Spooked by a middle-aged woman who looked like she just flounced off the set of an amateur Wagner production, Mayor Rob Ford seems to have neglected the remedial math homework I assigned a couple of weeks ago in this space. Case in point: on Friday, Brother Doug helpfully emailed around a lengthy list of year one accomplishments – real and imagined – that claims, right near the top, that the Ford administration saved the taxpayers a whopping $899,000 by reducing councillors’ annual office expense budgets from $50,445 to $30,000. To get $899,000, one multiplies 44 times the difference between $50,445 and $30,000 (brackets first). Alas, most councillors don’t spend the whole sum – not even close, as we can all see from the  councilor expense disclosure. So let’s tease apart this claim. Under the profligate ways of l’ancien regime, the maximum councilor expense spend would be $2.2 million (that’s 44 x $50,445 if you’re following along). But as the spending disclosure report clearly indicates, the total expense outlay for 2010 was just $1.55 million (I’m rounding). The maximum allowable under the new system of fiscal Fordism is $1.32 million. In other words, the real savings is just under $230,000, which is a much, much smaller number than $899,000.

I didn’t agree with every position Jack Layton espoused, but I have never forgotten one of his signature political lessons – an approach he once described when I was writing a profile during his run for the NDP leadership. Having struggled in the 1980s to gain traction at Toronto city council with a strident brand of lefty rhetoric, Layton embrace “propositional” politics. He came to realize it was better, and more positive, to advocate for something rather than just to oppose things. We’ve seen a lot of opposition to Mayor Rob Ford’s administration in this past year, and a great deal of it is spot on. But on the anniversary of Ford’s victory — and also on the eve of the opening of the “Fourth Wall” project at The Urban Space Gallery — I’d like to borrow a page from Layton’s book and propose a sort-of new idea to advance the debate about the state of the city. Sort of, because I’m shamelessly cribbing a very interesting idea that’s been buzzing around Calgary in the past few weeks, advanced by George Brookman, a former head of the Calgary Stampede, and Brian Felesky, a lawyer who is the vice-chair of Credit Bank Suisse Canada. Picking up on an April proposal from the Canada West Foundation, Brookman and Felesky — a.k.a. Transformation Calgary — have pitched the following plan: the city should ask Alberta and Ottawa for permission to levy an additional cent on the GST collected within the city borders. The funds — an estimated $300 million annually — would go towards building and operating new recreation and arts facilities. The hitch: voters would have to approve the plan before the levy takes effect. (They could also rescind it if things aren’t going as planned.)

“One key ingredient in any solution to Toronto's financial challenges will be a new relationship with our employees.  Together with our Agencies, Boards and Commissions, the City of Toronto employs over 53,000 people.  The vast majority of these are hard-working men and women who take pride in what they do for Toronto.  But, the fact remains that it takes 37 homeowners to pay for each city worker. “The math is simple.  The average city employee costs taxpayers just under $90,000 - that's salary and benefits.  The average homeowner pays the city $2,400 in tax each year.  So, it takes about 37 average homes to pay for each and every city employee. That's 37 taxpayers.  That's 37 private sector jobs to pay for one public sector job.” — Mayor Rob Ford, Empire Club, October 14th The math may seem “simple,” as the mayor assured a business audience last Friday at the Empire Club. The problem is, his math, as usual, is wrong. Let’s see if we can unravel the strands of his calculations. CLAIM: “The average city employee costs taxpayers just under $90,000.” According to recent pronouncements from the mayor and city manager Joe Pennachetti, labour costs account for about half of the City’s gross budget of $9.4 billion (2011). If you divide $9.4 billion in half, you have $4.7 billion. If we then divide that figure by 53,000 employees, we get a number just south of $90,000. So far so good. Tentative tick mark here. But here’s where the mayor’s arithmetic starts to get a little dodgy.

There were two highly revealing figures in the supplementary campaign disclosures filed by Mayor Rob Ford last week, as well as a lot of figures that weren’t disclosed, but would likely be even more revealing. First, we learned that about 45% of Ford’s total campaign donations came across the transom after he was elected mayor. As York University professor Robert Macdermid has pointed out to me, supplicants, lobbyists and other people doing business with the city have far more incentive to donate to an elected mayor than to a candidate in a large field. And donate they did: during the Harmony dinner last January, the mayor pulled in almost $792,000, an impressive windfall after a lack-lustre and poorly managed fundraising effort during the campaign. As it turns out, those additional dollars didn’t quite cover all of the mayor’s expenses. Since May, as we know, he’s been battling a compliance audit order, and has racked up over $55,000 in legal bills, which is the second impressive figure. By my reckoning, Tom Barlow, Ford’s lawyer, appeared at four or five compliance audit meetings, and prepared documents to support the mayor’s bid to have the order quashed by a court. If you do the math, Barlow probably clocked 100 hours on the mayor’s case, which will be heard in an Ontario court this spring.

As we head into this week’s provincial vote, has anyone noticed a ballot question floating around Ontario’s body politic? Oh, I pretty much know what the parties vying for Dalton McGuinty’s head want the ballot question to be. But whether there’s a real one out there is hardly clear. Certainly, the live wire of political anger that accompanied David Miller’s departure from the mayor’s office is conspicuously absent from this race. The only compelling narrative, at this point, is whether Andrea Horwath, the NDP leader, gets to be a kingmaker after Thursday. Will she make populist common cause with Hudak and negotiate the end of the HST on hydro bills? Or would she unearth the few progressive tidbits in the NDP platform and cut a deal with Dalton? I can barely contain my excitement. Lost amidst the desultory speculation about the shape and trajectory of a coalition is any consideration of how said minority government would deal with the occupants of that Death Star up in Ottawa. As a general rule, federal-provincial relations work best when there’s a bit of creative -- which is to say partisan -- tension built into the partnership. Yes, there were Liberals on either end of the equation between October, 2003, and January, 2006, with David Miller rounding out a progressive trifecta that delivered the gas tax, housing money, and other city-friendly policies.

Amidst the torrent of objections to Doug Ford’s backroom Port Lands plan, a central theme stands out: that Waterfront Toronto deserves enormous praise for its deep commitment to consulting the people of Toronto. At this juncture, however, I would argue there is one person in this city who desperately needs to be engaged – thoroughly and constructively – in the efforts to rebuild the Port Lands, and his name is Rob Ford. He’s our mayor (yes!), and he, more than anyone else right now, must find his way to a place where he can embrace what will eventually rise on that vast expanse of reclaimed, polluted land. With the extraordinarily fluid political situation at City Hall, it’s become possible to imagine that Item EX 9.6 – “The Toronto Port Lands Company – Revitalization Opportunities for the Port Lands” -- could fail on a close vote this week. Many in the rapidly growing ranks of the anti-Ford Nation would like to see such an outcome, as do respected voices, such as former chief planner Paul Bedford. On the merits alone, EX9.6 deserves to be buried in a landfill and forgotten forever. As many commentators have noted, the back-handed way the mayor’s brother foisted this hare-brained scheme onto Toronto residents reveals a deep current of contempt for the institutions of municipal government in this city.

Here’s a question for budget chair Mike Del Grande: How does the Ford administration spell renege? Answer: P-O-R-T-L-A-N-D-S. During last Tuesday’s shameful executive committee “debate” over Doug Ford’s scheme to redevelop the Port Lands, Del Grande noted, candidly, that if the city can extract itself from its arrangement with Waterfront Toronto, then proceeds from the sale of city-owned lands will flow into municipal coffers rather than those of the agency mandated to carry out the revitalization. A cash grab, in other words. Ergo the first recommendation in the staff report, which calls on council to authorize city officials to renegotiate the 2006 memorandum of understanding [PDF] between the City of Toronto, TEDCO and Waterfront Toronto – the justification (pretext) being that the latter had its chance but achieved nothing.* It’s worth pausing here to note some of the language in that MOU, which looks and reads to my layman’s eyes like a formal contractual relationship between three legally constituted corporations, one of which is partly owned by the Government of Canada and the Government of Ontario.

With Rob Ford’s executive committee set to view brother Doug’s plan to transform the Port Lands into an up-market playground, I’d like to add a pair of counter-narratives to the fractious debate about the latest twist in the waterfront revitalization soap opera. Counter Narrative 1: Contrary to Doug Ford’s assertions about the ineffectiveness of Waterfront Toronto, the fact that deep-pocketed investors have come ‘a calling confirms the agency has been doing something right. But typically, the brothers are too blinded by partisanship to understand the dynamic that led Westfield to their doorstep. Had they bothered to do their homework, the brothers would have discovered that in the past two or three years, WT has begun seriously marketing the waterfront to international developers, reeling in the likes of the Hines Company in Texas, a globally-active multi-billion-dollar building conglomerate that has signed on to develop a 1.5 million sq.-ft mixed use on the East Bayfront. But besides issuing RFPs to the international property market and conducting their own dog and pony shows, WT has consciously put the word out through a far-flung network of architects, planning advisors, economic consultancies and financial advisors. Indeed, if the Fords knew anything at all about development — which they clearly don’t — they’d realize that WT has cleverly exploited Ontario’s cumbersome regulatory approvals process to effectively pre-market the wide array of waterfront opportunities to a lot of very well-connected people.

According to the September issue of Toronto Life, the city is – or ought to be – in the throes of an “exodus to the burbs” where, as the headline informs the magazine’s soon-to-be-former readers, “The houses are bigger [and] the people are nicer [and] the commute doesn’t suck.” Inside, the display copy for the article — written by freelancer Philip Preville – starts with this little chestnut: “Screw Jane Jacobs. We’re outta here.” Long before I became a magazine writer, and certainly well before I spent a decade as Toronto Life’s politics columnist, I used to work part-time for Book City, in the Annex. The remainder tables always used to be piled high with copies of a paperback called “The Death and Life of the Great American Cities,” about which I knew nothing. Fairly regularly, a tall but stooped older woman, always wearing a shapeless brown wrap, would come in to browse. Eventually, one of my co-workers told me she was the author of said remainder. Jane Jacobs. Only later did I become aware of her accomplishments — here and elsewhere — and her truly remarkable celebrity among urban thinkers. But when I think of Jane Jacobs, I often imagine her in person, among the stacks at Book City. Now, courtesy of Toronto Life’s inexcusably coarse choice of words, I must summon up a different image. The article itself offers up a re-telling of a very old story, which is that some people, especially those who are economically comfortable and have young children, tend to move away from the downtown core. Sorry, but nothing new there. This has been going on, in one form or another, since the industrial revolution and the advent of the Garden City movement in Britain and the United States.

In the wake of Thursday’s consultapalooza, numerous pundits delighted in observing that all but three of the 169 deputants who toughed out the epic session opposed the sweeping budget (re: service) cuts envisioned in the KPMG documents. No one came to defend Ford-friendly expenditures, such as keeping the Don Valley Parkway properly paved or spending millions on studies to justify the mayor’s fantasy Sheppard subway scheme. In the UFC showdown between the War On The Car™ crowd and the War For The Library set, Team Atwood appears to have scored a knock-down win. Gotcha, Robbie. Team Ford bluffly responded that Ford Nation didn’t come out to make its populist voice heard because its denizens were hard at work, earning a living. Well, you know what? The vast majority of Miller's Minions  — or whatever one wants to call Toronto’s progressive centre-left — didn’t show up for pretty much the same reason. So while I applaud the citizens who endured this 22-hour circus, I certainly cannot blame anyone, of any political persuasion, for taking a pass, thanks. Indeed, even if Ford and the executive committee had adopted a slightly less survivalist approach — a two-day session in the relative comfort of the council chamber — the basic structure of the process is absurd, if not completely insane.