So it looks like some voters may have believed the mayor's "guarantee" there would be no service cuts. That's a problem for him.
Sunday evening on Twitter, the activist Dave Meslin put forward the novel idea that Rob Ford had run for mayor and gotten elected on essentially a left-wing platform—to which, Ford’s senior policy guy, Mark Towhey, replied, “Dave, what are you smoking tonight?” In the ensuing conversation, Meslin said that by campaigning on a “no cuts” platform, Ford was essentially embracing the programs the previous mayor, David Miller had introduced. “If he had truly run a right-wing campaign (“I will cut public services”) he would have lost. He would have lost bad,” Meslin wrote—to which Towhey accused Meslin of practising “selective memory.”
It’s interesting to take the view that promising to maintain your predecessor’s policies is an implicit endorsement of them, as Meslin does above. I’ll admit that portraying Ford’s populist campaign as “left-wing” is a bit of a stretch, but Meslin has a point. There’s every reason to believe that Ford voters took the future mayor at his word when he said he would not cut services. And Towhey’s dismissiveness is kind of instructive: You don’t have to be selective to remember that Ford campaigned on not cutting public services. He said it repeatedly, as part of a mantra alongside “Respect for taxpayers” and “stop the gravy train.” Many of us who heard talk of gravy trains and tax cuts immediately assumed he would be shrinking government. But Ford went way out of his way to insist he would not be shrinking the services government delivers at all. He guaranteed it. He was very specific in saying that he could achieve massive savings to finance tax cuts through attrition and efficiency. Which is why, even when he proposed massive cuts to services, he initially insisted on calling them efficiencies rather than uttering the word “cut.”
Towhey’s own memory of the election—i.e., that anyone who remembers this emphasis on not cutting services is being selective—could indicate that, for him, as director of policy to Rob Ford’s campaign, the service-cuts thing was not a big element of the Ford plan. He certainly wouldn’t be alone if he, as a reasonably savvy, informed political person, did not believe the massive savings required to finance Ford’s tax-slashing plan could be realized without service cuts. Many, many people—most of them Ford opponents—who knew the first thing about the city’s finances disbelieved the mayor’s promise on this front, and discounted it because they assumed it was “just politics” and that Ford voters would know very well what they were getting into.
But most voters are not savvy, informed political people, and I don’t think there’s any reason to assume they voted cynically, knowing the no-service-cuts thing was a sham. As I’ve written recently, most uninvolved voters want a high level of services and lower taxes, and consider both halves of that impossible equation to be top priorities. Ford, perhaps foolishly, promised them they could get exactly that.
And, as time goes on, we’re seeing more and more evidence that they took the mayor at his word and are now appalled to be facing talk of closing library branches and whatnot. The long lines of people waiting all night to make deputations at hearings. The 37 per cent approval rating. The Ford voters who told a focus group that they expected him to be able to cut lavish expense accounts and chauffeur service and perhaps lay off some “people at the top” to finance tax cuts and balance the budget (and who saw him as similar to beloved left-wing figure Jack Layton).
Those disappointed voters are making themselves heard, clearly, even to the councillors closest to the mayor. Several members of his inner circle went into open rebellion after hearing from their constituents this summer about possible proposed library cuts and a proposed sell-off of the waterfront for short money. A fairly reasonable proposal to have snow plows stop clearing windrows in the suburbs—that is, shovelling out the end of people’s driveways—was quickly shelved.
And then this week, a proposal to stop allowing people to put out extra recyclables that won’t fit into their bins in plastic bags—a move that would have saved the city $500,000 per year under the new contracted-out garbage regime—was defeated at the mayor’s Executive Committee. I repeat: The hand-picked group of Ford-friendly councillors chosen by him to act as his cabinet voted him down on a relatively painless service cut that would have saved $500,000. (It wouldn’t even have cut the amount of recycling they could put out: People could get an extra recycling bin at no cost.) Almost as bad from Ford’s view, the proposal to reduce the number of Community Environment Days from 44 to 11 narrowly passed at executive committee, but David Shiner, a member of Team Ford, “vowed” to bring it back up at the full meeting of council, where it might well be defeated.
If Ford doesn’t have the political juice to cut something as seemingly Kumbaya-PR-stunt flaky as “environment days,” or to tweak the way recycling is picked up to save the equivalent of 10 full-time salaries, then you’ve got to think the no-cuts message is coming loud and clear from voters to council. Even if the Ford braintrust doesn’t remember running a lefty campaign, voters certainly seem to remember voting for maintaining city services.
