There is a great scene at the end of An American Tail, the classic 1986 animated immigration saga, in which the mice of New York City build a huge, fire-breathing mechanical mouse to scare off all the city’s cats.
In the movie, Fievel Mousekewitz’s artificial monster, called the Giant Mouse of Minsk, works to perfection. Terrified felines plunge in droves off of the New York piers and onto a boat headed for Hong Kong, never to return. The mice rejoice, and begin a new future in a city cleansed of their natural enemies.
Somewhere in the bowels of Toronto’s City Hall, Rob Ford has been busy stitching together a similar monster. It’s called the Core Service Review, and he’s hoping it will paralyze the city’s lefties with fear until they eventually scatter and jump a slow boat to China, taking their cherished big government ideas along with them.
For the rest of the summer, we will be regularly inundated with terrifying reports about city services that could go on the chopping block. The current phase of Ford’s review process, which sees perfunctory but highly-publicized daily meetings on the KPMG-authored report, has provoked an unrelenting media blitz about what we could lose. Will it be water fluoridation? Day-care centres? Late night TTC service? It could be all of them, we’re told.
“Everything is on the table” has become the talking point on every Ford ally’s lips, repeated verbatim or paraphrased by every official close to the mayor in what is evidently a well-orchestrated communications campaign to startle the public.
But everything is not on the table. Far from it.
Important aspects of the KPMG review are a joke. The firm was not asked to consider the financial or social impacts of proposed cuts, and so its report frequently bears no correlation to reality.
To give just one example, on Tuesday consultants suggested “high savings” could be generated by eliminating the city’s business services, which include the Toronto Film and Television Office, the body that licenses film shoots and injects $950 million into the economy each year. Other business services, like the one that helps corporations relocate here from other regions, generate far more money for the local economy than they cost the city. Eliminating them would put an end to only to Toronto’s hopes of becoming a world class city but also of ever playing one on TV.
Yet this is an area KPMG identified as a high-value source of savings, while noting obliquely that doing so “will impact” the Toronto economy, “impact” presumably being a euphemism for “severely damage.” It’s not a suggestion our mayor, or any mayor, would take seriously.
Other proposed cuts like ending the water fluoridation program are so unpopular no councillor will stand up and vote for it.
Another, to eliminate recycling programs for apartment buildings, is probably illegal.
Public works chair Denzil Minnan-Wong hinted strongly on Monday that KPMG’s suggestion of scaling back bike infrastructure next year would be impossible. But of course when pressed he reverted to the mayor’s mantra. Everything is on the table.
By staying silent as much as possible (he reportedly backed out of a CBC Radio interview this week) Ford will pretend to consider these and other unworkable options at least until mid-September when his executive committee meets. As long as he maintains that he’s weighing each one of KPMG’s suggestions, Torontonians will not know what issues to mobilize around. He’ll clam up and let the panic spread. By the time the mayor tells us what he actually plans to cut, he’s hoping his opponents will be so confused and exhausted that they won’t fight back.
That Ford should choose this strategy is no surprise. Since being elected the mayor and his lieutenants have proven themselves adept at the politics of fear and intimidation, of making a lot of noise about things they swear they will do but which will never actually happen (see Giorgio Mammoliti’s crusade to defund Pride).
And unfortunately it works. Already residents have been whipped into a panic, showing up in droves at City Hall this week to deplore service cuts no one has had a chance to determine are even possible, let alone figure out if they’re cuts Ford will ever actually propose.
While Ford has managed to strike fear into his opponent’s hearts, they can take consolation that he might be feeling a little nervous himself. The mayor may not emerge from this unscathed. His campaign promise to balance the budget without raising taxes appears in tatters. He’s floating a three per cent property tax increase, and he’s likely hoping the suburbanites who elected him won’t notice if he breathes a lot of fire about services downtowners hold dear.
The other meager upside to the service review is that because many of the “opportunities” KPMG identifies are unrealistic, the cuts won’t be as deep and wide as they first appeared. At some point the mayor is going to have to come up with a realistic budget, and many of KPMG’s scary suggestions won’t be in it.
It’s not much consolation, and Torontonians may end up losing some services we depend on. But we should at least see how big this monster really is before we start jumping off the dock.
