Cautious hopes to regain our city

The former mayor says he leaves a wonderful legacy and that most people in Toronto agree. It just goes to show that David Miller is as a big a dumbbell  going out as he was coming in seven years earlier.

He knew practically nothing about governing the city as a councillor, and learned the same after being mayor. I must confess I was an early Miller supporter during his first campaign days of wielding a broom to symbolize sweeping out the mess at city hall left by another dope, Mel Lastman. The latter pictured Africans like a 1950s Saturday Evening Post cartoon of cannibals with spears dancing around some white hunters in a big cooking kettle.

Miller’s main stand so far as Downtown residents were concerned was that he opposed turning Toronto Islands into Toronto Peninsula by building a bridge to the airport there. (Now the miniscule port authority that shouldn’t even exist wants to put the bridge 70 feet beneath the water to avoid using the multi-million dollar ferries that were purchased especially for airport passengers.)

The broom gimmick, along with Miller’s golden curls, appealed more to voters than either a former Rogers guy who was in charge when that company tricked consumers with “negative option” billing, or a zombie-talking woman ex-mayor. Turns out the ex-Rogers guy, John Tory, after a truncated foray into provincial politics, has morphed into perhaps the nation’s finest radio talk-show host and dependable observer of the local and provincial government scenes.

Barbara Hall, on the other hand, hasn’t shined. Now granted, we journalists are basically a pack of dogs, but that’s what a free press engenders. Otherwise it’s not free. Barbara was appointed to head the highly questionable Ontario Human Rights Commission which often appears to operate as a non-judicial court to impose political correctness as defined by folks like Barbara. She crusaded to make journalism a federally regulated craft. Very bad, Barbara.

So both John and Barbara lost and David with the golden locks and curls became our mayor. It was obvious from the start that he didn’t know anything about governing a city. He had traded on his Harvard education, his good looks and sincere manner of speech on progressive talking points to win the mayoral chain but otherwise was an empty suit.

He had to depend on city staff to tell him what to do and they were more than eager to do that. When the great Tory rape of Toronto by amalgamation occurred, we ended up with a lot of bureaucrats who had been in Mel Lastman’s former North York empire. In addition, we had some of our own homegrown bureaucrats, all jockeying for power and turf (also known as “the gravy train”).

A know-nuthin’ mayor was the key to their hopes and dreams of hopping on board for power and glory and they knew how to cash that in. On your buck. Better still, Miller had attracted a faction of councillors who near-blindly supported any of his initiatives and could force them into being. Then a complicit premier, Dalton McGuinty, gave this civil-service-driven cabal access to more taxpayer money and an extra year in power.

Since some were left-wing ex-school-board types, they followed like good pupils when their teacher-employees—the bureaucrats—gave them lessons on how to run the city. (And, of course, how to benefit the city departments they command which operate independent of each other like concrete silos.)

Do you wonder why the city will tear up a sidewalk, do some work, replace the sidewalk and again tear it up almost the next day? Because different city silos were responsible for different aspects of what’s under the sidewalk and they operate independently. On your buck.

You look down many Downtown residential streets and see hideous, expensive plastic garbage and recycling bins blotting your view in front of each unit because there’s no other place to keep them. Stupid. Ugly. A bureaucrat’s suggestion and council’s mindless approval.

You see this ridiculous “street furniture” contract that was given to a single huge corporation for many years into the future to make Scarborough look like Downtown. As if…

You see arrogant stupidity almost everywhere these doctrinaire fools apply themselves. Grand schemes are purportedly financed with gimmicks like “selling” light poles to city-owned Toronto Hydro and imposing hefty taxes that hammer the real estate business,hurt homebuyers and impose more costs on gridlocked car owners.

Where they don’t apply themselves is to actually operate a city by keeping it functioning, in repair, moving its traffic, serving its taxpayers. That’s the legacy of David Miller and his council lackeys. This new mayor may or may not add to the disgrace of a nutty, elitist city council. We can only pray for relief from those dingbats.

The best suggestion that came from this mayoral campaign is to institute citizen-initiated recall of councillors. That way, in order to perpetuate their berths on the gravy train, some of these trough-quaffing characters will actually have to serve their constituents instead of merely relying upon name recognition and the hopelessness felt by voters.