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Rob Ford's Toronto

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Ford's billion dollar savings broken down: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news...ngs-claim/article12915419/#dashboard/follows/

With the video affair still hanging over him, Mayor Rob Ford has been striving to draw attention to his successes. Chief among them, in his telling, is taming the city’s budget.

In speeches and press conferences, he often claims to have saved a billion dollars.

“Everything’s going fine,” Mr. Ford said recently, when asked if the video affair was hurting the city. “I’m keeping taxes low. I’ve saved a billion dollars.”

When critics cast doubt on the claim, Mr. Ford provided a tally showing how he had arrived at the figure.

According to him, the savings are as follows:

$200-million from cancelling the vehicle-registration tax.
$6.4-million from cutting expense budgets of city councillors and the mayor’s office.
$78-million from contracting out garbage collection west of Yonge Street.
$606-million from various “efficiencies” ($57-million in the 2011 budget, $327-million in 2012 and $222-million in 2013).
$89-million from a streamlined labour contract with city employees.
$24-million from higher user fees.
Add all that up and it comes to $1,003,400,000, narrowly vindicating his claim. After listing the figures on his radio show last month, he said again: “We’ve saved a billion dollars.”

But scrutinize the numbers a bit and doubt creeps in. The $200-million for the car tax isn’t a saving in the usual sense. It saves taxpayers money, but it cuts city revenue, not expenditures. Counting it as a cut is like saying that a household is saving money when one of its income earners takes a pay cut.

The $78-million from contracting out garbage will be realized over the seven-year life of the contract and the mayor argues he is saving $1-billion within his four year-term, so he is stretching things here. The private collection company took over last summer. By the end of Mr. Ford’s term, it will have been in charge for 2 1/2 years, so the most he can claim to have saved by then is about $28-million, not $78-million.

Counting a $24-million hike in user fees as a saving is strangest of all. It is one thing to say that a tax cut is a saving because it saves taxpayers’ money, quite another to argue that making people pay more to take city-run swimming classes or rent space in a community centre is a saving.

Mr. Ford says that he is shifting costs to those who actually go to the classes or rent the space and “this reduces the burden on the general public.” Perhaps, but, sorry, raising fees doesn’t amount to an expenditure cut and it certainly doesn’t amount to a tax cut, so it can’t be called a saving even by the mayor’s flexible definition of the term.

Combing through the mayor’s sums in this way may seem like quibbling. What is a few million here and there given all the money he is saving, his supporters will ask. Don’t all politicians exaggerate their achievements?

But this is the platform he will be presenting when he runs for re-election next year, so voters have a right to expect that the numbers he uses are right. If this were a few years ago, Mr. Ford was still a city councillor and mayor David Miller were claiming a user-fee increase as a budget saving, Mr. Ford would be screaming blue murder.

Mr. Ford doesn’t need to fudge the numbers to claim success as a fiscal manager. The labour deal was a substantial achievement. So was contracting our garbage. Most impressive was the decision to stop using leftover money from one year’s budget to plug holes in the next.

He is not the first mayor to claim he has saved money. As recently as 2009, Mr. Miller was bringing in a budget that included $102-million in claimed efficiency savings. Mr. Ford and others pored over those numbers with the most skeptical of eyes. Now that Mr. Ford is mayor, he should expect no less.
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CowboyLogic said:
He's a bad leader in your opinion. That's not a fact, although you are entitled to your opinion.

And I can't agree that most people here back up their rants with facts. Some people here do, but some of the most extreme and unreasonable anti-Ford vitriol I've seen has been on this thread.
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When did Ford become a leader?
 
CowboyLogic:

Actually, a leader that has to avoid the media for a week and leave by the backdoor daily is a pretty good sign that he isn't good at his job. Communication is a key aspect of leadership - and on that score alone he is a failure. And certainly a good leader would be able to bring people together instead of driving them further apart - so unless your definition of leadership is significantly different than most, the factual basis of the claim remains.

Interesting use of the word "extreme"...it's *quite* familiar.

AoD
 
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A leader is able to bring together others to push forward a common agenda. According to Matt Elliot's fine work compiling city council vote results, Ford overall has been on the losing end of close to half of the council votes taken during his mayoralty, and so far in 2013 his percentage of council "wins" has dropped to about a third. The efficacy of his "leadership" has always been dodgy at best, and this year his influence has objectively declined. None of these claims are opinion, but just the cold hard facts of city council votes.
 
nfitz said:
You seem to be ignoring his comments about "traditional marriage" and his endorsement of the views of renowned bigot Wendell Brereton.
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And the fact that he is the first mayor in nearly 20 years to not march in the Pride Parade.
 
Not only did Ford skip out on the Pride Parade but more importantly, last year he did not go to ANY of the Pride events, for the 10 day festival. He can't even use his family long weekend away at the cottage to justify it. Now how do you justify a mayor, who will go to the opening of a gas station in Etobicoke or Scarborough but will not attend a single event of a 10 day festival, that brings in OVER 100 MILLION dollars to the city? In all of Ford's years in politics, he has never attended gay events like Pride (or anything else) but he has attended just about every business, ethnic, cultural and BIA event in the city. Why is that?

Is there any doubt, that Ford has been avoiding anything to do with Pride? Even Ford Nation knows the deal and probably a lot of them get a kick out of it but any reasonable person would conclude the obvious, that Ford does not want to be around gays and lesbians. The man is clearly a bigot and a homophobe.

The only reason Ford went to the flag raising this year, is because there was so much pressure on him and he knows it made him and the city he represents, look bad. It was Doug that actually forced him to go. He clearly, was not happy to be there. (Did you see the pics, with his miserable face? lol) Ford doesn't even try to hide it because he believes this supporters are homophobic, just like him, so it won't lose him many votes. Hopefully our next mayor will have a more enlightened view.

People need to stop justifying homophobia and a mayor who seeks to divide Torontonians. That can only be a bad thing for this city.
 
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Irishmonk said:
This could change things:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/story/2013/07/01/toronto-court-media-project-traveller-warrants-rob-ford-alleged-drug-video.html

I suspect the warrants will be kept under wraps for a further 6 months in order to give the Ford/TPS junta plenty of time to get all their ducks in a row.
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There aren't really any ducks *to* get in a row - either the video is part of the gathered evidence or its not. If it's there there's nothing at this point Ford can do to mitigate the damage of people actually seeing it. Not now, not 6 months from now. Only if its pushed beyond next fall could it matter.
 
k10ery said:
FWIW, marcus Gee here is stealing from GraphicMatt - see http://metronews.ca/voices/ford-for...-mayor-rob-fords-billion-dollar-budget-boast/

But Gee's doing a much worse job of it. Why no mention of the biggest line item, the $600M "efficiencies"?
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PinkLucy said:
Agreed, on both counts. It's a rather glaring omission, isn't it?
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Not sure if you're genuinely curious about Gee's shittily executed theft from GraphicMatt. To me Gee is clearly pushing the narrative that, notwithstanding Ford's oafish/criminal/crack-addled behaviour, Ford's "bottom line" moves have been "successful", and in that respect, the less scrutiny the better. The same refrain is being peddled by numerous conservative supporters who, while too ashamed to "support" Ford, are anxious to retrieve the meatier nuggets of the RoFo legacy from the bottom of the toilet before flushing.
 
bobbob911 said:
There aren't really any ducks *to* get in a row - either the video is part of the gathered evidence or its not. If it's there there's nothing at this point Ford can do to mitigate the damage of people actually seeing it. Not now, not 6 months from now. Only if its pushed beyond next fall could it matter.
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"Jacobsen notes there is no certainty that the warrants contain any evidence implicating the mayor in any wrongdoing; but he insists seeing the warrants may be the only way to clear the air."

It's my impression that there's more than the video at hand here. Even if that never finds the light of day there are lots of other potential goodies that could link the Fords to the drug gangs. Are you saying that none of the evidence currently under wraps can be manipulated or "lost" by the TPS over the next 6 months? I'll happily defer to any knowledge you have of our wonderfully transparent law enforcement/legal system.
 
Tulse said:
A leader is able to bring together others to push forward a common agenda. According to Matt Elliot's fine work compiling city council vote results, Ford overall has been on the losing end of close to half of the council votes taken during his mayoralty, and so far in 2013 his percentage of council "wins" has dropped to about a third. The efficacy of his "leadership" has always been dodgy at best, and this year his influence has objectively declined. None of these claims are opinion, but just the cold hard facts of city council votes.
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The Mayor only has one vote. He is not like a Premier who can do whatever he/she wants provided they have a majority. As the scorecard from Graphic Matt shows there are 18 left-wing Councillors who vote against Ford on almost every issue and they do it out of spite. It doesn't matter how worthy the issue - if Ford is for it they have to be against it. A good example was the vote to allow further study into the proposal to permit whisper-Jets to fly onto the Island. These 18 left-wing Councillor's voted against the motion despite the fact that support for the whisper-Jets is highest in the downtown wards that they represent and thousands of local jobs are at stake.

As long as these 18 obstructionists are on Council nothing worthwhile is going to get done at city hall.
 
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