Comrade Miller's "ZEROFOOTPRINT" On The Neck Of Toronto Taxpayers

MIA Comrade mayor is dreaming while the a majority of Toronto voters must be having nightmares about the fact that they voted for Miller or worse didn't excercise their right to vote.

Mayor's dreaming in green
By SUE-ANN LEVY

While Mayor David Miller and his budget chief Shelley Carroll swanned around New York City rubbing shoulders with the "climate change" elite earlier this week, I was stuck in unrelenting Toronto gridlock.

About the same time Miller unveiled his "cutting edge" web-based green initiative called Zerofootprint, I was forced to perform some rather fancy footwork of my own to get to a series of medical appointments on time.

I was late for every single one of them thanks to a combination of traffic tie-ups, construction detours and all too many drivers distracted by the cellphones glued to their ears.

I'm not the least bit green with envy that the mayor was in the Big Apple promoting himself at the C40 Large Cities climate summit while I was left to wend my way through a maze of city roads that grow more traffic-infested by the day.

Actually, the Zerofootprint concept sounds like a good one for those who are Internet-savvy enough to use it.

In fact, when I reached Miller in New York he did a good job of selling the technology, which will be up and running on a free, pilot basis for the city's 50,000 employees in July.

The mayor said once operable, people will be able to use the Internet-based tool to calculate their own "climate footprint" -- which includes the amount of electricity they consume, the water they use, the waste they generate, how they get to work, their shopping habits and food choices.

From that, they can make some informed decisions on how to reduce their energy use and greenhouse gas emissions.

I asked him if the tool will tell people how to reduce their reliance on their cars. He said there will be some "simple suggestions" and it will allow people in the same neighbourhoods to hook up if they want to carpool.

Miller added that to really get people out of their cars they need to build Transit City -- referring to the ambitious $6.1-billion network of seven light rail lines unanimously approved by his trained seals on the TTC three months ago.

It was at this point he lost me, especially when he had the audacity to claim the roster of new taxes -- oops, revenue tools -- he plans to bring in under the City of Toronto Act will be used, in part, to pay for the new transit lines and to clear the $300-million roads maintenance backlog.

Well, it's not so. The tax money raised will hardly cover the deficit created by his lavish union wage hikes and the overspending of his socialist brethern on council.

All that comment did was remind me why I bristled when I heard that the mayor and his budget chief had decided to swan around New York pitching their green dreams instead of being here to face the heat head-on like true leaders at the tax consultation sessions (tonight's being in North York).

If the city's gridlock was in check, if the fiscal coffers were not bone dry, if the streets were as clean and litter-free as King of Denial claims they are, if Toronto was running like a lean machine, he could spend all the time he likes playing footsie with the environmental elite and pushing changes to one's carbon footprint.

But as has become clear, the Emperor has no clothes. Miller is deluding himself if he thinks Toronto's taxpayers aren't aware of that fact.

Coun. Doug Holyday sat in gridlock as well yesterday. I caught him after he'd spent 27 minutes getting from City Hall to Spadina and Front.

"He's marching to his own drummer," said Holyday of the mayor and his trip to New York. "He's got his NDP activist tree-hugging agenda ... we could sit in traffic for weeks and I don't think that's going to bother him."

SPEAKING OF TRANSIT: It seems not even the city's debt woes will stop those TTC rascals from taking their appointed trips abroad. Six commissioners are set to jet off to Helsinki, Finland for an international transit conference, which starts on Sunday. TTC chairman Adam Giambrone, Joe Mihevc, Peter Milczyn, Anthony Peruzza, Bill Saundercook and Michael Thompson will all fly away. I'm told each gets up to $5,000 to spend on a total of three conferences per year. But the other two are in the United States and Canada, so why not blow the bundle on an overseas jaunt?