HUME: show some leadership, Pitfield!

I opened up my copy of the Star today to find a grumpy Christopher Hume. He laid into Jane Pitfield’s platform of tax cuts and hiring freezes. His column paints a much different picture than Star-colleague Royson James who attneded the same press conference. Jeff Gray from the Globe and Mail had a good article about Pitfiled’s platform launch.

It’s better for me to pull out a few quotes from the Hume column:

One might have thought that after what the Mike Harris Tories wrought in this city and province — remember Walkerton? — such banalities would have been banished forever from political discourse in Ontario, if not Canada.

Clearly not. The strategy worked — sort of — for Stephen Harper, though the ending of that tale has yet to unfold.In announcing her platform, Pitfield revealed a familiar though unfortunate willingness to pander to public cynicism about our so-called political elite, of which she is a member.

She also showed herself to be a politician bereft of ideas, intellectually and politically bankrupt. Instead of creativity and leadership, she offers the same old stuff that has brought this city, this province, indeed, this country, to a state of internal decay and international irrelevance….

Undoubtedly Torontonians are complacent, selfish, smug and prone to feeling hard done by, but still they deserve to be treated intelligently and told the truth. Rather than playing to their worst instincts, it might be worth appealing to their better nature. Instead of following, why not offer real leadership — just on the off chance it might work?

That would make Pitfield unique. After all, the incumbent, David Miller, accomplished perilously little during his first term. He has failed to deal with the big issues; we still don’t have a solution to our garbage problems, we still haven’t taken down the Gardiner Expressway, waterfront revitalization is taking much too long, the environment is more degraded than ever, urban planning remains second-rate and city council dysfunctional.

Read the full version of the article here.

Also at the press conference was Spacing’s own Josh Hume (no relation to Christopher) who will be covering the mayoral beat during the election for our upcoming Spacing Votes blog (which goes live Monday, September 18th). Here’s his report of the press conference.

photo by RON BULL/TORONTO STAR

PITFIELD’S SLOW TAKE OFF

On Thursday afternoon, in a small conference room at the Sheraton Hotel across from City Hall, Jane Pitfield held the first of six planned press conferences in which she would unveil a series of staggered platform pronouncements.

As the first cornerstone of her plan to “take the city out of decline,” she chose to focus mostly on budgetary concerns, notably how the City might reduce its expenditures. Among her “policy solutions” was a proposal to “critically evaluate all City services” by commissioning an independent forensic audit of Toronto’s finances; uploading certain services, namely social housing, to the provincial government; and a promise to reopen the debate concerning the 9 per cent pay increase voted on by City Council this past year. A prefab photo-op consisted of Pitfield and one solitary councillor, Mike Del Grande, signing an oversized pledge to reexamine the matter.

In what may become a major election issue, Pitfield revealed yesterday her plan to impose a hiring freeze on all City departments, exempting police, fire and emergency medical services, with intention of achieving staff reductions through natural attrition as opposed to layoffs.

Pitfield tended to avoid any discussions that landed outside the scope of her prepared remarks. When asked repeatedly about where the cuts would be made, “that is something I cannot answer today,” was a typical response.

When asked about who would drive the 100 new TTC buses if a hiring freeze were imposed, Pitfield stood literally speechless for 10 seconds before replying, “obviously we will need to have people drive the buses.” Laying the blame for many of the TTC’s woes on a top-heavy administration, she called for greater efficiency in public transit, adding, “this will be another plank of my platform, which is ‘transportation: moving people’ whether it’s by public transit or by car.”

One theme that Pitfield chipped away at, and one that will no doubt be a prominent part of her campaign, was her concern with the “real issues that matter to the people in the amalgamated city.” Implying that David Miller has ignored the needs of those in the suburbs, she framed her campaign as being about “what the majority of people want – not just one particular neighborhood, or perhaps the southern part of the city.” On multiple occasions she referred to Halton as being a model example of how a city can be run.

One of the more curious parts of Pitfield’s agenda yesterday was her stated plan to improve the morale of civic employees: “Employee morale is at an all-time low,” she claimed. Attributing this to a lack of employee training and development, she proposed to “take our employees on a retreat.” When one reporter asked whether Muskoka might be a good place to go, her response was equally bizarre, recalling “an idea from Phoenix, Arizona: It was a film and it was a booklet…it was a great plan…and that’s how [Phoenix] became the best run city in 1995.”

When questioned about whether her campaign has yet to take off, Pitfield responded that “people are so delighted that another person is running,” but conceded that “perhaps it’s hard to get enthused about budget and controlling spending.”

There is no word yet on what Pitfield’s next set of policy declarations will consist of, although she observed that “safety and security is the number one issue in the city,” to which she added “…and i will have a platform on that shortly.”