By Klaus Rohrich
Monday, August 13, 2007
David Miller really showed those Toronto taxpayers who's boss. They didn't bend over for his new revenue tools (spelled t-a-x- i-n-c-r-e-a-s-e-s); to retaliate he and his Greek chorus of leftie councilors are cutting services. So now, due to Miller's petulance the good people of Toronto will have to forego the luxury of having roads repaired, grass cut on a regular schedule, snow shoveled unless a minimum of 6" accumulated during any one snowfall and so on.
It's interesting to note that during all this time not once did Miller even vaguely entertain efforts to reduce the city payroll by contracting out certain city services in efforts to save money. Had Miller done so, he would have been in breach of his Faustian deal with the devil unions that seem to have Canadian municipalities in general and Toronto in particular, in a stranglehold.
Talk about dirty deals in dimly lit back rooms, Miller's action plan is the tip of a very nasty iceberg that reaches to God knows what putrid depths, as he sacrifices the health of the city he purports to love in favor of satisfying his power base, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE). CUPE's Toronto boss, Brian Cochrane, flatly refused to even consider any concessions, stating that the union had already conceded enough during the 1990s and wasn't prepared to even look at that as a possibility.
But, hey, why not, when you've bought and paid for the mayor and half the politicians on City Council? Let the poor schlubs who are paying the taxes worry about where the money to run the city is going to come from, so long as the union gets its piece of the action.
While there is no recall mechanism in Canadian politics, short of an assassination, it looks as though Torontonians will have to grin and bear it, as the Millerites serve out the balance of the current sentence. Miller's end game is to convince taxpayers that the city really is broke and thus get his revenue tools passed this October after the provincial elections. It's a fairly cagey move on Miller's part, as he's betting that the tax drones of Toronto will eventually swallow their pride and pony up the additional taxes to allow Miller to further lavish his union base with lucre. While this may be a risky ploy, Miller is surely betting that he can keep the city's unions on side for the next election without alienating too many of the people who voted for him during the last.
Chances are that it's a sound bet on Miller's part, who has proven himself to be a formidable politician, while most Toronto voters seem ill informed and easily mislead.
With Toronto's municipal budget approaching $8 billion per year, which is more than the current budgets of Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island combined, one wonders how accurate Mayor Miller's assertion that it is "factually false...utter nonsense" that some of the taxpayers' money may be wasted. I, for one, know of at least one tremendous waste of money and that's the city's purchase of the property housing Theatre Passe Muraille, in order to keep it afloat. If Toronto cannot afford to keep its lawns trimmed, roads patched or snow removed, then it damn sure can't afford to provide free space to a theatre that can't survive on its own.
That's one of those things I would classify as a luxury, rather than a necessity. However, even that fits in with Miller's Grand Game plan, as this action will buy him and his NDP cabal votes in the next municipal election from all the downtown artsy types who believe that experimental theatre is a necessity. Another waste of Toronto taxpayers' money is the grants passed out to special interest community groups. Again, these are naked ploys designed to garner payback during the 2010 municipal elections.
It seems that the only people that Miller and his cronies really don't care about are the ones dutifully coughing up tax money to keep the Toronto freak show running. It would be poetic justice if all turned out to bite him where it hurts.
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