largely contradictory fleeting thoughts being touted as a mandate based not on a persuasive argument but by some creepy sounding ‘moral authority’ that Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong actually tried floating. His Worship does not need to explain himself to you. He’s the Mayor! He shall clap His hands and there will be subways!

If only, huh? Without any divine intervention of that sort, the mayor and his morally authorized mandate is looking down the barrel of new taxes (and some old… Hello, VRT. Where you been hiding, gorgeous?), levies, tolls to get his subway built, and if there’s one thing Mayor Ford promised more than even subways was…

Sigh.

With glimmers of movement that he was willing to budge on the issue of not completely hating taxes with a passion other people hold toward baby killers, the through the looking glass quotient went through the roof. What? Mayor Rob Ford was actually leading us in having an adult conversation on the necessity of taxation in building a better city? That’s crazy talk. Crazy talk.

And then, of course, by yesterday afternoon we weren’t having that conversation. Brother-Councillor Doug went DEFCON 1, pressing the button on any talk about tax/toll/levy increases or any other instruments of the Devil. “We are against all taxes,” Councillor Ford said. “All taxes are evil as far as I am concerned.” Right then. So, I’ll mark you down as undecided then, shall I? Lotteries, casinos are the way we should be going, according to Councillor Ford, TorontoReno. Except folks at the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. aren’t as convinced that was a good idea. “I would have told them right off the bat,” stated Paul Godfrey, OLG’s chairman of the board, “this is a project that has no chance of being successful at all.”

Undeterred, the mayor fell back into line, snuffing out any future tax increase on cars for the rest of his natural life. “I will guarantee that were will never be a tax on cars again,” he told John Tory. Over my dead body, pushing up tulips. Or maybe that was Doug.

The shitshow didn’t feature just the Ford brothers. Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti said he would send back any money intended to build an LRT along Finch Avenue in his ward, and his constituents would wait 50 years if they had to for subway instead. This, three years after fully embracing the LRT for Finch. The leader of the provincial opposition, Tim Hudak, got in on the act, saying he would disregard any vote by council and build subways. Asked if he would chip in more money to fund that construction, Mr. Hudak demurred, yeah well, no. What do you think? Money grows on trees?

By day’s end, we were right back where we started. The mayor wanting subways he didn’t have the money to build and unwilling to even consider the most logical, straightforward revenue streams to help get the funding in place. And that’s the plan council and its LRT almost Transit City in everything but name was up against.

A couple days ago, we evoked Raging Bull’s Jake LaMotta as the movie character our mayor seemed a lot like in his stubborn drive for subways. Today we’re thinking the resemblance is more Elwood P. Dowd with his invisible white rabbit transit plan, Harvey. “Well, I’ve wrestled with reality for 35 years, Doctor, and I’m happy to state I finally won out over it.”

Evidently, the mayor, his brother and all those still willing to follow them down their transit rabbit hole are hoping to recreate a little bit of that movie magic.

– barkerly submitted by Cityslikr

Raging Bullishly On Subways

Following along with Toronto’s ongoing transit struggles, let’s call them, and I have a Raging Bull moment. It’s been a while since I’ve seen the movie but there’s that scene after, I don’t know, the 23^rd fight between Jake LaMotta and Sugar Ray Robinson, LaMotta’s lost the middleweight title (or failed to regain it from Robinson), been beaten to a bloody pulp (again) and he staggers over to his opponent’s corner. “I never went down, Ray. You never got me down, Ray. You hear me? You never got me down.”

Kind of reminiscent of Mayor Ford and his Sheppard subway plan, don’t you think?

Leading face first with not much defence to speak of, he just bulls forward, taking shots to the head and body, swinging wildly in retaliation, landing significantly fewer punches than his opponents. “You’ll never take subways from me, Karen. The people want subways, Karen. You hear me? The people want subways.”

Having attended a couple transit meetings and discussions this week and listening to the subways versus LRTs argument, it’s hard not to conclude that it’s really a bit of a mismatch at this point. Proponents of LRTs cite academic studies pointing to the reasons why the inner suburbs of Toronto shouldn’t expect subways, the lack of necessary density being one of the prime reasons why. There’s also the question of money, austere times being what they are. LRTs are less expensive to build and maintain. So, they’ve got cost and suitability going for them.

Subways?

Errrr….. ummmm…. uuuuhhhhhh… They go fast! Downtowners have them. Why can’t the suburbs? Suburban dwellers are not 2^nd class citizens. The St. Clair right of way was a disaster! The mayor has a mandate to build subways. The mayor has a mandate!

…

Did we mention that subways go fast?

…

Mayor Ford and his councillor brother, Doug, took to the airwaves last Sunday for two hours of unobstructed time (minus the ads, news and traffic reports) to make their subway case. Instead, they talked to Wendel Clark about the state of the Toronto Maple Leafs franchise, chatted Oscars and Norman Jewison and basically recited their transit script (see paragraph 6) over and over again, allowing Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti to chime in with his opinion on the matter. “Hey, guys. Subways are great. Let’s build one under Finch sometime. Talk to you soon.”

No expert testimonials to back their plan. No objective study explaining why building subways would be worth it in the long run. No one-on-one, face-to-face debate with an LRT supporter. Just glib and unsubstantiated rhetoric from a couple knuckleheads with no interest in public transit except as an election issue. Well that, and keeping it off the streets they drive their big vehicles on.

Now, in the final rounds and up against the ropes, the mayor is desperately looking to land a haymaker – boxing’s version of the Hail Mary Pass (in this case case, why don’t we call it the St. Jude) – to try and salvage at least a split decision on the Sheppard subway. Something, anything in order to avoid being completely and utterly sidelined… unless of course that’s exactly what he wants. Like Jake LaMotta, he’s throwing the fight, deliberately losing this battle in order to win the wider war of re-election.

“Now he [Mayor Ford] can argue that, by thwarting him, council denied suburban voters their right to have underground transit like downtowners do,” as Marcus Gee surmised in his Globe and Mail article last week.

So the Sheppard subway isn’t really for the suburbs, the transit deprived Scarborough. It’s for Mayor Ford. Rather than step back and accept the fact that he’s on the losing side of this, that his failure to deliver a feasible, reasonable, sensible plan to replace Transit City that he single-handedly declared dead has left him on the verge of suffering a TKO, he’s picked it up to use a club to bludgeon his way back into the hearts of Ford Nation.

“You never got me down, Ray. You hear me? You never got me down.”

Maybe the mayor has become a little punch drunk.

In a recent Angus Reid poll that showed nearly an even split between those wanting subways and those wanting LRTs, some 57% of those asked said they had no interest in paying tolls, congestion or parking fees, increased taxes to build subways. Pretty much a prerequisite if they’re going to be built. Gordon Chong, the mayor’s handpicked representative to write a report on the viability of a Sheppard subway said as much. As has the mayor in recent days. As has the Toronto Sun.

No, wait. It didn’t. In fact it pretty much called out Mayor Ford for even broaching the subject of increased taxes or any sort of user fees. The Toronto Sun. Called out the mayor. No taxpayer money even if it meant no subways.

The Toronto Sun, people.

But Mayor Ford soldiers on. Even at the time of this writing, he’s holed up in his office with developers, the Board of Trade and a councillor or two, trying to hammer out a deal to get his subway built. There are rumours being floated of a proposal to reinstate the vehicle registration tax that would go to help financing subway construction.

The VRT, people.

This is getting ugly. Somebody outta stop this fight. The mayor’s gonna  get really hurt.

Maybe Mayor Ford shouldn’t be preparing for re-election in 2014. Maybe he should be working on some material in order to play host to some adult cabaret show down in Florida. “I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody…”

– deniroly submitted by Cityslikr

The Tipping Point

The race is on!

Team Ford has climbed aboard the unofficial 2014 campaign bus, now doing weekly radio spots to get the word out to its nation of all the things accomplished in their first year or so power. Things the rest of the media have twisted and bent out of all recognizable shape. Re-Elect Rob Ford in 2014 for all the great stuff he did in 2011!

For its part, irrelevant city council is working to fill the vacuum and get on with the business of governing the city for the next two and a half years in the absence of any positive contribution from the mayor or those still trying to push forward his already shop worn agenda. The 25 or so can muddle through on an issue by issue basis, fending off the worst obstructionist tendencies thrown at it from the mayor’s office, with an eye on the magic number of 30. If council is able to cobble together that number, Mayor Ford would be completely sidelined and anyone who wants to contribute anything whatsoever to the running of this city will man the mayoral lifeboats and leave the ship to sink in the fetid waters of its own pigheadedness.

It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad political scene here in Toronto. Deathrace 2012. A council with a taste for doing things its own way without any input from the mayor or, at least, any positive input, discovers things run more smoothly without him. Why would it give that power up? So Mayor Ford must beat and berate a few lost sheep back into the fold with promised threats of electoral defeat in a couple years time in order to regain control of the agenda.

Where is the tipping point? If 27, 28 councillors become comfortable regularly working together, from those on the right of centre to the lefties, it’s no longer a black-and-white question of right versus left. The polarity that the mayor thrives on disappears. Those scary, frigid waters of partisanship moderate to more soothing temperatures. Come on, everybody. It’s beautiful in here. The once derided mushy middle, buffed up with increasingly impressive abs of steel, has transformed into a more desirable location. All reasonable councillors welcome.

Twenty-five councillors voted against Mayor Ford’s transit plans, twenty-six had Councillor Gloria Lindsay Luby been present at the special meeting. Let’s say now since the petulant firing of former TTC GM Gary Webster by five members of the commission’s board, Vice-Chair Peter Milczyn has developed second thoughts about his close ties with the mayor. That’s twenty-seven.

And exactly how comfortable are the likes of councillors Michelle Berardinetti, Gary Crawford, Michael Thompson standing tall for a mayor who is clearly floundering and that they aren’t strictly ideologically bound to? Same goes for Councillor Mark Grimes. And the stalwarts like councillors Vincent Crisanti, Frank Di Giorgio and Cesar Palacio, all who gained exposure by their willingness to oust Webster, don’t exactly have iron grips on the respective wards. Any further diminuation of the mayor’s popularity would surely threaten their political futures.

And of course, let’s not discount the protean nature of Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti’s politics. An unconditional supporter now but remember back to those days he despised the mayor when he was just an outsider councillor? Is this somebody you want watching your back when the shit goes down?

I’d say we’re within spitting distance of reaching a critical mass of dissent where what Mayor Ford wants or thinks or says no longer has any relevance. That’s not simply wishful thinking or trying to undo the results of the last municipal election. The mayor himself is responsible for squandering the support he once had at council, support that, frankly, caught me by surprise. Perhaps he looked at the previous megacity administrations and believed that 2^nd terms just came with the territory and carried on as if he were untouchable until 2017 or so.

And now he’s put his own political future ahead of that of the city by going all in with his ill-thought out, half-formed subway plan as a wedge issue.

“These guys, politically, they think they’ve got ya,” Councillor Doug Ford told the Globe and Mail’s Marcus Gee. “I was high-fiving Rob, even though he was down and out. I was saying, ‘Rob, this is positive, this is a clear agenda, you’ve got it.’” The mayor’s rivals “think they’re going to slice and dice him,” but defying him over transit was “the biggest political mistake they did.”

It’s not about better transit planning or some phantom mandate voters gave the mayor. It’s all politics. ‘A perfect springboard to re-election.’ “You can’t win the city unless you win Scarborough and Etobicoke. The numbers don’t add up.” So against all common sense and rational discourse, Mayor Ford offers Scarborough a subway, and we’ll get one going along Finch West too. You betcha.

How? M’eh. When? *Shrug* What’ll it cost to build? PPPs forever! How much to operate? Who cares? I’ll be Prime Minister by then.

If the mayor just wants to be the mayor rather than act like a mayor, his council colleagues have no alternative but to move forward without him. He and his brother seem to have decided to run for re-election instead of running the city. They’ve made their choice. Councillors now have to make theirs.

– straight shootingly submitted by Cityslikr

Pirated Radio

Conservatives these days.

It’s almost as if they’ve given up on the traditional mechanisms of democracy. Debate, discuss, deal, decide. All that outdated crap our grandparents and great grandparents fought and died to protect back… whenever.

Look. Nobody watches black-and-white TV anymore, do they? So who says our democracy has got to be the same?

Federally, after 6 years of not being able to earn enough votes to form a majority government, it seems that the Conservative party resolved to help keep some Canadians from finding their correct voting stations last election, thereby denying them their right to vote. No voters. No problem.

Here in Toronto, conservative leaning mayor, Rob Ford, having experienced a couple important setbacks and rebuffs by city council, has deemed his fellow elected local representatives to be irrelevant, and headed to more friendly terrain: talk radio. For 2 hours every Sunday (at least until the 2012/13 NFL season), he and his councillor brother, Doug, are taking to the airwaves, talking about the issues they want to talk about, listening only to the taxpayers they want to listen to and just generally reaching out to the regular folks they’d normally have to travel to a mall or Tim Horton’s to talk to. “’You’re going to get the straight goods from Rob and I,’ Mr. [Councillor] Ford promised Newstalk 1010 listeners during an interview with host Jerry Agar. “’You aren’t going to have the media twisting it around like they’ve been twisting it around for the last year and a half.’”

In short, the mayor and his brother are looking to replace actual governing by out-and-out campaigning some two and half years before the next election.

It’s telling also how their radio gig came about. The show, The City, was already established, hosted for its first 6 months or so by Councillor Josh Matlow. Its format was essentially the centrist leaning host moderating two other councillors from either side of the political spectrum in a two hour long discussion about municipal issues. There’d be listeners calling in to ask questions or give their opinions and members of the punditry invited to chime in as well.

Neither the mayor nor his brother ever took part in the show aside from phoning in. Mayor Ford called once to give Councillor Matlow birthday wishes and the councillor a couple times when he had a bone to pick with him. Otherwise, they remained disengaged.

Until this past January when, according to the program director of Newstalk 1010, Mike Bendixen, ‘the mayor’s camp approached him’. Interesting. While never deigning to appear on the show as is, Team Ford wanted to simply take it over, rejig it for their own purposes. Replace wonky policy talk and debate with one-sided, loaded partisan bluster. Like snivelling schoolyard suckie-babies who can’t play the game very well, so they grab the ball and insist on changing the rules.

Say what you will about The City hosted by Josh Matlow but it actually explored the nuts and bolts of municipal governance here in Toronto, never allowing one side to go unchecked. The City hosted by Rob and Doug Ford?

Of the show’s 78 minutes of actual Ford Bros. airtime, 10 minutes or so was given over to Leafs’ Talk with former player, Wendel Clark, his fights, his bar, his views on how to turn the team around, 6 minutes to Oscar talk and how the city should do something to honour Norman Jewison and about 3 minutes for some community bulletins. The only council member invited to join in on the conversation was hardcore Team Ford loyalist, Giorgio Mammoliti, who talked about his dream of building a subway along Finch Avenue. In terms of callers, by my count 4 were pro-Ford, 2 against and 1 I couldn’t really tell. One caller challenging the mayor and his brother to expand on their Sheppard subway plans and questioning their claim of the St. Clair disaster was cut off for a commercial break. When they returned, Councillor Ford spouted forth some dubious numbers about financing the subway, uncontested.

In an opinion column for the Toronto Sun on Saturday rationalizing handing over The City to the mayor and his brother to do with it what they want, Mr. Bendixen made the following assertion: After all, sharing ideas and opinions is what talk radio is about. If that were true, talk radio would not be the almost exclusive domain of right wing, conservative thought because ‘sharing ideas and opinions’ is anathema to modern conservatives. It runs against their grain of tightly holding onto ideas that only confirm their worldview and ridiculing opposing opinions that don’t.

It smacks a little too much of the democratic process that conservatives seemed to have developed an aversion for.

– fair-mindedly submitted by Cityslikr

Supplementary Reading

Since I’m sure the Ford Bros. are busily prepping for their co-hosting radio debut on The City, it’s probably good that we do too. Bone up on some facts and figures to counteract the less fact-y figures that’ll surely be flying fast and furious tomorrow afternoon. Write up a long check list of things that the mayor and his councillor brother don’t quite get right.

We’ll probably be hearing a lot about transit during their first show. The whole subways versus LRT (just fancy streetcars) debate. Jim, calling from an Oshawa Tim Horton’s, will regale listeners with that time he drove in downtown Toronto and was stuck for miles behind 9 streetcars that had nobody on them, his surroundings a dilapidated urban jungle.

Because you’ll probably be hearing much of the disastrous St. Clair right of way construction from the Ford Bros. tomorrow (I’m betting at least half a dozen times), take some time between now and then, if you haven’t already, to read James Bow‘s masterful blow by blow account of what actually happened. Full of intrigue and heroism, you will be pleasantly surprised to learn that it didn’t turn out to be quite the mess you’ll be hearing nor were the problems that surfaced due in any way to building streetcars in the middle of the road.

It’ll serve as a nice antidote.

 Hyperbole and Axes To Grind on St. Clair Avenue.

– helpfully submitted by Cityslikr