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Ford faltering

The mayor’s agenda hit more setbacks Tuesday, when council rejected several of his budget recommendations and three of his closest allies backed away from helping him fulfill his campaign promise to kill off the land transfer tax.

“The people of Toronto rejected the mayor’s agenda today,” said Councillor Janet Davis after the council vote on the Core Service Review. “This started as an exercise with a long list of cuts. The people of Toronto spoke up and put pressure on all their councillors and the mayor and said these services are important to us.”

It may be too early to declare the mayor’s agenda dead and buried, but Ford failed to win support on five separate motions on the service review, an issue he has made the centrepiece of his first year in office. Allies normally loyal to him defected and and joined a majority of councillors in deciding not to eliminate community environment days and the neighbourhood improvement program, not to cut funding to the Toronto Youth Cabinet and the Seniors Forum, and to protect the Toronto Parking Authority from privatization. Ford also failed in his attempt to stop council from recommending city-run zoos and parks be turned into conservancies rather than sold off.

None of the votes represented a significant amount of money-only $600,000 in total-but Ford’s failure to rally support on even relatively minor motions casts doubt on his ability to follow through with his wider budget-slashing plans, especially in the wake of his defeat over the Port Lands and his retreat from more contentious cuts last week.

Council decisions Ford supported Tuesday included votes to eliminate the Christmas bureau and the Hardship Fund, end the free garbage tag program, and push back targets for improving the city’s tree canopy. Altogether, the cuts represent roughly $27.6 million in savings for the city.

After the vote, Ford said he felt vindicated. “Today is a huge victory for the taxpayers,” he said. “We found $28 million in service adjustments. We did it, as a team. This is the first step. A lot of people said it couldn’t be done, and we did it.”

Yet the narrative that Ford rode into office on is now being undermined by his own team. The mayor has always said Toronto has a spending problem, not a revenue problem, but this week at council Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday moved a motion to study installing a road toll lane on the Don Valley Parkway, a tacit admission that the city needs to find revenue sources, not just service cuts, to balance the books.

Tuesday Holyday went further and suggested it would be unwise to eliminate the land transfer tax anytime soon, directly contradicting the mayor’s pledge to eliminate it during his term.

“I’m not even thinking ahead to scrapping the land transfer tax,” Holyday said. “I know that’s on the mayor’s agenda, and down the road somewhere I guess we’ll deal with that. But at this point I think we can’t think of doing that, the money’s just not there to do it at this time.”

Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, a member of the mayor’s executive committee, made similar comments. “I wouldn’t be a supporter at the present time of reducing or eliminating the land transfer tax,” he said. “I think we have a spending problem, but we can always use more revenue.”

Giorgio Mammoliti, one of the mayor’s closest allies on council, suggested the tax could be restructured to encourage home-buying in Toronto, but admitted it’s a key source of revenue for the city.

“We need the income, there’s no question about that,” he said.

The tax brings in roughly $300 million a year.

Aside from the $27.6 million in cuts approved by council Tuesday, roughly $65 million in so-called service efficiencies have been referred to the city manager, who will report back to council in October.

The combined total of roughly $93 million is scarcely a drop in the bucket of the estimated $500 to $600 million shortfall the city is facing, and the Core Service Review that Ford has spent so much of his political capital on has so far not revealed a glut of savings he predicted.

A user fee hike, property tax increase, and layoffs of city staff are expected to help make up the rest of the deficit. If so, Ford could end his first year in office having broken two key campaign promises-to neither raise taxes nor cut services-with the possibility of breaking a third, if he loses support needed to eliminate the land transfer tax.

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