Author: nevillepark

#WiTOpoli: it’s a thing now

Yeah, so that post I did is totally a thing now. It magically became a thing thanks to Steph Guthrie and her fearsome organizational skillz. There’s going to be two panel discussions on women in Toronto politics (because there were too many awesome people for just one) — here’s the description:

  • On May 23, The Comment Section panelists will discuss how women’s voices figure into conversations about Toronto politics and municipal affairs. This panel will identify Twitter as a key medium through which these conversations take place, but also address the many other spaces in which political conversations occur.
  • On May 30, The Front Page panelists will examine how female players in the political sphere are discussed on Twitter, in the media, and elsewhere. This panel will analyze the nature of political conversations about women, and the influence that these conversations exert on women’s political action and expression.

Oh, and also I’m on the May 23 one (just typing it makes me nervous already). You can now register for tickets; it’s free. Yeah.

The Matlow Jar

A plastic jar with a photo of councillor Josh Matlow taped on it.

Because people periodically ask:

One evening I was having post-council drinks when Josh Matlow’s EA came up and introduced himself. When he learned who I was, he chided me for being so hard on Matlow that day on Twitter (I believe I had called him “beige”) and gave an eloquent defence of his boss.

In embarrassment, I resolved to cut Matlow (and the rest of Council) some slack, and to that end I set aside a jar, kind of like a swear jar. Every time I say something unnecessarily mean about a municipal politician, I put 25 cents in the jar.

There are several bucks in there now. I haven’t decided what to do with the money yet, but it will probably go towards buying drinks for the councillors who receive the brunt of my wrath.

The More You Know

Too many dicks on the dancefloor

This is actually footage from a #TOpoli pub night

#TOpoli, we need to talk. This has been bothering me for a while now, and since it’s International Women’s Day I figure I may as well take this occasion to point out that our burgeoning scene is one big white dudefest. And white dudefests suck. But luckily there are small, practical things we can do to fix this, which is good, because I would hate to totally fucking snap and destroy you all with the burning rage of a thousand Nunziatas.

Continue reading Too many dicks on the dancefloor

Diary of a councilspotter: In which the politicians take over City Hall

Monday, March 5, City Council meeting 19

The Story So Far:

  • January 17, 2012: In an unprecedented victory, left-wing and centrist councillors get together and vote to reverse most of Ford’s proposed budget cuts. Getting cocky, they think about bringing back Transit City, the previous mayor’s transit plan that Ford strongly opposes.

  • February 8, 2012: At a special council meeting, TTC chair and (up till now) Ford loyalist Karen Stintz spearheads a motion to basically reinstate Transit City, which passes with a decent majority. Team Ford would fire Stintz if they could, but the rules say they can’t.

  • February 21, 2012: Five Ford-friendly members of the TTC board call a special meeting and fire the TTC general manager Gary Webster instead. This is a bad move, and the other four councillors on the board are pissed.

  • March 5, 2012: Council votes to dissolve the TTC board and put together a new one, which happens to include the minority of TTC board members who voted not to fire Webster (this includes Stintz), plus some centrist and left-wing councillors. Council then votes Stintz back in as TTC chair.

For those keeping track at home, this is the third failed attempt by Team Ford to get back at Stintz for Transit City. But there’s more: there’s another special council meeting on the 21st where they’ll be making decisions about transit on Sheppard. (The mayor and others want subways; the plan calls for light rail.)

The title of the post refers to what Cllr Giorgio Mammoliti actually said at some point yesterday. Yes, that apparently came out of his mouth with no irony. It’s only a slightly more fucking ridiculous version of what Cllr Denzil Minnan-Wong and Cllr Michael Thompson have said at various points in the past few months: they believe transit should be depoliticized. Which, I mean, I live and die by “the personal is political”, so you can guess how I feel about that. It’s horrible because everything is fucking political, and “depoliticize” basically just means “pretend it’s not political” or “our politics don’t count as politics”, which is bullshit—

—and if it’s not that, it’s some kind of libertarian shit, like, the government shouldn’t be in this business, which is also bullshit. Doug Ford said as much during last Sunday’s radio show when he was spouting off about how “taxes are evil” (yes, another thing that actually crawled out of someone’s mouth)—he said the government should be providing services, not creating jobs (damn the economy!). But apparently those services don’t even include transit. These people’s ideal government is basically a glorified utility company. No wonder they lack long-term vision.

And I realize the entire point of this enterprise is to get inside government and tear it down but I can’t help remembering another feminist soundbite: “Don’t like abortions? Don’t have one.”

Don’t like politics?

DON’T. FUCKING. BECOME. A. POLITICIAN.

Re: Gary Webster

Dear Councillors:

I’m writing to encourage you not to fire Gary Webster. It would mean paying out an enormous severance package (about $500,000) just to intimidate City workers and to further politicize the civil service. Webster is bound by professional honesty to serve the Mayor by advising him on the facts as they are and not how we would like them to be. Further, his duty is not only to the Mayor, but to all of us—so he must act in the public interest whether or not that aligns with Ford’s mandate.

Firing people because they can’t honestly agree with you is irresponsible from both a financial and an ethical perspective. Please do the right thing.

Yours,

Neville Park

Diary of a councilspotter: The roof over our heads

Friday, February 17, Executive Committee Meeting 17

Had to miss the first half of the special Executive Committee meeting on TCHC for a meeting with an Ontario Works caseworker so she could verify I’m broke and gainfully unemployed enough. This one’s new. She asked what I did my degree in; I told her “Philosophy” and she laughed in my face. Hey, I’d be laughing if I were her, too.

When I got there they were a few dozen deputations in. The crowd was the usual housing activists and scattering of cranks, plus a good contingent of regular folks who rarely go to these things, many clearly here out of desperation—unpracticed in public speaking, with choked-up voices and often halting speech. It takes a lot of bravery to go down to City Hall and beg a bunch of callous old guys not to sell your house out from under you.

—Sorry. It’s hard for me not to go all Joe Fiorito on this. But I think that if you were serious about eradicating poverty here in Toronto, a solid affordable housing strategy would be the place to start, and it’s absolutely fucking infuriating that a gang of small-government ideologues with six-figure salaries who don’t give a shit about poverty are the ones managing the crisis.

Crisis, eh?

As of December 2011, there’s a record-breaking 82, 138 households on the affordable housing waitlist (PDF). The list is growing by about 7.5% each year, but they house only 4–4.5%. We’re in this situation because—stay with me here—market rent housing is unaffordable (especially for the working poor and people on social assistance), which drives up demand for affordable housing; but more people want to move in than are moving out, because market rent is unaffordable.

What we really need is to drastically increase the amount of affordable housing available. Selling off property as a stopgap measure—in effect, cannibalizing TCHC’s own assets for one-time funds—would be moving backwards. So what are some things we can do? I thought of a few:

  1. Enter into partnerships with other organizations, like co-ops, which would take on some of the cost (and potentially develop into affordable housing independent of TCHC).

  2. Provide rent subsidies to people currently living in market rent housing, which Team Ford seems to favour. I’m not sure whether this would be more or less cost-effective.

  3. Use Section 37 funds, which developers pay in exchange for getting to put more units in their buildings, to subsidize a percentage of units in new developments. Right now the money goes towards neighbourhood improvements, but (I think) there’s no reason why it can’t be repurposed. Recently Habitat for Humanity has proposed acting as a go-between.

I favour door #3, because it a) actually creates more housing stock, b) takes advantage of the current condo building boom, and c) uses money we’re already getting, rather than some hypothetical amount the province or the feds should really cough up and totally won’t. But I’m sure TCHC will need to rely on multiple strategies to get out of the hole.

The political option

So rookie councillor Ana Bailão, chair of the Affordable Housing Committee, offered the mayor a compromise: sell only some of the properties, the ones which are vacant and unliveable, and establish a working group to report back this fall on better solutions. Given that the majority of Council would be behind her, Ford had no other reasonable choice. At the meeting, this pissed off deputy mayor Doug Holyday, who loosed one of his spittle-flecked old man rants on how Bailão’s compromise was “the political option”, as opposed to selling all 675 properties right away, that being “the business option”.

Protip, Holyday: that option’s “political” too. It’s all fucking political! The whole principle of “running the city like a business” is a political ideology. In practice it means whatever the fuck you want it to mean—as we saw during the budget process where Team Ford argued strenuously for businesslike practices like selling off assets without consideration for the revenue they brought in, and during the transit debate when they rejected the most efficient and economical option in favour of a prohibitively expensive subway dream.

No one else on Executive Committee bought Holyday’s argument either, voting for Bailão’s plan in the end. Unfortunately it probably just bought us some time. So I’m thinking about one of the deputants I saw—a mother flanked by her two kids, sitting on the bench outside the library nervously practicing her deputation—and worrying. What can you do? Where can you go when nobody gives a fuck?

You can now get back to fussing about Gary Webster. Good night, and good fucking luck.

Diary of a councilspotter: They can’t all be golden

Monday, February 13, Executive Committee meeting 16

That controversial TCHC item got punted to a special meeting on Friday, so today’s agenda isn’t very interesting aside from the presentation of the Chong report. It’s hard to work up much excitement for development charges by-laws. Luckily many of the Scoobies are here too, including new guy @oytamarind, and we’re occupying ourselves by surreptitiously passing out City Hall-themed valentines to various councillors, journos, and staffers.

(We’re in the caf when we spot Doug Holyday eating his lunch on the other side of the room and start double-dog-daring each other to go up and give him a couple of valentines. I finally take one for the team, because I broke down in tears in front of the guy at my last deputation and I figure it’s all uphill from there. Adorably, he assumes the Janet Davis one is actually from Janet Davis, because she later says he thanked her for it.

I offer Mary “Best Hair On Council” Fragedakis a Denzil Minnan-Wong valentine and she shoots me down. Ice cold, lady. Ice cold.)

The Chong report is—pardon the term—irrelevant after last week’s transit vote, but I figure the presentation and question period have got to be entertaining, and they are. I’ll say this for Chong, he did the job he was hired to do, and he’s a lively speaker. The report itself is a masterful exercise in dressing up bullshit to fool the uninformed; it reminds me of creationist literature that attempts to prove that the earth is six thousand years old. Gord Perks compares it to promises of pigs flying. At any rate you can only make it look reasonable with a delicate balance of sloppy and outdated data, selective statistics, out-of-context numbers, and pure mendacity. Notably, the report doesn’t offer any actual recommendations, because 1) who wants to sign their name to that shit? and 2) it has to support whatever Team Ford wants it to. It drives Gord Perks and especially Adam Vaughan up a wall—I swear if we weren’t there to make sarcastic asides to, he’d seriously lose it.

(A little digression on Why We Can’t Have Nice Things Subways:

  1. They’re really fucking expensive to build and nobody can pay for them
  2. They want to put them in areas that basically will not be dense enough to run profitably in our lifetimes.

And the niceness of subways cannot override those facts. Shut up and get on the LRT.)

In the end ExComm votes to establish a panel to look into subways, which—you might recall—council already voted to do. Does this mean they’re supporting the status quo? LOL NO, they voted for an entirely redundant second subways panel, which will totally never get past council, so really we could have all gone home and jerked off for four hours and we’d have the same result. It’s just a last noisy crying jag in the extended tantrum Team Ford have been throwing as their grip on power erodes.

There’s still some items to go, but I’m at that point of tiredness and boredom where I’m entertaining myself by Google image searching Mike Del Grande and laughing inwardly (Edit: apparently not so inwardly) how he looks like a hungover owl in like every single photo. Which is a pretty pathetic point to be at, even for a council creeper, so I pack up my computer and head home.

Someone is wrong on the Internet, TTC edition

So here I am having gotten work out of the way, done laundry, cooked dinner, looking forward to a pleasant evening of photoshopping city councillors and watching horror movies, when someone on Twitter linked Matt Gurney’s analysis of the whole transit thing that just went down and I had to read it and I don’t normally do the fisking thing but it’s so profoundly out of touch with reality I just need to sit down and bang out a post on how wrong he is about nearly everything here, paragraph by paragraph.

tl:dr; LOL WUT STFU NOOB

The Ford Plan, as it’s been dubbed, involved building a light-rail line entirely underground [blah blah]…It’s a plan with a lot of merit, but was hotly contested by a faction of council that preferred building a greater number of light-rail lines into more Toronto neighbourhoods.

Reality: This light rail plan, Transit City, was introduced under Miller and was about to get going when Ford got elected and unilaterally decided to cancel it in favour of his own plan. The problem is that the province had already agreed to pay for Transit City, whereas Ford’s plan was a little more…ephemeral. Fast forward to now, when the guys doing the Eglinton crosstown line, Metrolinx, are like, “We’re super confused about what we’re supposed to be doing, can City Council clear this up?” [PDF] So the TTC chair, Councillor Karen Stintz, called a special meeting and put forward a motion that was basically “Okay, guys, let’s do Transit City.”

LRTs aren’t as good as subways

Subways are faster and bigger, yes, but they’re also hella expensive, so they’re only worth building in much denser areas. So in this case, for the densities we’re talking about (and that includes projected future growth), light rail would actually be better. For the numbers and a good explanation of the differences between the transit modes, see the Pembina report.

Mayor Ford, a sworn enemy of any transit plan that removes lanes from roads

Um yeah, so that funding already included the costs of widening roads so they wouldn’t lose lanes. Was that good enough for Ford? HELL NO, he doesn’t even want to see the LRVs.

[Ford’s plan was] expensive, but Ford won a victory when he was able to convince the government of Ontario to pick up the entire tab — better than eight-billion bucks.

Well, no. He basically pinky-swore with the Premier. Their agreement was non-binding, which means Council had to approve it first [PDF].

It’s entirely possible that Ontario might agree to allow Toronto to take that $8-billion and use some of it — the portion saved by not burying part of the Eglinton line — on other transit projects

This was the point where I was like, “He doesn’t even go here!”

What actually happened:

Dalton McGuinty: I’ll give you guys $8 billion for this Transit City you planned.
Rob Ford: DISREGARD THAT, SUBWAYS SUBWAYS SUBWAYS
Dalton McGuinty: Um, if Council’s cool with that, I guess.
Council: Nah, the Mayor’s plan blows, let’s do Transit City.
Dalton McGuinty: Sure, whatever. It’s a deal.

Gordon Chong, a former city councillor that Ford hired to prepare a plan showing how the Mayor’s plan was fiscally feasible, spent a year doing exactly that, and determined that it was, indeed, a workable plan. But some new parking fees and road tolls were going to be necessary.

In reality Chong’s report was an “unabashedly political” piece of work that relied on suspiciously low estimates, optimistic projections, and funding sources more wishful than concrete. Subways are not really “workable” in this case because subways are fucking expensive. They’re so expensive that even with (really unpopular) parking fees and road tolls and whatnot the Sheppard subway would still be a billion dollars short.

Ford’s transit plan is arguably superior to the version endorsed by his opponents in council.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAno.

Ford’s plan 1) served like a tenth of the people Transit City would, 2) was horrifically inefficient (for one, LRTs are basically wasted underground), and 3) was prohibitively expensive. In fact, “plan” is kind of a strong word, considering that Ford’s creatively named “Transportation City” was basically just (misconceived) ideas with no means of funding them.

I am genuinely curious as to where Matt Gurney has been getting his information, because I suspect it’s that parallel universe where the St. Clair right-of-way is a dystopian warzone and Bombardier takes payment in Canadian Tire money.

Fuck the Post, I’m going to take a bubble bath.

What the flying fuck happened yesterday?

Let’s do this TUMBLR STYLE.

  • So they kicked off the Extra Special Surprise Transit Meeting by presenting a shit-ton of petitions from all over the city, mostly for Stintz’s plan.
  • Mammoliti banged the drum for a subway on Finch, which no one had even been considering until today and which no one can pay for.
  • His argument was that the people up there are real nice and they deserve subways.
  • Like the transit version of the Nice Guy™.
  • The spectre of the St. Clair Right-of-Way Disaster was constantly raised, causing innumerable PTSD flashbacks.
  • Gary Webster pretty much earned his whole year’s salary patiently answering councillors’ wrong-headed questions about LRTs.
  • Denzil Minnan-Wong and others brought up an ’86 vote on subways, because that was the last time subways were actually a good idea. I was not even crawling by then, if that gives you any perspective.
  • Possibly the funniest moment: Nunziata flipping out having just realized that the Stintz “don’t call it the Stintz” plan was basically Transit City. OH SHIT GUYS, SHE’S ON TO US.
  • Nobody knows the fucking difference between LRTs and streetcars.
  • Someone had a button maker and was turning out “I ♥ Gary Webster” and “Karen Stintz Fan Club” pins, seen on the lapels of many centre/left councillors.
  • Rob Ford moved to defer the vote for a month for no damn good reason.
  • Karen Stintz extended an entire goddamn olive tree to the man and he apparently refused any compromise, even though it would make him look good. WAT.
  • Perruzza got all fiery and shit.
  • Doug Ford and Norm Kelly demonstrated their extraordinarily shaky grasp of Canadian history. No, the 2010 mayoral election was not “the largest referendum in Canadian history”, and Toronto is not actually the capital of Canada.
  • Berardinetti shared an impassioned plea to “depoliticize transiAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA I can’t even type that with a straight face.
  • The audience died of hunger and dehydration while every goddamn councillor had to stand up and have their say instead of just having the fucking vote.
  • They had to vote THREE TIMES.
  • Ford et al. (that makes them sound so much classier) threw a fit by opposing all the subsequent motions, even the routine one to end the meeting, WAT.
  • We won!!!

The takeaway: The same people who lectured us since last summer about “nice-to-haves” and fiscal responsibility turned around and argued for throwing away billions of dollars from the province and pouring billions more into the exorbitantly expensive and unnecessary transit option (subways) just because they can’t abide seeing public transit vehicles sharing space with CAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRSSSSSSSSS. And when they don’t get their way they’re extraordinarily petty and mean-spirited about it.

The good news: they’re no longer a majority on Council. The best-case scenario a lot of lefties were hoping for when Ford got elected seems to have come to pass — he’s staked out a position extreme enough that most of Council won’t stand with him. He’s unwilling to compromise or build consensus, and that’s finally coming back to bite him in the ass. People are pissed-off, mobilized, and — for the first goddamn time in years — paying attention.

I don’t think it’s too early to declare Rob Ford the best shitty mayor this town’s ever had.

Income inequality, opinions vs. facts (or, the CBC is fucking lazy)

This CBC article certainly does a good job reporting on a poll about Canadians’ views on income inequality…but utterly fails to mention whether those views actually reflect reality. Which is fine when it comes to opinion-y questions who should take responsibility or whether large corporate profits are good or bad—but telling me that most Canadians believe that income disparity is about the same as it is in Europe is totally fucking useless if your audience doesn’t in fact know if it’s true or not. Like, this isn’t some common knowledge “did humans live at the same time as dinosaurs” shit. I consider myself decently informed and I had to google to get the stats. Links in the sidebar: not good enough.

So here we go.

Surveys prior to 2011 also suggested Canadians perceived a significant and growing gap between their country’s richest and poorest citizens. But in light of the “Occupy” movement’s recent campaign to raise awareness of the vast income differences between extremely wealthy individuals (defined by Occupy protest participants as the “top 1 per cent”) and everyone else, this year’s survey asked about this particular disparity.

Two-thirds of respondents said the gap between the wealthy and everyone else is larger than it has ever been historically. Only 27 per cent said the gap remains the same, while only four per cent said the gap was now smaller.

TRUFAX: Indeed, income inequality is higher now than it even was in the ’20’s. Back in the day, our old-school robber barons of the 1% took in 17% of income growth—today, it’s 32%.

Respondents to the Canadian survey did not identify a single clear cause of this growing gap.

Roughly three-quarters (74 per cent) cited reasons such as tax breaks for the rich (18 per cent), capitalism helping the rich (14 per cent), regional or structural disparities in the economic system (10 per cent), government policies (7 per cent) and fewer middle-class jobs (six per cent.)

Only seven per cent attributed the growing gap to “basic greed and speculation.” Five per cent suggested the wealthy work harder and earn what they make.

TRUFAX: There actually isn’t a single clear cause. Some actual causes include:

Also, those 5% “the rich just work harder” people are douchebags. Objective fact.

Compared to other countries, most respondents believed the income gap in Canada was smaller (44 per cent) or roughly the same (35 per cent) as the gap in the U.S.

Respondents were most likely to see Canada as having similar income disparities as European countries (40 per cent), versus 20 per cent who thought the gap was bigger in Canada and 17 per cent who felt it was smaller in Canada in comparison with countries such as France or Germany.

Close to half of respondents (46 per cent) believed the gap was smaller in Canada than in developing countries such as China or India. One-quarter thought the income gap was bigger in Canada than in developing countries.

Well, there is a handy-dandy Wikipedia table that you can fiddle with, where you can sort countries by Gini coefficients, and the OECD also keeps track of that shit. Tl:dr; Europe is actually doing much better than us. We’re a bit better than the States but not by a hell of a lot. And inequality is a lot worse in “developing” nations. However, the gap between rich and poor is increasing worldwide.

MOAR TRUFAX:

  • While our rich are getting richer, the poor aren’t really getting poorer in absolute terms—but that might not actually matter, because as the standard of living gets higher, it slips out of reach for people in relative poverty. Like, you might keep making $1000 a month, but if rent for a halfway decent shared apartment gradually goes from $400 to $700 and you have to start renting some shithole in the boonies instead, are you really better off?
  • From the same link, the top quintile (20%) of earners take home like 40% of the income. But the bottom two quintiles (that means 40%) of earners get 20%. That’s fucked up, man.
  • This chart says the same thing, I think, but in a super confusing way..

Who’s responsible for fixing it and how they should do it are opinion things, pretty much, but if you want to reduce income inequality in Canada, taxing the rich and increasing benefits like EI and welfare can’t hurt.

As for the facty-wacty (as opposed to ethical) reasons why a more equal society is better for everyone, that’s a whole ’nother post. Later, maybe.