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7 comments

  1. Wasn’t Royson James against the new taxes?

  2. He didn’t say he was for them here either, but he has provided an intriguing route out of the logjam which if the Mayor’s office is half-awake they should strongly consider accepting.

    It’s doubtful that any additional announcements on city fundings would have been scheduled in the two weeks between then and the election now that the parties have set out their stalls in the weeks after the 23-22 vote.

    Now Miller can say to the mushy middle – “you made your point, some additional money has been promised, Ontario has been prodded into action on approving LTT and MVT collection through their facilities which they hadn’t at the time of the first vote. Surely you can agree that the election cycle has moved on. We can issue press releases to the four winds, hug it out and let Ootes, Stintz et al revert back to being the serially outvoted Lastman Rump”

  6. Thanks for the link, Mark.

    I hope Miller takes a portion of tomorrow’s taxes campaign launch to tell Torontonians that community centres can be saved if Council debates and approves the taxes in September.

    It’s not a “hostage” thing, it’s that the cost containment measures assumed that the City wouldn’t be able to collect on the new streams of revenue for a longer period of time and with a vote that gets moved up, if the taxes are passed, the same level of cuts won’t be required.

    Although Miller will have to choose his words carefully so he doesn’t alienate the mushy middle, if all the arm twisting is done in the backrooms then the average resident still won’t be able to grasp what’s going on.

  7. I’ll agree with that. If you could fault Miller, it is that he did not sell the tax scheme properly in the first place, but now certainly has the best opportunity to do so. If the taxes are approved soon, the libraries and community centres can open. Some councillors on the left side of the mushy middle (your Perruzzas, Augimeris, Feldmans) will fall in line, and separate themselves from the Lastman Rump.

    But can Miller get enough votes for council to reverse the deferment? I thought it took more than a simple majority to do so.

    As for good news (if you could call it that), the TTC just decided to not cut service, but institute a 15 cent fare increase for November, which is in the middle of the 10-25 cent range of what was predicted. The much-needed service improvments will just be delayed until early 2008, when they should have been implemented already.