Our mayor campaigned on a promise to put "families first"… by which he meant putting the services on which they rely first on the chopping block.
When Rob Ford ran for mayor, his gravy-train talk got all the attention, but the first plank in his election platform was actually “putting people and families first.” Dig into Ford’s proposed 2012 budget, though, and you’ll see how little our family-man mayor actually cares about kids—at least the ones who, unlike himself and his own children, aren’t growing up wealthy with two parents and a backyard pool in the suburbs.
First, Ford and his posse made the brave stand in late-September of killing funding for the city-run Christmas Bureau, which has coordinated holiday gifts and donations for underprivileged children since 1956. Last year, the organization helped put presents under the trees of 100,000 low-income families—y’know, the ones Ford promised to put first—with an operating budget of $300,000. Next year that’ll be reduced to a lump of coal, with the hope of outsourcing its community service.
To put this into perspective, running the Christmas Bureau cost the citizens of Toronto about a dime each. But that was just the opening salvo in what Councilor Adam Vaughan, borrowing Ford’s vehicular turn-of-phrase, recently dubbed the Mayor’s “war on children”—though I’d add in “poor.”
Last week’s further proposed cuts will end 58 student nutrition programs and reduce arena ice times. They will close two swimming pools, five downtown wading pools and charge $2 for the rest, despite these being literal oases in Toronto’s blazing hot summers.
Also slated for closure is the High Park Zoo and Centre Island petting zoo, free alternatives to the Scarborough one that charges $13 for kids between 4-12 and $23 for those over 13, not to mention $10 to park. Ford is also hoping to reduce library hours and charge for DVD rentals (even though provincial legislation prohibits it) as well as raise TTC rates while slashing service. He also wants to charge kids to go to Riverdale Farm.
But wait, user-fees aren’t taxes, are they? Well, let’s check in with the mayor. The vehicle-registration tax that he cut was paid only by people who “used” the roads so, following Ford’s own logic, that means $2 to use a pool is also a tax. But while drivers paying $60 for an entire year of road-use was considered beyond the pale, Ford wants to tax kids as much as $120 (!) to cool down during a tw0-month summer break. (Maybe Ford considers kids fair game since they can’t vote, but a tax by any other name…)
These tiny taxes may be irrelevant to well-off families, but they add up and can severely impact the quality of life for Toronto’s underprivileged kids. And that’s to say nothing of daycare.
The budget adds Ford’s favourite figure—a mere $2—to 12,000 kids’ daily care costs by refusing to pay for heat, hydro and other occupancy costs for school-based daycares. Over the course of a year, that adds up to over $500 per child. (Again, remember, Ford felt that $60 was too much for drivers to stomach.)
Then there are those 2,000 subsidized daycare spots that Ford and Giorgio Mammoliti, Chair of the Mayor’s Child Care Task Force, say the city can’t afford to fund as of 2013. Did you know the province already funds 22,000 spots? I’m not arguing the province shouldn’t pony up more, but these kids’ futures matter more than who is footing the bill. Their success in life benefits everyone in Toronto—not just morally but economically.
Kicking these kids out of daycare, and shutting some of the city-run ones altogether (the current budget proposes closing three of them next year, at a loss of 100 spots) could force many of these parents, predominantly single ones, to quit their low-paying jobs and collect welfare. That’s a cycle Ford wants to perpetuate? That’s Ford’s desired legacy?
What makes this all even worse is that Ford’s father grew up dirt-poor, the baby in a 10-child brood who never met his own father and had to drop out of school in grade three. That he pulled up his bootstraps to the point of founding his multimillion-dollar Deco Labels and Tags company is exceptional, yes. But that exception proves the rule that such potential lies in all of our city’s children, rich or poor. Yet families-first Ford has shown no concern for the poor ones, or how his kid-targeted taxes will impact them.
Alas, such cartoonish evil shouldn’t be surprising coming from our Christmas Bureau-killing Mayor, whose Grinchy heart has proven over and again to be at least two sizes too small.
