{"id":7139,"date":"2009-10-13T09:00:04","date_gmt":"2009-10-13T13:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacingtoronto.ca\/?p=7139"},"modified":"2013-01-21T13:11:46","modified_gmt":"2013-01-21T18:11:46","slug":"john-lorinc-a-murray-mayoralty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2009\/10\/13\/john-lorinc-a-murray-mayoralty\/","title":{"rendered":"JOHN LORINC: A Murray mayoralty?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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When Glen Murray asked me to be his Facebook friend last spring, I reckoned his overtures weren’t merely about putting down roots in Toronto’s impervious social soil. Indeed, his status updates in recent weeks have read like the musings of a man in the midst of what other would-be politicians describe as a “listening tour.”<\/p>\n

With Murray poised to announce his candidacy for mayor this week, the progressive end of the political spectrum will have its first official post-David Miller standard-bearer — a position confirmed with the rather precipitous decline of George Smitherman’s chances in the post-eHealth audit era<\/a>. (Listen to this week’s Spacing Radio podcast<\/a> for an interview with Murray<\/em>)<\/p>\n

Murray’s resume, for those not familiar with it: he was Winnipeg’s mayor for six years, until he resigned in 2004 to run as a star candidate for Paul Martin’s Liberals (he lost). In office, he cut property taxes, shilled for a “new deal” for cities, and served as the first out-gay man to be mayor of a large Canadian city.<\/p>\n

Since 2004, he’s been in Toronto, doing this and that — stints with Massey College, the consulting firm Navigator, a national environmental task force<\/a>, and, heading up the Canadian Urban Institute<\/a>, which is more of a consulting outfit than its name might suggest.<\/p>\n

Murray’s much-hyped new deal, promoted with Jane Jacobs through the so-called C-5 mayor’s summit, proposed radically shifting the tax burden off municipal property owners by introducing city sales taxes, securing additional government transfers and increasing user fees; conceptual elements of his plan resurfaced in Stephane Dion’s ill-fated carbon tax proposal. Murray, however, failed to get his far-ranging strategy adopted, and we all know what happened to Dion.<\/p>\n

A few weeks back, he described himself as a fiscal conservative\/social progressive (who isn’t?). A legendary motor-mouth, he has long positioned himself as an urban ideas man about town. So I wouldn’t be surprised if Murray came out of the gate with an updated Toronto version of that new deal vision — tax shifting, lower property taxes, etc. — based on experiences from his days in Winnipeg.<\/p>\n

Approach with caution: For one thing, Winnipeg’s budget is very different than Toronto’s, and not just in scale. When Murray came into office in the late 1990s, the city’s revenues were a complete mess, due partly to ruinous property taxes — you know, the sort that drive out people and businesses and kill the core.<\/p>\n

On the face of it, he did succeed in cutting property taxes and diversifying the tax base somewhat. He built public spaces and cultivated the arts. But the fiscal reality is that the City of Winnipeg doesn’t have a major transit system to subsidize, whereas it spends lavishly on snow removal. The downtown is still heavily blighted, and inner city aboriginal poverty remains an unyielding social crisis. Comparing our municipal pressures to theirs is anything but an apples-to-apples exercise.<\/p>\n

The reality is that an electoral storyline about tax shifting isn’t going to sell in Toronto in 2010. John Tory would have to be a fool not to rekindle voter anger over Miller’s land transfer and vehicle registration levies. What’s Murray going to say in response? Let’s have more non-traditional “revenues”? I don’t think so.<\/p>\n

As I argued here last week, Miller’s looming departure is a kind of requiem for the new deal for cities. With the political trade winds blowing rightward, the main centre-left candidate — be it Murray or a council insider like Shelley Carroll – will have to find a new way to argue the big point David Miller’s tried to make for years: that a big city’s responsibilities are unique, and won’t be solved on the cheap.<\/p>\n

Oh yes, and it’s not just about accounting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Glen Murray asked me to be his Facebook friend last spring, I reckoned his overtures weren’t merely about putting down roots in Toronto’s impervious social soil. Indeed, his status updates in recent weeks have read like the musings of a man in the midst of what other would-be politicians describe as a “listening tour.”Continue reading “JOHN LORINC: A Murray mayoralty?”<\/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":[94,847,425,4657,6245,615,504,1030,444,12523,11553,426,13336,1439,1276,81,13335,19,613],"class_list":["post-7139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-2010-election","tag-canadian-urban-institute","tag-david-miller","tag-facebook","tag-george-smitherman","tag-glen-murray","tag-jane-jacobs","tag-john-lorinc","tag-john-tory","tag-liberals","tag-massey-college","tag-mayor","tag-navigator","tag-paul-martin","tag-shelley-carroll","tag-spacing-radio","tag-stephane-dion","tag-toronto","tag-winnipeg"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nJOHN LORINC: A Murray mayoralty? - 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\/2009\/10\/13\/john-lorinc-a-murray-mayoralty\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"JOHN LORINC: A Murray mayoralty? - Spacing Toronto\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"When Glen Murray asked me to be his Facebook friend last spring, I reckoned his overtures weren’t merely about putting down roots in Toronto’s impervious social soil. 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