Won’t somebody think of the rich?
If there’s one thing Councillor Gloria Lindsay Luby’s constituents can count on, it’s that she’s always willing to fight for their best interests, even if it means standing up to Mayor David Miller and the gang. In the spring, she selflessly campaigned for her Etobicoke residents’ rights to use leaf blowers: “Not all homeowners care for postage stamp-sized lawns,†she told the Licensing and Standards Committee. More recently, the Executive Committee member has decided that the suggested “revenue tools,†as proposed, aren’t such a good idea. The land transfer tax, in particular, will hit those buying $800,000-plus homes particularly hard, Lindsay Luby says, and she has asked staff to look into how this particular portion of Toronto’s population — those all-too-easy-to-ignore well-off homebuyers — would be affected.
In the meantime, Lindsay Luby is advocating that the proposed land transfer tax be limited to 1 per cent of a home’s price tag regardless of the cost (instead of a 1.5 per cent tax on homes over $250,000 and a 2 per cent tax on homes over $400,000). This, of course, would reduce by half the revenue the city expects to receive from the new taxes — which, at a projected $356 million, isn’t enough to cover Toronto’s $575 million shortfall anyway.
Unfortunately, the not-so-quick-thinking councillor isn’t championing another income-generating or budget-reducing idea to make up for the financial shortfall that would result. The city will have to find over half a billion dollars somehow, but we can worry about that later, I suppose.
Perhaps it’s that Lindsay Luby’s constituents, over a quarter of whom make over $100,000 a year, won’t mind if services, such as those provided by the Toronto Public Library (TPL), are cut. On July 25, heeding Miller’s call to decrease spending, TPL approved $1.23 million in cutbacks, which included staff freezes, discontinuing Sunday service and a $330,000 cut to the materials budget. Really, who needs libraries when you’ve got Chapters and Indigo?
Transparency troopers
Team Denzil Minnan-Wong and Karen Stintz are at it again. The duo’s latest project: providing Torontonians with better access to the goings-on at city hall. The councillors have started a website “dedicated to trying to pierce the veil of local government†by tracking the voting records of councillors. But why settle for simply being transparent when you can also editorialize? The land transfer and vehicle registration taxes are referred to as a tax grab, while Theatre Passe Muraille is dubbed a “money losing theatre.†Politics aside, at least the anti-Miller advocates are making an effort to provide information that the city makes it difficult to find, and they’re paying for it out of their own office budgets, too! What will Rob Ford say?
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Every Thursday, Spacing’s Dale Duncan contributes a column on City Hall for Eye Weekly.
8 comments
I actually don’t find Minnan-Wong/Stintz’ site that different from
http://www.votetoronto.ca/test/htdocs/index.html
except the slant is reversed.
Bias notwithstanding, there ought to be a clear/easy to use method of seeing how councillors vote on motions; figuring these out is a real pain from the official city of toronto site.
While you’re right on some level Nate, it is different on one fundamental level: Vote Toronto is community organized, and while it is run by progressives, it does not have an overt slant. The votes they tally are not given an editorial overview or primer.
Minnan Wong’s site is paid for by *us* as taxpayers to try and shame other councillors on how to vote. What’s worse is that the City tracks these votes and they are made public, its just the the city’s web site sucks and you can’t find anything you want easily. So there is a duplication of resources at use (an irony lost on both Stintz and Minnan-Wong who vote to slash $5000 here are there to save money for the city).
I often find these two councillors act like city hall is a cafeteria at high school and they are pissed that they’re not the popular kids. While I think more accessible voting records are extremely important, too many councillors politicize every move and every policy.
We both agree that the city web site could use improvement. [what’s the scoop on the ttc website update, btw?]
However,
I disagree with respect to the claim that Vote Toronto is ostensibly without a slant or that a primer isn’t given. On every topic there’s a sentence or phrase which gives away the intended interpretation of the vote. e.g. Island Bridge “seen by many as a barrier to development of the waterfront”, Youth Curfew “would criminalize a large proportion of society”, EUCAN garbage cans “TPSC calls this option a trojan horse”, etc.
There was an attempt made to SOUND objective, but it failed.
Secondly, Minnan-Wong and Stintz claim to have paid for the development of the site themselves. You could say that since taxpayer dollars fund their salaries, it’s us who are therefore ultimately paying for the site, but I think that’s stretching it.
Minnan-Wong can be odious. But Stintz is a far more credible opponent and a strong advocate for local issues affecting her ward.
a neutral site like howdtheyvote.ca (federal) would be fine – it could be co-funded. The Stintz-Minnan Wong site is amateur especially since it ascribes positions to councillors.
As for the office budgets though – depending on your viewpoint you could find a lot to argue about in different councillors budgets (or a lack of spending in Holyday/Ford’s case) if you had an axe to grind with them.
sorry, let me retract the part about who’s paid for it. Sigh.
The G&M article says that it’s being paid out of their office budgets.
Nothing makes my blood boil more than a story involving Minnan-Wong. He is such a loathsome hypocrite. As I heard him this week, he’s criticizing the mayor for not being more aggressive in pursuing funds from the province to make up the budget crunch. Yet this is the very same guy who criticized the mayor for the One Cent campaign, saying we need to get our house in order first.
I honestly don’t believe he even likes Toronto. I have no idea why he lives here.
Nate > I too should retract my pre-amble claim. (note to self: skim less, don’t rely on shady memory). Some of the best advocates for their ward end up being the worst thing for the city as a whole. Stintz was used as an example in our election report card on the topic of trees: she will go out of her way to personally deliver a tree to a ward resident (which almost always improves their property value), but will vote against allocating essential funds to water the City’s street-side trees. Rob Ford does lots of hands-on work in his ward but he votes against every bit of TTC funding or anything that costs more than $10.
This is why I think there’s a difference between the two sites. One is motivated by personal political gain/exposure, (which is being funded by taxpayers in the middle of a financial crisis) while the other is not.
There are too many councillors who will go out of their way to help a small range of people while ignoring the well-being of 90% of the population. These narrow-minded decisions (see Lindsay-Luby above) are more examples of what I wrote in this linked post: this council, with a left-leaning majority, is almost being forced to implement the last stages of Harris’ Common Sense Revolution. With downloading came the removal of a Metro council and a city-wide outlook. This has turned every ward into a fiefdom — there are no councillors elected to look out for the city as a whole besides the mayor. This council had a shot at reforming this with the new City of Toronto Act but instead went in an entirely new direction.
Sorry to slightly turn off topic….