Toronto's battery of communication specialists – from those in the mayor's office to the corporate spin doctors ensconced in the curved towers at city hall – spend so much time nit-picking the work of journalists they neglect to tell the people what their bosses plan to do. In plain language.
Their considerable propensity to find a speck of incongruity in every dust storm of news reports has blinded their senses and hamstrung their ability to do what they're paid to do – communicate.
Take the new plan to fund recreation programs in Toronto by jacking up user fees 66 per cent by 2014. Coming on the heels of the pay-as-you-don't-throw waste bin scam, and the land-transfer tax fiasco, one might have anticipated a carefully scripted rollout. Not so. The task is left to the general manager of parks and recreation and the chair of the committee to discombobulate reporters with charts and graphs and figures. More
Councillor Joe Mihevc was doing his best spin job Tuesday, shilling for the mayor and city hall's latest attempt to wring more money from residents' pockets.
If you are registered in a fee-paying recreational program, a council report recommends your fees go up an average 21 per cent this year and 10 per cent for each of the next six years – by 2014, cumulatively, about $31 million more per year.
"It's not a report about money," said the chair of the recreation committee, which will consider the recommendations on Monday before sending it for public discussion and a council vote as early as next month. "It's about getting kids to recreate."
Well, yes and no. Let's follow the money. Toronto recovers 30 per cent of recreation programs' cost. Property taxes cover the rest. But the city's fiscal crisis has left the department in a perennial deficit, forcing it to cut and slice to keep on target. Option? Raise more fees or increase property taxes in order to provide the same service level to a rising population. MORE
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