Tor Poli Is Right On The Money

But if we get nothing out of the election of Miller we do get four more years of material for our blogs.

Saturday, November 11, 2006

All is Not Lost - If Business People Vote Against David Miller

There are 100,000 businesses in Toronto. What if every owner voted against Miller?
He reveals all that he is in his response to the CFIB survey
It is big on platitudes (as he always is) and small on action.
I am posting a few of his pompous "I know better than you do" comments. The whole survey is here.

• Developing a comprehensive economic development strategy that enhances Toronto’s strategic advantages by focusing on key economic clusters.

• Note that he waited two years to even hire an economic development commissioner, and then hired a weak one.

• Creating the Mayor’s Economic Advisory Committee to strengthen Toronto’s competitiveness.

• This committee has never met.

• Adopting a plan to reduce the business tax ratio every year for the next 15 years.

• This will surely offer benefits to business people long after they have retired.

• Partnering with business to call on the provincial government to lower Toronto’s education tax rate to that of its 905 neighbours.

• Is this the partnership that included the incredible insult and slap in the face he delivered to the Board of Trade?

• Building positive labour relations to ensure continuity of service delivery for residents.

• This is where he gave the City's union employees jobs for live in return for a supposed commitment to continual improvement in service which has never been seen. Meanwhile, Local 416 (Garbage Collectors) are working on his campaign in Etobicoke and York in return for a promise to unionize the garbage services there. Regardless of what the residents want.

• Some of the questions on this survey oversimplify complex issues.

• Miller finds simple things very difficult. That's why he hasn't accomplished a damn thing in three years.

Fire this bum . . .

The Bloom is Off the Broom

I have been highly critical of almost everything that David Miller has done and not done during the last three years. Frankly I would have supported a yellow dog who ran against him.
But a yellow and red mother and activist from Leaside was certainly up to the task.
At the moment it looks like Miller will get four more years to play in the sandbox with developers and poverty activists alike, although I think that his close ties to billionaire city hall influencers and lobbyists hasn't been properly revealed to the electors.
Pitfield offers a lot to voters, but I'm not sure they have picked up on it. She is immensely likeable, has tons of personal charisma, and knows city hall better than anyone else - where the bodies are buried and where the opportunities lie. She is beholden to no one.
She also has gotten a real bad ride from the chattering class on her subway plan (it calls for the same funding formula being used for the York U line and from a cash flow perspective is not much different than Miller's). And her costing program, if you look at it, only calls for a 1% reduction in non-wage and non-mandated costs. If an organization cannot do this then it is enormously incompetent.
She has also been badly beaten up - without any cause - by numerous blogs, particularly Spacing. I think that the blogmasters of all these dubious news outlets have a problem. I suspect it comes from being pissed off at their mothers.
In the course of my often inflammatory (some will note the emphasis on the 'tory) commentary I also have come down hard on the state of the city.
I do this from the perspective of comparison. In the last three months I have been in Montreal, Calgary, Vancouver, Chicago, New York, Halifax. In the last year Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, Brussels, and Paris can be added to the list.
And Toronto has a poorer transportation system, has more littered streets, worse panhandlers, more degraded buildings in public spaces than any of the these cities. We are in 12th place among 12 cities that I have visited in the last 12 months.
And who should we pin this on? We can blame ourselves, most accurately for electing David Miller last time. But really, it is Miller's fault to have not moved ahead on any area of civic improvement or progress. He has no vision, it's unfortunate that he has had a job and worse that most likely he will continue to have one.
If you're pissed off at your Mom, vote for Miller on Monday.
But if you notice the blight around you, and think that Toronto needs some big ideas, vote for Pitfield.