Terry Lavender has an update, further to his opening piece.
In a perfect example of what I was talking about, it looks like Toronto City Council wil revise parts of Rob Ford’s proposed budget, reinstating planned cuts to firefighting, community grants, child care and other items. In the words of the Toronto Star today:
Mayor Rob Fords’ executive committee’s united front of no spending beyond the $7 million already added to the $9.4-billion proposed 2013 budget splintered Tuesday. Some allies broke ranks in support of at least delaying controversial cuts mothballing five fire trucks and closing a station on Runnymede Rd., while others fumed.
Makes the first paragraph of my story wrong, but emphatically proves my point.
“Makes the first paragraph of my story wrong, but emphatically proves my point.”
Then I must have missed your point, because all I gather from the Toronto Star’s quote is that Rob Ford and his supporters are suffering from internal fighting. A similar thing happened to the federal Liberals when they were last in power, and the same has happened (to a lesser extent) to the BC Liberals.
I don’t see how the outcome of the budget debate in Toronto tells us that their system is better than Vancouver’s. Please expand.
No, all this demonstrates is that Rob Ford is incompetent. That hasn’t been news for a long time.
Rob Ford has been a chronic lone wolf ever since he was elected as a councilor. He’s had a long string of incomprehensible votes on issues where Toronto City Council was unanimously supportive across the spectrum. There is a huge history of votes going 39 to 1 with Ford being that solitary vote, often for things like rejecting provincial money for additional nurses.
If Toronto had a party system the odds that Rob Ford would ever have risen to the top of a party (unless he and his brother fully bankrolled it themselves) would be slight.
But in the absence of such a system, Ford was able to run a lone wolf campaign that outlasted the early campaigns of other right-leaning candidates. When he became the last man on the right wing still standing to go into the General Election, they fell in line behind him, despite a lot of experienced operatives having substantial doubts about his capabilities based on his inability to accomplish much of anything in council.
Turns out that they were right.
It’s also worth pointing out that in this whole drama, Ford on a spur-of-the-moment move, voted to support a wildcat motion by Councilor Mammoliti (also of questionable competence and sanity) to avoid any property tax increase by purchasing a floating casino from BC.
In one move he undermined all of his allies on council and prompted another round of chaos on his executive committee. He snubbed a lot of people who worked hard to get a budget together and opened the door wide for his opponents to make changes and increase spending. Again, he snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
A party or slate system would have been a proving ground for Ford to get through if it had been present and likely an effective one.
What’s happening in Toronto right now isn’t any kind of exercise in democracy that anywhere else should be striving to replicate.
It’s an exercise is massive incompetence and leadership failure.