The Spirit of the People is not Dead in Toronto

For someone who believes in the potential power of the people, this small demonstration against Rob Ford's brutish abuse of power is heartening.

A Crippled General Laid Bare

That is the phrase Star columnist Royson James uses to describe Toronto Mayor Rob Ford. Even if you live nowhere near the city, his analysis of power misused and abused makes fascinating reading for anyone interested in the mentality and tactics of the right-wing.

The Toronto Star- Another Winning Editorial Cartoon.

One of the many reasons I love The Star.

Toronto's Thuggish Mayor

The thuggish mentality of the Ford crew is captured rather nicely here, I think.

An Elephant in the Room

I had a dream last night that Rob Ford and his brother were in my home, and everywhere they sat, the furniture broke. Could it be a metaphor for the policy impoverishment now afflicting Toronto, and accelerated by the firing of Gary Webster?

But then again, I suppose a literal interpretation would not be out of order either.

Video of a Sad Performance

See Ford bark, see ttc commissioners run.

Ford Gets His Way

The blowt king, aided and abetted by his minions, has gotten his way.

Toronto is the poorer for it.

Christopher Hume's Withering Assessment of Rob Ford and His Enablers

That Ford can still find five members of council willing to do his bidding, no matter how transparently shabby it may be, also speaks volumes about the sorry state of Toronto politics. The members of this odious quintet — TTC commissioners Norm Kelly, Denzil Minnan-Wong, Frank Di Giorgio, Cesar Palacio and Vincent Crisanti — shame all Torontonians, including the mayor.

And that's only a small excerpt from an excellent analysis.

A 'Dwarfish Thief' At Toronto City Hall

For those who think Shakespeare has lost his relevance in our time, try out this quotation from Macbeth when you think of Mayor Rob Ford and his abuse of power:

He cannot buckle his distempered cause
Within the belt of rule...

Now minutely revolts upbraid his faith-breach.
Those he commands move only in command,
Nothing in love. Now does he feel his title
Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe
Upon a dwarfish thief.

The bard was, indeed, a man for all seasons.

The Arrogant and The Obsequious

For those both fascinated and repelled by the abuse of power happening in Toronto, and the obsequious who make possible that abuse, I highly recommend today's column by Royson James, who speculates on the qualities of pusillanimous appeasement that will be required in Gary Webster's replacement.

What Do Stephen Harper and Rob Ford Have In Common?

Both, it seems, have a constitutional aversion to being honest with the people they purport to represent. Click here for a story on Harper's folly (i.e., the F-35 fairy tale Haper Inc. is fond of spinning to benighted voters) and here for how Toronto Mayor Rob Ford tried to bury the truth about the Sheppard subway line he is so passionate about.

By the way, The Toronto Star has announced that it is raising its subscription rates by an average of seven cents a day for seven-day-a-week delivery. The above stories demonstrate the excellence of its investigative reports and overall journalism that I am happy to pay a little extra for.

Doug Ford Rarely Disappoints

The Star's Christopher Hume has an amusing column on the other (better?) half of that dynamic duo known as the Mayors of Toronto. For those who enjoy their political theatre broad and farcical, the brothers Ford have been working overtime since their election, and Hume gives a great deal of the credit to Doug Ford. Enjoy!

Doug Ford Enhances Brother Rob's Reputation

Despite the way it may appear in some of my blog postings, I really take no particular pleasure or delight in pointing out the deficiencies and foibles of most of our politicians. Such is the weakness of my character, however, that I do exclude the brothers Ford, the mayors of what was once a proud city, Toronto, from that assertion. Rarely has caricature come to life in the political arena as manifestly as it has under their administration.

The latest source of my amusement and bemusement comes from the Sunday edition of The Toronto Star, which has the following headline:

Doug Ford suggests schools explore UFC-linked program

It seems that brother Doug, apparently oblivious to, or contemptuous of, both local and province-wide attempts at tackling (there's a word I know Rob understands) bullying (another word I suspect he is intimately acquainted with) in schools, believes that the best way to ensure at-risk students turn into real men and women is to teach them how to fight.

As reported by The Star, still experiencing the petulant wrath of the Ford bros, Ford’s constituency assistant, Anna Vescio, asked a Toronto District School Board trustee to circulate a brochure touting an initiative called UFC Community Works.

According to the brochure, the program promotes “the development of discipline, respect, teamwork, honesty, time management and physical fitness” through mixed martial arts training and meetings with UFC fighters.

UFC has become notorious for its brutal, bloody, no-holds barred fighting. Mixed martial arts events were banned in Ontario until this year.

I suppose that none of this will come as much of a surprise to close observers of the scrappy duo, who have formed a tag-team of sorts in the political arena, supported by the howling crowd known as their executive committee and those seeking elevation in their municipal status. Nonetheless, even if they like their confrontations at City Hall to be nasty, and brutish, they really should curb their blood lust and not try to inflict it on Toronto students.

Rob Ford Continues To Make An Ass of Himself

While the title of this post might strike many as redundant, even I, despite having borne witness to a great deal of asinine behaviour over the years, was surprised to see the following headline on The Star's website a few minutes ago: Mayor Rob Ford to Toronto: Don’t read the Star

Apparently the big boy is calling upon 'Ford nation' (is there anyone still residing there?) to join him in a boycott of The Star. Still petulantly miffed over a story that the paper still stands by, one revealing that he was asked to stop coaching football at a Toronto high school for inappropriate behaviour, the Toronto mayor continues to show the stuff he is made of, and because I prefer to keep a certain level of decorum and language on this blog, I will let the reader infer what that might be.

But please read the story, as it will make you laugh, cry, despair, or exult, depending upon both your level of maturity and, perhaps, political orientation.

Apparently They Don't Hold With That Readin' Thing Either

Or that might be the easy inference to draw about Mayors Rob and Doug Ford. As reported yesterday, The Toronto Star is filing a complaint with the City of Toronto's ethics commissioner over the lads' embargo of The Star of all official notices and pronouncements from the mayor's office. Today, their ability to interpret basic text (pedagogy for being able to read) must be called into question.

The front page headline in today's Star reads: Doug Ford to Star: Drop dead. The story reveals the deep insights of ideologically-conjoined twin Rob Ford:

“No one can force anyone to talk to anyone,” he said in a brief interview during a council meeting.

“You can quote me: if you apologize on the front page, it’s done. You can go to the Supreme Court and try to get Rob to talk to the Star — he won’t talk to you. He just won’t. Until you do it. It’s simple: put that one-liner (apology) in there, it’s over,” he said.

Either intentionally or unintentionally, the protective sibling misread or misrepresented The Star's complaint. As Torstar chair John Honderich has said:

[T}he complaint would not try to compel Ford to speak to Star reporters. Doug Ford, the mayor’s brother, nonetheless portrayed it as an attempt to do so.

One can only hope that at least collectively, the Fords and their ilk more carefully read the proposals that come before council.

The Toronto Star Fights Back

Because the ever-petulant Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, backed by his always doting and sycophantic executive, continues to boycott The Toronto Star on all official notices and pronouncements from his office, the paper has decided to file an official complaint with the city's integrity commissioner.

As reported in an article by Torstar Chair John Honderich in today's edition, the genesis of Ford's childish edict is a story that the paper ran during the mayoral campaign about his conduct as a football coach. At the time, Ford the candidate said he was going to sue the paper for libel, but never followed up on his threat, and has since stipulated that his freeze will stay in place until the Star runs an apology above the fold on page 1. As he recently told reporter Daniel Dale, “I don’t talk to the Star till you guys apologize. You guys (are) liars.”

Putting aside the howls of outrage that would have attended such a proclamation had a liberal mayor issued such a fatwah against a right-wing news organization, the Star, I believe, is right when it says that his boycott raises a serious issue of abuse of power and directly affects [their] ability to cover city hall and serve [their] readers.

The issue clearly goes beyond one person with an axe to grind. Ford, because of the political power he wields, was able to get political compliance from his executive committee to shelve Councillor Adam Vaughan's “free press and democracy” motion [that] would have prohibited city employees and politicians from excluding any specific journalist or news outlet from any “media conference,” “media event” or news release.

It has been said that all politics is local. That is also probably the best place to take a stand against political corruption as well.

The Power of the People

Despite our almost legendary passivity as a people, one small part of Canada is offering an example of what can happen when citizens shed the mantle of political disengagement that our politicians have long cultivated and counted on in order to push through their misguided policies unchecked.

The small part of Canada to which I refer is the City of Toronto whose people, it is becoming increasingly apparent, now realize the ghastly mistake they made in electing a mayor who told them what they wanted to hear during the campaign and uncritically accepted his lies, only to be faced now with the cost of that misplaced trust.

As most people know, Rob Ford won the Toronto mayoralty race by promising low taxes and no service cuts, miracles that would be wrought by elimination of the 'gravy' that his profligate predecessors had swilled with abandon. Hundreds of millions of dollars in savings would thus be available. Of course, it turned out that there was almost no gravy, unless one were to reclassify services regarded as vital to a well-functioning city under that designation.

Earlier in the summer, impassioned citizens made public representations protesting many of the proposed cuts. Yesterday and early this morning, they did the same in a 20-hour executive committee session in which the delegates were allowed only two minutes each to make their case, down from the previous five minute allotment in the first confrontation. Nonetheless, it is clear that their voices have been heard.

In an online Star report entitled Ford backs down from cuts, for now, we are told that by the end of the marathon session,  Ford voted .... to reject some proposed cuts and to put off decisions on almost all of the others to the 2012 budget process, which begins in November and ends in mid-January.

While the issue of service cuts is not dead by any means, I suspect that as long as public anger and political engagement continues over the prospect of living in a city robbed of its vitality and habitability by philistines like Ford and his council supporters, the citizens of Toronto will have the influence they should have over forthcoming budget deliberations.

Now if we could only export that engagement to the federal level .....

The Ford Gang Stays True To Form

Although I don't live in Toronto, it has become an object of fascination for me since the election of Mayor Rob and Doug Ford. Within their fiefdom resides a psychology that provides fascinating examples of and insights into the darker aspects of human nature: our propensity for selfishness and short-shortsightedness, our fear of ideas that conflict with our worldview, our tendency to demonize those who disagree with us, our happy reliance on propaganda and absolutism, and our elevation of ideologies over critical thinking.

I may return to each of these aspects in future posts, but I have time for just one short illustration now. As predicted in a previous post, while some councillors are feeling the heat, Team Ford is officially dismissing the results of a recent poll showing an overwhelming majority of Torontonians strongly opposed to the cuts in city services under current consideration because it was paid for by CUPE Local 79.

You can read the full story here.

Willful Ignorance in the Ford Administration

Toronto Mayors Rob and Doug Ford and their minions, like so many of the extreme right, tend not to let facts, reason, and data interfere with the purity of their ideological vision. Someone who describes city employees as 'the gravy' and denies that eliminating daycare subsidies are cuts, but rather 'efficiencies' will likely be unfazed by the latest poll showing Torontonians overwhelmingly opposed to service cuts.

Published in today's Star, the "Forum Research telephone survey of nearly 13,000 people reveals that more than three-quarters of Torontonians want their local councillor to protect services rather than comply with the mayor’s wishes. And only 27 per cent of residents say they would vote for Rob Ford if an election was held tomorrow."

Particularly interesting is that the results involve a ward-by-ward analysis, with wards of some of the most extreme right-wing councillors showing the strongest opposition to service cuts.

But for an administration that refuses any interview requests from The Toronto Star and excludes them from invitation-only events, the poll results, despite the very large sampling, will likely be dismissed.

After all, it was commissioned by CUPE Local 79, one of two major unions at city hall. Sometimes hard data isn't hard data, especially when your opponents are involved in its collection.

Hamilton Libraries: Something To Answer For

The other day I wrote a post called Hamilton's Vindication, with a link to a story detailing Hamilton Mayor Bob Bratina's invitation to author Margaret Atwood to tour the Central Library facilities. I suggested that Hamilton was enjoying a burgeoning reputation as a magnet for the arts, and that Toronto, its traditional rival down the road, was suffering a real loss of cachet thanks to the depredations being contemplated by the philistines at their City Hall (aka the Ford brothers and their wrecking crew). There was, in all honesty, an element of gloating to my post.

To be fair, Hamilton's hands are not entirely clean when it comes to its libraries. Yesterday, Spec civic affairs columnist Andrew Dreschel wrote a piece entitled Let’s make sure Atwood hears the full story, reminding people of the fact that the Picton branch, located in a poor area of Hamilton, was closed in 2009 to free up $140,000. To put the proposed Toronto closures into perspective, the article suggests the closing was justified, and did little harm to those affected.

In today's Spectator, there is an excellent rebuttal to that assertion by Hamilton reader Kathleen Moore. While I am providing a link to that rebuttal, due to the often ephemeral nature of online letters to the editor, I am also taking the liberty of reproducing her thoughtful response below:

Picton closure hurt a community

Re: Atwood should hear the Picton story (Column, Aug. 12)

I was a volunteer at the Picton Library branch and three generations of my immediate family frequented that branch. I’m sure you’re familiar with the phrase “If you build it, they will come.” The opposite is true as well, “if you unbuild it, they will stop coming.”

I watched as the branch brought in fewer and fewer books, cut programs and then drastically cut hours of operation. Of course, visitors and borrowing rates fell. The library board had engineered its own excuse to close the branch.

This all occurred before the excellent exposure given by The Hamilton Spectator Code Red series.

It is difficult to believe that in this day and age there are people who are unaware that illiteracy leads to poverty, which then leads to ill health and early decline. All of these things take a great toll on our society as a whole.

One of the largest housing projects in the city is at Strachan and James Street North. It is full of single-parent families and immigrants. Many of them don’t speak English or speak it as a second language. These are the people who can least afford to access an alternative to a public library. These are the people who are already battling a system that seems determined to keep them down. These are the people who were most comfortable in the atmosphere of a neighbourhood branch library.

To close a library branch in an area of the city where it can do the most good is counterproductive, and in the long run costs all of us far more than keeping that one little branch open and offering literacy skills to those who need them the most.

I can’t help but feel this great sacrifice was made so funds could be used for the bright and shiny new branches that have been built in the “burbs.” Pretty is as pretty does, and yes, I’d love to sit and chat with Margaret Atwood about the real cost associated with our library system, and I would tell her that when the focus of “long-term strategic thinking” is the bottom line, and we look at our library system as a separate entity and independent business instead of as a basic societal necessity, we all pay a much greater price in the long run.

I was opposed, and am still opposed, to the closing of Picton Library Branch.

Kathleen Moore, Hamilton