{"id":15167,"date":"2010-10-25T10:49:21","date_gmt":"2010-10-25T14:49:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacingtoronto.ca\/?p=15167"},"modified":"2013-01-21T13:12:46","modified_gmt":"2013-01-21T18:12:46","slug":"lorinc-what-wasnt-talked-about-in-this-election","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2010\/10\/25\/lorinc-what-wasnt-talked-about-in-this-election\/","title":{"rendered":"LORINC: What wasn&#8217;t talked about in this election"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone\" src=\"http:\/\/spacingmedia.com\/votes\/images\/feature-spacingvotes-600.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"600\" height=\"72\" \/><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone\" src=\"http:\/\/farm3.static.flickr.com\/2484\/3983017392_f3ecde4acf_z.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"599\" height=\"399\" \/><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone\" src=\"http:\/\/spacingmedia.com\/uploads\/toronto\/feature-lorinc.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"600\" height=\"85\" \/><\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s little question they talked\u2026.a lot. Over a hundred all-candidates debates, countless public events, press conferences, editorial board sessions, ads, Youtube videos, etc. They talked about positive visions and negative visions. They invoked phantom threats and then made some of their own. They talked about talking (the on-going sniping over George Smitherman\u2019s challenge to take on Rob Ford in a manno-a-manno debate). And, of course, they debated the merits of less debate (i.e., cutting the size of council, recall, citizen appointees, etc.).<\/p>\n<p>With all the verbiage, voters could be forgiven for concluding that we have had (endured? survived?) a full-body civic conversation about the issues facing the city. Here, for the record, is what we didn\u2019t talk about:<\/p>\n<p><strong>Waste Diversion<\/strong><br \/>\nUnder Mayor David Miller, council made a series of bold moves \u2013 the purchase of a new landfill, the transformation of the waste collection system, the city-wide roll-out of the green bin program. But the reality is that the City of Toronto still falls well short of Miller\u2019s 70% diversion target. The candidates had almost nothing to offer on the subject of closing that gap, so the city could live up to its conspicuous green branding. Remember that massive environmental assessment on how to deal with residual waste? No? Neither did the candidates, apparently.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Official Plan Review<\/strong><br \/>\nOne of the first tasks facing the new council is a statutory review of the city\u2019s official plan. This is a big one, and the candidates had nothing to say about their views about where the OP is getting us to where we want to go. There are credible planners who question whether the city\u2019s \u201cavenues\u201d strategy is working, at least partly because developers and their investors haven\u2019t expressed much interest in the mid-rise European-style buildings envisioned in the OP.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p><strong>Community Centre 2.0<\/strong><br \/>\nLast year the Auditor-General tore a strip off parks, forestry and recreation (PFR) for dithering with its capital spending. Endless consultations have meant chronic and frustrating delays in re-investment in parks and recreation facilities. In contrast to the department\u2019s leisurely approach, two facilities \u2013 Dufferin Grove and the Artscape Wychwood Barns \u2013 have demonstrated a radically different vision of what we mean by a community centre. Both have relied on extensive local partnerships instead of PFR\u2019s institutional boilerplate. Can this bottom-up approach be exported to other parts of the city? George Smitherman flicked ever so briefly at this one earlier in the summer, but that was about it.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Pedestrian Friendly Streets<\/strong><br \/>\nA lot more Torontonians walk than ride bikes, but you\u2019d never know it from the campaign rhetoric, which focused on the bike lane fight to the exclusion of everything else. Apart from some occasional spleen venting about the very small number of side-streets that have been temporarily closed to vehicular traffic, the leading candidates had little to offer about improving pedestrian safety (a    growing problem in an aging society, as accident\/fatality statistics imply), experimenting with shared streets, expanding sidewalk breadth, and further pedestrian-minded enhancements at signalized intersections (e.g., increasing the number of pedestrian scrambles).<\/p>\n<p>Will the next council emulate New York City and transform Yonge near Dundas into a pedestrian mall? I think we know what Rob Ford \u2013 who seems intent on banishing street-based public festivals and events altogether &#8212; would do (or not). George Smitherman, early on, made some positive noises about the idea, but I\u2019m not holding my breath.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The Structural Deficit <\/strong><br \/>\nThe elephant in the room, right? Ford defined the entire election by telling voters the city has a spending problem, not a revenue problem. Smitherman followed suit with his \u201cwar on waste.\u201d If either are elected, they will realize soon enough that you have to cancel a lot of chicken suit orders to peck away at the city\u2019s structural deficit. And it\u2019s not just about spending, as no less than the Toronto Board of Trade acknowledged early on:<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAddressing this structural deficit will likely require a combination of decreasing expenditures and increasing revenues,\u201d the board said in a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bot.com\/Content\/NavigationMenu\/Policy\/PolicyNews\/The_Growing_Chasm_An_Analysis_and_Forecast_of_the_City_of_Toronto_Finances.pdf\">tough-minded  policy paper<\/a> [PDF] released last spring [emphasis added]. \u201cIncreasing revenues requires measures like increasing property taxes and user fees or negotiating further ongoing grants from the federal or provincial governments. The problem will only get worse unless candidates are willing to `think big\u2019 and consider new ideas for restraining spending or raising revenues.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Enough said.<\/p>\n<p><em>photo by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/wyliepoon\/3983017392\/\">Wylie Poon<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There\u2019s little question they talked\u2026.a lot. Over a hundred all-candidates debates, countless public events, press conferences, editorial board sessions, ads, Youtube videos, etc. They talked about positive visions and negative visions. They invoked phantom threats and then made some of their own. They talked about talking (the on-going sniping over George Smitherman\u2019s challenge to take<a href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2010\/10\/25\/lorinc-what-wasnt-talked-about-in-this-election\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"sr-only\">&#8220;LORINC: What wasn&#8217;t talked about in this election&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4051,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[94,6675,5663,425,6245,564,416,227,19,1060,16328,8263,3407],"class_list":["post-15167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-2010-election","tag-auditor-general","tag-community-centre","tag-david-miller","tag-george-smitherman","tag-new-york-city","tag-pdf","tag-rob-ford","tag-toronto","tag-toronto-board-of-trade","tag-waste-diversion-under-mayor","tag-wylie-poon","tag-youtube"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>LORINC: What wasn&#039;t talked about in this election - Spacing Toronto<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2010\/10\/25\/lorinc-what-wasnt-talked-about-in-this-election\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"LORINC: What wasn&#039;t talked about in this election - Spacing Toronto\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"There\u2019s little question they talked\u2026.a lot. 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