$575 million not a real number, says Pitfield

Cross-posted from Eye Daily.

When I saw the front cover of Sunday’s Toronto Sun and its headline screaming “How to save our city,” I couldn’t resist giving the story a look online. Within it’s pages, I discovered this perplexing piece of information regarding the city’s projected $575 million budget deficit for next year:

“It’s important to remember that is not a real number,” says Jane Pitfield, one of five Torontonians consulted with experience ranging from city council to economics to small business to teaching politics and public administration in a university.

“That $500 million is made up of a wish-list,” says Pitfield, who sat on the city’s budget committee for seven of her eight years on council before losing to David Miller in last November’s election. “It’s what they’d like to be able to do if they really had the money.”

I would have assumed that projected deficits would be calculated by looking at the cost of services the city currently provides and comparing that with how much money the city is expected to make in the year to come. Pitfield’s comment, however, implies that the $500-plus million deficit is made up of money that would be spent on mere frills and seems to ignore the fact that there’s already so much that we go without. In road and bridge repairs alone, the city has a $301 million backlog. The backlog in repairs to city-owned subsidized housing, meanwhile, hangs around $300 million. Add to that how understaffed many of the city’s departments are — planning, municipal licensing and standards and parks, forestry and recreation, for example, always seem to blame a lack of manpower on their inability to get things done — and it’s hard to believe that the projected deficit is a wish-list rather than a needs-list.

(If you’re interested in hearing more of what Pitfield has to say on Toronto’s budget, the Sun has put together a video, which you can watch online. Her opening lines: “No one likes Toronto right now. The 905 don’t like to come to Toronto.”)

The frustrating thing is that this kind of rhetoric, full of half-truths and cleverly edited information, is having the desired effect on the general public — those who don’t follow city hall regularly, but want to know that the people they elected are running things smoothly.

This hit me Friday night, when, while half-watching Adam Vaughan go at Denzil Minnan-Wong on the local news, a friend of mine who doesn’t pay much attention to local politics just assumed that Minnan-Wong was on Mayor David Miller’s side, since he was the one getting the tongue-lashing.

Overall, most people have the general understanding that the city is in trouble, which makes it all the more easy for those who oppose the mayor to throw out a bunch of over-used statements about getting one’s house in order to make him look like the bad guy. And this, of course, makes them look good. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do much for the city.

Photo from the Toronto Sun.

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