How our mayor just screwed Toronto in three easy steps.
There’s one essential thing to keep in mind during Toronto’s municipal budget panic extravaganza, which is playing out now at City Hall and in newspaper headlines near you: Pretty much everything controversial about it is the result of a political con, a three-card monte game by Mayor Rob Ford. Let’s cue a replay of the past year’s events and watch closely to see if we can spot the red card.
Step One: Ford got elected promising he could cut taxes by eliminating “gravy”—wasteful spending and inefficiency—and “guaranteeing” there would be no service cuts whatsoever. He claimed extravagance by his predecessors had created billions of dollars in waste that could easily be eliminated to save money for citizens.
Step Two: Upon taking office, he cut taxes to the tune of about $320 million, which created a giant budget hole that had not previously existed.
Step Three: Pointing to that budget hole, he proclaimed there was a crisis in the city’s financing, so we would need to drastically cut services. He blames the fact we cannot afford these services on his predecessor’s years of excessive spending.
The second step is the key to unraveling the mystery here, a bit of sleight-of-hand borrowed from Ronald Reagan and Mike Harris. If what you want to do is shrink government, you cut taxes before doing anything else. This is fiscally irresponsible, because it immediately creates a budget deficit. Still, that irresponsibility works for you, because the deficit becomes the justification for cutting government services: “We simply can’t afford this level of spending!” It’s entirely dishonest, but effective nonetheless.
Despite the constant suggestion by Ford that David Miller and past mayors have spent beyond the city’s means, the city has never run an operating deficit (and is not legally allowed to do so). Last year, in his first budget, Ford spent the $350-million operating surplus Miller left for him from the year before. Then he eliminated the vehicle registration tax, at a cost of $60 million per year. He cancelled an expected three-per-cent property tax increase and a 10-cent TTC fare hike that together would have been worth about $100 million in 2011. Compound those numbers going into next year and these cuts have created a total loss to the city over two years of about $320 million.
If Rob Ford hadn’t cut or cancelled all those taxes, we’d have enough to cover the entire budget hole without eliminating a single bus route, library hour or arts grant, without laying off a single staff member, and without drawing on reserves.
Just to repeat so it’s perfectly straightforward: Dollar-for-dollar, every single cut in the 2012 operating budget was made necessary by Rob Ford’s 2011 tax cuts. Period.
An unnamed “top official in Rob Ford’s office” told Robyn Doolittle of the Toronto Star that this was the plan from the beginning. In November 2010, he said that because of the tax cuts, the “safety net” would be gone: “Councillors will be forced to approve whatever we put forward.”
There are many Torontonians who think the city overspends on staff salaries, grants to community groups, bike lanes, transit and all kinds of other things. That’s fine. An honest politician could make that case, and cut those services deemed unnecessary or unwanted. And then, with the savings, that honest politician could either redirect the money to more necessary programs or cut taxes. Plenty of people would disagree loudly with those decisions, but at least the process would be prudent and truthful.
Instead, Ford cut revenue first so that a “crisis” would force us to cut services even if we thought they were necessary or desirable. It’s as if you looked at your household budget, decided that your spouse’s decision to buy organic vegetables rather than regular ones was making it a challenge to get ahead, and then quit your job as the first step to solving that spending problem. You could try to blame your sudden inability to pay the mortgage on your spouse’s gourmet-food habit, but it would remain obvious that your decision to eliminate income was the real cause of the crisis.
That’s what Rob Ford has done here. He calls it “respect for taxpayers,” but it looks more like a giant scam being perpetrated on the citizens of Toronto.
