Sitting at one of the round tables at the Core Services Review public consultations at Danforth CI on May 26, I realized why boycotting this creepy exercise (which I admit was my first thought) was just not an option.
Sure, the whole thing’s a set-up. The staff-devised meetings and online opinion survey, add-ons to the mayor’s $3 million “efficiency” probe, ask residents to comment, alas, not on what makes the city fantastic and fair, but on what services we can shave down, privatize or live without.
Yes, the people will speak, but the mayor and his brother have already pre-announced the punchline: smaller city government, more private companies feeding off public contracts.
So what’s to consult?
It’s a negative, nasty, manipulative project that forces respondents to decide whether services like tree protection, community centres, low-income housing, childcare, etc, are “necessary” or “not required,” and which should be slated for contracting-out or paid for by user fees.
In seeking priority rankings, the survey, among its many crimes, pits transit for the disabled against transit for everyone else, jobs for youth against neighbourhood facilities, and protecting heritage buildings against designing beautiful streets.
Reason must prevail. This may be hard to take in, but residents are actually being asked at the click of a mouse to deconstruct public amenities fought for and developed over years in a consultation where the options are already narrowed by fiat.
Sorry, folks, the major decisions have already been taken: the city is $774 million in the hole, not by accident or dreamy thinking, but by design.
Gord Perks sums it up: if Rob Ford hadn’t frozen property taxes, ditched the vehicle registration fee and frittered away the surplus, “we would be in a position where property tax increases just over the rate of inflation could have kept the ship afloat. Now we face significant tax increases or cuts, not because services cost so much, but because Mayor Ford really blew it in his first budget.”
So there we are. What to do with this phony consult? One option is to leverage it. It’s why David DePoe, the activist who triggered the second probe of Rob Ford’s alleged furtive corporate donations last week, turned up at one of the 30-some round tables that night in the Danforth CI cafeteria.
“This would all be a useful process,” he tells me, “if there weren’t already an agenda.” Still, he was elated that the place wasn’t crawling with Fordists. It was a happy revelation I had myself, in spite of the gloom of participating in an exercise designed to worsen our lives. Thing is, the fiscal rebels in the room had no intention of doing that.
The table I sat at stacked the “necessary pile” with as many services as they could load on, and all agreed the city had to be judged by how it treated the most vulnerable. “Services show our responsibility to one another,” one participant offered, a sentiment prominent in the summary report of all round table comments offered by staff.
“I was impressed,” says Councillor Janet Davis, who attended the same meeting, “by how much residents believe all services are necessary. Clearly, people are willing to pay more for a strong city.”
But it’s easy to see why many are ambivalent about getting too close to the action. “It’s a loaded process,” says Social Planning Toronto’s exec director, John Campey. “Do we give it credibility by participating, or by staying out of it cede the grounds?”
Campey is developing a guide to the survey and the ways it biases the outcome chief among them is the fact that the property tax increase option tops out at 10 per cent, which would still leave the city $400 to $500 million in debt, he maintains.
“It’s impossible for someone to say through the survey that they’re willing to pay a 15 to 20 per cent increase if that’s what it takes to avoid user fees, cutting services and outsourcing 311 to Bangalore. It’s not designed to elicit an objective result,” he says.
At the eco/social justice coalition OneToronto, Steve Shallhorn tells me flatly, “If the consultation fits Ford Nation, it will be trumpeted if it doesn’t, it will be ignored.”
And absent a minor political miracle, that’s about the size of it.
ellie@nowtoronto.com
