"Harmony dinner" to wipe out campaign debts has raised $700K-plus

Dean French, one of the organizers of Thursday night's "Harmony Dinner" -- an unusual joint fundraiser aimed at clearing the campaign debts of Toronto mayoral candidates Rob Ford, Sarah Thomson and Rocco Rossi -- says that, as of Wednesday morning, more than 700 tickets had been sold.

The original goal was 500 tickets. The cash value of the tickets raised is about $700,000, French said.

"I can say that it's going to have a significant impact for all three candidates," he said.

Elections fundraising rules prohibit the candidates from splitting the pot evenly. They -- and their supporters -- are selling their own tickets and will receive only those proceeds. French said he can't release the totals they raised until after the event.

George Smitherman finished with little or no debt but is involved to help Thomson, who dropped out late in the race and backed him.

Ford finished his campaign $800,000 in the red -- $150,000 more than estimated after his Oct. 25 win -- a spokeswoman recently told the Globe and Mail. Rossi has paid off about half his $60,000 debt, while Thomson now owes about $80,000, down from more than $100,000.

Thomson, Smitherman and Rossi will speak, with the mayor going last. Diners will then hear the music of jazz-pop singer Matt Dusk.

The night promises to be a strange mix of political bedfellows, as evidenced by the events co-chairs -- former premiers Mike Harris (arch-conservative), David Peterson (Liberal) and John (red) Tory.

Noticably absent will be Joe Pantalone, the standard-bearer for former mayor David Miller's left-leaning egacy who finished third behind Smitherman and Ford.

He elected not to participate, largely because of the involvement of Harris, whom he feels did terrible damage to Toronto and its citizens as premier.

Pantalone held his own fundraiser Tuesday night, attended by about 100 people including councillors Janet Davis, Shelley Carroll, Mike Layton and Paula Fletcher.

"Once some promised cheques come in, my debt will be cleared," Pantalone said.

 

Doug Ford, Del Grande lash out at the lefties

The left-leaning councillors who used to run City Hall, including Gord Perks, Janet Davis and Adam Vaughan, spent Monday and Tuesday visiting the budget committee. They came like snipers, one after the other taking aim at their hosts over proposed cuts to the Tenant Defence Fund, bus routes, a program to detect lead in tap water, and much more.

Budget chair Mike Del Grande and his vice-chair, Doug Ford, fired back with fusillades that must have warmed the hearts of council conservatives who were routinely shut down when David Miller was mayor. The off-the-cuff speeches are instructive because they give Torontonians a sense of what the Ford administration is thinking and planning, likely more so than the carefully crafted speeches made by the mayor.

Here is Doug Ford at committee on Tuesday:

“There was a clear mandate from the people of Toronto that they want less government, they want to stop the wasteful spending. And I can assure you - You said there was no gravy down here. Well, I’ve only been here a couple months, but I can assure everyone in this room that there is more gravy than there is at Thanksgiving Thanksgiving. Have we got to it yet? No we haven’t got to it yet. We’re hitting the low hanging fruit ...

We're pushing this (budget) forward to bring it up to the end of February, until we have eight months to go through line item by line item, every piece of paper, every roll of toilet paper, look at synergies. So anyone to sit back that says there's no gravy at city hall has been stuck down here for too long. They're in this little glass room thinking this is the way it's done ...

I can assure you every department down here has fat. There isn't one single department that does not have fat down here and they would not surive in the private sector, I guarantee you ... In my guesstimate, there's probably 10 per cent waste and fat ...People have been down here too long, they don’t know what’s going on in the real world. The real world is making things run efficiently.

Customers call me up and ask me for a 10 per cent reduction or I’ll go somewhere else. The problem is the government has a monopoly. We have to break that monopoly. They have to be competitive with the private sector. Yes we should outsource everything we can. Let the unions compete, because they haven’t had to compete in their lives.”

and here is Del Grande from Monday:

“All of a sudden this year we’re supposed to make things happen that some people couldn’t make happen for seven years. And if we just went along our merry way, I think the board of trade said 5.9, let’s round it off to 5 per cent, we need $575 million here to just basically try to tread the water the way we’ve done.

That’s without adding any of the other things that people want to add. It’s not getting to the $25 (per capita) for the arts funding, even though people applauded and cheered themselves when we brought in that tax. And lo and behold, it went into general revenues. It didn’t go into the arts. That wasn’t done today. That was done yesterday. So all of a sudden that’s a big issue because we haven’t fulfilled a commitment.

So $575 million and you do the simple math, let’s say we didn’t do the car registration tax, we kept it and we raised taxes by the rate of inflation, that’s $100 million. $100 million versus $575 million that people want to spend, that’s still a gap of $400 million. And I don’t know where else you’re going to find more taxes to pay for that, whether you’re going to increase the car registration tax, increase land transfer tax, increase more and more and more.

The middle income (residents), it falls on their shoulder to pay for all this. A key word that everybody forgets here is called affordability. You spend what you can afford to spend. And sometimes it makes for hard decisions to say no. No we can’t do it. No we can’t provide for more.

Car registration, bring it back. It still doesn’t cover. So you know, we’ve had an election where people have said enough’s enough. We want you to downsize government. And we can’t afford those things we can’t afford. It’s as basic as that.

I find it ironic when I sat on the opposite side of things here, we were a nuisance. We rarely came in here because we knew what the end outcome was going to be in terms of the vote. Now people are surprised that there’s a different way of thinking here. Those that advocated for the way things were done in the past isn’t happening. That’s life, that’s elections, that’s what it’s all about.

We start with a deficit here, every year we’re short half a billion dollars. Structurally short. What you want is revenues matching expenses. That’s your starting point but we don’t seem to get that here."

UPDATED: Who is polling about a bridge or tunnel to the island airport?

Some Torontonians recently received a call from a pollster asking their opinions about building a bridge or tunnel to the island airport.

The pollster, apparently, also asked residents if they voted for Mayor Rob Ford.

The obvious suspect would be the Toronto Port Authority, which is looking for $45 million to build an underground passage, with moving sidewalks, to get pedestrians from Bathurst Quay to the Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport. The 90-second ferry rides would continue.

The TPA has heard about the recent polling but is not behind it, and doesn't know who is, says the federal agency's spokeswoman Suzanna Birchwood.

There have been no serious efforts to get a bridge built since 2003, when David Miller was elected mayor on a pledge to kill the span plan, and he made it his first act in office.

The Ford question immediately turns heads toward Ford's office and outgoing chief of staff Nick Kouvalis, a political strategist whose company Campaign Research does, among other things, telephone polling. Building a bridge sounds like something the car-first Ford would float. But our inquiries were met with flat denials of any involvement.

If you got one of the calls, and/or have any idea who is behind them, drop me a line at drider@thestar.ca

UPDATE: We were pointed to the Jan. 12 entry on the CommunityAIR (anti-island-airport) blog, which talks about the poll and gives more details on questions, including "What kind of a job is Mayor Ford doing?" and others that seem to be slanted to get respondents to favour a bridge over a tunnel -- for example, noting that emergency vehicles could get over a bridge but not through the tunnel. The phone number given takes respondents to Toronto pollsters Foundation Research/Forum Research. We have a call in to Forum president Lorne Bozinoff. During the civic election campaign, Forum did some polls independently to get publicity for the company.

The blog entry jibes with an email account of the poll we got from a reader, who asked that we not publish her name. Thickening the plot, she says she was also asked about underground versus light rail:

I found the Star item on recent polling calls regarding the island airport very interesting. I was surprised to receive such a call one evening about a week ago and while it wasn't clear who was behind the poll, I certainly hung up feeling like it was a Rob Ford call.
 
They asked to speak with the youngest person in the home who was also over 18 years old. I let my husband off the hook and took the call. I don't usually agree to these polls, but was curious to hear more about what they wanted to know
 
Along with the questions about who I voted for in the last mayoral race and transportation to the island airport (where I was asked if I'd prefer to spend approx. $35 million on a bridge that would also help emergency crews get over very quickly or $65 million on a pedestrian walkway - the former was presented as more appealing), I was also asked if I would prefer more underground or light rail trains.

UPDATE 2: Another reader writes. They were asked only question? I'm starting to wonder if this is a real poll, or somebody just calling a whole pile of people.

I did indeed receive a call regarding this survey about a week or 2 ago but there was no question about who I voted for. There was only the 1 question, did I support an underground pedestrian tunnel at I think 65 million or a vehicle bridge at 25 million. (dollar figures may be off)

I voted for the cheaper option.

 

 

 

 

Movie star Owen Wilson names his baby Rob Ford

Well, OK, Robert Ford Wilson, according to peoplemagazine.com.

Toronto's mayor  is Robert Bruce Ford.

There is no reliable hint of a link, but Wilson's pick is très traditional for show business, where unusual offspring monikers include Apple, Audio Science, Hopper, Pilot Inspector and Sosie.

Google says "David Miller" + "mayor" = "Rob Ford"

We have taken note of Mayor Rob Ford putting his stamp on the city and its government.

There are the new blurbs about Toronto at the end of press releases, which replace boasting about environmental sustainability with boasting about customer service.

And the mayor's decision to change the main number for his office from 416-397-CITY to 416-397-FORD.

Look at the splash page for the City of Toronto's website and you'll see that one of the scrolling photos is a very political "No more personal vehicle tax" banner and a photo of Ford next to a woman holding the mock licence plate "NO CAR TAX."

So our antennae twitched when we put "David Miller" and "mayor" into Google and the top result is: "City of Toronto: Mayor Ford's office".

Click on it and you are at Ford's official bio. Nowhere do the words "David Miller" appear. Nor are they among the keywords built into the page.

Maybe Google's algorithm elves code from the right?

PR association lauds Ford's campaign communications "excellence"

The Toronto chapter of the International Association of Business Communications has lauded the Rob Ford mayoral campaign for excellence in communications.

“While some didn’t like what he had to say; the clear, consistent and passionate way he said it brought his supporters together,” said Carrie MacAfee, the chapter's president. “Though it was not perfect, his campaign showed the power of strong communications.”

The association gave the Ford campaign a B+, compared to a C- for the response of Adam Giambrone's mayoral campaign to his sex scandal, the same mark for Mayor David Miller's office's response to the G20 meeting and a C+ for the response of the TTC and its union to a photo of a sleeping fare collector.

 

 

Rob Ford’s campaign for Toronto’s top job was an example of excellence in communications, according to a 2010 Report Card released by the Toronto Chapter of the International Association of Business Communications (IABC).

Councillor Mary-Margaret McMahon finishes her "embarrassed" speech

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At the start of last week's council meeting -- the first real working session with Mayor Rob Ford and the new council -- the ever-chipper Councillor Mary-Margaret McMahon stood up and released a blast that surprised many of her colleagues.

“I was embarrassed to be a Toronto councillor that day,” McMahon said, reflecting on a one-day session the previous week where council took care of some housekeeping itms . “We had three small items on our agenda, one being whether to have sandwiches at our meeting or not. It took us five hours, that is ridiculous.

“It was a complete and utter waste of our time, money and effort,” she said. “That is not why I ran for council.”

McMahon had more to say but was ruled out of order by Speaker Frances Nunziata, amid a chorus of grumbling from the veterans. McMahon, who calls herself one of council's "neutral newbies", now says she should have spoken to Nunziata earlier, to let her know her plans and make sure it was done in the appropriate way.

On Dec. 23, we visited McMahon's City Hall office and gave her a chance to complete her thoughts. Click the link at the top of this post to hear it in Quick Time format. If you don't have the free software, you can download it here: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/

 

Community activist Dave Meslin's open letter to T.O.'s new councillors

Dave Meslin, the guy behind the Better Ballots initiative and many others aimed at boosting community involvement in the City of Toronto's decision-making, has written an open letter to Toronto's 14 new city councillors on his Facebook page.

Here's part of it: "As you begin your career as a City Councillor, I just wanted to write this short letter to you encouraging you not to pick sides. Don't join a team. Try to build relationships with each of the other 43 Councillors, and with the Mayor. We need new heroes at City Hall. But not partisan heroes. We need consensus heroes. We need Councillors who can pull together alliances and coalitions based on trust, compromise and listening.  Listening to voters, experts, local activists, and each other."

So far, it seems, most of the newbies are doing just that. They have formed a loose-knit alliance among themselves while several, including Josh Matlow writing in the Star, have bemoaned council's left-right dynamic that leads to a winner-take-all result rather than any kind of consensus-building.

Mayoral debt fundraiser tentatively set for Jan. 27

Organizers of a "unity dinner" aimed at paying off some or all of the campaign debts of mayor-elect Rob Ford and his main rivals are eyeing Thursday Jan. 27 for the event. Tickets could go on sale as early as this week.

But the idea of one big event with proceeds being split between the participants (confirmed interest has come from Ford, Rocco Rossi, Sarah Thomson and Giorgio Mammoliti, with George Smitherman essentially debt-free and Joe Pantalone not interested) is proving problematic.

One of the politicos involved tells The Goods that election rules provide for donors to get partial rebates from the city only on donations toward a particular candidate. That means, the politico said, there will be "a somewhat complicated means of selling tickets as each purchase/donation must support one candidate only (ie you can't sell one ticket on behalf of a group of candidates and pool the money) but there is a goal of addressing several deficits."

Lawyers have been consulted (no shortage of them among this crowd) and it is all being sorted, we're told.

Ford ran up the biggest debt -- about $650,0000 -- but as the winner has by far the biggest drawing power. Thomson’s debt is about $100,000; Rossi owes about $40,000. Giorgio Mammoliti’s debt is unknown.

No venue is booked yet. Don't expect a star-studded gala with high-priced entertainment. We're told a fairly traditional fundraising dinner is all that's planned at the moment.

Movers-and-shakers involved include: Doug Ford, John Tory, Ralph Lean, Andy Pringle, David Peterson and Mike Harris.

 

 

Howard Moscoe, 71, developer's aide and law school applicant

Howard Moscoe dropped by the Star's office the other day for a chat. The genial left-wing firebrand is in his final days as a city councillor, and always gets a warm welcome when he pops into the press gallery.

"Well, I've got a job," Moscoe announced with a grin. The United Way? The Steelworkers' Union? Nope, Moscoe, 71, is going to work for Smart!Centres, the huge developer that builds shopping mall usually anchored by a Walmart. It was Smart!Centres that Moscoe's left-wing council allies beat back from an attempted incursion into Leslieville.

He's going to use his city planning smarts to help the Vaughan-based company stickhandle its way through government red tape. Moscoe said he presumes rules for retiring councillors will prohibit him from working in Toronto for at least a while, so he'll likely be hither and yon.

And then, with trademark Puckish humour: "And I'm going to law school. People are scrambling to get a 75-year-old lawyer." Moscoe has applied to Osgoode Law School but has yet to write his LSAT admission test.

We wish him well but can't help imagining some of the entertaining verbal jousting there would have been between Moscoe and Mayor Rob Ford. Then again, there's no shortage of planning issues at the city, and Ford is litigious, so who knows ...