A Memorial To A World Class City

Kelly McParland: David Miller's sad legacy

Posted: February 17, 2010, 2:40 PM by NP Editor

The other day I had to get from Union station, at the south end of Toronto, to a library at Yonge and Bloor.

It's not a long way. You could walk it if it wasn't freezing. But I had the car, so I was stuck. I figured it would be easier to park the car and take transit because six years of David Miller as mayor has turned street traffic into a nightmare. But I decided to risk it, and headed up Jarvis. I made it half a block before hitting gridlock, so I pulled an illegal turn and found a jammed parking garage.

It cost $3 each way on the subway, plus $12 for parking. So, $18 to spend a couple of hours at the library. Under Mr. Miller's new budget, library service is to be reduced. That's the price, he said, for "a great city."

Mr. Miller isn't running for re-election, and appears to have quit pretending to deal with reality. His "legacy" as mayor was supposed to be a brilliant transformation of the city's transit system, getting people out of cars and into buses, subways and streetcars. He's definitely made it less attractive to drive a car, mainly by encouraging an almost endless traffic snarl,  but the rest of the program -- i.e. providing an alternative -- is a different story.

The bus and subway system have been "improved" so much that passengers have taken to following around drivers and ticket-takers with cellphone cameras, documenting their mid-shift naps, spontaneous coffee breaks and surly attitude to riders. When the besieged workers set up a Facebook site to commiserate with one another, it was assaulted by an online invasion of fed-up customers. Mr. Miller is a confirmed left-winger and has made much over the years of his sympathy with city unions, yet the result is a union leadership so arrogant that Amalgamated Transit Union boss Bob Kinnear called a press conference to insult anyone who dared criticize his dozing, coffee-slurping troops, who have allegedly become so traumatized by all the attention they fear taking bathroom breaks. Especially if it means parking their bus in the middle of the street, with the door open on a freezing night, blocking traffic so they can grab a donut and chat with the folks at Tim's on the way to said toilet break.

"Listen folks," instructed Mr. Kinnear, "stop harrassing people who are doing their jobs. Stop insulting them. Stop waving your cameras in their faces as soon as you get on the bus or streetcar."

Or what? They'll loaf through their shift at half speed while treating riders like an annoyance? And how will that be different?

Mr. Miller insists the TTC is a spectacular example of his successful devotion to improving transit. It's chaired by Adam Giambrone, a baby-faced 32-year-old whose chief qualification for the job is that he thinks Mr. Miller is a god. Mr. Giambrone presides over an operation that has increased staff by 25% to carry the same number of passengers it did 20 years ago. The trains are dirty, unreliable and overcrowded. People hate them, as evidenced by their spontaneous revolt against transit employees. Ticket-takers can make over $100,000 a year by working overtime, which is a lot easier when you can snooze on the job. Mr. Miller just keeps insisting everything is fine, as if repeating it to himself makes it so.

Mr. Giambrone was hoping to follow his hero into the mayor's office, but his campaign ran into a spot of bother last week when it turned out he'd been doing his best to imitate Tiger Woods. Though unmarried, he had a regular girlfriend who featured in his carefully-crafted self-portrait as a stable, regular guy. Until a different girlfriend, angry and armed with the inevitable text messages, called the papers and ratted him out as a serial philanderer who had slagged off the "official" girlfriend as a political necessity. Mr. Giambrone had to admit #2 girlfriend wasn't his only departure from fidelity, and withdraw from the race. But not before Mr. Miller launched a staunch defence of his record, lauding his "leadership" and insisting his "transformation" of the system had been "unique."

Well, I guess you could say that, if you view a lousy system jammed with ticked-off passengers as "unique." But that's Mr. Miller's way. Ignore the iceberg. We're still afloat, so far. On Monday Mr. Miller brought down his last budget, including a 4% hike in property taxes and a slew of fees and hikes. The mayor likes to brag that Toronto has the lowest property rates in the region, which is true. That's one reason it produces a yawning deficit every year, which is usually paid off by the province after weeks of municipal pleading. This year, though, the province has a record deficit of its own, so Mr. Miller is out of luck on that front, and has responded by jacking up taxes and adding to the fees charged on everything short of TTC bathroom breaks. The latest is a $350 penalty for fire calls that prove to be false alarms. The charge will apply for each vehicle sent out, and will be applied even if you immediately call back and cancel. So if the toaster jams and the smoke sets off the automatic alarm before you can stop it, and three trucks are dispatched, that's 1,000 clams on your account, buckeroo. Courtesy of David Miller and his "great city."

It's useless complaining. As Mr. Kinnear made clear, Toronto's public servants have an attitude problem. It annoys them that the people who pay the taxes that keep the whole colossal mess of a government afloat just don't appreciate how good they have it. John Tory, the former provincial Progressive-Conservative leader, who considered running for mayor himself, learned that when he suggested to a gathering of municipal authorities that they needed to start working better as a region. Mr. Miller has resisted such entreaties, and his spokesman dismissed Mr. Tory with a snappy put-down: "Talk radio hosts are obviously entitled to their opinion," he said, referring to Mr. Tory's evening spot on a local radio station.

(The spokesman, Stuart Green, offended when his remark was criticized, fired off a letter to the editor of the Toronto Star, blaming its reporter for incorrectly posing the question.)

So there you have it. An arrogant, inept, self-important administration blindly insisting it's doing a great job, while insulting anyone who dares to disagree. Great job Mr. Miller. Wonderful legacy. Say, you couldn't speed up that retirement a bit, could you?

National Post