John Downing For Mayor

Has Miller made it better?

By JOHN DOWNING

Stephen LeDrew echoes one of the most devastating lines ever in U.S. presidential elections when he asks Torontonians if they feel better off now than they were three years ago when David Miller was elected mayor.

It was during the 1980 presidential debates that Ronald Reagan asked viewers: ”Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Most decided they weren’t, and gave him eight years.

A Decima poll said 58% of Torontonians want a change of city leadership. And “time for a change” is the most potent mood in voting. But it’s no wonder most would answer that we’re not better off.

Not with 3% tax increases every year. Not with a grubby city. Not with a decline in services, a cattle-car subway and an increase in gridlock — all because the left hates cars and loves spending our money on their pet projects.

Just about everyone rains on this parade of fumbling policies. However, I don’t believe everything the doomsayers say.

For example, that quoted report from the Toronto Community Foundation. It said 1,000 businesses and 23,600 jobs have moved out into our exurbs in the last five years. No doubt there’s been a major erosion, reducing our vitality, because of bumbling. Yet I don’t think things have become so bad that 731,737 Torontonians use food banks, as that Vital Signs 2006 report claimed.

I don’t believe almost one in three residents are grabbing free food. But then, I also doubt stats from bleeding-heart lobbies and council socialists that exaggerate homeless needs, which have snowballed into a huge hit on the civic treasury and a growth industry.

There’s a fog of malaise drifting along too many streets. If there’s anyone ecstatic with all their politicians, they should be sent to the zoo as a rare species.

We can’t blame Miller for all the city problems, no matter how tempting when he pulls that smug act, the blond with streaks of mean. Yet he can’t escape most of the splatter, either, because he leads the NDP majority that through secrecy, cronyism and toadying to the unions rules like litter on our streets.

Miller was going to change the city right to its core. He waved a broom of reform to symbolize that. (A good line outside one debate had a man saying Miller could sell that broom on Ebay because it wasn’t used.)

He leaves himself open to the “better off” question because he’s proud of council’s record and says he’s done “pretty much” what he promised, or at least started to.

It’s a mistake to get too excited about foreign media criticism because it’s just the views of a few writers and editors. But this city, which once basked in the approval of National Geographic, the New York Times, Time and The Economist, now even has publications that few of us have heard of, like Travel & Leisure, saying Toronto no longer rates as a Canadian city you “must” visit.

Now that smarts!.

City Hall farces

C’mon guys, Toronto still has lots to offer. A museum that looks like it’s exploded. A City Hall museum where you can watch farces, such as pompous antiques saying garbage must be buried (so it can hurt future generations) and can’t be burned to get valuable energy — even though that’s long been happening throughout the world, in almost 500 incinerators in Europe alone.

Never mind, the Miller Lites insist it won’t happen here, making us a curiosity.

We have bigger traffic jams than Manhattan, London and Paris. Why, you can even still gawk at streetcars, since we’re one of the few cities that haven’t scrapped them.

Best of all, our downtown streets have picturesque characters who will tell you where to go in colourful argot.

Golly, who could wish for anything more?

Except most of us do.