Did anyone hear Mayor Rob Ford so much as grunt a word of thanks, on behalf of all Torontonians, to his predecessor for backing a slate of policies that has brought the city’s murder rate down to levels not seen since the 1980s? Didn’t think so. In a bit of an ironic twist, our police-involved chief magistrate surely owes a huge debt of gratitude to Socialist Mayor™ David Miller for the latter’s role in the long-term improvement in Toronto’s violent crime rate, which crested in 2006 during the so-called year of the gun. And while he’s at it, Ford should toss a great big bone to the provincial Liberals for their role, which has also been significant. Of course, Ford and his right-wing cronies will do nothing of the sort. But the record strongly suggests that the Miller/Bill Blair approach – a mix of community policing and outreach, preventative measures aimed at disenfranchised young people and broad-ranging, multi-agency investigations of gun-and-drug import operations – has clearly proven to be far more effective on the ground than Julian Fantino’s militaristic manner. A little history is in order: At the close of Mel Lastman’s term, police-community tensions in high-crime neighbourhoods like the Jane-Finch corridor were running very high, thanks in part to media revelations about racial profiling but also because of Fantino’s great love of coded language and racial insinuation. His most noteworthy response to the mayhem: the establishment of a guns and gangs task force.  

  Listening to the first post-kumbaya consultation by Waterfront Toronto, at the Toronto Reference Library a week ago, I was struck (again) by the sense of sheer unreality in the new rhetoric about accelerating development on the Port Lands. If you could inject truth serum into Waterfront Toronto CEO John Campbell and John Livey, the deputy city manager, they’d both readily confess it will take a century to build out this 700-hectare sludge pile, the largest of its kind in North America. All together, now: C-E-N-T-U-R-Y. And that’s if we’re really hustling. To cite just one comparison, the railway lands, at about a quarter of the size, remains a work-in-progress three decades after the redevelopment process began. It’s not that the process is snail-like; rather, the market (yes!) can only deliver and then absorb so much new construction activity. It’s the way of our world. But the waterfront mandarins must now worship at the altar of acceleration because that’s what the brothers Ford believe they procured for Toronto’s impatient citizenry. So no one talks about 25-year horizons and phasing strategies anymore. Rather, the city is looking across the full breadth of the Port Lands for `quick wins,’ which is to say, something – anything -- the Fords can brag about in 2014.  

WHAT WE TALKED ABOUT: By the end of last Tuesday’s news cycle, Mayor Rob Ford had steered his gravy choo-choo train to a politically intriguing destination: after the tumult of the summer core service review, Ford’s subsequent threats about drastic tax increases, and the left’s dire warnings about gutted municipal services, city manager Joe Pennachetti delivered a spending plan for 2012 that was hardly apocalyptic. Yes, there will be some service cuts, a few closures, layoffs and a tax hike of 2.5% (which is actually a shade over the inflation rate yet a whole lot less than what Hazel McCallion is poised to inflict on Mississaugans). But the recommended budget is hardly a catastrophe. So Ford, with cover from Pennachetti, got to make good on his pledge to bend the curve of city spending, and do so on the first anniversary of taking office. By the end of Friday, however, the mayor’s party had succeeded in snatching defeat from the jaws of victory…again. We had budget chair Michael Del Grande’s what-were-you-thinking moment, with his revealing rumination about the possibility of banishing non-English language books from the city’s library system. (Memo to Mike: Every other Torontonian is an immigrant. This isn’t Gravenhurst, in case you hadn’t noticed.) Paul Ainslie, one of Ford’s generals, simply couldn’t get himself up to the press gallery fast enough to denounce council’s bean-counter-in-chief.

If Unbuilt Toronto chronicler Mark Osbaldeston gets around to penning a third installment of our city’s missed opportunities, Michael van Valkenburgh’s extraordinary vision of a naturalized estuary for the mouth of the Don River will surely have pride of place in those as-yet unwritten pages, if not in the city itself. After Friday’s briefing by senior waterfront officials, I came away with the distinct sense that the Brooklyn designer’s award-winning plan – the product of an international design competition, extensive public consultation and intense technical and regulatory review – is pretty much dead in the water, so to speak. Yes, deputy city manager John Livey and Waterfront Toronto CEO John Campbell talked in very general terms about “staging” and alternative financing approaches and still more public consultations (the first session is Dec. 12 at the Toronto Reference Library). But it seemed quite clear from their comments that price and speed will determine Toronto’s port lands development plans from here on in. As Campbell, never one to mince words, put it, “The handcuffs are off.” Handcuffs, John? C’mon.

Scanning the fascinating images in Mark Osbaldeston’s second compilation about Toronto’s “alternate history,” — Unbuilt Toronto 2 — I found myself strangely unmoved by some of the architectural projects that never made the great leap off the drawing board. Unbuilt 2, in some ways, is a collection of opportunities probably best missed. There are the monumental and vaguely totalitarian government and commercial structures from the earlier decades of the 20th century, as well as strange post-mo confections, such as Moshe Safdie’s jumbled plan for the old Maclean Hunter site at the corner of Yonge and Highway 401. From the space age 1960s, we have stadia floating in the lake, and a flared bottom to I.M. Pei’s CIBC tower that reminded me of nothing so much as bell-bottom pants. The heavy grid that undergirds the 1980s plan for the Ataratiri lands is crowded and deadening. The cover image, of a possible Bloor Street wing for the Royal Ontario Museum (shown above), has the lovely feel of antique lithograph, inspired, as Osbaldeston explains, by a British architect whose resume included the façade of Buckingham Palace. Look more closely, though, and the façade turns its back onto Bloor while two Italianate towers loom inexplicably above the roofline.

Mayor Rob Ford’s plan to bury the 19-km Eglinton Crosstown LRT from end to end, instead of just through the crowded core of the city, will be rightly remembered as the single most expensive infrastructure mistake in Toronto history. In fact, this optimistically-priced $8.2 billion scheme — which is $3.6 billion more than the original amount budgeted for the Crosstown, and includes $1.4 billion to replace the Scarborough RT — will make us harken back nostalgically to an innocent era of smaller flubs, like the Ontario government’s original Scarborough RT or even Mike Harris’ decision to cancel the Eglinton West subway after the province and Metro spent $100 million digging a tunnel stub that was subsequently filled in. Ford’s vision of an Eglinton Crosstown that’s hidden from view will bring a deep blush of shame to the faces of future generations of Torontonians. And here’s the pungent irony at the heart of this billion dollar boondoggle: Ford and his fiscally-conservative allies would never approve this kind of wasteful spending if they were using the city’s own money, as opposed to funds provided by Queen’s Park. When the cash is coming out of someone else’s coffers, however, those lofty principles vanish in a miasma of political opportunism. Why Metrolinx and their bosses in the Liberal cabinet are continuing to play along, then, is anybody’s guess. As the agency’s vice-president of investment strategy and project evaluation John Howe remarked piously during Thursday’s Toronto Talks Mobility conference, “We need to demonstrate that we have credible leadership and projects selected on the basis of good evidence.” Indeed.

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.