It makes me laugh to hear the detractors that have come out of the woodwork now that Toronto Mayor Rob Ford has begun to announce some ideas of what cuts will be made to help ease the city of Toronto out of its financial hole.
These are the same people that blame Mike Harris for everything that is wrong in Canada.
Mike Harris ran on a political platform that expressly stated that the PC Party was going to eliminate the massive NDP debt that Bob Rae left Ontario in. Harris laid out where the cuts would be made to stop the financial bleeding and won a majority. When the cuts began to happen to services, Ontario went mental crying that they didn’t expect there to actually be cuts to services.
Fast forward to the Rob Ford era of Toronto.
Mayor Rob Ford ran a campaign that stated that he would find efficiencies and trim the fat off of Toronto city services. When asked if there would be service cuts he stated “No”.
Now that Ford has made his proposals, people seem to still live in “La-La Land” believing that Ford wasn’t telling the truth.
Ford asked every department to trim 10% off their budget.
That didn’t mean that 100% of the TTC would shut down, but yes maybe an underutilized bus route would need to be chopped.
10% didn’t mean that there would no longer be a Toronto police force patrolling the streets but there are a number of management positions as well as other clerical duties that are being done by high paid officers that could be done by someone for $15 per hour.
It didn’t mean that we don’t need a fire department, but there are a lot of fire chiefs, assistant fire chiefs, fire captains and other fancy well paying titles that are not on the front lines battling infernos but sitting on desks collecting big paychecks that could be shown the door.
Regardless of what Margaret Atwood’s hippie beliefs are, all 99 libraries were never going to be closed; but a few could be and some reduced hours could be looked at to save the Toronto taxpayer a few bucks.
Yet people still don’t get it and now the mayor’s approval rating has sunk to a low level. Again, what did people expect would happen?
If a family sits down and looks at their budget and decides to find efficiencies, what does it mean for them? Does Fido go without food for one week a month? Does the family put out newspapers around the house to save on diapers for their newborn? Do they stop bathing to cut the water consumption in the home?
No, but belts are tightened, some frills get eliminated and you move on with life until there are better times.
The people of Toronto voted in Rob Ford to fix all the financial messes that the previous spend happy mayor left us. The city has a deficit of almost $800 million which means that if nothing is done, the debt of the city of Toronto will grow by $800 million every year.
Have you seen what has happened in Greece and Spain? Not dealing with the city’s debt will mean that the same financial woes that those countries face will eventually happen here too.
The mayor has some controversial ideas for how to eliminate the deficit and bring Toronto back to prosperity, it’s time to just let him do the job that the overwhelming majority of taxpayers voted him in to do, and stop listening to the non taxpaying hippies that want the David Miller utopia to continue.
Regardless of whomever succeeded Miller as the mayor of Toronto would run into deep crap. It’s easy to govern a city when the ‘right choice’ is coinciding with the ‘popular choice’, but Mayor Ford does not have that same luxury. Toronto essentially has three options:
1) Cut services
2) Raise Taxes
2) Ignore the problem and let the deficit grow.
Miller’s choice was to pick option 3, and now Toronto operates on a $700m deficit, with debts totaling at $4.38 billion. I highly doubt Toronto will ever pay off 100% of its debt (unlike Mississauga which has been debt free since 1978) because of the high infrastructure costs, but at the very least Toronto should be running an annual surplus (and for that matter, so should the TTC).
From day 1, Ford made the mistake of setting himself to do the impossible task; that is to satisfy everyone. It was a huge mistake to go out an campaign the impossible: solve the budget problem without any service cuts. The voters are fickle, and I guess they feel that Ford took advantage of them.
Toronto’s Financial Statements:
http://www.toronto.ca/finance/pdf/2010fr.pdf
Page 81 (or 73) has all the details. It might be worthwhile to have a financially literate friend to comprehend the details.
But what has he actually done so far?? These are all ideas, but which of them have come to fruition and are saving the people of Toronto money now?