Two headlines leap out at me from the morning e-mail from The Toronto Star: “City May Ban Trans Fats” and “Toronto on the Verge of Bankruptcy”.
It seems while the city council is failing to come to grips with its over-expenditures and is now compromising its ability to cover its basic operations because of the interest it is paying on its debt, city officials and councillors want to take on another issue which is outside their jurisdiction, damaging to business and the city’s tax revenue and hugely expensive to enforce. So the city that can’t afford to repairs its breaking water pipes, fill the holes in its roads or clean the garbage from its streets and parks wants to regulate what residents and visitors eat.
I find myself wondering if bankruptcy wouldn’t be such a bad thing if it forced David Miller from office in favour of an appointed trustee, because clearly the city cannot afford 3-1/2 more years with him as mayor.
Toronto will not go broke because it is not getting enough money from the province or Canada; provincial subsidies to the city ha increased 400% in the past four years. Toronto will go broke because it has a decades-long history of spending money on luxuries and and in areas beyond its jurisdiction, pleading poverty when it can’t afford basic municipal services and then depending on ever-larger subsidies. Toronto has failed to account for hundreds of millions of dollars taken from surrounding municipalities in the past decade allegedly for social services and apparently has no plan for how it will carry-on now that the appropriation is being phased-out. The city just cannot stop spending more than its income.
Call it incompetence, call it shameful, call it deserved pain.
It seems while the city council is failing to come to grips with its over-expenditures and is now compromising its ability to cover its basic operations because of the interest it is paying on its debt, city officials and councillors want to take on another issue which is outside their jurisdiction, damaging to business and the city’s tax revenue and hugely expensive to enforce. So the city that can’t afford to repairs its breaking water pipes, fill the holes in its roads or clean the garbage from its streets and parks wants to regulate what residents and visitors eat.
I find myself wondering if bankruptcy wouldn’t be such a bad thing if it forced David Miller from office in favour of an appointed trustee, because clearly the city cannot afford 3-1/2 more years with him as mayor.
Toronto will not go broke because it is not getting enough money from the province or Canada; provincial subsidies to the city ha increased 400% in the past four years. Toronto will go broke because it has a decades-long history of spending money on luxuries and and in areas beyond its jurisdiction, pleading poverty when it can’t afford basic municipal services and then depending on ever-larger subsidies. Toronto has failed to account for hundreds of millions of dollars taken from surrounding municipalities in the past decade allegedly for social services and apparently has no plan for how it will carry-on now that the appropriation is being phased-out. The city just cannot stop spending more than its income.
Call it incompetence, call it shameful, call it deserved pain.
