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REPAIRING TORONTO'S BUDGET
* FROM THE ARTICLE:
MARK STATE: HOW TO ACHIEVE A BRIGHT FUTURE FOR THE G.T.A. 1ST published Wetpaint.com 2006.
![[Untitled]](http://image.wetpaint.com/image/1/Ay4uAYY4o25dozYAFnWU3w40753/GW311H340 "[Untitled]")
Welcome to my website.
I'm Mark State, and you've logged into
THE STATE OF OUR TORONTO.
Allow me to apologize for the length of this article. I'll summarize for those who may not have the time to read through it all. Remarkably, although the piece was written between 2006 and 2010, every aspect of it is still relevant right now, today.
The article points out that progress is very slow in Toronto because of basic flaws in governmental approach that come with their own built-in impediments. To correct the situation, two approaches to a changed philosophy in how government should be conducted in the city are proposed.
The first is to change spending patterns from their current "spend now, pay later" paradigm to an "earn first, then spend" paradigm of city budgeting. This is designed to reduce, and eventually eliminate, deficits and debts.
The second is planning the city with future generations in mind: that is, not to make any developmental decision without first considering its impact on future generations.
The purpose of this approach is to begin now, in 2010, the process of planning and building a city for the future, so that future generations can look back with thanks for the wonderful city they live in, rather than struggling to survive the aftermath of a disorganized jumble of unrestricted and hodgepodge growth.
These considerations move beyond the appearance of the city to show why such an approach affects the survival and well-being of future generations here.
As a 2010 Mayoralty candidate whose campaign was directed at providing real vision and leadership to the city, I'm continuing to publish my thoughts on this page to illustrate clearly that there are important considerations regarding the foci of city council that still require implementation by the next C.E.O. of Toronto, i.e. your new Mayor.
Why must Toronto keep waiting to get crime out of the city, the homeless into homes, the city beautified into a world-class attraction, its waterways cleaned up so we can swim safely in them?
Because none of these can happen until funding from the Provincial and Federal levels of government makes its appearance. Toronto, on its own, just does not have enough money to pay for the services it needs to provide for its citizenry.
How can we see the results of the city's lack of cash in terms of recent events?
The reasons for its pollution are well-known and shameful, as is the reason for the pollution of the Humber, the Black Creek, the Rouge tributaries, and the Credit tributaries running through the GTA.
* Bottoms covered in pollution from sewage lines, industry runoff, and farm animals formerly allowed to pasture too close to the running streams
* Waterways silted in and not deep enough to harbor aquatic life
* Not enough aeration to keep bacterial and pest infestation at bay
* Banks not well-protected against erosion on meanders
* Cemented-in waterways that prevent ecologically complete settings
* Animal owners not picking up pet feces that create e-coli pollution that finds its way into aquifers
* Over-wintering geese that foul up areas near waterways with e-coli harboring feces.
Incidentally, the Greater Toronto Region Conservation Authority already possesses both plans and the technology to clean them up right now! But they do not possess the money to do anything about it.
Is Crime Fighting affected by the lack of city money?
* Most crime in Greater Toronto could be stopped rapidly, sometimes before it happens.
* It's definitely a financial issue. Probably as few as 1/3 more bicycle and plainclothes officers patrolling the streets and neighbourhoods and working undercover in crime 'hot spots', plus the purchase and application by the city of currently available crime prevention technology in the G.T.A., would do the job. The city is doing the best it can with an inadequate budget.
We are constantly hearing of the need for more 'public housing'. Why do we have a need for such a thing; and what is meant by 'public housing'? How come there is no money for that?
Public housing is a way of producing housing that people of limited income can rent or purchase. Terms of ownership include rents and purchase prices geared to the income of the tenants or new owners, regardless of how little money they have/are able to earn.
The idea is to relieve the normal pressure of paying for a home for people who need a place to live, yet just do not have the income to pay normal market prices. It's a good-neighbour policy, recognizing that every person deserves to live in dignity, yet not every person can afford to live in even the basic shelter of a room in a rooming house somewhere. It's funded by tax dollars and paid for by provincial and municipal budgets.
If all the vacant real estate now owned by the city were to be converted into housing, and a way found to ensure that only the current GTA homeless (according to the Canada Census) population would be moved into it, and a way found for people in utter poverty to pay for their homes, we could move our homeless off the streets.
Currently, neither the Province nor the City are able to afford to build enough public housing to satisfy the growing need for it.
Can a way be found to afford to build the public housing the city needs? How may this be accomplished?
Until now, City government has been looking at the problem from the point of view of the need for more housing money. The solution, however, lies not in the struggle to keep looking for funding from the usual sources, but rather to examine the route to correct the lack of funds to address the problem. A simple way to address that process is called 'future planning'. On this website you can read much about how that process can help the City resolve its budgetary limitations.
Rather than become muddled in the problem at hand, future planning imagines what things will be like when the problem is solved. Then it determines what is needed to achieve the imagined outcome, working backwards from the future vision of "Mission Accomplished!" to the present. It thus provides a plan of how to reach the future vision in small, identifiable, and attainable steps.
Without future planning, we look at our housing needs and the people who are in need, and cast about (in a fruitless effort) trying to find money and ways to fix the problem by addressing it in the present. Future planning looks at the future. It says, "Let's imagine that we have a house in the future comfortably occupied by a family who in the past were prevented by lack of income from buying a home. How did they get there? Can we manufacture the steps they need to take, and the city needs to take, in order to fulfill this 'future-vision'"? Each step in the process examines the way to get to the step ahead of it. The process requires detailed and often complicated planning, since most often several steps are required to produce a single result, several steps may be required to produce each of those steps, and so on.
Once the details have been worked out, the steps are simply followed in forward order. But the important thing is that they become attainable.
A simplified version of this process might look like: "What do we need to fulfill this vision? We need a place to build a house (land resources allocation).
What are the steps to achieve this? We need a house built (materials and contractors, funding). What are the steps to achieve that? (We need a family, chosen through need, to live in it.) What are the identification processes to achieve this? etc. etc.
We need to provide our theoretical family with a way to earn the income necessary to purchase this house since they are coming from a source of families who --if left as they were when they could not afford it-- probably never could find a way to pay for it (examination of individual capabilities that might lead to an earning capacity, job creation), etc. etc.
We set that vision as a goal, then create programs we need to accomplish it in reverse, building back to the present. Then we implement the programs and accomplish the task.
As long as we only see only problems (otherwise known as "issues") and not the solutions, we can't solve anything because it looks impossible. This is one of the reasons a city government immersed in facing issue resolution via a paradigm that looks at them only from an issue-by-issue perspective can never lead to useful solutions for anything.
Let's look at some of the considerations that will have to be addressed to solve our homeless problem.
* The catch-22 of providing low-to-no-cost housing: as long as there is not enough employment opportunity for those who could benefit from such a program, cheaters (people pretending to be needy, people from out-of town trying to take advantage of the G.T.A.’s generosity by moving in to get free or low-cost housing) would make the process counter-productive. Our welfare system is already known across Canada for its paid housing, and already attracts the homeless from other Provinces. The best filtering process for distribution of low-cost housing is to provide it for people who pay for it; not to give it away for free.
How will they pay for it? Our unemployment reports tell us there aren't enough jobs to go around for everyone willing to work. The answer? The city is going to have to create jobs. Is this possible? Is there a precedent for it? Has it been done before?
Quite simply, yes, it's been done before, in many different parts of the world and with great success...even right here in Ontario [http://www.ecdevjournal.com]; and what was discovered is that those who create the jobs for others make the most profit from their efforts! Ask any industrialist.
Does this mean that if the city helps to provide real jobs for people, it will make money from the effort? Keep this thought in mind, as it will be addressed in very real terms in the moneymaking section of this website. But for now, remember that the city just plainly and simply needs more money.
But suppose jobs could be found for the poor. Aren't they lazy and a bad hiring risk?
Consider the following true story. A Vietnamese boat refugee family was given a home, clothing, food and a car by one of our Toronto churches after their refugee boat foundered off the coast of Newfoundland in the early 1980's. At the time, a great outcry was raised and supported by the media about how the 'boat people' deliberately sank their vessel in order to take advantage of Canada's welfare policies. The church didn't care about that. All they wanted to do was help. $15.00 was collected from each of their parishioners; and willing friends of parishioners also donated $15.00 each (including myself...I had a buddy who was a parishioner). The family was gifted with a house, a car, clothing, furnishings and food.
Three years later, they had opened up a factory that now employs more than 300 people, many of whom were born in this country. Is this an isolated event?
Not by a long shot. Entrepreneurs are to be found in every neighbourhood, and poverty is not defined by energy or unwillingness to work.
The church had a future vision for this family that they would be welcome and survive here, and the family just turned out to be capable of an entrepreneurial win. It merely exceeded expectations!
But without the vision of the church to provide? Nothing.
* Drop-in-the-bucket Federal funding received thus far has not, and such funding cannot, cover our current housing needs. The recent $200mil 'Skippy' grant being used to build 800 homes to house the 5052 homeless counted in the then Homeless Canada Census is less than a third of what will be required within two years. Somebody should change the name from 'Skippy' to 'Skinny'.
* Try counting to 200 million, and then give up because you should have been counting to 600 million, and you just wasted your time. Politicians who sincerely want to make positive changes continually feel that kind of frustration.
No one has considered using the unused city properties to convert them into a place to develop housing. No local architectural firm has come forward with civic concern to offer an inexpensive design for interim housing. Instead, what has been done by the city to those who want to help themselves establish residential locations is enough for all of us to hang our heads in shame.
In fear of systemic abuse, the city has actually shut down and destroyed every attempt by homeless people to build homes for themselves. What marvellous energy and enterprise is awaiting employment under the eyes of expert advisers for new building and conversions?
Enough about housing. What else is being adversely affected by the city's lack of money?
What about the other issues we've been hearing about? Garbage, the TTC, Roads, etc?
* There are ways our current budget can be rearranged to better allocate the money we already have. Neither future planning nor a decent amount of leadership has been exercised by the city in addressing these basic services. Garbage disposal and other Public Works issues and TTC/traffic jam issues are all soluble in ways that will lessen their costs drastically in future without spending a great deal of money today. Follow the links (top left).
But each of the issues --along with other important decisions facing the city-- has become a political football hijacked by political ambition and.private enterprise.
People who have been brain-injured (much like the storied retired boxing athlete) often show an immediate lack of awareness ("stupor") of their surroundings and circumstances. They have been knocked "stupid". The word "stupid" means "benumbed, showing dullness of mind". While energy is expended on the City Council hijackers and their --mostly stupid-- agendas, real issues must take a back seat in council because no one has stated a future vision and done the planning to prevent such stupidity from being given any importance. Nothing is in place to lead us to a brighter, beautiful future.
This lack of vision not only bogs down the process of meeting the city's real service needs, but also involves Council in time-consuming and unproductive bickering while the hijackers are grabbing the attention of the media to ensure their names remain in the public eye. The media are not stupid. They know that manufacturing fascinating headlines brings bigger profits, and they love the sport. Only the citizenry are cheated.
What kind of process is the current city council capable of producing, given their lack of future planning?
* Tiny increments of progress through individual issues are heralded as great victories because City Council is an elected body frustrated with the huge amount of energy required to win a proportionately small amount of funding assistance. Every tiny victory is indeed a great one.
* The city council, faced with the need to produce something to show their worth, resort to producing more of what we already have: more infrastructure and more development. Nobody knows, in light of what a future Toronto might look like, whether the increased infrastructure and/or development is on track to get there, because there is no vision of a future Toronto to compare it with. Another difficulty with this approach is that the 'more' that is being produced is more of the same, which alone may not be on track towards a viable future at all, and eventually paid-for by increasing taxation in a variety of new ways authorized by the City of Toronto Act.
What's the rest of the problem? Besides lack of future planning, issue-hijackers on city council and not enough money on hand for important works for our citizenry, what else prevents the city from solving its issues?
* Because it is poor, the City has had to apply, hat in hand, to the Province and Ottawa for financial assistance. Sometimes, when the city's needs match the province's needs, it is successful. But when money shows up as a targeted amount addressing a single issue, the City must relinquish control of how it may ultimately spend the province's money. By controlling City funding and its allocation, 'big government' retains a measure of control over Greater Toronto's purse strings.
You may recall how the Toronto District School Board fought budget restrictions by the Provincial government, who had many years earlier taken control of the school systems away from Toronto, Hamilton, and Ottawa because the cost of education could not be borne by the cities' meager tax income anymore.
Even though it collects property taxes, which used to support the school boards, the cost of education has become too high for the city to manage. In fact, the City of Toronto, relieved of the burden of supporting its public school board, is still too cash-strapped to manage efficiently the rest of its budgetary obligations.
The Province's response to the TDSB's fight to provide a proper education for our kids was to accuse the Board of overspending and incompetence in managing a budget; the province eventually suspended the entire elected Board of Education Trustees while taking over the supervision of the board's budgetary requirements, even imposing its own "manager" to slash the budget singlehanded.
Rather than changing the name to "The Ontario School Board For The City Of Toronto", it kept its old name of The Toronto District School Board. This creates confusion because it is assumed by most citizenry that The Toronto District School Board belongs to Toronto, especially since we elect our school boards locally during municipal elections and a great portion of our property tax revenue used to support our schools, both public and Roman Catholic.
The overt control exercised by the Province over the Toronto District School Board is similarly exercised in most aspects over all civic government spending in the Province, only in a less visible manner. Are they allowed to do that? Sure they are. The way government is set up, not only the TDSB but even the cities legally exist only by permission of the provincial government. Within the Province, they can enact or suspend whatever they want by a simple act of Parliament. And if the party in power has a strong enough majority, they might not even need an act of Parliament.
By severely limiting the availability of funds and deliberately prolonging the time required to solve local issues, 'big government' embarks on an easily-obtained program of controls.
'Small government' is told how much of the requested funding they will receive and where (within the program it was requested-for) it may or may not be spent; the city is thereby forced to keep returning for more assistance due to the calculated inadequacy of the initial (and subsequent) amounts granted to address issues for which it has (ostensibly) been provided -- except, as mentioned, where the request meets the Province's plans.
Does the city know this is happening deliberately? No, because council is so absorbed in issue-fighting that it cannot see the bigger picture. And even if it could, it lacks the leadership and imagination to find a way out of this catch-22.
The feds do it to the provinces, and both the feds and the provinces do it to the municipalities.
The net result is that the lower level of government scrapes the bottom of the barrel economizing to fit their inadequate budgets, and ultimately the citizenry lose services.
When citizens complain, big government blames the incompetency of the lesser government's scraping process.
Most money for government services derives from its tax base. The rest comes from investments and loans obtained from extremely rich private individuals and lending funds. Every large government has such repayable loans.
The largest tax bases in Canada are owned by the Federal government. The Feds make laws allowing the Provinces and Territories to collect certain parts of income taxes; but the operations money for the Provinces' and Territories' expenses (and the amounts that eventually trickle down for use by Municipality operations called Municipal Transfer payments) comes via 'transfers' from Capital Hill.
The exception to this occurs when the Provincial government has outfoxed the Feds in advance of receiving their own additional income. For example, Alberta owns much of its oil-producing revenue, while Newfoundland fights the Feds for its own oil-producing revenue because it failed to put safeguards in place to keep the revenue before it started. The net result is that both provinces produce a large amount of oil, and initially Alberta has had a thriving economy while nothing much had changed in Newfoundland regarding the relief of poverty there. Because of oil production concessions to Newfoundland and the pollution cutback restrictions imposed on the Alberta Tar Sands, the balance is beginning to shift.
In turn, the provinces provide the municipalities with the right to collect taxes on the properties contained within their Municipal boundaries. Since this is never enough for infrastructure funding, the Municipalities must do their scraping by raising additional funds via Municipal Transfer funding, licensing and fees, as well rearrangement of budget priorities.
That's where some Municipal politicians seek a power base by fastening on to a popular issue and grabbing media time over it. This hijacking of council time and money keeps their names in the public mind and helps them get re-elected.
Who's at fault for this system?
* The bottom line is that while we love to blame our politicians for failing to solve our current beefs, it's not really their fault we remain firmly fixed in the present and wheel-spinningly unable to advance into the future.
They are at fault, however, for failing to find a way out of this vortex of political struggle by now.
If we want more accomplished more quickly, with greater benefit to a wider range of need, there will have to be changes.
But not a few career politicians will resist any necessary change in the standard policy of overspending and then going to big government to recover the cash, or planning over-budget spending and then going to big government to cover its costs. For that style of politician, the message is, "I am losing control by the removal of my issue-based candidacy. It takes away the motivation I can engender in the voting public to vote for me on one or another manufactured issues." They don't like the idea of having to remain within the confines of a conservation-style budget.
Conversely however, using a willingness to stay within budget limitations as a magnifying glass on a politician's campaign might assist the voting public to determine who is running for election to promote positive progress, and who is merely a career politician.
The reason for failing to solve this predicament: the current political process hynotizes politicians into thinking that the issues are really what matters --and more, what gets them elected-- and so they are unable to see the problem from a broader perspective. They therefore don't actually see this predicament, only its frustrating fallout.
When the city adds additional infrastructure and development, they feel satisfied Council is doing its job.
The largest two voting populations in Canada are the City of Toronto and the Province of Ontario. The potential power of the vote is tremendous! Canadians have never exercised their voting muscle to ensure that the elected individuals are voters' servants instead of vice-versa, in part because we have rarely had any definite instructions for them as we send them off to parliament. Why exact instructions on them when they (and their parties) choose the issues on which they will run?
As a result of a lack of specific instructions from us, they are stuck with only provincial or national Party business. And their political parties, with decisions based on re-election, tell them (and us) what to do.
If the population had a clear picture of what they want before voting, the candidate who promised to support a local public picture the best way possible would get elected.
Is it possible for the electorate to have a picture they can all get together on?
* Yes. In an organized fashion, Greater Toronto is quite able to develop a vision: a Future Plan. We would then be able to hold politicians accountable to its fulfillment and expect them to support it with us.
The development of such a plan would be very wide-ranging to accommodate our varied needs. Yet, despite its potential developmental complexities, such planning is undertaken by corporations and public interest groups to plan their development into the future. Built in to future planning is the technology of malleability, which allows flexibility over time to suit the needs of both present and future.
It's not difficult to paint a beautiful picture of Greater Toronto's future we can all, or at least mostly, agree upon. For example, if we ask ourselves what kind of city we'd like to leave to the a seventh generation of Torontonians two hundred years hence, we'd probably come up with some fairly broad commonalities. The result of the exercise is the "Future Plan".
But such a plan is difficult to achieve when we consider our constantly changing technology and living style into the future. Another alternative, with less difficult planning procedures, is to make decisions about things changing NOW with future generations in mind.
How do we plan today to enhance the future for the citizens of tomorrow?
Here's 'now':
* City Council's apparent fiscal impotence becomes even more frustrating when the requested funding eventually turns up in insufficient amounts, leaving Council to deal all over again with the same problem --an issue-- for which it sought funding in the first place.
* We feel a similar frustration when an apparent lack of action on "important issues" becomes obvious, and we become impatient with politicians who make empty promises about 'fixing things up' after it turns out that there is no money to do the fixing with. Due to our issue-by-issue approach to civic politics, such promises are a symptom of myopia in the face of larger concepts of overview-style budgetary management and the avoidance of 'big government' controls.
Here's the difference:
Overspending must stop. Normal budget operation dictates that money must be in hand before it gets spent, not afterward.
Future Planning is able to resolve such crippling controls by viewing individual issues through the lens of a single issue: budget decisions based upon their effects into the future.
With a forward-looking budget, the city has the option of allowing the Province or Ottawa to crawl through its various Future Plan components to look for issues, or to plan against this by
* simply diminishing every component of a future plan-style budget by a similar percentage to fit an inadequate guaranteed Provincial assistance amount, and then
* making back (earning) the balance of the required funds on its own; and by
* utilizing MPs who ran on the promise of support for the Future Plan style of civic governance.
If and when it occurs, the inadequate budget-for-services support can be blamed on Big Government rather than the other way around. In order to argue successfully for a budget cutback, Big Government would have to re-evaluate every component of a Future Plan municipal budget with its own experts--a largely impossible task as well as a media disaster, since the city would never need nor desire to request more money on an issue-by-issue basis, only for what it had already allocated according to the Future Plan budget.
When more money is needed than the province or the feds can reasonably afford, the city would provide for itself. More on that topic on this website.
If things stay as they are, what can we expect to happen?
* In 2007, the Province of Ontario and the Federal Government granted Toronto a "Charter", enabling the use of income from more than just property taxes, the tiny share of some other taxes, and the various existing provincial and federal government funding assistance upon which the current city budget is based.
An increase in city income, stemming from the taxation of alcohol and entertainment purchases, is now available for Greater Toronto Area's budgetary requirements. In addition, the city is adding more taxation in the form of development taxes, which are charged against developers but paid for by the purchasers of their properties, and billboard taxes, which are charged to billboard owners, who then add the taxation amount to the price of using the billboards for their advertising agency clients, who then add the additional cost of placing the ads to their clientele, who add the cost to goods purchased by us to cover the tax. These are called "third-party taxes" because they are designed to look like a third party is paying them, but in fact they are being paid for by us.
There are two problems with the charter grant. Indulge me in imagining a scenario of how the implemention of extra taxation plays out.
* Nobody wants increased taxation on anything.
* While on the surface, additional spending money from such taxes would perhaps provide some relief, it would not be enough to effect all the changes and improvements Greater Toronto seriously needs.
* The return to the taxpayer for the increase in taxation will not be visible, probably pointed instead towards some large attention-getting project and not designed to move the city ahead except by providing more-of-the-same infrastructure and development. (Since I wrote this, the city has engaged a Waterfront Development Board of nine people, all but two of whom are developers, and is about to sell off waterfront lands designated as parkland by a previous environmental assessment to condo developers to make extra money to cover a 2-3hundred million dollar deficit caused by the Transit City streetcar project.)
Here's the imaginary part:
* Very shortly (not including items planned by the federal or provincial governments) without the tight reign on spending offered by a future plan budget, we would be right back where we started, trying for additional funding except that now we are able to institute our own additional taxation, and when we again go hat-in-hand for additional funding, ‘big government’ will have the excuse to consider that the City can't effectively manage its budget. After all, it's been given the power to impose more taxes and here it is coming back with its hand out for more again! etc
* Lack of funds wwill continue to require juggling budgets with the inevitable loss of public services.
* Considering the city as 'incapable' would allow Big Government to exercise even more control through a show of pseudo-need-to-interfere to address the issue of the city's alleged incompetence with the additional (but still inadequate) tax base granted by the Charter.
They might even appoint a city manager to oversee the budget 'required by this set of circumstances'. They have a wonderful precedent from the recent past with the Toronto District School Board.
* [That the Province could not find a place to shave the School Board's budget in a meaningful fashion is of no consequence. But the school board have since demonstrated they learned a valuable lesson from the threat of another dismissal thrown at them by the Province from time to time: in subsequent budgets, usually during a last-minute exercise, and under a threat of additional penalties every time, they meet the Province's demanded budget cuts for education. Did they have to cut back on educational services? Of course. But they kept the management of the school system out of the hands of a Manager whose mandate would be more focused on savings than kids' education.]
By the way, in the process of Toronto getting a Charter, did anybody ask you what you'd like included in this upcoming new City Of Toronto Charter?
Why, when taking such a leap, were the contents of this charter not created with your (public) consultation? A cynic might say it's because if you had been consulted, 'Big Government' might have seen the need to give Greater Toronto more access to existing tax money [e.g. more of the gas tax, some of the GST] instead of placing the GTA in a more vulnerable financial position.
You don't need to feel alone in being left out of the process. Other than making (ignored) recommendations, the city was excluded from the deliberations about its upcoming Charter.
What will be the net result of keeping city "business as usual"?
The homeless will still be on the street; crime will continue to grow at all levels [Mayor David Miller of Toronto, at an all-candidates meeting October 25th, 2006 at the Native Canadian Center: “Crime is going down in our city. Just gun crime is going up.”]; our rivers, lakes, and streams will still run polluted and devoid of healthy aquatic life; and we will continue to be hamstrung by a host of seemingly insurmountable issues. As always there will be more infrastructure and more of the same bleak developmental style without consideration of future impact.
When we see the consequences of issue-by-issue decision-making in this light and without an eye to the future, our lack of coherent forward progress makes a kind of horrible sense.
We can see our unfinished business with our own eyes. So when our politicians try to tell us that everything is fine and progress is being made, we too become frustrated.
* During elections, candidates who share your frustration will give you all kinds of ideas for repairing the mess, but they speak on an issue-by issue basis, trying to solve problems in the same old ineffective ways. Wise politicians will choose some small program that can utilize public participation to lessen the cost, so they can take a little heat off by actually accomplishing something, while others will make expensive pie-in-the-sky promises they can't keep. Then, after getting elected, they all make a big noise about how unfairly they are treated by Big Government, how it's not their fault because they tried (as if making a pie-in-the-sky promise was actually a "try" of some sort).
The record shows that civic leadership since the mid-1900's is only now beginning to solve some of the urgent issues still remaining from back then. It has taken 50 years to begin catching up to 50-year-old issues because of the same old approach our city government takes to solving them.
How can the city more effectively fund its programs?
* Forward progress has been slowed, impaired, or immobilized because of the system of issue-by-issue governance that concerns itself with making up spent money and ignoring the guidance of decision-making on the future of the city. We are truly dependent on the provincial and federal Governments to drop money into the city’s lap before we are able to start moving.
Or that would seem to be the case if you are willing to subscribe to this system of current civic governance.
But in fact, the City is restricted to tiny increments of improvement because Greater Toronto is not yet making spending decisions based upon a coherent and operative Future Plan; and as a result, we have no solid direction towards which to begin moving through the power of our three-million-plus-voter-strong energy.
My solutions to the Budget question are more far-reaching for manageability and tangible results than anything achieved by issue-by issue politics. I can offer a political solution based upon real and current methods of corporate governance. My solutions are based on developing a future vision addressing all issues in the context of a shared plan designed for the express purpose of giving our future generations an amazing City in which to live.
For details on the steps by which this may be accomplished, please follow the link below entitled "How Can A Future Plan Make Things Different Or Better??", and read the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) information found on its own link.
Committee Formation
There is a predictable way governments at all levels push aside issues in need of immediate attention, but for which funds are not readily available. This is simply handled by forming committees of able, willing citizens to study the issues. These willing souls dive right in to get to the bottom of a problem to determine ways to fix it. Committees may only make recommendations. They are not normally empowered to draw conclusions that are designed specifically for direct inclusion into the city's plans. (The Toronto Waterfront Board is an exception to this rule.) This places the onus of sudden expertise onto City Councillors, who are expected to vet various Committees' recommendations to determine which are most likely to receive funding attention from big government (the issue-by-issue style of budgeting).
Forming a committee to study an issue accomplishes two important goals.
* Programs addressing urgent issues can be delayed by committee delay for study until 'big government' money shows up, or, when the inadequate funding arrives, committee recommendations may be shelved.
* Ultimately, a committee may be disbanded altogether if it doesn’t show promise for achieving funding-source success. The committee may even be blamed for not making a fund-able recommendation.
Isn't the development of a Future Plan just another form of Committee-making to sidestep the issues?
No. For two reasons:
Under the Future Plan system, the hammering out of issues, ideas, and budgeting takes place before a suggested improvement gets to city council in order to save council from the problem of trying to be an expert on too many issues.
* Any committee work for a future plan is undertaken by concerned citizens from the public sector, the private sector, or combinations of the various sectors reflecting their own interests and desire to provide for future generations. Based on the quality of the proposal and on the advice and counsel of their own experts (from whom the city's legislative body seeks clarification), council will enact legislation making the proposal a part of the city budget. New requests are in the form of a formal proposal encouraged by and presented to an alderman or, in the case of a public sector proposal, to the alderman in charge of the public service segment originating the proposal. Following specific guidelines that may include public consultation and proposal of budgeting sources for funding the proposals; and, provided it enhances the Toronto of the future without countering an already-adopted proposal nor presenting any legal/moral difficulties, it must eventually be incorporated into the plan with a permanent budget assigned for it. A group expert in proposal writing will assist citizens' groups formulating their proposal. Throughout its formulation, legal and planning assistance would be provided for the proposal group.
A Future Plan adjudication board would be available for the purpose of determining that the proposal resolves an aspect of the city's future in a useful manner. Following review, its recommendations sent to city council where they are debated from the point of view as to whether or not they serve Toronto's future, adopted and granted a budget. The Committee's work is not theoretical.
The equivalent of a Municipal "Act" is brought into the city's bylaws to protect the Future Plan budget.
* Where a committee does not volunteer a proposal, but council determines one is necessary, it may appoint a committee for the purpose of formulating a proposal.
* Components of the plan are not decided upon by instant-expert politicians.
________________________________________________
How can civic governance based upon Future Planning happen for the G.T.A.?
*As a responsible voter, you are Greater Toronto's only chance to solve the pressing issues of today and for the foreseeable future. During the next municipal election you must be innovative and courageous. You have to choose a city government with the vision and commitment to get things done, that will over time, together with its citizens' participation, guide the city's development with a working Future Plan and build the rest of a supportive infrastructure; in sum, to make a future possible. Afterward it will be necessary to choose and elect only the Big Government candidates whom we can send to Parliament with our own agenda.
What are future-building assets of the G.T.A.?
• a shared vision of a beautiful and peaceful city well into the future
• a group of intelligent, concerned, and ready-to-act citizens who want to set things right,
• our own energy and talent,
• our own civic property tax base and possessions, and
. our own potential to develop legitimate additional income sources without having to sell off our assets.
Fortunately, in certain small areas of improvement, we have enough cash to do what we need to get started on our bright future without waiting with our hand out for support money from Ontario or Ottawa.
For now, in order to let the money from 'Big Government' come when it comes, we need to do some hard decision-making about spending decisions made by the previous municipal government . If and when big government assistance already applied-for shows up, It can be used to pay us back retroactively as the legitimate contribution to our achievements. And it will come, sooner or later. We'll set other goals based upon other priorities, beginning our Plan where it can most easily be implemented, until it can carry us where we want to go.
In the meantime we must be aware of the traps set against progress in the proposed City Of Toronto Charter (trying to model city council on a Parliamentary model, dividing the nature of representation into various types of city councillors, etc.), but these are topics for another discussion. Suffice it to say we will be able to avoid such blockades by careful and deliberate navigation through the Charter's implementation.
On the left-hand side at the top of this page, please visit links that will take you to headings that interest you. You may also copy and paste those links into your address bar for future consideration.
Under each linked page you will find writing by myself, comprising a personal vision of what Greater Toronto might be able to accomplish to provide a 'bright future' for our great grandchildren.
Caveat!
Speaking of myself in the third person:
Mark State's vision only represents Mark. And you may want to study his ideas more before coming to your own conclusions about how the GTA can be assisted into the future. He believes your own visions are the key to the future of the GTA, and that's why he has drawn up a citizen-based method of moving towards the City's Future. Regardless of the approach to examining the future and planning for it, Mark State's intention is, and always will be, the inclusion of public ideas, plans, and programs that make for a better Toronto going forward.
Our combined Future Vision needs to remain completely open to the results of various citizen-initiated research efforts; for example, long-range plan-developing proposals where you will have direct input, and in more controversial cases the decision-making process will be supported by the City to include good old-fashioned town hall meetings, a neighbourhood plebiscite or even referendum voting.
Back to the first person case:
Please consider what I have envisioned and support the formation of coherent Future Planning in either the long-term sense or as a ground for decisions made by civic government for Greater Toronto when you consider its leadership. Let's open a discussion where you express your own desires for a bright future, and form a consensus maintaining the vision and purpose of the Future Plan in arriving at that beautiful, peaceful, and prosperous future. Try to avoid electing municipal officials who are opportunistic faces with no real thought of a future-century Toronto.
While David Miller, our current Mayor, is a very bright and hardworking man; his limited ability to develop overviews and look into the future beyond a very short limit have unfortunately compromised his priorities and leadership abilities. He has become mired in the same old business-as-usual muck of inability to accomplish needed change, and our deficit has increased as a result. The GTA needs some major overhauling and needs a leader who will not only begin tackling issues but encourage, plan and maintain our collective vision of a bright future.
"We will get to our shared vision of the future of the City of Greater Toronto."
--Mark StateMark State
A genuine leader and visionary for Mayor in 2010, presenting you with the straight goods.
There is much more material available on each of these items, which I published here before, during, and after the election. In addition, material will continue to be posted on this website.
MARK STATE: HOW TO ACHIEVE A BRIGHT FUTURE FOR THE G.T.A. 1ST published Wetpaint.com 2006.
Welcome to my website. I'm Mark State, and you've logged into
THE STATE OF OUR TORONTO.
Allow me to apologize for the length of this article. I'll summarize for those who may not have the time to read through it all. Remarkably, although the piece was written between 2006 and 2010, every aspect of it is still relevant right now, today.
The article points out that progress is very slow in Toronto because of basic flaws in governmental approach that come with their own built-in impediments. To correct the situation, two approaches to a changed philosophy in how government should be conducted in the city are proposed.
The first is to change spending patterns from their current "spend now, pay later" paradigm to an "earn first, then spend" paradigm of city budgeting. This is designed to reduce, and eventually eliminate, deficits and debts.
The second is planning the city with future generations in mind: that is, not to make any developmental decision without first considering its impact on future generations.
The purpose of this approach is to begin now, in 2010, the process of planning and building a city for the future, so that future generations can look back with thanks for the wonderful city they live in, rather than struggling to survive the aftermath of a disorganized jumble of unrestricted and hodgepodge growth.
These considerations move beyond the appearance of the city to show why such an approach affects the survival and well-being of future generations here.
As a 2010 Mayoralty candidate whose campaign was directed at providing real vision and leadership to the city, I'm continuing to publish my thoughts on this page to illustrate clearly that there are important considerations regarding the foci of city council that still require implementation by the next C.E.O. of Toronto, i.e. your new Mayor.
| NOTE: Readers wishing to find ideas for alleviating the economic crunch currently experienced by the city may be better served by clicking the link "How Toronto Might Improve Its Economic Prospects During This Downturn" in the box above left on the page. This is a featured page. |
Why must Toronto keep waiting to get crime out of the city, the homeless into homes, the city beautified into a world-class attraction, its waterways cleaned up so we can swim safely in them?
Because none of these can happen until funding from the Provincial and Federal levels of government makes its appearance. Toronto, on its own, just does not have enough money to pay for the services it needs to provide for its citizenry.
How can we see the results of the city's lack of cash in terms of recent events?
- We have been mourning the death of the Don River since 1969, when concerned citizens actually held a funeral for it. The latest "progress" on rehabilitation of the Don River by city council was a committee report (due in in 2008) outlining a plan showing how the lands around the mouth of the river will be utilized by the public! In 2009, the revamping of the lands into a small park was well underway. In the meantime the Don is still running polluted and we can't fish, swim, or canoe in it. And a report on developing land around its mouth isn't going to change any of that. Only action will bring change, and action costs money.
The reasons for its pollution are well-known and shameful, as is the reason for the pollution of the Humber, the Black Creek, the Rouge tributaries, and the Credit tributaries running through the GTA.
* Bottoms covered in pollution from sewage lines, industry runoff, and farm animals formerly allowed to pasture too close to the running streams
* Waterways silted in and not deep enough to harbor aquatic life
* Not enough aeration to keep bacterial and pest infestation at bay
* Banks not well-protected against erosion on meanders
* Cemented-in waterways that prevent ecologically complete settings
* Animal owners not picking up pet feces that create e-coli pollution that finds its way into aquifers
* Over-wintering geese that foul up areas near waterways with e-coli harboring feces.
Incidentally, the Greater Toronto Region Conservation Authority already possesses both plans and the technology to clean them up right now! But they do not possess the money to do anything about it.
- Recently, city council and the Toronto District School Board hired David Crombie to head an investigation that would determine how to keep more than half the swimming pools open in the city, after finances showed they would need to be closed. Crombie's group decided that there were no funds available to keep the pools open.
Is Crime Fighting affected by the lack of city money?
* Most crime in Greater Toronto could be stopped rapidly, sometimes before it happens.
* It's definitely a financial issue. Probably as few as 1/3 more bicycle and plainclothes officers patrolling the streets and neighbourhoods and working undercover in crime 'hot spots', plus the purchase and application by the city of currently available crime prevention technology in the G.T.A., would do the job. The city is doing the best it can with an inadequate budget.
We are constantly hearing of the need for more 'public housing'. Why do we have a need for such a thing; and what is meant by 'public housing'? How come there is no money for that?
Public housing is a way of producing housing that people of limited income can rent or purchase. Terms of ownership include rents and purchase prices geared to the income of the tenants or new owners, regardless of how little money they have/are able to earn.
The idea is to relieve the normal pressure of paying for a home for people who need a place to live, yet just do not have the income to pay normal market prices. It's a good-neighbour policy, recognizing that every person deserves to live in dignity, yet not every person can afford to live in even the basic shelter of a room in a rooming house somewhere. It's funded by tax dollars and paid for by provincial and municipal budgets.
If all the vacant real estate now owned by the city were to be converted into housing, and a way found to ensure that only the current GTA homeless (according to the Canada Census) population would be moved into it, and a way found for people in utter poverty to pay for their homes, we could move our homeless off the streets.
Currently, neither the Province nor the City are able to afford to build enough public housing to satisfy the growing need for it.
Can a way be found to afford to build the public housing the city needs? How may this be accomplished?
Until now, City government has been looking at the problem from the point of view of the need for more housing money. The solution, however, lies not in the struggle to keep looking for funding from the usual sources, but rather to examine the route to correct the lack of funds to address the problem. A simple way to address that process is called 'future planning'. On this website you can read much about how that process can help the City resolve its budgetary limitations.
Rather than become muddled in the problem at hand, future planning imagines what things will be like when the problem is solved. Then it determines what is needed to achieve the imagined outcome, working backwards from the future vision of "Mission Accomplished!" to the present. It thus provides a plan of how to reach the future vision in small, identifiable, and attainable steps.
Without future planning, we look at our housing needs and the people who are in need, and cast about (in a fruitless effort) trying to find money and ways to fix the problem by addressing it in the present. Future planning looks at the future. It says, "Let's imagine that we have a house in the future comfortably occupied by a family who in the past were prevented by lack of income from buying a home. How did they get there? Can we manufacture the steps they need to take, and the city needs to take, in order to fulfill this 'future-vision'"? Each step in the process examines the way to get to the step ahead of it. The process requires detailed and often complicated planning, since most often several steps are required to produce a single result, several steps may be required to produce each of those steps, and so on.
Once the details have been worked out, the steps are simply followed in forward order. But the important thing is that they become attainable.
A simplified version of this process might look like: "What do we need to fulfill this vision? We need a place to build a house (land resources allocation).
What are the steps to achieve this? We need a house built (materials and contractors, funding). What are the steps to achieve that? (We need a family, chosen through need, to live in it.) What are the identification processes to achieve this? etc. etc.
We need to provide our theoretical family with a way to earn the income necessary to purchase this house since they are coming from a source of families who --if left as they were when they could not afford it-- probably never could find a way to pay for it (examination of individual capabilities that might lead to an earning capacity, job creation), etc. etc.
We set that vision as a goal, then create programs we need to accomplish it in reverse, building back to the present. Then we implement the programs and accomplish the task.
As long as we only see only problems (otherwise known as "issues") and not the solutions, we can't solve anything because it looks impossible. This is one of the reasons a city government immersed in facing issue resolution via a paradigm that looks at them only from an issue-by-issue perspective can never lead to useful solutions for anything.
Let's look at some of the considerations that will have to be addressed to solve our homeless problem.
* The catch-22 of providing low-to-no-cost housing: as long as there is not enough employment opportunity for those who could benefit from such a program, cheaters (people pretending to be needy, people from out-of town trying to take advantage of the G.T.A.’s generosity by moving in to get free or low-cost housing) would make the process counter-productive. Our welfare system is already known across Canada for its paid housing, and already attracts the homeless from other Provinces. The best filtering process for distribution of low-cost housing is to provide it for people who pay for it; not to give it away for free.
How will they pay for it? Our unemployment reports tell us there aren't enough jobs to go around for everyone willing to work. The answer? The city is going to have to create jobs. Is this possible? Is there a precedent for it? Has it been done before?
Quite simply, yes, it's been done before, in many different parts of the world and with great success...even right here in Ontario [http://www.ecdevjournal.com]; and what was discovered is that those who create the jobs for others make the most profit from their efforts! Ask any industrialist.
Does this mean that if the city helps to provide real jobs for people, it will make money from the effort? Keep this thought in mind, as it will be addressed in very real terms in the moneymaking section of this website. But for now, remember that the city just plainly and simply needs more money.
But suppose jobs could be found for the poor. Aren't they lazy and a bad hiring risk?
Consider the following true story. A Vietnamese boat refugee family was given a home, clothing, food and a car by one of our Toronto churches after their refugee boat foundered off the coast of Newfoundland in the early 1980's. At the time, a great outcry was raised and supported by the media about how the 'boat people' deliberately sank their vessel in order to take advantage of Canada's welfare policies. The church didn't care about that. All they wanted to do was help. $15.00 was collected from each of their parishioners; and willing friends of parishioners also donated $15.00 each (including myself...I had a buddy who was a parishioner). The family was gifted with a house, a car, clothing, furnishings and food.
Three years later, they had opened up a factory that now employs more than 300 people, many of whom were born in this country. Is this an isolated event?
Not by a long shot. Entrepreneurs are to be found in every neighbourhood, and poverty is not defined by energy or unwillingness to work.
The church had a future vision for this family that they would be welcome and survive here, and the family just turned out to be capable of an entrepreneurial win. It merely exceeded expectations!
But without the vision of the church to provide? Nothing.
* Drop-in-the-bucket Federal funding received thus far has not, and such funding cannot, cover our current housing needs. The recent $200mil 'Skippy' grant being used to build 800 homes to house the 5052 homeless counted in the then Homeless Canada Census is less than a third of what will be required within two years. Somebody should change the name from 'Skippy' to 'Skinny'.
* Try counting to 200 million, and then give up because you should have been counting to 600 million, and you just wasted your time. Politicians who sincerely want to make positive changes continually feel that kind of frustration.
No one has considered using the unused city properties to convert them into a place to develop housing. No local architectural firm has come forward with civic concern to offer an inexpensive design for interim housing. Instead, what has been done by the city to those who want to help themselves establish residential locations is enough for all of us to hang our heads in shame.
In fear of systemic abuse, the city has actually shut down and destroyed every attempt by homeless people to build homes for themselves. What marvellous energy and enterprise is awaiting employment under the eyes of expert advisers for new building and conversions?
Enough about housing. What else is being adversely affected by the city's lack of money?
What about the other issues we've been hearing about? Garbage, the TTC, Roads, etc?
* There are ways our current budget can be rearranged to better allocate the money we already have. Neither future planning nor a decent amount of leadership has been exercised by the city in addressing these basic services. Garbage disposal and other Public Works issues and TTC/traffic jam issues are all soluble in ways that will lessen their costs drastically in future without spending a great deal of money today. Follow the links (top left).
But each of the issues --along with other important decisions facing the city-- has become a political football hijacked by political ambition and.private enterprise.
People who have been brain-injured (much like the storied retired boxing athlete) often show an immediate lack of awareness ("stupor") of their surroundings and circumstances. They have been knocked "stupid". The word "stupid" means "benumbed, showing dullness of mind". While energy is expended on the City Council hijackers and their --mostly stupid-- agendas, real issues must take a back seat in council because no one has stated a future vision and done the planning to prevent such stupidity from being given any importance. Nothing is in place to lead us to a brighter, beautiful future.
This lack of vision not only bogs down the process of meeting the city's real service needs, but also involves Council in time-consuming and unproductive bickering while the hijackers are grabbing the attention of the media to ensure their names remain in the public eye. The media are not stupid. They know that manufacturing fascinating headlines brings bigger profits, and they love the sport. Only the citizenry are cheated.
What kind of process is the current city council capable of producing, given their lack of future planning?
* Tiny increments of progress through individual issues are heralded as great victories because City Council is an elected body frustrated with the huge amount of energy required to win a proportionately small amount of funding assistance. Every tiny victory is indeed a great one.
* The city council, faced with the need to produce something to show their worth, resort to producing more of what we already have: more infrastructure and more development. Nobody knows, in light of what a future Toronto might look like, whether the increased infrastructure and/or development is on track to get there, because there is no vision of a future Toronto to compare it with. Another difficulty with this approach is that the 'more' that is being produced is more of the same, which alone may not be on track towards a viable future at all, and eventually paid-for by increasing taxation in a variety of new ways authorized by the City of Toronto Act.
What's the rest of the problem? Besides lack of future planning, issue-hijackers on city council and not enough money on hand for important works for our citizenry, what else prevents the city from solving its issues?
* Because it is poor, the City has had to apply, hat in hand, to the Province and Ottawa for financial assistance. Sometimes, when the city's needs match the province's needs, it is successful. But when money shows up as a targeted amount addressing a single issue, the City must relinquish control of how it may ultimately spend the province's money. By controlling City funding and its allocation, 'big government' retains a measure of control over Greater Toronto's purse strings.
You may recall how the Toronto District School Board fought budget restrictions by the Provincial government, who had many years earlier taken control of the school systems away from Toronto, Hamilton, and Ottawa because the cost of education could not be borne by the cities' meager tax income anymore.
Even though it collects property taxes, which used to support the school boards, the cost of education has become too high for the city to manage. In fact, the City of Toronto, relieved of the burden of supporting its public school board, is still too cash-strapped to manage efficiently the rest of its budgetary obligations.
The Province's response to the TDSB's fight to provide a proper education for our kids was to accuse the Board of overspending and incompetence in managing a budget; the province eventually suspended the entire elected Board of Education Trustees while taking over the supervision of the board's budgetary requirements, even imposing its own "manager" to slash the budget singlehanded.
Rather than changing the name to "The Ontario School Board For The City Of Toronto", it kept its old name of The Toronto District School Board. This creates confusion because it is assumed by most citizenry that The Toronto District School Board belongs to Toronto, especially since we elect our school boards locally during municipal elections and a great portion of our property tax revenue used to support our schools, both public and Roman Catholic.
The overt control exercised by the Province over the Toronto District School Board is similarly exercised in most aspects over all civic government spending in the Province, only in a less visible manner. Are they allowed to do that? Sure they are. The way government is set up, not only the TDSB but even the cities legally exist only by permission of the provincial government. Within the Province, they can enact or suspend whatever they want by a simple act of Parliament. And if the party in power has a strong enough majority, they might not even need an act of Parliament.
By severely limiting the availability of funds and deliberately prolonging the time required to solve local issues, 'big government' embarks on an easily-obtained program of controls.
'Small government' is told how much of the requested funding they will receive and where (within the program it was requested-for) it may or may not be spent; the city is thereby forced to keep returning for more assistance due to the calculated inadequacy of the initial (and subsequent) amounts granted to address issues for which it has (ostensibly) been provided -- except, as mentioned, where the request meets the Province's plans.
Does the city know this is happening deliberately? No, because council is so absorbed in issue-fighting that it cannot see the bigger picture. And even if it could, it lacks the leadership and imagination to find a way out of this catch-22.
The feds do it to the provinces, and both the feds and the provinces do it to the municipalities.
The net result is that the lower level of government scrapes the bottom of the barrel economizing to fit their inadequate budgets, and ultimately the citizenry lose services.
When citizens complain, big government blames the incompetency of the lesser government's scraping process.
Most money for government services derives from its tax base. The rest comes from investments and loans obtained from extremely rich private individuals and lending funds. Every large government has such repayable loans.
The largest tax bases in Canada are owned by the Federal government. The Feds make laws allowing the Provinces and Territories to collect certain parts of income taxes; but the operations money for the Provinces' and Territories' expenses (and the amounts that eventually trickle down for use by Municipality operations called Municipal Transfer payments) comes via 'transfers' from Capital Hill.
The exception to this occurs when the Provincial government has outfoxed the Feds in advance of receiving their own additional income. For example, Alberta owns much of its oil-producing revenue, while Newfoundland fights the Feds for its own oil-producing revenue because it failed to put safeguards in place to keep the revenue before it started. The net result is that both provinces produce a large amount of oil, and initially Alberta has had a thriving economy while nothing much had changed in Newfoundland regarding the relief of poverty there. Because of oil production concessions to Newfoundland and the pollution cutback restrictions imposed on the Alberta Tar Sands, the balance is beginning to shift.
In turn, the provinces provide the municipalities with the right to collect taxes on the properties contained within their Municipal boundaries. Since this is never enough for infrastructure funding, the Municipalities must do their scraping by raising additional funds via Municipal Transfer funding, licensing and fees, as well rearrangement of budget priorities.
That's where some Municipal politicians seek a power base by fastening on to a popular issue and grabbing media time over it. This hijacking of council time and money keeps their names in the public mind and helps them get re-elected.
Who's at fault for this system?
* The bottom line is that while we love to blame our politicians for failing to solve our current beefs, it's not really their fault we remain firmly fixed in the present and wheel-spinningly unable to advance into the future.
They are at fault, however, for failing to find a way out of this vortex of political struggle by now.
If we want more accomplished more quickly, with greater benefit to a wider range of need, there will have to be changes.
But not a few career politicians will resist any necessary change in the standard policy of overspending and then going to big government to recover the cash, or planning over-budget spending and then going to big government to cover its costs. For that style of politician, the message is, "I am losing control by the removal of my issue-based candidacy. It takes away the motivation I can engender in the voting public to vote for me on one or another manufactured issues." They don't like the idea of having to remain within the confines of a conservation-style budget.
Conversely however, using a willingness to stay within budget limitations as a magnifying glass on a politician's campaign might assist the voting public to determine who is running for election to promote positive progress, and who is merely a career politician.
The reason for failing to solve this predicament: the current political process hynotizes politicians into thinking that the issues are really what matters --and more, what gets them elected-- and so they are unable to see the problem from a broader perspective. They therefore don't actually see this predicament, only its frustrating fallout.
When the city adds additional infrastructure and development, they feel satisfied Council is doing its job.
The largest two voting populations in Canada are the City of Toronto and the Province of Ontario. The potential power of the vote is tremendous! Canadians have never exercised their voting muscle to ensure that the elected individuals are voters' servants instead of vice-versa, in part because we have rarely had any definite instructions for them as we send them off to parliament. Why exact instructions on them when they (and their parties) choose the issues on which they will run?
As a result of a lack of specific instructions from us, they are stuck with only provincial or national Party business. And their political parties, with decisions based on re-election, tell them (and us) what to do.
If the population had a clear picture of what they want before voting, the candidate who promised to support a local public picture the best way possible would get elected.
Is it possible for the electorate to have a picture they can all get together on?
* Yes. In an organized fashion, Greater Toronto is quite able to develop a vision: a Future Plan. We would then be able to hold politicians accountable to its fulfillment and expect them to support it with us.
The development of such a plan would be very wide-ranging to accommodate our varied needs. Yet, despite its potential developmental complexities, such planning is undertaken by corporations and public interest groups to plan their development into the future. Built in to future planning is the technology of malleability, which allows flexibility over time to suit the needs of both present and future.
It's not difficult to paint a beautiful picture of Greater Toronto's future we can all, or at least mostly, agree upon. For example, if we ask ourselves what kind of city we'd like to leave to the a seventh generation of Torontonians two hundred years hence, we'd probably come up with some fairly broad commonalities. The result of the exercise is the "Future Plan".
But such a plan is difficult to achieve when we consider our constantly changing technology and living style into the future. Another alternative, with less difficult planning procedures, is to make decisions about things changing NOW with future generations in mind.
How do we plan today to enhance the future for the citizens of tomorrow?
Here's 'now':
* City Council's apparent fiscal impotence becomes even more frustrating when the requested funding eventually turns up in insufficient amounts, leaving Council to deal all over again with the same problem --an issue-- for which it sought funding in the first place.
* We feel a similar frustration when an apparent lack of action on "important issues" becomes obvious, and we become impatient with politicians who make empty promises about 'fixing things up' after it turns out that there is no money to do the fixing with. Due to our issue-by-issue approach to civic politics, such promises are a symptom of myopia in the face of larger concepts of overview-style budgetary management and the avoidance of 'big government' controls.
Here's the difference:
Overspending must stop. Normal budget operation dictates that money must be in hand before it gets spent, not afterward.
Future Planning is able to resolve such crippling controls by viewing individual issues through the lens of a single issue: budget decisions based upon their effects into the future.
With a forward-looking budget, the city has the option of allowing the Province or Ottawa to crawl through its various Future Plan components to look for issues, or to plan against this by
* simply diminishing every component of a future plan-style budget by a similar percentage to fit an inadequate guaranteed Provincial assistance amount, and then
* making back (earning) the balance of the required funds on its own; and by
* utilizing MPs who ran on the promise of support for the Future Plan style of civic governance.
If and when it occurs, the inadequate budget-for-services support can be blamed on Big Government rather than the other way around. In order to argue successfully for a budget cutback, Big Government would have to re-evaluate every component of a Future Plan municipal budget with its own experts--a largely impossible task as well as a media disaster, since the city would never need nor desire to request more money on an issue-by-issue basis, only for what it had already allocated according to the Future Plan budget.
When more money is needed than the province or the feds can reasonably afford, the city would provide for itself. More on that topic on this website.
If things stay as they are, what can we expect to happen?
* In 2007, the Province of Ontario and the Federal Government granted Toronto a "Charter", enabling the use of income from more than just property taxes, the tiny share of some other taxes, and the various existing provincial and federal government funding assistance upon which the current city budget is based.
An increase in city income, stemming from the taxation of alcohol and entertainment purchases, is now available for Greater Toronto Area's budgetary requirements. In addition, the city is adding more taxation in the form of development taxes, which are charged against developers but paid for by the purchasers of their properties, and billboard taxes, which are charged to billboard owners, who then add the taxation amount to the price of using the billboards for their advertising agency clients, who then add the additional cost of placing the ads to their clientele, who add the cost to goods purchased by us to cover the tax. These are called "third-party taxes" because they are designed to look like a third party is paying them, but in fact they are being paid for by us.
There are two problems with the charter grant. Indulge me in imagining a scenario of how the implemention of extra taxation plays out.
* Nobody wants increased taxation on anything.
* While on the surface, additional spending money from such taxes would perhaps provide some relief, it would not be enough to effect all the changes and improvements Greater Toronto seriously needs.
* The return to the taxpayer for the increase in taxation will not be visible, probably pointed instead towards some large attention-getting project and not designed to move the city ahead except by providing more-of-the-same infrastructure and development. (Since I wrote this, the city has engaged a Waterfront Development Board of nine people, all but two of whom are developers, and is about to sell off waterfront lands designated as parkland by a previous environmental assessment to condo developers to make extra money to cover a 2-3hundred million dollar deficit caused by the Transit City streetcar project.)
Here's the imaginary part:
* Very shortly (not including items planned by the federal or provincial governments) without the tight reign on spending offered by a future plan budget, we would be right back where we started, trying for additional funding except that now we are able to institute our own additional taxation, and when we again go hat-in-hand for additional funding, ‘big government’ will have the excuse to consider that the City can't effectively manage its budget. After all, it's been given the power to impose more taxes and here it is coming back with its hand out for more again! etc
* Lack of funds wwill continue to require juggling budgets with the inevitable loss of public services.
* Considering the city as 'incapable' would allow Big Government to exercise even more control through a show of pseudo-need-to-interfere to address the issue of the city's alleged incompetence with the additional (but still inadequate) tax base granted by the Charter.
They might even appoint a city manager to oversee the budget 'required by this set of circumstances'. They have a wonderful precedent from the recent past with the Toronto District School Board.
* [That the Province could not find a place to shave the School Board's budget in a meaningful fashion is of no consequence. But the school board have since demonstrated they learned a valuable lesson from the threat of another dismissal thrown at them by the Province from time to time: in subsequent budgets, usually during a last-minute exercise, and under a threat of additional penalties every time, they meet the Province's demanded budget cuts for education. Did they have to cut back on educational services? Of course. But they kept the management of the school system out of the hands of a Manager whose mandate would be more focused on savings than kids' education.]
By the way, in the process of Toronto getting a Charter, did anybody ask you what you'd like included in this upcoming new City Of Toronto Charter?
Why, when taking such a leap, were the contents of this charter not created with your (public) consultation? A cynic might say it's because if you had been consulted, 'Big Government' might have seen the need to give Greater Toronto more access to existing tax money [e.g. more of the gas tax, some of the GST] instead of placing the GTA in a more vulnerable financial position.
You don't need to feel alone in being left out of the process. Other than making (ignored) recommendations, the city was excluded from the deliberations about its upcoming Charter.
What will be the net result of keeping city "business as usual"?
The homeless will still be on the street; crime will continue to grow at all levels [Mayor David Miller of Toronto, at an all-candidates meeting October 25th, 2006 at the Native Canadian Center: “Crime is going down in our city. Just gun crime is going up.”]; our rivers, lakes, and streams will still run polluted and devoid of healthy aquatic life; and we will continue to be hamstrung by a host of seemingly insurmountable issues. As always there will be more infrastructure and more of the same bleak developmental style without consideration of future impact.
When we see the consequences of issue-by-issue decision-making in this light and without an eye to the future, our lack of coherent forward progress makes a kind of horrible sense.
We can see our unfinished business with our own eyes. So when our politicians try to tell us that everything is fine and progress is being made, we too become frustrated.
* During elections, candidates who share your frustration will give you all kinds of ideas for repairing the mess, but they speak on an issue-by issue basis, trying to solve problems in the same old ineffective ways. Wise politicians will choose some small program that can utilize public participation to lessen the cost, so they can take a little heat off by actually accomplishing something, while others will make expensive pie-in-the-sky promises they can't keep. Then, after getting elected, they all make a big noise about how unfairly they are treated by Big Government, how it's not their fault because they tried (as if making a pie-in-the-sky promise was actually a "try" of some sort).
The record shows that civic leadership since the mid-1900's is only now beginning to solve some of the urgent issues still remaining from back then. It has taken 50 years to begin catching up to 50-year-old issues because of the same old approach our city government takes to solving them.
How can the city more effectively fund its programs?
* Forward progress has been slowed, impaired, or immobilized because of the system of issue-by-issue governance that concerns itself with making up spent money and ignoring the guidance of decision-making on the future of the city. We are truly dependent on the provincial and federal Governments to drop money into the city’s lap before we are able to start moving.
Or that would seem to be the case if you are willing to subscribe to this system of current civic governance.
But in fact, the City is restricted to tiny increments of improvement because Greater Toronto is not yet making spending decisions based upon a coherent and operative Future Plan; and as a result, we have no solid direction towards which to begin moving through the power of our three-million-plus-voter-strong energy.
My solutions to the Budget question are more far-reaching for manageability and tangible results than anything achieved by issue-by issue politics. I can offer a political solution based upon real and current methods of corporate governance. My solutions are based on developing a future vision addressing all issues in the context of a shared plan designed for the express purpose of giving our future generations an amazing City in which to live.
For details on the steps by which this may be accomplished, please follow the link below entitled "How Can A Future Plan Make Things Different Or Better??", and read the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) information found on its own link.
Committee Formation
There is a predictable way governments at all levels push aside issues in need of immediate attention, but for which funds are not readily available. This is simply handled by forming committees of able, willing citizens to study the issues. These willing souls dive right in to get to the bottom of a problem to determine ways to fix it. Committees may only make recommendations. They are not normally empowered to draw conclusions that are designed specifically for direct inclusion into the city's plans. (The Toronto Waterfront Board is an exception to this rule.) This places the onus of sudden expertise onto City Councillors, who are expected to vet various Committees' recommendations to determine which are most likely to receive funding attention from big government (the issue-by-issue style of budgeting).
Forming a committee to study an issue accomplishes two important goals.
* Programs addressing urgent issues can be delayed by committee delay for study until 'big government' money shows up, or, when the inadequate funding arrives, committee recommendations may be shelved.
* Ultimately, a committee may be disbanded altogether if it doesn’t show promise for achieving funding-source success. The committee may even be blamed for not making a fund-able recommendation.
Isn't the development of a Future Plan just another form of Committee-making to sidestep the issues?
No. For two reasons:
Under the Future Plan system, the hammering out of issues, ideas, and budgeting takes place before a suggested improvement gets to city council in order to save council from the problem of trying to be an expert on too many issues.
* Any committee work for a future plan is undertaken by concerned citizens from the public sector, the private sector, or combinations of the various sectors reflecting their own interests and desire to provide for future generations. Based on the quality of the proposal and on the advice and counsel of their own experts (from whom the city's legislative body seeks clarification), council will enact legislation making the proposal a part of the city budget. New requests are in the form of a formal proposal encouraged by and presented to an alderman or, in the case of a public sector proposal, to the alderman in charge of the public service segment originating the proposal. Following specific guidelines that may include public consultation and proposal of budgeting sources for funding the proposals; and, provided it enhances the Toronto of the future without countering an already-adopted proposal nor presenting any legal/moral difficulties, it must eventually be incorporated into the plan with a permanent budget assigned for it. A group expert in proposal writing will assist citizens' groups formulating their proposal. Throughout its formulation, legal and planning assistance would be provided for the proposal group.
A Future Plan adjudication board would be available for the purpose of determining that the proposal resolves an aspect of the city's future in a useful manner. Following review, its recommendations sent to city council where they are debated from the point of view as to whether or not they serve Toronto's future, adopted and granted a budget. The Committee's work is not theoretical.
The equivalent of a Municipal "Act" is brought into the city's bylaws to protect the Future Plan budget.
* Where a committee does not volunteer a proposal, but council determines one is necessary, it may appoint a committee for the purpose of formulating a proposal.
* Components of the plan are not decided upon by instant-expert politicians.
________________________________________________
How can civic governance based upon Future Planning happen for the G.T.A.?
*As a responsible voter, you are Greater Toronto's only chance to solve the pressing issues of today and for the foreseeable future. During the next municipal election you must be innovative and courageous. You have to choose a city government with the vision and commitment to get things done, that will over time, together with its citizens' participation, guide the city's development with a working Future Plan and build the rest of a supportive infrastructure; in sum, to make a future possible. Afterward it will be necessary to choose and elect only the Big Government candidates whom we can send to Parliament with our own agenda.
What are future-building assets of the G.T.A.?
• a shared vision of a beautiful and peaceful city well into the future
• a group of intelligent, concerned, and ready-to-act citizens who want to set things right,
• our own energy and talent,
• our own civic property tax base and possessions, and
. our own potential to develop legitimate additional income sources without having to sell off our assets.
Fortunately, in certain small areas of improvement, we have enough cash to do what we need to get started on our bright future without waiting with our hand out for support money from Ontario or Ottawa.
For now, in order to let the money from 'Big Government' come when it comes, we need to do some hard decision-making about spending decisions made by the previous municipal government . If and when big government assistance already applied-for shows up, It can be used to pay us back retroactively as the legitimate contribution to our achievements. And it will come, sooner or later. We'll set other goals based upon other priorities, beginning our Plan where it can most easily be implemented, until it can carry us where we want to go.
In the meantime we must be aware of the traps set against progress in the proposed City Of Toronto Charter (trying to model city council on a Parliamentary model, dividing the nature of representation into various types of city councillors, etc.), but these are topics for another discussion. Suffice it to say we will be able to avoid such blockades by careful and deliberate navigation through the Charter's implementation.
On the left-hand side at the top of this page, please visit links that will take you to headings that interest you. You may also copy and paste those links into your address bar for future consideration.
Under each linked page you will find writing by myself, comprising a personal vision of what Greater Toronto might be able to accomplish to provide a 'bright future' for our great grandchildren.
Caveat!
Speaking of myself in the third person:
Mark State's vision only represents Mark. And you may want to study his ideas more before coming to your own conclusions about how the GTA can be assisted into the future. He believes your own visions are the key to the future of the GTA, and that's why he has drawn up a citizen-based method of moving towards the City's Future. Regardless of the approach to examining the future and planning for it, Mark State's intention is, and always will be, the inclusion of public ideas, plans, and programs that make for a better Toronto going forward.
Our combined Future Vision needs to remain completely open to the results of various citizen-initiated research efforts; for example, long-range plan-developing proposals where you will have direct input, and in more controversial cases the decision-making process will be supported by the City to include good old-fashioned town hall meetings, a neighbourhood plebiscite or even referendum voting.
Back to the first person case:
Please consider what I have envisioned and support the formation of coherent Future Planning in either the long-term sense or as a ground for decisions made by civic government for Greater Toronto when you consider its leadership. Let's open a discussion where you express your own desires for a bright future, and form a consensus maintaining the vision and purpose of the Future Plan in arriving at that beautiful, peaceful, and prosperous future. Try to avoid electing municipal officials who are opportunistic faces with no real thought of a future-century Toronto.
While David Miller, our current Mayor, is a very bright and hardworking man; his limited ability to develop overviews and look into the future beyond a very short limit have unfortunately compromised his priorities and leadership abilities. He has become mired in the same old business-as-usual muck of inability to accomplish needed change, and our deficit has increased as a result. The GTA needs some major overhauling and needs a leader who will not only begin tackling issues but encourage, plan and maintain our collective vision of a bright future.
"We will get to our shared vision of the future of the City of Greater Toronto."
--Mark StateMark State
A genuine leader and visionary for Mayor in 2010, presenting you with the straight goods.
There is much more material available on each of these items, which I published here before, during, and after the election. In addition, material will continue to be posted on this website.
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