Toronto Election 2010 - Recently Updated Pages

SENIORS: ANSWER TO A DILEMMA

MarkState — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 14:51:29 CDT

REALLY ADDRESSING THE NEEDS OF SENIORS

-By Mark State,
Your[1] 2010 Toronto Mayoralty Candidate

You may wonder why the City of Toronto is slow to respond to Seniors’ needs.

As long as I’ve been aware of CARP (The Canadian Association Of Retired Persons) and other Seniors’ advocates, they have been formulating and submitting lists of the special needs of Seniors to all levels of government, including the city. Seniors’ needs differ through age-related circumstances from those of the general population. But unless those needs are also reflective of the needs of the remainder of the population as well, the level of action on Seniors' issues at the city level has historically been unsatisfactory.

There is a good reason: City Hall is not, in general, a pro-active institution. It is a reactive one.

Special Groups’ needs at the city level are typically not discussed unless a specific issue that includes them is presented in council.

In council’s former and current incarnations, when CARP or any other institution presents a list of their priorities to city hall, the best that can happen is the formation of a committee to "look into", or "address" the needs reflected on that list by “studying” them and “making recommendations”. Any action taken to address those needs becomes minimized; and Seniors, as well as other special interest groups, remain marginalized unless something drastic happens to some unfortunate individual, the disaster hits the media, and city hall (or, for that matter, the Ontario Legislature) sees it as an issue that must be addressed.

THE SOLUTIONis to establish a permanent City Corporation whose purview is Seniors’ concerns, with direct access to the Mayor’s office and the ability to both act independently and place Seniors’ needs before council in the form of bills to be discussed and voted on.

Toronto already has a Housing Corporation, a Hydro Corporation, etc. This would be the Toronto Seniors’ Corporation (TSC) able to correlate all existing Seniors services as members under one serious umbrella commission, rather than a loosely federated group of individual services. The TSC would operate with a board of directors composed of distinguished Seniors, a city councillor in charge of its portfolio, and the Mayor. Eventually, if the TSC acquires assets and investments, such as modern, city-owned Seniors’ residences designed for retirement comfort instead of warehousing, professional management may be hired by the Board. The TSC would be in charge of first response to Seniors’ concerns and representing them to the city and to council.

If the TSC does its job well, it will become a global example; and it will provide Seniors with a means of sharing their perspective and experience in partnership with the rest of the community.

As your[1] 2010 Mayoralty candidate, I made keeping the needs of Seniors current a priority. I recognize that just as our freedom is continually protected by young Canadians wearing the uniform of our country; it was, initially, a precious gift from those people we call Seniors. I recognize that although computers are becoming lightening fast and transportation is becoming greener, it was Seniors who gave those conveniences to us. Seniors put a man on the moon. I and my sister are Seniors, and our 98-year-old mother is a Senior. Seniors’ special concerns are real and important. I have proposed a genuine solution that would ensure they are solidly met.

*footnote: [1]. Definition of the phrase “Your ” Mayor: Toronto’s chief public servant. [Just being “The ” Mayor wasn’t part of my candidacy.] –

Mark State

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A SOLUTION TO THE ELECTRICITY SHORTAGE

MarkState — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 02:09:19 CDT

Readers of these blogs will already know they are solutions to current problems felt by Toronto specifically, but that they may be generalized to any municipality.

PROBLEM

Realization that electrical energy-sourced accessories to an evolving lifestyle are cleaner and thus more environmentally sustainable than other readily-available forms of energy provision.
Not enough electrical generation to economically power all the consumption that has increased since that realization.
Excessive space taken up by windmills, photo-electric arrays, generating stations.
Excessive pollution caused by atomic and fossil-fueled electricity sources, CFL and CCFL lighting.
Expensive electrical provision from general suppliers to consumer locations.

SOLUTIONS

Frequent readers will also be aware of the Eco-Friendly power station I devised and whose URL appears on the home page of these blogs.

**[ If you are not a frequent reader of this website, I strongly suggest you become so in order to lift yourself --at a minimum-- slightly above the information sources upon which your fellow citizenry totally depends (i.e. the mass media), so that in future you may be more selective in your election of officials running for office in your own neighbourhood, town, city, province, state, and country. You will also develop an ability to suggest your own viable solutions to problems besetting humanity in a far more informed way than you currently possess.]

In this blog, I intend to show that the -best- source of electrical energy for our current needs is wind power produced by a variety of windmill known as a HELICAL GENERATOR. I will demonstrate several ways to employ helical generators to solve the electrical energy supply shortage.

HELICAL GENERATORS

A helical windmill differs from others in that its blades revolve around a vertical axis rather than a horizontal axis, and are very small in diameter. You've seen helical windmills outside stores and gas stations in the form of signs that seem to magically spin all by themselves,

Images are from Internet Advertising Websites and belong solely to their advertisers.
They are portrayed here as excellent examples of their craft only, and may be removed upon request of the owners.

or perhaps in roof vents as a ball-shaped housing with slots that spins around its base without using electricity.

With very little modification, Helical Windmills can provide electrical power in similar quantities to standard windmills, with a vastly smaller footprint (i.e., they take up much less room).

Helical windmills can also be housed in containers that provide noise attenuation, protect them from the elements, and face them into the prevailing winds in order to make more efficient use of the energy supplied to them in that manner.

HOW DO WINDMILLS WORK?

A lot of people think that the wind pushes the blades of a windmill and that the windmill converts the force of the wind into motion as it is blown around. This is completely incorrect.

A windmill works because its blades, like the wings of an airplane, are airfoils. An airfoil is a piece of material with one side made longer than the other by forming it into an arc. The arced side of the material is longer than the straight other side. This means that wind currents take a little longer to pass over its surface. If the surfaces are both in a wind current of a steady speed, then the shorter side of the airfoil will allow the current to pass over it at its normal speed; but the arced side will force the current to take a little longer to pass over it, simply because it is a longer surface.

This has two effects: first, because wind current is being slowed down, it exerts less pressure along its route than the side that is not being slowed down. Thus, the piece of material with two uneven-length surfaces will have two different air pressures acting on it: a stronger air pressure on the short side, and a weaker --or lower-- air pressure on the long side. And second, because the air pressure on the longer side is lower, the airfoil will tend to get sucked in that direction. Creating a lower air pressure causes suction in a manner similar to drinking through a straw.

If you put the long side on top, the airfoil gets sucked up, and an airplane stays in the sky that way.

If you put it on the side, the airfoil will be sucked in the direction of the longer side, and the material will turn on an axis, as is the case with a power generation windmill.

So, an airfoil is actually SUCKED in its direction of travel, not pushed by the wind. All windmills work this way.

Interestingly, it's not necessary for the airfoil to actually have a shorter side, so long as it has a longer side.

For example, children's handheld windmill toys and boat sails, while being airfoils and working in the above fashion, have no short sides...just an empty space and a billow-shaped side.

(c) Google Images

The wind merely blows at its own rate right past the empty side of those airfoils, and more slowly past the curved or billowing side. This means that sailboats are actually SUCKED, not blown, in the direction of travel. The sails suck the boat in the direction of the sails' billow, and the keel of the sailboat acts as a resistance in the water that enables the boat to travel in a fore-and-aft direction.

(c) Google Images/Wooden Boats

Helical windmills have an airfoil as well, but helical airfoils are established vertically so that the lower air pressure sucks the windmill around a vertical axis.

Normally, there are airfoils on opposite sides of the axis to keep the spinning constant. Sometimes, the airfoil is in a spiral configuration around the axis.

They work marvelously in even a whisper of a wind current, but their chief advantage is that they take up a great deal less space than a standard wind vane style windmill.

The distance measured by including the size of the vane-ends and their bodies is longer than that measured only down the length of the vanes where there is no end in the way.

Wind currents hitting any one of the vanes are split in two, and one part of the current must travel around the end of the vanes to their axis while the other half of it only travels the distance between the vane ends and the axis, which is shorter.

The long side will have a lower air pressure as a result, and the helical will turn in the direction of the long side. As it turns, the next vane will present itself to the wind direction, and so-on. Because it is air pressure turning the helical and not wind power, even the smallest breath of wind will keep a smoothly-floating (i.e. one with good bearings around its axis) helical turning madly.

When a electrical generator is attached to the turning axis of a windmill of any variety, the turning vanes' energy can be converted to electricity.
The amount of electricity that can be generated by a windmill depends upon the amount of pressure-differentiated surface offered to wind currents by it. More electricity can be created by

more windmills
windmills with more airfoil surface

Adding more airfoil-type vanes to larger --or many-- windmills can drive bigger --or more-- generators and create more electricity.

An important point to note for comments being made later on in this page is that a bigger number of vanes on small windmills have the potential of creating a comparative amount of electricity to a lesser-veined larger windmill.

Using this theory, which of the following makes more sense?

This?

Or This?
Wikipedia Image
The first automatically operated wind turbine, built in Cleveland in 1887 by Charles
F. Brush. It was 60 feet (18 m) tall, weighed 4 tons (3.6 metric tonnes) and powered
a 12kW generator.

The answer is that the second windmill was designed as a turbine, and could potentially generate more electricity than one of the windmills in the wind farm had the wind vanes been designed as airfoils and the low-pressure surface of the airfoils added up to more surface area than a wind farm turbine's airfoils. The reason it did not supply a larger amount of electricity is because the blades were slightly tilted in the belief that power supplied by the wind was wind force, rather than differential pressures. They had no air foil shaping. Three-blade windmills such as are found in modern installations are designed for an economy of construction resources, designed to milk wind current energy with fewer parts, but could be redesigned to create more electricity per square area of generating-unit space if they were multi-bladed instead of three-bladed turbines. The environmental impact of such a design would be the same amount of electricity --or more-- generated out of a wind farm a great deal smaller in area.

ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF CREATING HELICAL MOTION USING AIRFOILS

The slots on a ball-shaped slotted roof vent are bent into airfoil vanes so that one side of each slot represents a longer distance than the other, as far as wind currents are concerned.

The base of the vane component floats on a low-friction connection that acts as its axis, and the ball constantly turns not only due to an outer wind-provided pressure differential, but also due to the movement of heated air currents as they rise out of the attic creating its own differential as they move past the blades.

The purpose of roof vents is to keep the moist air in the below-roof airspace changing in a controlled fashion with a self -powered helical windmill.

But here's the most interesting thing about those roof vents: Even if the vent has no moving parts, the airfoil slots in it will draw air current through it simply because they set up a low pressure draw on one side of the slot. This type of roof vent is called a "Passive" roof vent. Here's one commercially available model.

BACK TO HELICAL WIND GENERATION OF ELECTRICITY...

Next is a helical electricity generating system I designed that uses one long airfoil spiraled around its axis. There are a few varieties of these (one or two shown below. Mine differentiates itself with its single long airfoil wrapped around its axis and multipurpose housing. It sits in a sound-attenuating columnar housing (i.e. a column whose construction is deliberately designed to absorb most of the sounds created by an operating windmill inside), open on opposite sides. A little wind vane on the column's top end electronically sends signals to controls that move the closed column so that the openings are always in the direction of the prevailing winds. This is to prevent operational noise from radiating off the system. The column has "shutters", much like a sliding door to an outside house deck, that can be closed to limit the impact of severe winds or shut down the helical inside during maintenance. The design may be used under water or on land where its screw-shaped anchor keeps its "footprint" very small. But as I've never built one, I can't say for certain how well (or if !) it would work.

Can you see which "side" of the airfoil is longer? Which way will this helical turn?

As is the case with all windmills, manufactured electrical power can be used instantly while excess power can be stored in banks of storage batteries and/or capacitors to be used at times when more power is required. Excess electricity (this means more electricity being generated by the windmill than is being used at the moment) can also be "uploaded" into the standard electrical grid. In most municipalities, uploaded excess electricity is paid for by the local hydro provider, just as if it was purchased from any other of its generation sources.

EMPLOYING HELICAL GENERATORS TO SOLVE THE CITY'S ELECTRICAL SUPPLY PROBLEMS -- AND MORE...

The generating capacity of a helical windmill combined with its small footprint makes it an ideal rooftop generator for high rise buildings.

If every highrise over ten stories were required to posses enough helical generators on their rooftops to supply more than half their electrical needs, the city would be populated by low-usage energy-conserving tall buildings.

To offset the cost of installation, landlords may become, under current Ontario Canada law, their own electric companies, and make their buildings more attractive to renters by charging a much lower price for electrical usage by their tenants than Hydro.

These installations and electricity charges would be regulated by the city in a similar manner to the way rent conditions and controls are now regulated by the province. Buildings like MURBS and other lower-rise apartment/condo units could follow the same example, if they wish to become regulated users.

Combining generators with geothermal-assist HVAC as a requirement in all new high rise buildings would make the buildings very inexpensive to operate and much more environmentally friendly in terms of energy use.

Required greening of the sides and rooftops of the buildings would make them more attractive and support avian and insect wildlife rather than being a detriment to it.

SOME COMMERCIALLY AVAILABLE HELICAL GENERATORS

(c) Savonius VAWT

(c) http://helixturbineenergy.com

"Rooftop" generator
(c) Google Images and MWPS (My Wind Power Systems) Denmark
[Note that there are three Helical Vane Sets in a row]

(c) Energy Beta.com

(Vanes elongated by emphasizing the curve and extending them past their upper and lower connection points.)

c) Darrieus Wind Turbine

(c) Taiwan 2009 JinGuaShi Historic Gold Mine FRD 8738. jpg

"Combined" Darrieus Savonius Wind Turbine

(c) GHT 'Blue'
Water-Generator Helical Turbine

(c) 'Helix Wind' 4.5 KW VAWT
Note how many airfoils have been incorporated in this double-spiral helix.

Turby Vertical Axis Windmill

HEATING THE STREETS

A helical generator enclosed in a vented casing to protect it from the elements and perched atop lamp posts could store energy to run bright (LED) street lamps at night. In winter, triggered by temperature and moisture detectors/controllers, the stored energy supply from these generators could run glycol-filled snow-melting coils beneath the paved surfaces to keep streets and sidewalks clear of falling ice and snow, thus saving plowing and salting costs; and the streams, rivers, and lakes would be spared the polluting influx of salt and snow-melting chemicals currently in use for snow removal purposes.

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MarkState	Latest page update: made by MarkState , Yesterday, 5:15 AM EST (about this update - complete history)
	Keyword tags: ccfl cfl electricity electricity shortage fluorescent generating generation helical helical wind high-sodium incandescent led mercury mercury-free salt pollution snow clear wind (edit keyword tags), green energy, sustainable energy generation, sustainable energy More Info:links to this page

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MarkState — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 07:21:10 CDT

OTHER WEBSITES BY MARK STATE:
http://feedbacktomark.wordpress.com Commentaries about remedying the TTC's problems
http://ecofriendlypower.wetpaint.com Solving the world's electrical energy supply problems

This page has two stories with the same ending. I'm not into spoiling endings, but I'm going to tell you the conclusion of these because it makes a great introduction.

The conclusion is that there are ways everyone can use his or her individuality to contribute to the world in such a way as to make it a better place.

Well, we've all heard that one before. But here's an interesting update: During the 2010 election I developed two ways you can actually be a contributor to decisions made in every aspect of Toronto life and in your business or profession regardless of what part you play in that business, and profit by both.

Here's the first story:

Some time ago, my old pal Laurence Cherniak blew into town. I hadn't seen or heard from him in over 20 years as he let his photography and printing business take him all over the world and did all the things most of us dream of doing until --maybe-- we get around to them after retirement. I was Laurence's first SCUBA diving instructor in the late sixties (Lord, am I that old???), and since then he has compiled over 5000 logged diving hours and dived all over the world. Laurence was passing through to close up his Coldwater and Hanover homes so he could settle down in BC for some time before he intends retiring in Maui.

We started catching up, and I told him about my Mayoralty Campaign and all the things I wanted to do for the city. At some point, he interrupted me, and exclaimed, "My God, Mark! Do you know what you just said?" As some of my best friends will delightedly tell you (even sometimes without being asked): when I am blathering away, I'm not awfully good at listening...even to me. So I said, "No. What did I say?" "It isn't exactly something you said, Mark," explained Laurence in a voice that was, to me, sounding puzzlingly excited, because very few people since I was an infant have shown any excitement at all over what I have had to say, "It's something that I thought of while you were speaking. It's exactly what you are talking about! It's Social Action!" Apparently, this is a topic about which Laurence had done some thinking in the past; and what I was saying clicked with his thoughts on the subject.

Two days later, we sat down and discussed the various ins and outs of what Laurence had heard, where he had gone with it in his mind, and where I thought I could take it to benefit the city. Between some time after we sat down in the early evening and 2:00 AM when we were in another part of town doing something else, we had covered a lot of aspects of this topic and changed the name to suit the game. It was now "Social Actualization", and had a body of substance I am developing and I invite you to help me develop by leaving me a message at markstate@cia.com with any ideas that come to mind after you read what it's about.

What is Social Actualization?
There are two sides to Social Actualization.

The first is giving the general public an alternative voice they can use to participate in the life of the city, and can be initiated and implemented privately or publicly. The second is an opportunity for the citizenry of Toronto to personally take back the lack of services caused by unavailable civic budget funding (due to the diversion of that money to paying carrying charges on the debt --that I refer to as its $multi-billion 'deficit'-- owed by the city) while simultaneously allowing the city to reduce and eliminate that debt by several millions each year.

The first is a generalized and formalized extension of those dozens of polls and questionnaires people receive on the Internet every day brought into real life activities. It entails providing everyone with a secure vote on everything available for voting upon, and for making their personal viewpoints on anything known for others to vote on; and gives everyone who wants it all kinds of perks to choose from. Did this make me a "chicken in every pot" political candidate? Well, it probably would have if this aspect of Social Actualization wasn't able to be offered equally well by the private sector.

Using this electronic extension of 'Vox Populi' (with your SocialActualizationCard PIN) can be done on any secure computer website and take hundreds of different forms. Any given day, an opportunity can offer itself to use your vote on a private website, such as helping decide which favourite brew of the week will be featured at a discount via your pub's website, or what you'd like the grocery store to carry that it doesn't have; on a public website, such as Parks & Rec., the liquor control board, city hall, Queens Park, Parliament Hill or the various Supreme Courts; on your own website where you are looking for public opinion; or on a general website set up for the purpose of getting public opinion via a series of alphabetized main topics, sub-topics, and very low-down-the-chain topics indeed, set up by the Public Library. Once logged in to a site, you can elect to be updated on its progress from time to time. On any of these, or on your personal website, it's one way to actualize your personality in the community, but you have to get a PIN number or other non-duplicable personal identification device in order to play.

If you haven't got your own website because you can't afford one, I can arrange for you to have one at no charge using a website development company I have a connection with. It doesn't matter whether you own a computer or not since there are locations with public computers, such as public libraries, some recreation centers, and some public services. A website continues to exist for you whether you are there or not, and can be used to send free mail, speak to people overseas for little or no cost, even used to make money by selling things or encouraging others to visit commercial websites. In fact, offering people their own website is one of the ways I can help anyone interested in pursuing that line of endeavour develop personal earnings. But I digress...

The PIN can be stored any one of your ID cards, (including a membership/ATM card of the Toronto Citizens' Trust Company (TC2) I want to establish to help boot entrepreneurs and employment in the city with micro loans and silent-partner grub-staking,) so it can be used to vote away from home.

The other side of Social Actualization gives people a voice in different ways. It's an umbrella term used to describe social organization schemes that benefit their user groups and participate in making the city a better place in which to live. Of course, the SAC Card can be an adjunct to this, but the concept centers around the creation of civic participation groups. One is the Toronto Seniors' Corporation in city hall described elsewhere on this website, another is the participation of community groups in maintaining the public flower beds and subway stations. Others might include a virtual presence (and a vote!) at open community meetings, such as the development of the St. Lawrence Neighbourhood or the Toronto Waterfront Development.

Both of these aspects of Social Actualization are viable and might meet with council approval because they are comprehensive and forward-looking and fit with my idea of being proactive and future-oriented in city council decision making.

[Remember what you read in here in case you voted to sell off hydro (Rossi), cut the number of representatives at city hall in half (Ford), add another 7 billion dollars to the city deficit debt to pay for new streetcar lines and subways while eliminating 4000 jobs from civil service (Smitherman), or just leave everything as the departing Mayor left it (Pantalone) but freeze property taxes (Ford) just as Mel Lastman did to initiate the city's deficit debt in the first place. Remember that these cuts in jobs and services, additional drains on your tax dollars over time, and sell-offs of city property are retrograde and reactive steps proposed or initiated (in the case of the winning candidate) by Candidates who still do not understand that the way to eliminating the deficit is with a greater amount of creative productivity by citizens determined to win freedom from that debt over time. Productivity is not production: don't confuse the two. Productivity is what we do when we spend time thinking of better ways to do things and then get involved in doing them. The net result of productivity can be more bang for the buck. A more comprehensive explanation is in the next story.]

Story Two:

A lot of strange things show up in a political Candidate's email as you might imagine. So one day it was not unusual to receive an invitation addressed to all the Mayoralty Candidates to make a funny video to be entered in a contest where a million viewers over the remaining time until the election could judge the winner. Well, a rose is a rose is a rose; and a million viewers is a million potential voters is nothing to sneeze at, even though only potentially half of them will actually come out to vote, so I wrote an email to my marketing firm asking them their opinion of the idea. They checked out the sponsor, and replied that it seemed a legitimate enterprise and to go ahead with it if I wished.

Accordingly, my campaign assistant Lal Johnson, a talented young local actor Michael George William, and I dressed up in silly costumes around some of Toronto's recognizable architecture and did silly things there to conform to the silly song that the competition required us to follow as part of the rules of entry, all directed and photographed by the brilliant videographer Kelvin Preena. Ten other Mayoralty Candidates had agreed to participate including four of the media favourites, and we sent our entry in late and unedited. But we were the only ones who submitted the video material we promised we would deliver. The sponsor for the competition was Elite Work Force, a supplier of highly qualified engineers to the aerospace industry, and the principal behind it was Tom Davis, now retired and re-living his pickup hockey years by reminiscing about the team that recorded the silly song in 1984.

What is Productivity?

What we didn't know about Tom Davis was that he had been a pioneer in human resource management software development and had partnered with Dr. Tom Barker, PhD, ASQ, of Process Design Consultants Inc. to write a book breaking down into actual components the quality we call productivity, created a corporate model that takes advantage of that investigation, tested its effectiveness by placing it experimentally in various corporations around the world and evaluating it on both an individual employee level with Myers-Briggs and on a corporate improvement level with fiscal and statistical analyses of success; and then published how that information can change the nature of a business simply through literally encouraging the employees to be more satisfied with their jobs by valuing the person behind the job in specific ways. If the same result could be accomplished with a simple pat on the back, there would be no point in writing a book about it. For a company to make the changeover to this model requires careful examination to see where and how the changeover to their suggested new corporate model can best be implemented and requires careful guidance by trained consultants to ensure that the principles that work are understood and followed until the process can become self-sustaining.

At some point during the campaigning process, Mr. Davis --with the same complete lack of finesse with which he laid the idea of the silly hockey song video on all the candidates-- approached most of the candidates he thought he could work with, and presented his new corporate model concept to each of us along with an offer to use its principles at no charge to the city to make the civil service here in Toronto many times happier, satisfied with their work, and more productive using his new Productivity Communication corporate model. Tom is a very straightforward guy, and gave me to understand that he was promoting the concept's use by the city in order to sell it to the GTA and eventually Canadian business communities and beyond as a model they could see in action; and as the model had been tested and proven in the private-sector business community already, I read the proposal. Having been cross-appointed to the Graduate MBA program in case studies when I was studying for my Masters Degree in Educational Planning, Administration, and Curriculum Development in the early 70's, I immediately understood the part their model plays in the evolution of the corporate model.

Productivity is an event, not an end-result. It does not mean production. It occurs when things are working at their optimum levels. An example of productivity in a manufacturing environment spans the entire spectrum from a corporate culture valuing initial thought and high intercommunication levels amongst all its employees, through creativity and method devising to implementation, to production, to warehousing, to sales and shipping without being just a single one of those stages. It is measured in degrees of individual contribution and both individual and group creative output over time and against a vector of employee satisfaction. Creativity is a hallmark of its health. A "Productivity Communications" management model takes advantage of the human desire to communicate and participate in creative outcomes.

Its opposite number can be found within the numerous "Compliance" models of corporate structures, which are characterized by a culture providing employees with guidelines intended to restrict employee behaviour so as to create order and control for predictable outcomes. While some Compliance models require more and some less creative input from employees, every variety of corporate culture with the notable exception of the Productivity Communications model depends upon Compliance restrictions of some description. Davis and Barker discovered that Compliance models of corporate cultures are counter-productive to the Productivity Communications corporate model developed by them; and appear to have replaced the Compliance component with more generalized goals and objectives in an atmosphere of worker satisfaction in order to create order and control for outcomes without emphasizing the predictability component.

The Productivity Communication model works by eliminating the Compliance factors in the workplace, and by replacing them with ultimate value on the individual mind as a communications-specialized instrument most efficiently utilized when it is communicating with other minds. It transforms the individual possessing that mind into a willing, participative employee who finds increased productivity and quality of work to be an enjoyable challenge when the mind is given an opportunity to local-area-network with other minds regarded as different but being of essential value to the computational overview.

Its implementation was found to increase corporate profitability year over year in the private sector. Increased corporate profitability translates into a bigger bang for the buck in the civil service. And the sweet kicker is that in implementing this model, employees derive greater work satisfaction at the same time, because what the authors term the 'Compliant model‘ aspect of the workplace disappears in direct proportion to the disappearance of tension and work dissatisfaction it produces, eventually giving the individual employee complete recognition as an individual and creative contributor to the staff and freeing the way to developing improvement in the service.

THE ENDING

[That's the story of how the following came about. The following is my White Paper. It's a very long essay (find me an essay I've written that isn't very long!!) about why I would have made a very different sort of Mayor based upon the above two concepts and what they could mean for our Toronto if implemented here. Some of the material in them is repetitive to the above as well as other essays on this website, but the White Paper was not initially written with the above in-depth introduction explaining where it all originated.]

Forward

I’m Mark State, a former 2010 Toronto Mayoralty Election Candidate. This paper represented how I hoped the public --had they been more aware of my candidacy-- would recognize the viable alternative choice for Mayor I represented.

My campaign for Toronto’s Mayoralty was focused on the recovery of the city both in a current time frame with programs aimed at eliminating the city’s deficit debt, and with future-oriented decision making in city council. It offered solutions involving some degree of thought and consideration during their formulation; and was positive, forward-looking and non-penalizing to the city rather than being retrograde and destructive as are my victorious opponent's platforms.Appendix [7] A vote for me would also have been a vote for reducing and eliminating the deficit that is consuming money we need to spend on the city’s infrastructure and ending the current city government’s disorderly spending and acquisition spree, just as his was; except my goals would have been achieved through positive and pro-active means, and perpetuating that form of decision-making through having city council’s decisions based on a future vision of Toronto rather than its curent mode of decision making that has resulted in unsightly and random growth fueled by rampant and ungoverned development and urban sprawl.

Concomitant with that basic platform were Social Actualization and Productivity: two parallel ideas of both actualizing the city to participate in its governance by having a vocal presence, and increasing the wealth of the city by creating jobs with decent incomes; by this means and others providing a larger citizenry-held stake in the welfare of the city and its people. I held then and still do now, that the city’s leadership is composed of public servants that by definition are servants of the public, rather than expecting that the public is a golden goose whose taxes can fund unhindered civic spending at the whim of the city’s administration.

I differentiated myself from all the other Mayoralty candidates and especially the victorious one by being more proactive and creative in assessing not only solutions for issues but preventative and life-improving measures; where he tends to be reactive, and destructive, retreating into removal of services and forecasting hiring freezes as well as selling off the city's fixed assets and continuing to spend money on unwise investments.

A political education obtained by serving in council and the province has constrained the thinking of former councillors running for the Mayoralty so that they understand reaction as action.

Real solutions to the governance of Toronto of the nature I proposed were, during the election campaigning period, stifled under the day-to-day and issue-by-issue challenge of campaign politicking in the popular press. This prevented me from getting out the message that city governance must be wide-ranging and intended to build rather than cut back, nurture rather than freeze and not be based in traditional political nonsense but rather common sense, fearless innovation, understanding overview, and welcome public participation. These qualities distinguished me as a genuine alternative choice for office anywhere but in the press, who were, instead of searching for visionary leadership, engaged in looking for exciting big ideas from more well-known candidates, regardless of whether or not an in-depth examination of those ideas would show their weaknesses. The majority of Toronto's electorate never new me as a candidate.

At Mayoralty Candidates forums where I was present, I alone chose to respond not only about how topics of discussion are relevant to people’s lives, but also how they relate to the broader picture of a healthy, wealthy, forward-looking city.

My Mayoralty platform was based –in the long run—on my central theme of reducing and eventually eliminating the deficit without the need to raise taxes, in order to free up funds we need to spend on infrastructure improvements. That’s an opportunity for proactive solution-finding. I’ve seen it, I’ve investigated it, and I’ve done it by proposing measures that at once build and offer inclusiveness to all Torontonians as participants in moving towards and benefiting from Toronto’s future.

All of my various solutions and proposals may be found on my websites: mark-state.com, a compendium of my political essays over the past four years, and letschangetoronto.com, which spoke to some of the things Toronto has an ability to change in order to progress.

I was registered as a Mayoralty candidate in the 2006 election, where I participated in the various forums and activities held for the running candidates. However, at that time I did not conduct a campaign. I had decided that I would run in the following (2010) election, and wanted to prepare by informing myself about the process of being a Mayoralty candidate through being a participant, and to begin educating myself about how to improve current city management. Still, out of a show of loyalty that is only to be expected from close friends and family, I received 194 votes. (The difference between my unsolicited votes and those coming to the other candidates was that I knew each and every one of my voters on a personal basis!) Some pundits have averred that such a small showing of votes indicates that I was not a viable candidate for the Mayor’s job. I can’t argue with an uninformed opinion about the subject. I’m more than happy to let my various platforms and personality speak for my suitability; and I believe they speak very well to that.

A well-informed voter is always the best kind of voter. The mantra of "stopping the gravy train at city hall" does not, unfortunately, constitute good voter information. It's an alarmist motto that has little or no basis in reality. The structures at city hall that the current Mayor intends to reduce have been put in place after no small amount of consideration and thought, and are designed to service the community adequately and with an efficiency of cost that borders on the frugal. But since it's all the media --without journalistic in-depth examination-- gave you to go on and as voters your information comes from the media, you made your choice based upon it. The following --much more useful-- information is another part of what the media didn't tell you.

When you have been informed through this White Paper about whom Mark State is and what kind of Mayoralty I wished to provide you, you will clearly, solidly, and unequivocally understand that you were prevented from making another kind of choice for Mayor; and, had you been informed of my candidacy, and as well, as events unfortunately seem to be unfolding, you might have been able to make a better decision on October 25th, 2010.

Productivity and Social Actualization

This white paper speaks to two types of issues in the 2010 election that the media never provided you with. They are key to the continued health and well-being of the city and can be grouped under the headings ‘Productivity’ and ‘Social Actualization’. Productivity issues encompass all the solutions required to bring Toronto from a negative financial position to a positive one, and Social Actualization issues revolve around the quality of life here. Both can only be viewed from the positive side of their various aspects if one wishes to produce economic, cultural, or lifestyle positives from their examination.

Social Actualization is also a catch phrase I use to describe the taking-back of services and responsibility by the general public within a social infrastructure that was originally designed to be responsive and a safety net, but is currently characterized by such anomy, isolation, and distancing of public service from fellow Torontonians that we are faced daily with mounting taxation, joblessness, people living on the street, people with zero income, no housing for their families or food to eat, people who because of age or infirmity are marginalized, all of which the city has facilities designed to assist; and people to whom the city and its public service is an oppressor, not a benefactor. At the root cause of its inability to serve is a lack of available funds. In an unusual parallel, some of these inequities can be offset in part by involving the general public in the kind of responsibility for their neighbours that information and power of personal expression can bring.

In order to provide that means of expression, Torontonians might make their voices heard where and whenever it is requested using a PIN-encoded voting component built into the bank card of a Toronto Citizens’ Trust Company (another solution to assist joblessness via friendly banking) that any Torontonian can join for a minimum deposit of one cent; and that card may be used to vote online for any issue that is posted on any citizen participation website to which the holder has access.

The card may be used to vote on a range of things, including selected public concerns that don’t need a public information/consultation meeting, like rating goods and services, including public services on line, to private concerns, such as which contest or beer to feature at the ‘local pub’ next week. Depending upon who publishes the question, the answer is available through citizenry direct participation. As time progresses, the uses of the Social Actualization Card (SAC), the name of the Toronto Citizens’ Trust Bank card, will vary in variety and number.

The principle of Social Actualization also covers more specific concerns.

Toronto’s seniors have long been petitioning all levels of government for more considerate services. The root problem resides with access to government on behalf of a definable population segment. One solution may be to create that access on a very real basis by providing a civic government commission specifically for and run by seniors as a means to have them be heard both in terms of their needs and also in terms of their counsel.Appendix[1]

Selling off school properties due to declining enrollment is a retrograde step that means a reduction in city-held fixed assets. Its solution can be found in the combination of many different architectural solutions to other quandaries. When one combines a variety of lessons learned through the evaluation of factors such as Churches who have built retirement or living communities, looking at a declining rate of immigration to Toronto, the international competition that resulted in our award-winning City Hall architectural design, the attraction to Dubai created by their new magnificent architecture, our own underground PATH, and the complaints of citizens surrounding the new St. Lawrence redevelopment plan; the conclusion can result in an idea that can save the schools, thus both keeping Toronto’s entrepreneurial community alive and vibrant, raising the educational achievement bar through repopulating our schools with a strong middle-class migration to Toronto from other countries, and retain even more value in the property than ever without having to reduce the city’s capital holdings.Appendix [2]

Reducing violent crime is not just a matter for policing and community services to address. Key components to encouraging more positive behaviours in young people and making criminal behaviour less popular reside in the formal education community and the power of the press.Appendix[3]

Using our vacant properties to build for tomorrow might include temporary modular housing for homeless families, neighbourhood parkettes, gardens, or club houses to bring people together and alleviate loneliness and isolation.

The TTC represents a variety of opportunities for improvement.Appendix [4]

Double-digit unemployment rates present an opportunity for the city to become involved in encouraging small businesses and entrepreneurs.Appendix [5]

City planning focuses on the short term, and in order to better serve its mandate needs to be focused on how we can help create the Toronto of the future by beginning today. The Toronto of the future is the one we will be leaving to future generations; and very little thought has been allotted to that end in our current planning.Appendix [6]

There are probably dozens of such issues whose resolutions could come under the umbrella heading of Social Actualization. The main idea for including it as one of the branches of my campaign platform is that it combines positivity and resolution together without requiring retrograde or band-aid fixes on immediate issues.

Productivity

Productivity is harnessing the human brain to create excellent results. It is achieved with receptive communication, encouraged creativity, sharing, democracy, and a vision that the future impact of its outcomes might provide a sustained satisfaction in both consumers and producers. Confusing it with production limits the vision inherent in the word. Productivity implies a system of progress. Production looks only at one minor end-result of productivity. That they are often confused prevents the profitability of a business because production gets placed ahead of productivity and results in limits to growth and improvement. This is key in any industry except those whose investment is strictly in production, and where productivity is discouraged as a sidetrack. Typically these latter types of business are the children of business models involved in productivity where the productivity has been limited to the creative effort but not extended to the production line. Thus the two types of business model remain separated from each other in terms of function.

In Toronto, we currently strive to produce a level of community care that is severely hindered by the existence of a 3 billion dollar deficit simply because the funds going to carrying charges on that deficit are not going to infrastructure maintenance. The roads and sidewalks are waiting longer for repairs, the sewage system needs upgrading, our rivers, lakes and streams run polluted, we can’t afford to keep our swimming pools open, our affordable housing is running ten-to-one behind its need while new condos pop up all over the city in random fashion, and taxes continue to escalate to pay off the carrying charges on the deficit because the city’s current income is insufficient to do so.

Unraveling production due to limited available funds from productivity in all city departments can lead to improvements in infrastructure maintenance without increasing a payroll we have already invested because the productivity quotient leads to a more efficient production when it is implemented.

One of the alternative means proposed to recover funds needed to maintain the infrastructure but lost in the carrying charges of the deficit, as suggested by some of the other candidates who ran in the past election, is to reduce the civic workforce. My suggestion is that rather than just blindly reducing a workforce that has been deliberately evolved to maintain our quality of life in order to save a few dollars that will not make a dent in the city’s deficit, we consider how that workforce can be altered to keep its current assets and produce more and better results for the city’s investment in it.

Can Toronto lead the way to more efficient use of city budgets by having a more efficient public service workforce by emphasizing productivity, and how could this be managed?

While municipalities everywhere in North America are freezing wages, removing services, and cutting jobs in an effort to control costs, the city of Toronto may have an opportunity to be the example of how it is possible to create a change in work environment for employers that will enhance an overall general employment picture while improving the human component of those employed in community services.

How might this be possible?

Business schools teach the difference in effectiveness between what they call a ‘classical top-down hierarchical’ management model and a ‘bottom-up communications’ model. All agree that the communications model is more effective in terms of producing innovation and productivity: essential to a business's profitability and advance. But in North America, we have had difficulty in maintaining productivity as a primary focus in businesses over any reasonable period of time. In a communicative environment like North America, that the bottom-up communications model can’t seem to take hold is a puzzling dilemma. What’s the missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle that would keep a business productivity-oriented and place it on a track of happy, continuous improvement?

In my search to compile a vision that will see Toronto brilliantly move forward into a healthy future, it was obvious to me that not implementing a business model directed to worker satisfaction, innovation, and overall productivity is a stumbling block to keeping any changes we make in that direction. I am never in favour of reactive solutions like wage freezes, hiring cuts, and work friction because they are not proactive and seek a future backed by retreat.

Strange things happen to candidates for office. All kinds of people drop by with great ideas for improving the lot of the city in hopes that a candidate will utilize the idea to help the city in some fashion. One of the most amazing things about Torontonians, and I suppose about people all over the world is that they want improvement and betterment for not only themselves but for all mankind. Thus, I was gratified during the campaign to be shown a business system that teaches how productivity can be instituted and indefinitely maintained in a work environment by utilizing a variety of business model I’ll call the Corporate Communication model and eliminating its barrier, something referred to as a Compliance model. Please forgive the lengthy explanation that follows. The concept is rather involved and takes some explaining to get across.

It is the case that when people feel forced to do anything, they typically rebel. The missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle was that Compliance to any business model, including the bottom-up creative model, ignored our prized North American-inculcated feelings of individuality. In the top-down hierarchical model, individuality is actively discouraged, and in the bottom-up communication model, it is also discouraged in favour of routines valuing group effort, where the routines are the Compliance component. Both are examples of Compliance models because they miss one key ingredient: the self-value felt by the individual within the corporation. In North America, that self-value is a key factor in our everyday life.

The Productivity Revolution, An Employee Guide To Global Competitiveness was presented to both myself and many of the other candidates in the upcoming election by the authors, Dr. Tom Barker, ASQ, and human resource management software pioneer Tom Davis. They have a global perspective on the Productivity Communications business model, and made me aware that it is applicable to metropolitan government civic service as a means for such a workforce to comfortably increase productivity and thereby avoid the cutbacks, attrition non-hiring, wage freezes, and potential union frictions that have been suggested as solutions to "cost-savings" by the other candidates.

[I should point out here that those "cost savings" are false because

They do not save enough money to make a difference in the deficit Toronto holds, even if every penny of so-called "cost savings" were to be deposited against the deficit, which it will not be in any case, since the city continues to take on unwarranted and un-financed projects it intends to pay for later with a woefully inadequate budget.
The personnel we lose in our civic service will result in a cutback of services and access to city hall by Toronto's citizenry.
The human misery caused by employment or wage cuts can never be warranted by giving it a dollar value.
The actual cost of such unemployment will be borne by us, the taxpayers, through federal and provincial cutbacks made necessary by having to pay the out-of-work former civil service in Toronto employment insurance, re-employment assistance, and potentially welfare.
Cutbacks to councilors' budgets means fewer ward-sponsored community events and less assistance to community groups by the city.]

The Productivity Communication business model has been field tested and proven, and the results in the private sector indicate that if it is implemented in our civic employee work force the city will receive far more value for the currently spent dollar from our civic employees. And the sweet kicker is that in implementing this model, employees derive greater work satisfaction at the same time, because what the authors term the ‘Compliant model’ aspect of the workplace disappears along with the tension and work dissatisfaction it produces, giving the individual employee complete recognition as an individual and creative contributor to the staff and freeing the way to developing improvement in the service.

Because I wish to extend the benefits of the Productivity Communication model into the civil service sector and its examples derive from the private sector, the analogies and comparisons I make using the latter to inform the former are intermingled. I apologize for any confusion that may arise in the reader due to the back-and-forth discourse that follows.

The book goes so far as to suggest that so long as individuality remains amongst the most prized hallmarks of its population, North America will not soon recover its economic downward slide by producing a more healthy employment picture until the predominant management model is changed from one based upon Compliance to one based on Productivity Communication and more emphasis is placed upon the kinds of productivity that communication can engender.

The process begins through examination and understanding the definitions that form the underpinnings of an existing management model based on one variety or the other of Compliance, so that certain hallmarks can be changed to arrive at a communication-based model. This gradual changeover is posited as more efficient than implementing an entire restructuring and upheaval in order to accomplish a pre-defined new work environment. The authors show empirical research with various participating corporations illustrating how guided changeover in those firms began to take place in as few as 3 months and resulted in a many-fold increase in profits over time so long as it remained in place.

Using a “Productivity Chain” illustration, Dr. Barker compares how the two predominant management models affect outcomes. The book illustrates how different cultures utilize one or the other to take advantage of certain local resources, such as cheap labour, to attract businesses --especially those in the manufacturing and service sectors.

The traditional, top-down Compliant model can’t take advantage of the individualized, competitive edge provided by the democracy, diversity and education that characterizes the western hemisphere. Rather, it is better suited to controlled, homogeneous, or uneducated societies with cheap labour willing or more suited due to a Compliant societal mindset to operate in a top-down instructions-based business model. Where employed in this hemisphere, it stifles the potential competitive edge offered by the North American mind. The Compliance model still has its uses, for example in a production facility where it excels in a single-minded societal construct, and independent thought in the worker class can be a barrier to production quotas. Some standing armies come to mind. The authors have discovered the same in some overseas electronics assembly plants.

Typically, the Compliance model discourages innovation, quality and effectiveness through such methods as threatening employee livelihoods with words like wage freeze, cutbacks and out-sourcing, which coincidentally are precisely the methods proposed by other Mayoralty candidates including the one who recently took office to increase the profitability of the Toronto civil service. Constant application of the Compliant method in North American business leads to a discouraged work force and a slower, unimaginative production capability.

I realized that if a workforce moves to the Productivity Communications model using the methodology recommended by the book, it becomes more productive for the same payout by the employer. I also realized that if the civic employees in Toronto can be introduced to an environment where they would happily create a service many times higher in efficiency and productivity, there would be no need for retrograde practices such as hiring freezes, wage cuts, and so-on because the civic workforce would become a valuable asset in paying off the deficit.

How would that work?

Workplace environments based on Compliance result in employees giving effort limited to the parameters outlined in their instructions.

Productivity Communication-based workplaces have been shown to create environments in which employees enjoy participating in cooperative effort, and in which performance outcomes and improvement become the result of both individual and group input and cooperation. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0af00UcTO-c In this model, cooperative effort is also a driver for continuous improvement. Continuous improvement is one of the primary factors in the private sector for maintaining a competitive position, growing business and sustaining profits. Profit is the primary reason private sector employers operate a business. In civic government terms, profit may be seen as achieving more for the citizenry at the same cost as has been invested as achieving less in the past.

I think we can all agree that we want more from the civil service, especially in terms of infrastructure maintenance.

The book concludes that there are other potential societal benefits from employing this business model. They include a reduction in the practice of off-shoring to Compliant labour forces as a method to generate profits and, because the model depends upon respect and acknowledgment of the individual worker, it removes worker differences due to ethnicity currently overcome by replacing 'tolerance' with open mindedness based upon interpersonal respect, thus removing one more aspect of counterproductive stress/discomfort in the workplace. Rather than the typical observation of lack of productivity (and production) in terms of “labour costs”, we may be looking at an inappropriate management model that restricts North American workforce Productivity Communication and productive potential.

There is a human cost to retroactive methods of accomplishing profitability in the private business world. Where production plants have moved to cheaper labour, the impact has devastated communities throughout Canada and the rest of North America, creating revenue shortages needed to support and maintain high quality services. Good-paying permanent jobs of the past have been replaced by temporary minimum wage jobs. People have lost homes and jobs and more often have begun to depend upon food banks as a means of survival. The result is a self-feeding downward spiral in a local economy.

With the burden of a heavy deficit placed upon it, Municipal Government is a logical major employer within which to begin a model shift from the Compliant model to the Productivity Communication-based model of day-to-day operations. Rather than threatening that workforce using coercive methods in order to reduce massive government deficits and reduced private sector profits, the answer may lie in increased productivity and work satisfaction coming with a changeover to the Productivity Communications business model.

Realizing the difference and the different outcomes predicted by either of the two models leads to the conclusion that turning around the decline of the North American job market may begin to be accomplished by implementing the new communication based management model, especially in places where productivity can replace expanding costs, such as in the Municipal employment sector.

Municipalities are also a prime target for switching to the Productivity Communications model because they’re a source of normally long-term positions as compared to governments where party politics force bureaucrats into an allegiance and Compliance dependency upon a party in power. The non-temporary nature of Municipal bureaucracy allows time to establish and maintain the Productivity Communications corporate culture. The manageability and leadership necessary to establish and maintain it can better be controlled as it is occurring.

Sustainable Job Growth/Creation

As a part of my campaign vision for Toronto’s future, I include a number of opportunities in all social sectors that illustrate how a Productivity Communication-based and Socially Actualized environment creates inclusiveness and prosperity for all without having to use retrograde steps such as the removal of jobs and government assets and addition of new taxes.
In addition to practicing budgeting based upon a future vision for the city, Toronto will generate new revenue streams to reduce and eventually eliminate its $3Billion deficit and move on to the business-as-usual of betterment of life in the city for everyone.

Toronto can be the exemplar to the rest of the world of both private and public applications of the Productivity Communications model, led by a proactive civic government.

This new prosperity will create exponential job growth…one that
produces realistic opportunities for graduate students where they can
use their skills and generate enough income to pay down the
mountain of debt they accumulate from student loans. Likewise, the
new direction will create a new revenue stream for Toronto based
educational institutes as they become centres of excellence in a new
industry for human factoring productivity. The new revenues will allow such institutes to reduce tuition fees to families of Torontonians.

Best Practices

Democracy is vulnerable to improprieties when it is part of a Compliant environment. Compliance creates situations where fear can be used by leaders that demand personal allegiance in order to mask unhealthy/illegal practices. (One needs to look no further than the stock market crash in 2008 for an example of runaway unhealthy practices that led to global chaos and the devastation of total economies.)

Best practices are a fundamental outcome of communication based management because employee cooperative effort creates respect and transparency at all levels, by providing employees with an environment where they can monitor and respond to unhealthy and/or illegal practices that can harm the employer, their customers and/or their community.

* * * * *
Common byproducts of Productivity Communication based management: Mutual Trust, Respect, Cooperation, Fairness, and Inclusiveness

Common byproducts of Compliance based management: Distrust, Fear, Manipulation, Lying, Cheating, and Bullying

Dr. Tom Barker and Tom Davis have a web site called http://www.eliteworkforce.com where their books are available for purchase. Davis reiterates that the name of the game is “productivity” and the world is the “playing field”. “The age of managing droids in North America must end. Canadian employees can’t hope to compete if they remain uninformed about the requirements of the game and are kept in the dark about the limitations and opportunities provided by the playing field.”

In an agreement reached with the authors, I had been given permission to offer the eBook free of charge to any City of Toronto employee who wished to have it, and reproduced it via my website: http://www.letschangetoronto.com

Immediately after the election was concluded, I sent a copy of my "White Paper For The Human Factor: Productivity/Social Actualization" along with a letter of congratualtions and hope for the future to the new Mayor. I never heard back from him, so I don't know if he actually read it or not.. You decide.

Appendix [1]

REALLY ADDRESSING THE NEEDS OF SENIORS -By Mark State

You wonder why the City of Toronto is slow to respond to Seniors’ needs.

As long as I’ve been aware of CARP and other Seniors’ advocacies, you have been meeting and formulating and submitting lists of the special needs of Seniors that are different from the general population to all levels of government. But unless those needs are also reflective of the needs of the remainder of the population as well, the level of action on Seniors' issues has historically been unsatisfactory.

There is a good reason: City Hall is not, in general, a pro-active institution. It is a reactive one.

Special Groups’ needs at the city level are typically not discussed unless a specific issue that includes them is presented in council.

When CARP or any other institution submits a list of their concerns to city hall, typical procedure is to form a committee to "look into", or "address" them by “studying” them and “making recommendations”. Any action taken to address those needs becomes minimalized; and Seniors, as well as other special interest groups, remain marginalized unless something drastic happens to some unfortunate individual, the disaster hits the media, and city hall (or, for that matter, the Ontario Legislature) sees it as an issue that must be addressed.

THE SOLUTION is to establish a permanent City Corporation office for Seniors’ concerns, with direct access to the Mayor’s office and the ability to place Seniors’ needs before council --as though they were issues— in the form of bills to be discussed and voted on.

Toronto already has a Housing Corporation and a Hydro Corporation, etc. This would be the Toronto Seniors’ Corporation (TSC) able to correlate all existing Seniors' services as members under one serious umbrella incorporation, rather than a federated group of individual services. The TSC would operate with a board of directors composed of distinguished Seniors, a city councillor in charge of its portfolio, and the Mayor. Eventually, if the TSC acquires property and investments, such as modern city-owned Seniors’ residences, designed for retirement comfort instead of warehousing, a management group may be hired. In the meantime, the TSC would be in charge of immediate response to Seniors’ concerns and presenting them as items in council or acting upon them independently within its own budget. If the TSC does its job well, Seniors will be the envy of other Torontonians, and concerns regarding Seniors’ retirement facilities and health care addressed in the 2004 Ryerson report “In Profile: Personal Support Workers in Canada” will be addressed.

Had you elected me Mayor, I would have made keeping the needs of Seniors current a priority. I recognize that just as our freedom is continually protected by young Canadians wearing the uniform of our country; it was, initially, a gift from those people we call Seniors. I recognize that although our computers are becoming lightening fast and our modern-day transportation is becoming greener, they are here because Seniors gave them to us. Seniors put a man on the moon. I am a Senior, my sister is a Senior, and our 98-year-old mother is a Senior. I truly do understand that the special needs of Seniors are real and important.
*footnote:

I wanted to be chosen as “your ” Mayor …Toronto’s chief public servant. Just being “The ” Mayor wasn’t part of my candidacy.

– Mark State

Appendix [2]

SCHOOL PROPERTIES SELL-OFFS: A PREVENTATIVE SOLUTION

Closing And Selling Off Toronto’s School Properties
...what can be done?

In this instance, Toronto can take a lesson from various churches that now are at least partially supported by attached residences. The church-attached residences vary in nature from seniors’ residences to parishioners’ residences, but they all support and are supported by the church of which they are a part.

The school properties are owned by the city, and the city can build on them. The schools in question are not well-attended enough to warrant keeping them open. We don’t want to lose the city-owned properties.

Putting one and one and one together would have the city building long-term varied lease residences on the school properties specifically for families with school-aged children. Two good-sized buildings can house a thousand three-and-four-bedroom residences, each leased only to families of that description.

Perhaps, based upon the age of the youngest child, a “maximum residency” annual lease for a family might run five years beyond that child’s eighteenth birthday. This would leave the family free to renew its lease annually, but after the youngest child attained the age of twenty three (which would allow the family to stay on until that child graduated from elementary school, senior school, and university if need be), the family would be required to move out and make room for another. Condominium use would be counter-productive because it would turn the property to a non-school-feeder residence over time.

The buildings would take on the name of the school . For example, “Brookhaven Elementary School” would indicate the school itself plus two 500-unit three and four bedroom residences built directly where the school buildings are now, to preserve their playground and green park use areas.

Let’s fantasize for a moment about the nature of those residences. We are starting anew here, so we can allow our imaginations to roam.

First, each should be designed as an award-winning piece of architecture, chosen through world-wide competition. The criteria should be the sustainability of the design as a contribution to the city’s future generations. Would they be favourably impressed by the design? Would it contribute to Toronto remaining a beautiful city?

Second, they should be owned by a city corporation. This would enable the city to not only retain the land and school fed by the residential children but also to collect rents and property taxes on the units. Each unit should be sound proofed, well ventilated, and built with a firewall separation from its neighbours.

Next, as new buildings, they can be built using environmentally efficient heating and cooling assistance. Each could also contain the necessary electrical generation support systems that would reduce the amount of electricity it utilized from the hydro grid. Each can contain a required amount of abundant external year-round greenery throughout its height, walkways, and roof development. Transportation corridors designed for a future PERT system should be included in the floor plans.

The new buildings could serve not only as publicly-owned schools and apartments, they could also serve as a community hub.

Multi-level underground facilities attached to the buildings can contain parking, shopping, public transit drive-through stops, and community-use levels containing hobby, daycare, swimming pool, club, meeting, auditorium, cinema, gymnasium, dojo, and music rooms of several descriptions, graphic and ceramic art studios, medical services, and multi-purpose rooms –all for use by not only building residents, but by the entire surrounding neighbourhood as well.
Commercial tenants should be chosen to not interfere with the existing neighbourhood commercial services, but rather as a supplement to it, and existing commercial enterprises in the neighbourhood should be given first opportunity to lease them.

Emergency service vehicles and personnel could be stationed in the new buildings, allowing building security and neighbourhood security to be heightened by resident police, fire, and paramedic services.

Thus, not only do we save the school properties as city-owned, but we also develop a very good source of long-term income for our currently cash-strapped city through a city-owned corporation that manages the buildings, leasing premises and commercial enterprise space. We attract international attention and subsequent immigration especially of families with children, and we provide for the future of the city.

Appendix [3]

CRIME PREVENTION

A coherent future vision for the city must include its being a crime-free place to live. Thanks to our police department, the GTA is largely a safe and peaceful place to live for most of us.

I suppose the rosiest possible future would be a city with no crime in it at all. It's an attractive idea, and we can plan for it with a future vision that will help to take us there.

Working Towards The Elimination Of Violent Crime

Increased violent crime can be stemmed and perhaps completely eliminated if it is addressed on three fronts:

· removal of the felons from the streets;
· education of children in all school districts to emphasize self-motivation skills and rewards for
projects undertaken from inner direction; and
· more outspoken languaging regarding crime in the media, making it a crime-fighting ally.

The first front, removal of the felons from the streets, may be addressed by an increased visible and invisible police presence and available crime-fighting technology. While the outgoing city government has made arrangements to provide additional membership to the police force, it's the effective means of deployment, as well as the numbers of officers available, that will make the difference to our crime statistics. Deployment in a way that will almost instantly stem crime, or even better, prevent it, is an avenue to ridding the city of this serious blight on our city. Following the leadership of effective programs in other major cities, an offer to a gang member to leave his/her gang with the assistance of the police department may be made to groups rounded up from time to time for the purpose.

The second front --teaching children to be self-motivated and inner-directed-- is designed to create a future generation of latchkey kids, who upon returning home will get involved not in gangs, but instead join interesting community groups, pursue engrossing hobbies, care for the younger children in their families or in the neighbourhood, prepare dinners for the family when they arrive home, join specific interest clubs, study and do homework, and other worthwhile pursuits that children who can appreciate their own interests and abilities and sense of self-worth are more likely to do. Kids who decide for themselves what kinds of positive activities they want to pursue (self-motivation), and need no prodding from anyone to take on that expression of their interests (inner direction) do not engage in joining gangs in order to acquire a feeling of self-worth or security.

The city needs to protect itself by a system of grants it can give to schools that are shown to have set up curricula designed to inculcate self-motivation and inner direction.

And the last front can be achieve by encouraging the media to stop sanitizing language about the perpetrators with reportage using names these social miscreants love. Criminals in street gangs love to read and hear reports about themselves aggrandizing them as gangsters, shooters, etc. etc. It gives them brownie points for recognition and popularity. Replacing this sanitized language with epithets like slime, pukes, murderers, dam fools, etc. would be an awakening and system shock to the criminal mind those sub-humans possess. When the rewards are lessened in the media, the acting out to receive those rewards will likely diminish as well. A negative aspect of this is that the language used might affront some readers/listeners. On the positive side of the ledger, it will allow the media to get on board actively in the fight against crime.

Appendix [4]
[NOTE: More articles on better solutions for the TTC may be found in my Feedback To Mark TTC commentary website.]
REPAIRING TTC SERVICE-MINDEDNESS

[The following is the content of a brochure handed out at TTC public meetings in 2010 addressing public dissatisfaction with the service.]

So...Amalgamated Transit “wants to know our concerns", do they? They want to find out why we're fed up with their service, they say...Well, they've got a whole lot more coming than they suspect. But you can legitimately suspect that they have no intention of changing anything, because “listening to your concerns” is just an old-timey political trick to make public concerns lose energy and go away; and if that’s the hand that Kinnear is playing today, or if as an attendee you can’t voice potential solutions to the problem with somebody really listening, you’re being deceived.

A CHANGE is what's needed...... because when the unions, executive, and management of the TTC have traditionally been more interested in the financial "bottom line" (or in the case of a couple of the past elected officials posted as Commissioners being more interested in their “vision of how things should be”) than the needs and benefits of the service to its ridership, the net result can only be poor service as noted by us, its customers. Nobody's watching the store to see that the customers' best interests are being served. That would just be good business practice… it’s not rocket science.

Examples of this abound: TTC Right-Of-Ways that hurt our economy by impeding both traffic flow and customer parking causing businesses to lose income and close down, yet continue to be built after the lessons learned on the Spadina line; a Customer Information Line open only between 8 am and 6 pm and closed on statutory holidays so that not only locals but also tourists can't be properly served by it; inhumanly crowded rush hour vehicles; one or two buses serving some entire routes with no night-time service; subway stations that are dirty and falling apart and do not, in the main, service disabled passengers; operator rudeness and jerky driving; long waits for buses in bad weather; streetcars not having their routes instantly served by buses when the track is impeded...often causing VERY long waits by users who have no idea of why the streetcar isn't coming because the Customer Service Line hasn’t been informed either... until some energetic person on foot happens by after walking the length of the closed-down line, and passes the word along to accumulating crowds that will pack the first several cars through the holdup; charging drivers to park their cars in subway station lots when they take transit. A really major example of this myopic view of running a transit system is the publicly announced proposal of LRT lines run down the center of rush hour routes so as to deliberately impede automobile traffic and thus hopefully force an increase in ridership on public transit --rather than finding a way for all forms of traffic to coexist in an equitable manner and designing a system capable of serving the city constructively.

The strong public reaction you witness here is indicative of a severe lack of business acumen and just plain irresponsibility on the part of those running the TTC on our behalf; and the rank and file are just following suit by imitating their executive leadership –BOTH Union AND Management-- with poor public relations, poor driving, poor scheduling, maintenance, and poor on-the-job care and concern. The current city management of the TTC, and that of the Toronto ATU locals’ executive has set the pattern, and all members of both have fallen into line.

Mr. Kinnear, rethink your responsibilities. Your union is a separate entity under contract to service the TTC. The ATU is not an employee of the city, not entitled to keep its membership working except through a renewed contract agreement with the city. We, the citizenry, keep you employed to serve us because you are a ready source of expertise that would take a great deal of trouble to replace. But non-replacement is never an automatic guarantee for a contractor. There has been talk of privatization of the transit service, and quite clearly the manner in which the union operates the city’s transit vehicles and maintains its properties has led to a significant level of discontent. Nobody automatically loves any of your membership just because he or she puts on a uniform. The ones we love have shown love to us first. As union members, your confreres have lost sight of the fact that they are in business to stay in business. To stay in business, one builds a patronage of satisfied, returning customers; not the captives your union and its equivalent management at City Hall has apparently made us out to be. Yes, it’s also true that half of the responsibility for the equation leading to civic dissatisfaction rests squarely on TTC upper management. They, too, must be corrected; and no union protects their jobs.

I propose three solutions that are intended to turn this series of difficulties into a WIN for the TTC’s ridership, the City, and the Union. If we're voting for certain things at these meetings, perhaps we could vote on their implementation.

1. An ELECTED OFFICIAL, fiercely on the side of the public’s interests rather than either its bottom line and/or self-aggrandizing political interests, immediately placed in charge of the TTC, and given teeth to conduct performance reviews, hire and fire, and make changes as needed to upgrade the level of service.
2. Hire a new overall TTC Executive Manager with a proven track record of making a transit service into a real people-server rather than treating it as a theoretically-constructed people mover.
3. The TTC’s contracted ATU Locals will legally establish and enforce the following credo appropriately.

TTC AMALGAMATED TRANSIT UNION MEMBERS’ CREDO

Ø THE TTC RIDER is the most important person in our Toronto union local’s business.

Ø THE TTC RIDER is the central part around which our entire transit service revolves.

Ø We are dependent upon our ridership as well as their financial and political good will for our livelihoods.

Ø In return, our ridership is dependent upon our providing a reliable, convenient, friendly, skilled, efficient, and safe transit service for them.

As an ATU member, aware of my responsibilities in our customer/service relationship, I support it by treating all our customers with gentle respect, appreciation, helpfulness, and dignity.

Appendix [5]

WHAT TO DO

[Exerpted from http://www.mark-state.wetpaint.com: How Toronto Might Improve Its Economic Prospects During This Downturn ...And How It's Being Frustrated From Pursuing A Turnaround]

One remedy to a situation in which a municipality continually finds itself in arrears, under-budget and unable to manage with available funds is to identify independent revenue generation solutions as an alternative to the 'hat in hand' mendicant method of approach to senior government for additional funding over and above standard revenue streams.

The city already receives certain reliable amounts from taxation, transfer of funds, licensing and fees. After that, we are expected to cover our expenses. If we cannot do so, then we ought to be able to generate additional funding without having to approach senior government for it.

It is not impossible to turn Toronto around economically by putting people back to work using the city as a formal cause in that effort. The idea is not new, and it has been applied before with great success. The Ontario Government has made some small steps in that direction as well:

ecdevjournal link

Here's one of a group of potential economic turnaround packages:

There are few jobs available in today's ravaged economy, and many, many applicants. In addition to the currently unemployed, there are also homeless people who according to the previous homeless census in Toronto (±5000 out of ±5800) stated unequivocally that they would rather be working and off the street.

When jobs are not available, people must become entrepreneurial in order to live. Our latest entrepreneurial class is panhandlers, who can make on average $100,000.00-plus tax free** per annum during economically prosperous times. Unfortunately for most of them, they are unable to keep the money because they are subject to costly addictions, robbery, coercion and extortion rackets by panhandler hierarchy. While they will hedge about the terminology, they have a strong work ethic.

[**For the incredulous, I invite you to do the math: Panhandlers work 8 or more hours a day doing mundane repetitive tasks and subjecting themselves to violence and abuse in the process, but earn an average of $20 to $60 an hour depending upon their location, panhandling style and time of day.

Example: the stoplight panhandler. Looking extremely poor & morose, and walking up & down lines of stopped traffic with a cup outstretched and a sign asking for help, how much does he earn?

Traffic lights change every 30 seconds. One looney on average for every 3 lights is $40.00 per hour.

Except that every hour there are at least two people who hand over a five dollar bill, making it $50.00 per hour. That’s $400.00 per day, $2,000 per week, $104,000 per year.

Do they work a full day all year long? I don't know. For $400 a day, would you? Maybe they go south for the winter and panhandle there.

Street ‘accosting’ panhandlers can make more than twice as much as stop light panhandlers if they are skilful with their approach. Make up your own math].

What do panhandlers actually do to earn their living? They shed their human dignity. That’s hard work. Try it some time. The unemployed's work ethic and entrepreneurial spirit is not limited to panhandlers. There is a huge resource of people in the city willing and able to apply themselves in some entrepreneurial effort -- if only they could have an opportunity to do so.

Every entrepreneur in business has the potential to hire others to work for him/her, so assisting one person to become an entrepreneur creates opportunities to put many others to work. There are also literally thousands of people out of work whose total conception of employment centers around the concept of ‘job’, where somebody else takes the entrepreneurial chances and job seekers accept a salary to work for them.

To an entrepreneur, these job seekers are untold wealth. The more people they can put to work making money for them, the more they will earn; and the job seeker only wants a small portion of what he earns on behalf of the entrepreneur as a reward for his knowledgeable labour. The person holding a job is happy because he or she is earning a salary, has benefits and an option for retirement earnings. Everybody wins.

People who are working earn money. Money buys housing, food, and gives an opportunity to practice charity on a grander basis than giving somebody in greater need than you, your last quarter.

The city needs more money than it can get through its transfer-of funds allotment, raising taxes, charging parking fines, licensing and permitting. Traditionally, it applies for this extra money from the province or the federal government. The issues associated with requesting money from senior government (not unlike panhandling, but without its proven efficiency) are wide-ranging, but may be summarized as 'overall not satisfactory' for a host of reasons, some of which are listed above.

One unorthodox solution to this quandary could very likely be for the city to become entrepreneurial as well.

The city might start off its entrepreneurial career with the establishment of a Trust Company or Caisse -- whichever is the best route for a city that also wishes to float its own low-interest, borrower-centered mortgages and charge cards; and offer an automatic discount for the cardholder if it is used within the city limits-- in every neighbourhood offer full banking services, offer ATM's that are differentiated by giving out small change to any bank card holder with a very minor surcharge based entirely upon their home-banks' or location-providers' charges, and group-supported micro-loans.

[A CAISSE is a type of credit union where every depositor is a shareholder in the company. It is very depositor-friendly, and as a payday loan arranger can manage credit based upon paycheques used as collateral without cashing them at additional expense to the depositor, while offering money management counselling to the depositors that would enable them to get off the payday loan habit. A City Of Toronto Caisse would be composed of any Torontonian wishing to deposit in it. Management of a Caisse is conducted by the depositors who elect managers and approve the Caisse's financial direction at shareholder meetings. A TRUST COMPANY is a privately-owned savings, mortgage, and lending company, with rules that are more relaxed than those governing federally incorporated major Banks about how their money and business is managed. The advantage of a Trust Company is that it can emulate the generosity of a Caisse, but that its investors and owners must purchase all its shares. This would allow a Toronto wholly-owned trust company to direct all its profits to the city.]

Part of the business of the projected Trust Company or Caisse would be the business of strong qualification, low-interest loans and micro loaning.

Suppose the city were to offer potential entrepreneurs (identified from groups of small business people wanting to expand, the less-than-successful ones struggling to make a go of their enterprises, the Self-Employment Benefit "SEDI" grads, and persons with a realistic business vision) start-up money for premises and equipment, expert managerial advice, accounting and legal help in maintaining those businesses, etc., ‘grub staking’ in return for becoming a full partner in the businesses and taking 50% after-tax profits as a full partner share. Funding might come partially from the city's Trust Company or Caisse banks, and a strong financial institution eventually built through a careful enterprise over the first few years into a place from which Torontonians could expect financial services oriented to them.

The entrepreneurs would be assisted to eventually purchase back the city's initial investment at its original cost with the partnership profit-sharing period considered as its sole means of gaining by the transaction. Much of the new entrepreneurial energy might be devoted to service industries focused on improving the lot of the city, thus saving the city in infrastructure and maintenance cash outlays.

Expert managerial assistance for new start-ups might come in part from the existing professional community, and also from business and accounting professionals who may themselves have been out of work when such a program started, and who can work in an entrepreneurial consultative capacity, financially aided initially by their own silent partner: the city, in much the same way as their clients.

A bootstrap program of this nature will eventually enrich the city so that not only will its citizens be able to afford their homes, but there will be enough additional income over the property tax base (currently 36% of budget funding) and regular 'senior government'-paid programs (about 28%) to assist the city to begin to thrive financially on its own and begin the expensive task of repairing the damage caused by past civic governments, and the more bizarre programs of the most recent ones, to a strong future.

Appendix [6]

[Excerpted from http://www.mark-state.wetpaint.com “RESTORING OUR TORONTO TO FUNCTIONALITY AND PURPOSE”]

The Difficult Part Of Reform

Reforms are never completely welcome. They seem complicated and difficult: nobody likes change. The current president of the United States was elected on a platform of CHANGE because the citizenry of that country realized that the status-quo was not getting them anywhere useful. When they asked themselves whether they were able to undertake that needed change, they said, “Yes, we can!” What they were really saying is, “We are willing to try to improve things in a deliberate manner.”

With a mindset of wanting to improve, people see that improvements can be made and work solutions for them. The leadership that offers to keep that awareness alive for them is the one that allows them to rise to the next level of betterment.

Look around you and ask yourself, is Toronto getting anywhere useful? We have lots of increased infrastructure and development, but does anybody know whether more of those elements is, in the final analysis, where we should be putting our energy?

If all we do is add more infrastructure and more development, what guides the city’s growth?

What will Toronto look like fifty years from now?

More of the same, but bigger?

A hodgepodge porcupine of a city with giant concrete quills sticking out here and there all over it?

Traffic jams? Toll roads?

The same old downtown streetcar system gussied up with fancy new streetcars running down the middle of our major streets?

Is that the legacy we want to leave our children? Is that the best we can do for them? Isn’t there a very nice future the city can plan for itself? If there were and we could see the future to know what it looked like, we could compare it with what we do in the present –step by step– so we can see whether we are growing toward it.

What’s the solution to these perplexities?

Perhaps it is time to improve some of the ways we approach city governance.

Some nitty-gritty changes might be good for us; for example, change in key areas of how we tackle our city’s overall well-being.

What Is The Evidence Of “Stuckness”?

Pollution: After a good many years spent talking it up, we’re not green yet. Our garbage is an unresolved issue, all of our streams and rivers, lakes and ponds are still heavily polluted. We can’t swim in them, or safely eat whatever fish still survive in them. Our inadequately informed civic leadership has given us advice that is unsound about becoming green at home (CFL’s, 1.6 gal flush toilets, “improved” fossil fuel generating stations, inhibited traffic flows, trying to get rid of plastic shopping bags by charging a nickel for them — all these present more drawbacks than benefits; and there are better and more useful alternatives to them). People who have tried to generate their own electricity have been penalized for it. There is no economic incentive to promote green-ness in the community; only rhetoric, token instances showing example greening solutions, and conferences, committees, and discussions by politicians who have a strong feeling that something really needs to be done but no idea of what that might be.

Poverty: Straightforward evidence of a downward trend in city care is readily available: look around you. Poverty mars our main streets in the form of homeless people sleeping on the corners of second-grade roads while fancy high rises poke the sky. The poor panhandle for a living or have to go to shelters and food outlets for the most basic of daily human needs. Not only they, but previously employed and relatively well-off people are having difficulty finding work.

Decline: Many of our properties are developing a run-down look because people either can’t afford to care for them or can’t be bothered because the city offers them no sense of pride in living here.

Questionable Decision-Making: We are about to spend a billion dollars for new streetcars, a technology that is 115 years old, and fraught with all kinds of operational hindrances. While a more streamlined variety of streetcar offers a pleasant-looking legacy to Toronto from the departing current civic government, what real improvement do they offer in terms of city betterment?

The Rising Cost Of Living: Commodity prices that directly affect the cost of living are considered ‘healthy’ when they are escalating at an inflationary rate. Why is it that when our pocket books have difficulty keeping up with rising costs, they don’t seem to be factored in to the ‘healthy’-ness of the economy?

Poor Traffic Control: Our traffic control systems are messy and disorganized. Traffic snarls are the rule, not the exception. If you are a motorist or otherwise involved in constant slow-motion traffic and rush-hour or other snarls, you should know that there is technology that could prevent those inconveniences completely. It is here now, and can be implemented on Toronto streets. If traffic can be moved efficiently on the streets in the city, the lessened load on the rush-hour expressways would be diminished to the point where the words “rush hour” no longer seem so ironic.

Unequal Senior Care: Seniors are not being equally well-cared-for in all of our seniors’ residences, and are continually threatened financially. When they live alone, their well-being becomes jeopardized when the weather is too cold or too hot, when not enough food is available, or when physical access or getting around becomes an overwhelming difficulty. Some cannot afford to buy proper nutrition. These are the folks responsible for giving us our current affluent lifestyles. They contributed to society all their younger lives, and now that they are older and less able to defend themselves against the vicissitudes of life, live marginalized lives.

Governmental Short-Sightedness: All are examples of how a city government can tangle itself into an entropic state by not only placing emphasis on the wrong values; but more than that, by enacting a form of government decision-making that results directly from those values, because they inhibit the ability to rise above pressing daily issues to a bigger picture governed by direction, where decisions regarding growth may be deliberated with some degree of guidance.

The province is in a spiral of more-of-the-same infrastructure expansion as well:

Ontario’s premier in the not-so-ancient past spoke happily in favour of spending public dollars to continue our electricity generating dependence on atomic energy, arguably the filthiest polluter of any form of energy generation because it generates deadly toxic waste that takes literally hundreds of thousands of years to deteriorate, until that effort was stopped at its inception by an outside agency. Who stopped it? The commercial firm designated to do the job when it discovered it couldn’t make a profit from it. Meanwhile, the lack of upload-regulating technology in place by hydro actively discourages local, low-cost, residentially-generated power.

In an effort to improve transport of commuters, more trains and more tracks are being added to the existing rail lines without some really basic questions about what more current alternatives might already be in use by other cities in other countries all over the world.

Poor Bicycle Route Planning: Cyclists –who for some strange reason continue to place their faith in a TTC that has yet to justify their trust– are unable to freely travel through the city, especially in the so-called ‘improved’ public transit renovation areas, and they and motorists present a problem for each other.

Cutbacks In Public Services: We have to close schools, swimming pools, and community centers because we can’t afford to maintain them. We and other major cities in Ontario and the rest of Canada lost responsibility and control of our school board to our provincial government for the same reason.

Increased Violent Crime: Street slime –people who have deliberately chosen to make their living from evil action– make our neighbourhoods dangerous to life and limb by remaining free to rob, murder, and deface us.

Desperation Decision-Making At City Hall: The list of our civic governance inadequacies is enormous. There are enough problems to create an entire website for the problems alone. Some of the problems within city council itself include:

Excuses being made for why we must accept the inadequate pace of remedial change to the city; or why we must accept selling off our city’s Waterfront Park Reserve birthright to developers in order to pay for our misguided lust for more infrastructure and development. These rationalizations usually begin with the insufficiency of the city’s taxation abilities to cover the costs of any remediation. Meanwhile, enormous amounts are being spent on foolish purchases, such as poor infrastructure repair planning and the above-mentioned streetcars.

Questionable Continuation Of Streetcar Transit: Were you aware that when comparing the carbon footprint of streetcars and buses, buses are cleaner because streetcars slow traffic and cause it to stop while loading passengers, resulting in the burning of more fossil fuel by hindered automobiles than by buses moving more swiftly and freely between stops; and it takes more metal manufacture and recycling to build and maintain streetcars than buses? Being able to move around impediments such as other stalled buses and road accidents makes buses more versatile than streetcars that line up when one in the lead experiences a hold. The ability to drop passengers off on the sidewalk instead of the middle of the road also makes buses safer. Not only are buses capable of carrying the passenger load in the city, but they are evolving to become sustainable transportation almost as fast as cars.

The current purchase of a fleet of new streetcars ensures that a relatively inefficient form of public transit will continue for another twenty to thirty years. We are told that the purchase is a good thing because the new streetcars are prettier and lower to the ground and will run up the centers of rush hour routes forcing commuters to use them instead of cars. Will you stop using your car (or bicycle) and take public transit instead?

Ignoring The Needs Of — Or Worse, Hindering– Traffic: Statistics Canada says that several million commuter trips each year are made in and out of the city in cars by people who do not wish to use public transit. Without being certain that these people are willing to get up earlier in the morning and give up their automobile travel to take public transit, the TTC’s wishful thinking that people will be forced to switch as it narrows those rush hour routes with reserved-lane streetcars will only result in one thing. The automobile users they thought would switch to public transit will clog their deliberately traffic-inhibited routes to a stop.

The City’s Cash-Strapped Status: The enormity of the number of issues that have to be resolved, and the perceived cost of resolving them, are frightening prospects to a cash-strapped council who can’t see any way out of its predicament.
·

development priorities that place new, mainly downtown residential and civic building in as priority projects intended to improve the wealth of the city by providing more upscale housing with no coherent future planning as to the impact on the remainder of the city are short-sighted.

budgetary allotments being set aside to create more parks instead of improving the ones we have.

closing of swimming pools while the city tries to get the Board Of Education to pay for them. Neither can come up with enough money to keep less than half of them open. The swimming citizenry loses a resource, and children who don’t have a place to learn to swim drown.

inadequate funding of our children’s educations results in an overall poor comparison with other countries on a par with Canada economically, forcing some local schools to adopt overseas curricula so their students can compete equally for positions in the universities right here in Ontario. The results of an inadequate education budget are felt more widely than in the areas of academe: they also have negative sociological consequences.

How The City Has Learned To Cope

City government has learned to cope in the barest manner by experience. If it complains enough, and ‘cries poor’ enough, it can always hope for economic support from senior forms of government to save it from its shortfalls –where it needed to, but had not prioritized to, avoid shortfalls because it has always looked at “more is better” rather than “what are we doing, and why?”.

As you ask questions or hear media news broadcasts, information you receive runs continually and often frustratingly contrary to your concerns. The resulting puzzlement, disappointment, and feeling of powerlessness, can be frustrating to those who sense it from time to time in their lives. Perhaps you have a pet beef that you wish the city would “fix”. Seen any action on it lately? Why not?

Reform Is Possible

None of this is necessary. I can understand why those we elect don’t effect the measures that will restore vibrancy and good living in every corner of this city. Because city council establishes its decision-making patterns on years of precedent, I think it never occurred to them to examine its efficiency. Not only does the city government not know how to make positive changes in this regard, its difficulties are enhanced by establishing boards of advisers whose livelihood will be increased if they advise the city to keep on doing what it does, and in the same way, only more-so.

Perhaps city council hasn’t learned about how large corporations and other cities are successfully tackling similar issues to those we now face. Maybe they are afraid of making necessary changes because they’re uncomfortable with anything that isn’t something they have done before. Maybe both.

There is an unexamined plan for achieving what’s necessary and obvious in order to remedy the current ills of the city. In order to succeed, the steps of the remedy must be planned to echo far into the city’s future.

Amongst the other issues they address, pages in this website may be found that portray management methods that affect every aspect of life in Toronto in a positive manner. The methods combine economic recovery and strength-building with applied programs of deliberate future planning to maintain control over a corrected service system, solve the city’s money shortage, housing dilemma, waste disposal problems, straighten out the traffic snarls the city is plagued with, reduce all crime to near-zero levels; and in short, as the humourists phrase it, “cure what ails us”.

· The methods are based in common sense and ingenuity. Many of them feature “future planning”, resulting from a scheme called a “future plan”. It’s important to underline that a future plan is not a cure. It’s not an answer that is going fix things up as soon as it’s implemented. It’s a route and a remedial opportunity that enables clarity in decision making because it offers clear philosophical direction.

Doesn’t the city already have a future plan?

Counter-arguers to this website will point out that the province and the city already have a ‘development plan’, and they do . It’s variously called the Ontario ‘Place To Grow’ act of 2005, the Toronto Official Plan of 2002, and most recently, the Greater Toronto Area Economic Summit of May 2009.

However, each of these Official Plans –with an exception of two sections in the GTAES entitled “investing in our human capital”, and “Tax incentives to support desired outcomes and behaviours, such as building the green technology sector”; and one section in the PTG Act: 2005, c. 13, s. 1. “to ensure that a long-term vision and long-term goals guide decision-making about growth and provide for the co-ordination of growth policies among all levels of government” –are based entirely on the principle of ‘more-of-the-same’; and rather than opening up the city and area to a bright beautiful future are unfortunately and unalterably destined to keep Toronto, the GTA, and the province mediocre.

One will note that the Ontario government has interpreted its own act in this instance; and rather than emphasizing the word “guide” has chosen to emphasize the word “growth”, meaning “grow bigger and more projects”, such as the ‘Metrolinx’ project in conjunction with the GTA. This misled path of ‘more growth is healthy’ is causing Ontario to begin facing the same kinds of economic stress held by Toronto, and for the same reasons. Often, money is re-routed from civic projects in other Ontario cities and towns to be used to cover Toronto-and-area’s grander projects because Toronto is regarded by the province as being the ‘economic engine’ of Ontario. Hence, more economic independence by the city would be in the best interests of a cash-strapped province.

Toronto’s Official Plan has nothing in it to relieve any of the disorder, confusion, and disarray just mentioned in any realistic fashion. Instead of determining how the future might appear to people living in the city long after we have begun to provide for their circumstances, it deals with “healthy growth”; meaning that as long as increases in infrastructure and development are taking place, everything is all right. The forward-looking parts of the Official Plan don’t get past 14, 15, or at best 25 or so years into the future. If it looks good now, it must be OK…and only “more of the same” looks good for now because the city needs money and only knows how to get it through traditional methods.

Appendix [7]

How did the new Mayor get elected if his campaign against the deficit is not a workable one?

Job cuts, attrition cutbacks, wage freezes and union friction are all intimidating to employees. They form part of current plans evolved by the current Mayor, some of whose contemplated personnel or budget cut-backs do not seem to evidence either understanding or appreciation that every member of the civil service is a human being; and they are all going to be negatively affected by proposed retrograde and coercive measures to carve chunks out of the civil service as they lose their jobs, perhaps unnecessarily.

The idea of reducing the roster of city employees is calculated presumably for the purpose of stopping the city budget blood-letting that is taking place with an increasing deficit debt, as though by diminishing the civil service in the city, money will magically be found to pay off more of the debt and allow for the implementation of desperately-needed civil services. It can't work, because while the money shaved from reduction of the civil services might be re-applied to supporting the city's infrastructure needs, it is far, far too little to make a dent on the debt, and the carrying charges on that debt will continue so long as the debt exists; and as long as the debt continues to exist, it will increase. Take my word for it. Over time, the city will begin to lack good representation between council and the citizenry, and services to everyone including the city infrastructure will begin to dwindle due to the lack of personnel required to provide them. It's like cutting off an arm to stop yourself from bleeding to death.

Meanwhile, the citizens who voted for this Mayor were bamboozled into thinking that the city's civil service was fat and largely unnecessary and that expenditures by council members were often unfounded and over-priced finduciary negligence through his blustering attacks on council overspending. He complained loudly as a councillor that fellow council members irresponsibly spent their riding budgets while he spent little to nothing; while in fact he spent the same kinds of expenditures on his riding, but out of his own wealthy pockets and those of wealthy riding supporters rather than the budget that had evolved over time to define the funds necessary to support riding activities. Those who voted to reduce riding budgets on the grounds that they were fat were ignorant of the means by which those budgets had been arrived at through years of experience that detailed the needs of the ridings as they could be supported by their representatives. Those who voted to reduce the number of civil service employees had no idea of the jobs those employees were doing, or whether or not they were essential; nor whether or not a reduction in employees could result in the same services being offered. They had no idea that in addition to creating hard times for workers who were removed from their jobs, both federal and provincial, and indeed the city's own tax reserves would be further strained by eventual unemployment insurance payments, retraining costs, social service support, etc., or that each employee released prior to retirement for no cause would be entitled to a very nice 'golden handshake' parting pay-off according to existing legislation. City hall spun the story that not retiring upon request was an effort of employees to increase their severance pay; while it was only an effort by them to keep their jobs, as several meetings hosted by them pointed out in no uncertain terms.

Eventually the city tendered its garbage collection to a private firm, citing future savings of nearly $100million over a nine-year term. However, the new garbage collection firm will reduce its collections frequency from that currently being provided by the city-owned service by an estimated 30%. One wonders whether that 30 per cent drop in collection service over the nine year period of time would show savings that would justify the expense or whether it works out to show that the city wins nothing that could not be gained by reducing its own service by 30% while maintaining the 70 jobs it divested itself of (with, lest we forget, 70 golden handshakes going into 70 reluctant pairs of hands). Although the paparazzi reported the news, not one paper delved into accounting comparisons of the two collection services; except the Globe raised a question based upon Hamilton's partially privately-owned garbage collection service, which showed that Hamilton was not appreciably farther ahead because of its utilization of private services.

The Mayor's band-aid and bandwagon campaign approaches to cost-saving, using the mantra "Stop The Gravy Train" were supported by individuals who were literally prevented from considering their effect on the human factor and their potential for negative and retrogressive outcomes because they were fed to them by the paparazzi as news. They never questioned or examined them carefully enough before believing their winning candidate's unthought-out proposals as eagerly propagated by a willing and largely non-judgmental press that loved them for their outrageousness and ability to boost buyer sales during the election. The media daily harped about his inability to come up with useful proposals, though. They harped on it enough, and repeated his name enough that when the time came to mark their ballots, the choice of the populous was the current Mayor. Then, the paparazzi in their articles wondered in print how he could have won the election.

The election outcome --except that I wasn't a known candidate during its occurrence-- was satisfying to me, however. I support the aims of the new Mayor, even though his methods are retrograde, reactionary, and just plain bad.

The city needs to lose its debt. Saul Alinsky, who invented neighbourhood organizing methodology in Chicago during the notorious Mayor Daley years, once said, "No woodpecker ever felled a rotten tree in a single peck. Ya gotta keep peckin' away and peckin' away." So, from my point of view, the new Mayor may not save more than a nickel towards reducing the debt. But his stated aim is to fell that rotten debt tree, and that nickel is one peck, and it's a peck-of-a-lot better than spending more and increasing the deficit debt as his opponents surely would have done. And to add credit to his record thus far, one must admire that under the constant fire and duress of the paparazzi and public opinion, he has stayed the course. He has been a rock in council, past which the budget-mess loving opposition could not go. Any one of his opposition candidates except myself would have been an unmitigated financial disaster for the city. Of all the other candidates, I'm glad he was elected.

Once Rob Ford has entrenched the process of economy-consciousness in a council chamber that has been historically opposed to it, perhaps the next Mayor will take it to the next step, which is citizen-centered proactive wealth creation combined with future outlood, my personal specialty.


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SHOULD WE SELL TORONTO HYDRO OR ANY OTHER WHOLLY-OWNED CORPORATION?

MarkState — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:15:48 CST

Welcome to my website.

I'm Mark State, and you've logged into

THE STATE OF OUR TORONTO.

ARE YOU INTERESTED IN THE REAL FACTS AS TO WHETHER HYRO SELL-OFF IS A GOOD IDEA OR NOT?

[The following commentary was published in response to the National Post Article: "George Smitherman Promises To Sacrifice A Few Hobby Horses If Elected Mayor"]

Perhaps he'll change his mind by the time the election rolls around, but Rossi's first salvo, as I recall, opened with a vow to sell off Hydro and lower and freeze the Mayor's salary, which at just over $160,000 for being the 24/7/365 C.E.O. of the largest city in Canada guarantees finding people for the job who are not in it for the money. But suppose he froze that meager (looks like $80/hr but because of overtime demand actually works out to ± $50.00/hr with zero overtime or stat pay) pittance we pay our Mayor at a still lower amount. Could he please explain to us how a few thousand dollars will make any difference in the deficit-run budget of a city that operates in the multi-billion dollar range?

Now, he seems to be defending the "sell-off-Hydro" stance by citing our approx 450 million dollar a year debt charges. And Smitherman's debating the sell-off concept like it really has some sort of meaning. They both have GOT to be blowing in the wind!

The sale of Hydro isn't going to reduce the city's debt enough to cancel money we'll still be paying on our debt charges; and it would reduce our ability to pay those charges by a whopping 200 million –Hydro’s profit-- annually, jacking our current “unsustainable funding” budget back up from $400mil to $600mil --a giant step backwards. In addition, Toronto's credit rating would be lowered in the eyes of the World Bank the moment we sold off one of our best assets...both fixed and liquid, in one amazingly stupid fell swoop!

No, no, fellas. We don't sell off our good possessions --unless, like the upcoming Waterfront Development sell-off debacle, they will produce taxation income and mortgage interest for the city into the far future, so that all three levels of government are in agreement that sacrificing open-concept Waterfront and Scarborough Bluffs views by selling both (as well as pieces of new development land opened by further shortening the Gardiner Expressway) to a happy consortium of condominium developers to pay for our bad spending habits is a justifiable circumscription against future generations of Torontonians enjoying Chicago-like parkland there. But I digress…

Let's look at the SALE of Hydro, currently being accomplished by gradual dismemberment. Lately, there's a move afoot to sell off its Telecom division. All kinds of telecom companies are salivating to possession of a half-billion dollar property for pennies on the dollar so they won't have to put the networking infrastructure into the ground that Hydro has already put in place; and Hydro management is willing to sell it. Why? Are they giving it away to corporate friends?

What’s in it for Hydro? Why are Hydro’s informed rank and file, who are completely nonplussed by the idea, questioning the motivations of their Board of Directors?

A year ago Hydro sold off 85,000 of its water heater customers to one private company. The sale made 12 million for the city on a total sale price of 41 million because the financial agencies handling the sale gobbled up the rest, and may have cost the city about a million dollars a year in profits produced by the division. [cupetoronto.ca/index.php].

What kind of a dent would that $12 mil have made, assuming Hydro still had any of it left over after their fiscal year-end declarations, in Toronto's ability to pay off its debts?

Council is now crowing that we have arrived at a balanced budget (and many are shaking their heads and admitting they don’t know how it happened), and playing the event as though it begins to solve Toronto’s chronic economic shortfalls. Every single mayoralty candidate --even these two-- will tell you that the city has a runaway budget and that deficit spending makes it so poor it continually has to go to senior government for handouts. With this surface-only victory as a positive credential making her into the maven of city budget rescue, Shelly Carrol is going to throw her hat in the Mayoralty candidacy ring. Like Pantalone, she seems completely satisfied that everything's OK on Toronto budget street. That’s just plain disrespectful of Torontonians’ intelligence. Not nice.

As far as the sale of Hydro is concerned, who WILL profit from it?

Certainly, the new private owners will be charging us for electricity --at a profit-- via a company we previously owned and whose profits belonged to us. Private owners would be able, were they so inclined (unless of course they were buying it out of an altruistic desire to supply us hydro without only seeking a cheaply-won profit! Hey! Ya think?) to divide up the over two billion dollars worth of fixed assets the company now owns and sell bits of it off to other hydro companies, including multinationals; and the sale would more than pay back the cost of Hydro’s purchase.

There are only a few Canadians who have companies rich enough to purchase Hydro, but I don't for one second suspect that Ricci just wants to sell of Hydro to make some corporate moguls even richer at our expense.

I just think he hasn't really given any depth of thought to, really, any of the actions he envisions happening around him when he takes office at all.

Perhaps he's been taking lessons in political office-holding from Smitherman.

In any case, neither one of these guys has yet come up with anything except vague pronouncements about what in their rather thin imaginations needs doing to get the city back on course, mostly basing their entertaining rhubarbing in news headlines so they can make a popularity splash with the media. Maybe that’s why they have been picked as the two most likely candidates to head up the city over the next four years.

It kind of makes one wonder, "Why bother having an election at all?"

(Mark State was a 2010 Mayoralty candidate. The above piece was written as a political rebuttal to a fellow candidate's intention to sell off Hydro.)

Were you referred to my website by Wikipedia? (A Learning-Curve Story about State in Wikipdeia-Land)

MarkState — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:13:23 CST

A Wikipedia Article Attempt

I entered the 2006 election race for two reasons: I was appalled by what I perceived to be the complete lack of positive forward movement under the current Mayor and the complete lack of a coherent opposition to his candidacy by the media's favourite choices for his opponents. Based upon his being the favoured candidate of the Toronto media, I decided that the incumbent would easily win again. In case he ran a third time in the ensuing election, I was going to oppose him for all I was worth; but first I'd better find out what was involved in running for Mayor, and the kinds of strategies being used by the more experienced candidates so that I'd have a possible chance of election in the next go-round. The election was a great learning experience, and it taught me quite a bit. In the meantime, as a neophyte candidate, I took the opportunity to delve more deeply into how and why governmental strategies at city hall were largely impotent in terms of results, and became more determined than ever that if anybody was going to effect positive changes there, it was going to have to be someone who understood what needed to be changed to turn around some obvious gaffes, and was willing to run to rectify the situation.

In the 2006 election, I conducted no visible campaign, and only my family and friends and their families were informed I was running. That was my vote base. My name was actually difficult to locate on the ballot, and one friend in a downtown riding couldn't find it without the assistance of both the deputy returning officer and his clerk, because the D.R.O. by himself couldn't find it either! So, thanks to the friends who managed to locate my name and cross off the arrow next to it. I had problems finding it too!

With a total of 194 of my friends, family, and acquaintances having voted for me and an actual election under my belt, I was quite pleased with the results. For the next election, I joked, I was going to change my name to Mark Aardvark-State, because historically the first person on the ballot picks up an extra 5-10,000 votes. No kidding! (See, I learned a few things during that experience.)

First Wikipedia Entry Attempt: The Bio

Well, along came this year's election, I've declared that I'm running, and the election campaign team thought a good place for Torontonians to see my name was in every body's favourite on-line reference tool, Wikipedia. (I also had a personal bug in my ear about how the media overlooked almost everybody who ran in that 2006 election in favour of the incumbent and two candidates they picked on the basis of having been associated with politics before the election, which in my opinion is not a reason for choosing a Mayor.) So after batting the details around with me for a couple of weeks, the team writer posted the following article, which we determined to be free from politicking or campaigning, and merely positive-sounding and informative. You will see some strange diacritical markings that have to do with publishing the article in Wikipedia. The article read:

MARK MANUEL STATE

"'Mark Mañuel State''' is an engineer, educator, broadcaster, academic, and municipal visionary who announced his candidacy for Mayor of the City of Toronto on 14 November 2009.

FAMILY:
Both of Mark State’s parents, Albert & Millie State, were active members in the Hamilton community where he grew up. Both, from time to time, held the presidency of several community service and/or recreational organizations. Albert was an education consultant for the Ontario Ministry of Education in English, and a recognized expert on Shakespeare and drama. Millie, an occupational therapist who retired as head of the department at Hamilton's Mountain Brow Hospital, had co-founded the Simcoe Ontario YWCA; and among her other presidential posts was the first female president of the Hamilton CJO. Patrons of the arts, they were founding members and long-term patrons of the Stratford and Shaw drama festivals.

PERSONAL STRENGTHS:
Creativity, intelligence, a very personal understanding of both Self-employed and Job-oriented working life starting from the worker receiving minimum wage, to the small businessman, to the executive responsibilities of a unique player in the pollution abatement industry, and integrity.

HOBBIES:
- Outdoors-man
- Inventor.
- Musician

VOLUNTEERISM --PAST AND PRESENT:
· Scouts Canada
· Toronto Distress Centers
· First-ever volunteer hospital visiting clown at the TGH.
· Out Of The Cold Winter Overnight Hostels
· Hadassah Bazaar
· Masonic and Shriner community service
· 6-Bass Player for Scarborough Naparema and Oakville CCAH Steel Pan Bands

EARLY INSPIRATION

Mark State's long suit has always been successful innovation. In 1958 at the age of 16, he frequently passed by a used articles store that he noticed was suffering from a lack of custom. State offered to increase the sales of the store in return for a small percentage of increased profits. After he spent several days cleaning and thematically rearranging Merchandise, and innovating a "WOW" sale, the store became crowded with customers.

Although the new merchandising was spectacularly successful, the proprietor informed State that he had no intention of paying for the work he had done. The experience left an impression on him and eventually placed him on the
political scale as a crusader against public misconduct and breach of trust.

Throughout his life, State has continued using his innovative talents to exercise his creativity in the arena of solutions addressing our human condition.

ENTRY INTO POLITICAL CAREER

State is already a veteran of the municipal electoral process, having run for Mayor in the 2006 race<sup>1</sup>He asserts that this foray into municipal politics was not for the purpose of winning, but rather to gain experience in the campaigning process. Newspaper and broadcast media had already chosen the front runners<sup>2</sup>, and although his platform at the time was inspired, it lacked depth. Having come dead last with a total of 194 votes compared to the incumbent's 300,000<sup>3</sup>, he chuckles that at least his 194 voters all knew him personally.

There would be no doubt that in a future election he would come up against some very savvy candidates, and it would take some foreknowledge of the process to emerge as a potential winner.

The intervening years did nothing to ease State's discomfort with the manner in which the city was being managed by the 2006-2010 civic government; and in November of 2009, at his birthday party at the [[Mandarin Restaurant]] in central Toronto, he announced his decision to register his candidacy yet again for the post of chief executive officer of the city; and this time, in earnest with a very serious message for the voting public.

2010 TORONTO MAYORAL RUN

Basing his candidacy on moving the city into the future by guiding planning decisions based on a long-range view, he emphasized an economic recovery package combining an entrepreneurial city with an employment bootstrap program; improving the enjoyment of living in the city through tax-benefit support for beautification of city streets, properties, and buildings; and an improved traffic and transit system entirely different from those proposed by the outgoing council, intended to solve the problems of traffic congestion that had plagued the city for decades. He maintained that the nature and scope of his platforms in all of the city’s concerns are the result of targeted accuracy derived from discovering the origins of current concerns and the depth of solutions being offered. He also emphasized that increased infrastructure and housing development are misleading hallmarks of a healthy city economy.

OUTSIDE POLITICS

State is no stranger to executive decision-making. He had been chief SCUBA instructor for the downtown JCC and News director for KCAP, a CBC affiliate in Kapuskasing, Ontario. As a public school teacher, he organized individualized, developmental curricula and detailed anecdotal reportage for every student in his classes. During his work in architecture, he designed and costed various projects; personally interacted with the city architectural approvals, committees of adjustment, and inspection departments on behalf of clients; and oversaw a great many projects, managing his own firm and overseeing the work of his professional employees. As a marine officer, he worked with with both superior officers and subordinates aboard ships during his service as an officer cadet. His 2002 retirement after serving as vice-president of engineering and industrial sales for a company in the business of making and selling pollution-abatement devices gave him corporate executive experience.

At the age of 30, during his studies at [[York University]]'s prestigious [[Environmental Studies]] faculty as an invited degree candidate, he designed his own curriculum at the Master's level in education planning, administration, and curriculum development. In it, he incorporated cross-appointments to [[University of Toronto]] classes in education planning under former deputy Minister of Education Dr. Jack McCarthy and with curriculum guru Dr. Al Selinger and media studies legend [[Marshall McLuhan]], to whose classes typically came famous thinkers from all over the world to commingle and discuss their topics of expertise with Dr. McLuhan and his small group of students. Dr. McLuhan was fond of State. Because of his ample frame and consistently positive outlook, he nicknamed State [["Bacchus"]], keeping a photograph of State given to him by his grateful student as Bacchus in his office.

== References ==

== External links ==
* [http://www.mark-state.comMark State Official Website]
* [http://mark-state.wetpaint.com/page/ABOUT+MARK+STATEMark State Curriculum Vitae]
1. Wikipedia: Toronto Municipal Election 2006. * [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_State]
2. CTV.ca: Toronto Civic Vote 2006.
* [http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20061017/where-they_stand_061022?s_name=tor2006Story]
National Post: Mayoralty candidate Pitfield accuses LeDrew of joining race to help out Miller * [http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/toronto/story.html?id=152112a3-19ac-4b5a-a02d-f29486bda351]
Inside Toronto.com: CITY VIEWS: David Miller's departure's a shock - but no surprise
* [http://www.insidetoronto.com/news/cityhall/article/151965--city-views-david-miller-s-departure-s-a-shock-but-no-surprise]
Toronto Star: Viewing mayoral race with eyes wide shut
* [http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/96882--viewing-mayoral-race-with-eyes-wide-shut]
CBC News: Porter Airlines takes off despite protest
* [http://www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/2006/10/23/porter-flight.html]
3. Wikipedia: Toronto Municipal Election 2006.
* [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_municipal_election,_2006]
4. Mark-State.com: Repairing Toronto’s budget. * [http://mark-state.wetpaint.com/page/REPAIRING+TORONTO%27S+BUDGET]

Wikipedia refused to run the article because even though I was running for Mayor in one of the world's major cities, I was not deemed to be a notable enough character in the world to be published in the on-line encyclopedia. This unfortunate circumstance was due to my lack of prior encounters with the media, my lack of historical importance, and lack of notable contributions to mankind to post on their pages. Not what we wanted, but fair enough, we thought. We will wait until we are notable and post an article then. Wikipedia has its rules.

Second Wikipedia Attempt: Candidate Entry

Then Wikipedia posted the page which may have referred you here, labeled Toronto Municipal Elections 2010, in which it ran a list of what it described as "declared candidates", and others who were expected to declare; and even others who might have the idea of declaring in the future (no kidding!), and not forgetting to include those who had been expected to run but decided against it.

Although I had declared publicly in November 2009 that I would run, and had included it in the bio article I had removed, the writers of the new Wiki page had not included my name amongst its list of candidates on the new elections 2010 page.

Again, my team writer and I conferred, and he entered a thumbnail on the page that was, we thought, neutral and informative for Wikipedia's interested Toronto readers (he represented himself with the comedic username "Hezbollatte"). My last piece of advice to him (censored in here) was, "AND REMEMBER ABOVE ALL, this is not an opportunity to canvass for votes. It’s only a factual sentence or two on Mark State, just as the others are…tell ‘em who I am. Find out where on the scale of presentation that Wikipedia’s article allows that I can fit in, and show ‘em they’ve got a real (censored) to contend with."

After several edits, the new page entry read:

"Mark State, 67 - State indicated his intention to run to an invited audience in November, defining his candidacy as reform and pragmatic. State wishes to return Toronto to a state of economic self-sufficiency through capital investment . [16]"

Simon P., an editor in Wikipedia, surprised us by almost immediately changing the entry to read,

"State, 67, ran for mayor in 2006 and placed last with 194 votes.[20][21]A retired engineer State wishes to return Toronto to a state of economic self-sufficiency through capital investment and a more vigilant approach to planning.[22]"

As I felt the "194-votes" reference might be misleading in its implications for the new election campaign, I asked my campaign team's writer to change the reference back again, but no sooner had he changed it then it was immediately reverted back to the way he had arbitrarily edited it by Simon P.

At this juncture, I emailed the campaign team writer, as follows:

"The guy who keeps changing the paragraph is Simon P. I read his request to leave his changes alone, and I am infuriated by not only his audacity, but also his weak idea of why it is that his changes are relevant. Totally infuriated.

The entire idea of the number of votes I received in the last election determining my relevancy in the upcoming election is distasteful beyond my ability to express it, and is a completely groundless measure of worth, just as John Tory’s position in the 2003 election is a completely groundless measure of his worth...

Simon P, who keeps changing this entry, seems to think that the relevancy of my candidacy is determined by how I did in the last election. Please ask him to stop inserting his own political agenda into the Wikipedia. That John Tory’s claim to have come in second in the 2003 election is included is only an indication that he did not win that election. Nobody evaluates him on the number of votes or the percentage of votes he received back then...

The value of a candidate to an electorate is based upon his perceived ability to serve their needs. The way the electorate finds out that information is through the campaigning process, not via the misguided evaluation parameters of some opinion-ist.

Just keep fixing the article you inserted on our behalf."

Then ensued a long debate between my team writer, who felt the new entry could be prejudicial to my election prospects and Toronto-based Wikipedia editors Simon P. and "Bearcat" who not only agreed with Simon P., but maintained it was Wikipedia's duty to present the number of votes to its readers; and further that our having written the entry in the first place (to make up for the lack of one) made it invalid because it came from we who were its subject matter (!?) Keep in mind also, as you follow this story, that neither of these editors had done any investigation of why I had only received my 194 votes, or included a note about where they had come from, leaving an unfortunate and inaccurate flavour with readers regarding the 2006 voting turnout on my behalf. When queried about their reasons for giving the number of votes, they replied that it proved I was not worthy of voters' attention in the upcoming election. That reply is quoted in red below in this article. Amazingly, they felt that Wikipedia had the right to direct your 2010 vote elsewhere.

Months later, this page also caught the attention of Calgary Herald reporter Nicholas Moreau, who trusted Wikipedia's reputation enough to report, unexamined and verbatim, the possibly misleading 194-vote statistic given him by the Wikipedia page in his reference to my candidacy.

The subsequent debate, which I followed with more than a small amount of interest, resulted in my writing a letter of complaint to the Wikipedia management group. The response from management was a suggestion to take our discussion with the editors before all Wikipedia editors in a review forum and accept the resulting decision.

And in a side comment, for holding his position that the changes were unfair and irresponsible editing, and for reverting the page back to its original entry more than three times, my writer was barred from both making further changes and commenting on the site by the three times reversion rule.

For your interest, I have copied and pasted the writer/editors discussions on the site here. The word "reverted" used here means "changed back to a previous editorial view".

One further note, which brings us up to date on this story. I had grown tired of the entire play-by-play evolution of this foolishness, and decided that if Wikipedia wished to maintain all the facts in a way deliberately worded to my detriment, they owned the bat and ball and had every right to do so. Moreover, the 2006 election results, when read from the point of view of "State ran a distant last-place" (rather than "State joined the race, entered all the debates, took part in the candidates meetings, and emerged with 194 very personal votes from the election as someone who had taken the trouble to study the elections process in order to run in the next civic election",) could have more factual material added, authenticated by the same footnote already in use. I obviously didn't learn all the tricks in electioneering, or I would have seen this Wikipedia page entry coming. I decided the entire fiasco needed to end in a way compatible with Wikipedia's direction, but enough that people would sit up and take notice of its slanted intent. So the very last edit was composed by myself and placed into Wikipedia January 14th, and it reads,

"State, 67, ran for mayor in 2006 and placed last with 194 votes, gaining a zero-ballot vote in two and one in three of the Toronto ridings.[25][26]"

(If you were referred here by the Wikipedia page link, you will have noticed that Simon P. has since reverted the entry back to his misleading version again. )

After making that final change, I added the concluding comment in the group to date, shown in the discussion below.

This discussion is maintained on the history pages of the Wikipedia article. You may see it for yourself there.

Re: Wikipedia’s entries for Mark State

Mark State

User Hezbollatte and I have been reverting each other over the Mark State blurb. I feel it is relevant to note that State finished distant last in the 2006 election, Hezbollatte has been removing that information. I also don't think it is appropriate to describe him as a "grassroots" candidate as that is a POV and mostly meaningless term. What do others think? -SimonP(talk) 13:14, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

User SimonP's changes are disingenuous and biased: given his status as an Olivia Chow supporter, his ungrammatical attacks on the brief bio entry of a mayoralty candidate are agenda-driven and reflective of his own POV (the unnecessary modification of the word "last" is indication enough of bias). To an electorate, a candidate's value is based upon a perceived ability to serve their needs; this is determined through the campaign process, not via the misguided evaluation parameters of an historian manque. Moreover, John Tory’s claim to second place in 2003 indicates only that he did not win that election; accordingly it is mentioned that State, like Tory, is running for a second time, which makes it self-evident that neither candidate was successful the first time round. If people honestly intend to evaluate a candidate on the basis of the vote tally of a previous candidacy, there is a footnote link to a roundup of all 2006 candidates. And unlike SimonP, I have not crossed the line by attempting to besmirch other candidates and would-be candidates with negative and irrelevant edits. If he wishes to deliberately downgrade Mark State, he may start a dedicated Wiki page to that purpose. What do others think now?Hezbollatte(talk) 14:20, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

Let me get this straight: SimonP's status as a supporter of a federal MP who's never been an electoral opponent of Mark State, and is highly unlikely to be one now, somehow makes him biased against Mark State? (Chow's former role as a city councillor is irrelevant, by the way; she had already gone federal by the time State mounted his first-ever run for municipal office.) You're going to have to explain that one a bit more. Particularly given the fact that you're hardly a neutral party yourself — just you go ahead and try to prove to me that you aren't directly involved in Mark State's campaign organization — whereas SimonP has a longstanding record of being one of the most prolific and highly respected contributors this site has ever had. His ability to be neutral and objective is utterly beyond question, while yours has yet to be demonstrated. Bearcat (talk) 16:51, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

It seems pretty clear that Hezbollatte is on this site purely to push the candidacy of Mark State, and quite likely is State himself. There is no reason the details of State's electoral history should not be included. The truth is that he is a fringe candidate with no chance of victory, and it is disingenuous to our readers not to suggest as much. - SimonP (talk) 13:52, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

SimonP has no business suggesting an election result on these pages, and it is astonishing that a Wikipedia admin who has spent several years positioning himself in the media as a beacon of Web 2.0 democratization is now attempting to subvert the electoral process of Canada's largest municipality. A few necessary corrections: user Hezbollatte is not Mark State, and as stated in my earlier post, I have violated NO Wiki protocol, stated NO opinion in State's bio, and made NO attempt to downgrade other candidates with vindictive edits, whereas SimonP has crossed the line in all three cases. So "it seems pretty clear" that his own anti-State agenda is the only tangible thing "pushed" here. And to address his bizarre final sentence with a quick public administration lesson: whosoever registers to run for elected office has a chance of winning said office, both by definition and backed by rule of law. Perhaps unaware of this somewhat significant fact of liberal democracy, SimonP makes an earnest case for a "some are more equal than others" clause in Elections Canada guidelines. I wish him all the best in his quest to roll back the Enlightenment, but he should remember that the 2010 Toronto municipal election will not be decided on a Wikipedia page.Hezbollatte (talk) 15:39, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

Please answer the question. Why should the details of State's performance in the last election not be included in this article, when they are included for every other candidate who has run before? - SimonP (talk) 17:19, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

What Elections Canada guidelines do you even begin to suppose are binding on Wikipedia? Bearcat (talk) 18:40, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

It's certainly valid to refer to a candidate's past electoral performance. Just saying he ran before is quite vague - we don't know if that means he was a serious contender who came a strong second or if he came in last with less than 1% of the vote. While there's no need to belabour his 2006 performance it shouldn't be ignored either. Fred the happy man (talk) 00:54, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

Agreed that it's valid to refer to past performance. This is why the user provided a link to the 2006 election results page and an additional link to further 2006 press coverage; however, both were deleted by Simon Pulsifer. Pulsifer's continuing involvement in Toronto politics makes his predatory editing of this page more than inappropriate, and his own admission of bias above only makes a stronger case for a (along with additional relevant candidate information) in the service of flaunting a last-place finish, vandalism suspension; however, it was user Hezbollatte who was thrown off Wikipedia for attempting to restore neutrality to State's bio to counter Pulsifer's obsessive gate keeping. Mista X was on the right track by wiping the bios, but we don't want to upset Bearcat and Pulsifer, do we? The election is eight months away and this page is already a wash. Nice going, kids. Charlie808 (talk) 18:12, 9 January 2010 (UTC)

An article with more information in it is more of a "wash" than one with none? Fascinating. Bearcat (talk) 16:03, 10 January 2010 (UTC)

I completely agree with Simon P. here. State has no chance in this election, and it is disingenuous to our readers not to suggest as much in this article. As full and fair as possible an exposure is warranted to effect that position. To leave the thumbnail without any comment is to offer a disservice to voters, who should be at the very least given a clue about the possibility wasting a vote on a 2006 election fringe candidate in the upcoming contest by giving them the statistics of the previous one. My vote of thanks to Simon P. (talk) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Corruption Eraser (talk • contribs) 04:08, 10 January 2010 (UTC)

Every single candidate who's run in a prior election has their prior results noted here, except for Mark State. Hezbollate's original project, furthermore, was to write a campaign-style bio of Mark State as an independent standalone article which was promptly nominated for AFD, because campaign-style bios of electoral candidates are not what Wikipedia is for — and he or she has never made a single Wikipedia edit that didn't involve State. Which means that the natural — and logically reasonable — assumption is that Hezbollate is directly involved in State's campaign and was using Wikipedia in an attempt to promote State's candidacy. Except that advertising is not what Wikipedia is for.
And when a person with no prior edit history suddenly shows up in the middle of a contentious debate, the likelihood that they aren't a puppet of the original editor is vanishingly low. When two people with no prior edit history show up in tandem, it's even lower. And when the whole thing is perfectly replicating the playbook of the 2006 "VaughanWatch" fiasco? I'll let you guess what that does to any reasonably intelligent administrator's suspicions. Bearcat (talk) 16:01, 10 January 2010 (UTC)

“I feel it is relevant to note that State finished distant last in the 2006 election… There is no reason the details of State's electoral history should not be included. The truth is that he is a fringe candidate with no chance of victory, and it is disingenuous to our readers not to suggest as much.” –Simon P. Wikipedia editor[1] MarkTheHandyman is Mark State and has always held the position that Wikipedia should be as fully informative in as neutral a way as possible. I respectfully request that this change be maintained in keeping with the intent and the spirit of the publication. Thanks. User:MarkTheHandyman —Preceding undated comment added 05:45, 14 January 2010 (UTC).

Mark's Blogs, Commentaries, And Technical Writing

MarkState — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:10:42 CST

If any of the following links do not open when you click on them, try holding down the "Control" key while clicking. If you still experience no connectivity, highlight the link, then copy and paste it into your address line.

TOPICS

"Transit City", the TTC's plans to modify the street-scape of Toronto by running LRT Right-Of-Ways up the centers of Rush Hour Routes in a deliberate attempt to snarl traffic on them and thus persuade motorists to switch to Public Transport. feedbacktomark.wordpress.com

"Renewable Resource Generating Station", Executive Summary (without calling for investment) of an actual patent-applied-for invention currently in process (since 2002) before the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office). The Executive summary describes a generating station that's environmentally friendly, pollution-free, inexpensive to install relative to the output it can produce, and invisible! [WHAT??? Invisible? How can that be???] Check out the Executive Summary at http://ecofriendlypower.wetpaint.com/

One of a series of Replies to the Blog Site "Bow. James Bow" and his article "Farewell Mayor Miller"-

Note: The following article has been re-edited for this page, with various additions and updates since its original posting.

I apologize for confusing you for a reporter.

Your website is professional enough-looking for someone who values his pundit-ing as good reportage, and looks like that of others who are definitely reporting for various media. I didn't intend to seem "snooty" about it; but I suppose I've been labeled as worse than that; and I totally admit to being opinionated --but who of us isn't.

So before you read on, a caveat might save you some time by not reading what I have to say here, or publishing it either. As Blog owner, it's your choice.

Caveat: To me, John Tory is a well-known person, with strong corporate connections. That one qualification for mayoralty in Toronto is his complete and only justifiable reason for running.

Now that he has indicated that he will not run for Mayor, I can safely say that my thoughts entered here, although showing him in a less-than-flattering comparison with the kind of person this city needs as its next mayor, do commend him for both his fund-railing abilities and his personality. I met Tory briefly at the funeral for one of the Tory Tory partners who had died far too early in life, introduced by one of the mourning family, and was impressed by his obvious charisma and gentleness.

True, he is widely recognized as a moral and upstanding man; but it is hoped that at least a majority of candidates for that office will be sharing that virtue. It's his track record that convinced me he should not have run for Mayor; and I honestly believed if he were to have been elected,--and the polls showed him as being the odds-on favourite-- it would have been a larger, even overwhelming, tragedy for our city than the current administration's inept handling of civic affairs.

This blog, published when John Tory was still expected to run, was an attempt to show voters my opinion as his opponent and convince them that having a well-known name in politics is no reason to warrant being elected for any position. I gathered the information in it from reliable sources. None of it is false, so far as I am aware; and none of it has changed since he decided to not throw his hat in the ring for this next civic election.

John Tory's former potential candidacy is still a warning for people who consider that a career in politics somehow qualifies a candidate for a political position.

It doesn't.

Thus, I'm maintaining the content of this blog on my own web pages.

Neither the fact that the media have repeatedly published his name nor the fact that his father's law firm represents the greater majority of the moneyed folk (whom Tory knows on a first-name basis,) in this country qualifies John Tory to be Mayor of Toronto.

My message is simple. DON'T VOTE FOR A NAME. A NAME DOESN'T MAKE A GOOD MAYOR.

INVESTIGATE THE CANDIDATES AND CHOOSE FROM THE BEST PLATFORMS, NOT THEIR NAMES.

Why I write this follows, but first in order to substantiate my position that John NAME would not be a good candidate for Mayor, I'd like to tackle a couple of platforms attributed to him that you and others quote.

James Bow has invited readers (specifically me) to "make of [his opinion] what I will".

I can't change your opinion, James, but I can add to your informational resources such that perhaps your opinion will become more informed. And I hope those of your readers who have been similarly persuaded of the value of Tory for Mayor will be similarly enlightened.

[And in the case of George Smitherman, I hope this posting about John Tory will caution responsible, self-respecting voters to be more critical of WHOM and WHAT it is they are casting ballots for other than a recognizable NAME.

George Smitherman was a major player in the Metrolinx program that promoted diesel trains along the corridors abutting the city; who because of the strong promotional and protesting activities of the "Clean Train Coalition" has been awakened and is now backtracking to a position on electric trains that, had he done his homework in the first place, he would have realized was not only current in many world transport systems, but better all-round for the Toronto corridors (although his ministry is still sticking with "more trains is better trains" rather than looking for more up-to-date alternatives).

Why did the Clean Train coalition make an impact on Smitherman's decision to (at least verbally) support electric over diesel trains?

I suspect this serious back-tracking and sudden waking to the issue of diesel vs electric trains was motivated by two decisions: his declining popularity due to the eHealth "scandal" celebrated by the media lately, during which Robert Kaplan, the very capable current Minister of Health resigned his cabinet post for mistakes that had continued since the time Smitherman previously held the post; together with his thoughts about running for Mayor in a city where siding with the Clean Train Coalition would earn him more votes.

What the Clean Train Coalition does not realize is that when Smitherman leaves provincial parliament, his cronies most likely have no intention of continuing with the electric train idea because it is too innovative for them to consider.

As well, his riding will be losing a representative with a strong voice . As long as his political ambition, though, looks upon the Mayor's job as a political coup of some sort for him --which to my mind is his reason for running-- he will make the short-sighted decision to do so; and that's another indication of the lack of depth of his political career's decision-making abilities. That the city is in need of somebody who will manage and repair the its current difficulties, though, means that someone looking for the political coup of Mayoralty isn't the person it needs.And in almost every media-uncovered situation in which Smitherman found himself in an embarrassing position, that has been the underlying cause. Smitherman's attention to the portfolios he was assigned lacked depth.

He was a major player in the formation of the concepts and evolution of the eHealth network where he quite apparently didn't do that obviously necessary homework that would have avoided a future political mess. With the current administrative eHealth controversy that resulted in Kaplan's resignation, Smitherman now finds himself doing damage control in both eHealth and the the Metrolinks program as though by doing so he can rescue a vestige of his strained credibility, lost through the results of that inattentiveness.

Smitherman's FIT programs, intended to green Ontario and provide tax incentives for doing so, are surface-laudable; and in almost every variety of greening proposed have run into obstacles and objections based in the reality of the situations they affect. Can this be because the proposals lacked an appropriate amount of depth in the form of initial research on each? [http"//www.thestar.com/printArticle/695150]

Is this apparent propensity for shallow preparation due to a poor choice of ministerial research staff who do a shoddy job of preparation for him; or is it due to his enjoyment of exercising the position he holds in various committees without desiring to fulfill the responsibility of in-depth involvement in each due to either lack of interest or having such a busy schedule that he finds it difficult to do that necessary work?

In the current press, Smitherman as a Mayoralty hopeful keeps mentioning his Ontario sexual orientation as one of his bankable assets, along with the fact that he is Toronto-born. Are we to understand that one’s sexual orientation is a reason for one’s political suitability; or that being born in Toronto would make one a good Mayor?

Let us not forget

all the other openly gay cabinet ministers in governments all over the world, some of whom preceded Smitherman's entry to office: Ted Nebbeling, BC’s Minister of State for the 2010 Olympic Games (and former Mayor of Whistler) before his recent untimely death; Scott Brison, federal Minister for Public Works and Government Services in the Paul Martin Liberal government – who when asked about his sexuality retorted that he is not a gay politician, just a politician who happens to be gay; and that his sexuality is irrelevant, like being a Catholic politician (he’s Catholic); France’s Frederick Mitterand, federal Minister of Culture; Australia’s Penny Wong, federal Minister of Climate Change and Water, and Chris Finlayson, federal Minister of Arts, Culture, and Heritage; Nick Brown, Brittain’s Minister of Agriculture; Chris Carter, New Zealand’s Minister of Education, as well as others whose sexuality did not define their service

. That he was the first openly gay Cabinet Minister in Ontario is, without a doubt, something distinguishable about him. There is another openly gay cabinet minister now claiming to be the first openly gay lesbian Cabinet Minister. To the gay community those postings are examples of their civil rights being properly realized at long last; but as to making the distinction that somehow this affects one's intrinsic suitability for the position of Mayor in a city that hosts one of the largest gay pride celebrations in the world, I think it's a non-issue; and that Smitherman would better his chances by preparing to defend the value of his candidacy to all voters --gay and straight alike-- on the issues.

If he runs for Mayor, will Smitherman have any substantive platforms? Does he have any now? What are they? At the time of their implementation, will they have had a sufficient amount of research and thought put into them to avoid unnecessary delays and questions about their impact on society? Will they come (without any examination in depth) from this website? Will he have the staff and/or the available time to devote to all the work required of a Mayor in depth, or will his work continue to be characterized by shallow preparation? Time will tell.]

Regarding John Tory, you wrote, "I’m basing my assessment of John Tory on the proposals he brought forward during his mayoralty run." Tory's platforms for the 2003 election were also reported In The Star as follows (and I'm certain that there were other platforms in his portfolio, such as those you mentioned). To save space, I'll address each point individually, with my remarks indicated by ***:

Like Miller, he acknowledged that the city needed to spend a lot more money than it was doing on public transportation,

***Well, now Miller has spent a HUGE amount of money on public transportation; and guaranteed that we'll be using the same old style of trolley transit system that we've been using for over a hundred years for the next 40 or so years until it wears itself down, but not joining the rest of the world in examining new forms of mass transit that will probably be our next choice, when we will again be 40 years behind the times. And we'll be constructing that system in large part without due respect or attention paid to other-than-public forms of urban transport like trucks, cars, and bikes.

But how has Tory expressed his perspective on the streetcar purchases, etc., that define Transit City? If he had been in opposition, Tory would have been vociferously against "Transit City" in Parliament...even from the point of view of being the official opposition (which obviously didn't do its homework either).

and he acknowledged a number of pressing issues, such as the need to renovate or replace the Scarborough RT.

***When the RT was originally conceived, the Ontario government was overruled by the city on one important point. The province wanted to construct a silent high-speed mag-lev vehicular presence rather than the slow, tremendously noisy (probably exceeding legal decibel levels) system we finally got because city council insisted on it.

The current city council's idea of running LRTs in ROWs ("Right-Of Way", where there is a curbed-off pair of streetcar lanes up the centers of rush hour traffic routes, just like is being built along St. Clair Avenue West) is Neanderthal compared to the original placement of the Scarborough LRT: completely off the travelled highways.

The question is why Tory in 2003 held the view that the Scarborough LRT "requires renovating or replacement"; and the answer is because the TTC said in a published report at the time of the 2003 election that the RT is out of date and envisioned that it would no longer be able to carry the crowd it's intended for. A band-wagonning Tory chose to superficially jump aboard the "need" for LRT renewal as an interim political opportunity. The history of the Scarborough LRT or its viability issues were not investigated in such a way as to provide depth to the platform. Since then, nothing has been done to that service, and it's still running similarly to the way it always has. Since then, Tory has been silent on the subject, both in and out of public office.

He talked in terms of extending the subway to the Scarborough Town Centre and similar projects.

***Again, another popular issue: based upon the discontinuation of the Lastman-initiated Sheppard subway. (Now, that subway has been placed on a Provincial Priority List to be continued to York University and Keele and Steeles as one of the out-of-towner links with Metrolinks.)

His campaign approach was also one of trying to build a broader consensus, and he took that approach with him when he became leader of the Progressive Conservative Party..."

***Building consensus was obviously not on Tory's mind when he insisted on the funding of private schools by the province over good advice to let it go; and thus lost a provincial election the polls had predicted he could win.

Mr. Tory is hardly running on a staunchly conservative platform,

***Staunch conservatism or any other staunch positioning does not have the ability to handle all the directions this city must take in developing its future existence.

and some of his policies -- including opposition to high-rise condominium projects -- are very ill-conceived

***it's not "condominium projects" that are a root issue, but rather housing for this 38th largest city in the world, including where that housing should be located, of what type (including high rise condos), and what it should look like.

Tackling one form of housing as a policy is a popularity contest kind of a platform that shows a misguided or shallow depth of thought on the subject.

But unlike Mr. Miller, he seems to grasp the fiscal challenges of the city's budget shortfall, expected to top $200-million next year.

***Not in his 2003 campaign nor to date in any findable location has Tory offered any useful ideas of how this "budget shortfall" can be handled, which is indicative of this being mouthed 'rhubarb' (argumentative political blather) rather than substantive narrative.

His platform includes a complete review of program spending, reductions to councilors' office budgets, a civil service hiring freeze and the sale of "non-core" assets -- all well-needed reforms that have been overlooked for too long.

***The writer has an opinion that the above-mentioned 'reforms' are necessary; and in at least the first case, I think a program spending review was and still is necessary. So, OK, exactly what did the Tory platform say about how the review should take place? The answer is that there were no guidelines offered.

-The call for "review" was merely a mouthed hope that in conducting such a review, economies of measure could be found that would save the city money.

-Blanket calling for reductions to councilors' office budgets is in itself counter-productive; and was only being made in response to the yearly publication of stupid expensing of EXTRA-budget items that when discovered were and continue to be always made good by embarrassed councillors, and a call by uninformed citizens pointing out that the salary schedules for councilors and the Mayor seemed too high.

-A civil service hiring freeze is meaningless rhetoric, because it's impossible to run a city of this size without a good civil service; and attrition means continually finding good people to take up the slack. But that's only reality talking.

- And the city doesn't own any assets it can afford to sell for now, because we're broke, and we need the assets to fund our liquidity.

The idea of selling them off reveals a shallow understanding of the city's economic positioning.

Meanwhile, he promises a property tax freeze following a single-year increase limited to the inflation rate.

***If we remember, city council had at the time been threatening to raise the mill rate under Lastman's chairmanship (which it eventually did with great outcry of pain from wealthy people with beautiful homes...some of whom Tory is well-connected with...who received increased taxation estimates for their dwellings).

This bid for votes by being in opposition to the tax increase was not disguised; but attaching a property tax increase to the GDP inflation rate was a slippery slope down which city council might have found an attractive recurring money source over and above the one-time blast that Lastman brought in...much to the chagrin and discomfort of the very home-owners Tory was thinking about protecting by being in opposition to the proposed property tax increases. Their taxes would go up along with everybody else's every year, but they'd go up in much greater amounts.

Remember, though, hooking the property tax rate to the inflation rate was Tory's platform. Again, shallow thinking.

It is not just on economic issues where Mr. Tory trumps his rival.

***Every single economic issue that Tory has been involved with [--with the two exceptions of his United Way chairmanship and raising money for

St. Mike's Hospital, both of which made use of his excellent and extensive corporate connections--] has become an unmitigated disaster. Check out his bio on Wikipedia.

Unlike Mr. Miller, he has shown a strong commitment to public safety by promising to hire an additional 400 police officers.

***Immediately upon being elected, Miller's new city council hired 400 new police officers, which had nothing to do with Tory and everything to do with Lastman's wishes and Julian Fantino's careful planning. Since then, Miller has arranged with the Ontario government to hire an additional 1000 police officers. You decide the political depth of this issue. It will be seen again.

And even on the issues close to left-wingers' hearts, like public transit and housing, his plans are both more practical and more comprehensive.

***Read above. No thought-through platforms at all. None, zip, zero. Not practical (transit), and too comprehensive (high-rise condos being portrayed as the villain).

Mr. Tory's best qualification, though, has nothing to do with his platform. Because the mayor represents just one of 43 votes on Toronto's council, the position requires a strong degree of moral leadership to achieve any degree of effectiveness.

***How about just a strong degree of leadership?

Has Tory exhibited this when he was CFL commissioner and the league lost the Ottawa Roughriders and almost lost the Hamilton Tiger Cats or tried and failed to expand the league to seven cities in the USA and had to close down those franchises within two years;

or when he co-chaired the federal Conservative party's election campaign during which it lost 158 seats and only retained two in Ottawa...not even enough to call itself an official party;

or when he chaired (by invitation of his pal Ted Rogers) the Rogers Cable business and it came close to bankruptcy during the two years of his chairmanship;

or when he was run for Mayor in 2003 and got into a kerfuffle with John Nunziata about a bribery issue that allowed the Miller campaign group to do an end run around the Hall campaign group while the media was focused on the Tory/Nunziata affair, and resulted in Miller's election as Mayor;

or when he was the provincial Conservatives' election convention choice for leader, but as yet officially unelected to fill his seat in Parliament. Ernie Eves had to give up his solidly conservative seat (good riddance!) so Tory could sit in parliament as duly elected leader;

or when the last provincial election took place, and the provincial Conservative party --forecast by the polls to win the election-- lost due to Tory's insistence of platforming the public funding of private schools over his colleagues' advice to the contrary; and during that election he was defeated in his own riding.

Finally, after much discussion within the party and another vote as to whether he should remain as leader, another Conservative MP gave up her seat so he could try to get elected in the by-election. Both in the main and that by-election, Tory was beaten by an opposition from the Liberal party that ordinarily, by courtesy, will not even run a strong candidate against the leader of another party who wishes to sit in parliament.

Where should I begin in this list of disasters that apparently, the persons who 'asked' him to run believe still does not prevent Tory from being a good candidate for leader of our city?

Does the fact, as he reports, that people (apparently with short memories) "asked" him to run qualify him?

Why did Tory say he might run because some people asked him? Did he need to be asked? Come to think of it, why did George Smitherman and Glen Murray say in exactly the same fashion that they needed to be asked? Couldn't these people see that Toronto needs a leader and step forward without needing to be asked?

Unlike Mr. Miller, who has spent nearly a decade in municipal politics, he would bring a fresh perspective to City Hall.

***It's only my personal thinking on the matter. But I feel persuaded that John Tory is either incapable of a 'fresh' perspective or of being unable to bring any useful perspective to city hall. To the seasoned politician he is, adopting a genuine perspective might alienate votes; so I expect a similarly shallow, current-events based platform group from him again.

More importantly, his tremendous management experience -- including as president and CEO of Rogers Cable and Rogers Media, and commissioner of the Canadian Football League -- would command strong respect from city politicians.

***With his track record in these positions, if city politicians respected his accomplishments in either field, I'd be surprised.

As a close friend of Ted Rogers and with his strong connections to wealthy individuals, Tory leaves me wondering about his original qualifications to take the post of CFL commissioner, although at a later date, he showed himself as being good at bringing the money on board for the United Way and St. Mike's hospital. Had he exhibited some strong negotiating experience in his past that would prepare him for dealing with game rulings, owners and players as the final arbiter in their disputes? Or was his qualification for the commissioner's position due to his connections with the owners?

As opposed to Mr. Lastman, who frequently lost control of Toronto's dysfunctional city council, we believe he would succeed in achieving results.

***I believe that Lastman was elected and re-elected by a landslide of Greater Toronto votes, as he had been for ages in North York before the city amalgamated. This, and the manner in which the control mechanisms at city hall make it virtually impossible for a Mayor to lose control of the city council repudiate the idea that Lastman "lost" control. In fact, Lastman ensconced the power of the Mayor by centralizing it more solidly than any mayor prior to his election; and was only exceeded in this area of governance by Miller, who learned at Lastman's knee.

As he was approaching the end of his term of office, Lastman's ill health required him to relinquish his tight rein on council more and more. Under those conditions, his established privilege of calling the shots diminished.

While he was Mayor, the city never enjoyed more publicity; and when he was elected, he didn't hesitate to bring the same form of governance and benefits to the people he had instituted in the North York community; benefits which made him unbeatable there in election after election.

Lastman was an unabridged showman, and used all of his energy on behalf of the city in which he had invested his heart. Sometimes, his showmanship made him an ass; and when it did, everyone in the world laughed at him or was embarrassed by him; and everybody in the world knew where Toronto is.

Now, they've forgotten.

Is there anything in...

'John -disaster-prone- Tory's';

or George -Oops? Uh-oh!- Smitherman's';

or Glen -Abandon Mayoralty office all ye who seek ambition elsewhere- Murray's';

or Giorgio -I sit in Miller's inner council ergo sum- Mammoliti's';

or 'Denzil -Suddenly, I have something to say- Minnan-Wong's' (actually, I like Minnan-Wong's independent attitude);

or 'Adam -It's what I, and not what you want: all you residents of Lansdowne Avenue, Jane Street, Kingston Road etc. etc!- Giambrone's' (somebody please defeat this guy in the next election!)

...abilities or background that would again bring the kind of leadership that might place Toronto as well-loved on the world map?

Not just passion, heart, or (lord help us!) showmanship, but any world affection-grabbing quality?

If we don't care about being loved by the rest of the world, we should maybe think about a Doug Holyday kind of leader, who is reported by his constituents to be a genuinely independent and reasonable progressive thinker.

HAVING WRITTEN THE ABOVE, I AM FULLY AWARE THAT MOST VOTERS WILL STILL VOTE ENTHUSIASTICALLY FOR A NAME, BECAUSE THAT'S AS FAR AS THEY WISH TO GO IN TERMS OF INFORMING THEMSELVES. THE MESSAGE TO ASPIRING POLITICIANS IS SIMPLE: PAY AS MUCH ATTENTION TO DEVELOPING A NAME FOR YOURSELF AS YOU DO DEVELOPING A PLATFORM. IN THE LONG RUN, THE NAME WILL WEIGH MORE HEAVILY IN GETTING YOU ELECTED.

2. Written In Response To A 'Post' Online Article:

Visibility In The Public/Union Bargaining Process

MarkState — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:04:41 CST

Welcome to my website.

I'm Mark State, and you've logged into

THE STATE OF OUR TORONTO.

The following email was sent from my computer to the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, Toronto location, in response to a protest letter sent by them to city hall regarding the 2009 garbage strike.

While the ideas contained will very obviously strike opposition within the breasts of both unions and management (pun intended), I believe the interests of the population at large will be served by having

shorter strikes
accompanied by less posturing and more cooperation between the sides.

Following the template I suggest, public and membership pressures to end a threatened strike quickly and equitably will ensure both these benefits.

During the 2009 garbage strike, the citizens suffered stink and inconvenience and the strikers lost a significant portion of their annual income; but the city's rat population fed well, and the city gained several millions of dollars saved by not having to pay the strikers their wages, which it promptly decided to spend on infrastructure over-runs. Hmmmmm. Just sayin'.......

Two small edits are shown with square brackets.

From: Mark State [EMail address withheld for this purpose]
Sent: June 25, 2009 2:32 PM
To: MS Ontario
Subject: Garbage & Other Strikes (this letter may be published to your membership)

I read with interest the news article about the CFIB’s protesting to the Ontario and Municipal Government of Toronto re outrage concerning the (upcoming) garbage strike.

In case you hadn’t noticed, the media articles on various bargaining positions sought by the two sides in the strike were your only source of information about how negotiations were proceeding, and whether or not a strike was likely to occur.

You read about various points of view made to the press by spokespersons for each side, and had to take what they were saying as being a factual account of what was transpiring around the bargaining table.

A better route for public information, as well as accurate media information, would be to legislate that all contract bargaining talks with all unions and businesses be open to the public and broadcasted on television and/or podcasted via the internet.

Openness in the bargaining process would allow citizenry to make up its mind as to who was asking for what, and who was balking at the request and why.

The Visibility thus afforded to the public about the bargaining sessions would ensure honesty and frugality on the part of the bargainers, because they would know they were being observed during the process; and that the public, their customers/patrons/citizens, and union members were doing the watching.

In most cases, I believe that the bargaining sessions would be shortened; and that because the public was observing [and commenting on the behaviour of the bargaining teams], the public’s requirements would also be taken into consideration during the process.

I have a great many friends in small business, and one or two in large business as well, whose enterprises are going to be negatively affected by this (referring to the garbage collector's strike of 2009) strike, just as they are whenever a public strike of any kind ensues. But I have even more friends who are residential home dwellers…in high rise, low rise, and single family dwellings, who are equally adversely affected by all public strikes. A public strike is a no-win situation for all sides, including business and the citizenry.

Both the Province and the city need to enact visibility legislation regarding the bargaining process in labour negotiations today, to prevent the kind of second-hand, opinionated information gathering that will continue to hide the actual process and the positions of the key players from the public, and to make strikes less prevalent going forward.

Mark M. State

Now, dear reader, it's time to point out that I was a Mayoralty candidate in the recent 2010 civic elections, and to invite you to search for solutions to the garbage strike offered by my then-opponents in the race. I'm sure that, like myself, somebody might have had a good suggestion about preventing such things as population-disrupting strikes of all kinds in the future. Or not.

And be especially careful about politicians being willing to legislate "essential services", because when a service is considered essential, its union becomes a service of a government; and neither it nor its members can be replaced with competing unions unless the government group it works for votes to put the service out for tender or to change unions. In other words, once declared essential, the number of groups that are likely to be considered for the job narrows --for better or worse-- down to one. Forever.

Recently, the Ontario government, sick and tired of a regular progression of transit worker strikes, declared the Toronto transit an essential service. This means that during contract negotiations, no matter what the stress, the transit service must run, and the union workers (who are NOT essential service, but must perforce continue to RUN the essential service because it is essential, and not running it is therefore unlawful) don't get a chance to strike.

The net result of this has been twofold. First, no more bothersome and inconvenience-causing transit strikes; but secondly, an attitude by some transit operators of invulnerability in the face of poor driving or a bad attitude towards passengers. Coincidentally, these are exactly the two main items that were under heated discussion in the transit passengers' protest meetings with the transit union boss and some representative drivers in 2010.

PANHANDLERS: A Very Positive Solution To The Problem

MarkState — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:03:50 CST

This page is dedicated to the memory of Tony Clemens (d October 18, 2011), who brought sunshine into our lives.
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THE STATE OF OUR TORONTO.

For many years, I've known a number of people who panhandle for a living, both on an ongoing basis and through temporary acquaintanceships. When they had signs saying they were for hire for casual work, I've hired them to work for me, some on repeated occasions. During cold winter nights for several years, I volunteered at "Out Of The Cold" (a pan-Toronto program that provides overnight accommodation, dinner and breakfast and a take-away lunch, new clothing, etc. for homeless persons during the winter months in a host of church, synagogue, temple, and mosque halls), where I came in contact with and got to know many people who made their living this way. The following information, opinions, and novel resolutions offered re Panhandling came from a consideration of information accumulated over the years through observation of and discussions with Panhandlers; and I'm presenting it to you now in this format in order for you to understand that this is a problem with at least one solution. Since I like win-win solutions best, that's how this one comes out. It's safe to write that no other Mayoralty candidate in the 2010 election gave this problem any creative thought at all; and of course, if you don't like my ideas, you are invited to come up with better ones. Panhandling is a phenomenon supported by lack of a welfare social safety net, and has been discovered by its participants to be a wonderful way to earn money. (There's a place for comments at the bottom of the page.)

Who Are Panhandlers? -- An Introduction

Panhandling is one of the most misunderstood professions in the city today.

The misunderstanding is one that you, the ordinary citizens, have about panhandling. It comes from two sources: Panhandlers appear to the casual observer as mainly dirty people and alcohol or substance addicted, so they earn the stigma of being human vermin; and you hold the opinion that they are a drain on the righteous wage earner, asking for money for which they have no right.

Here are the facts.

First, the negatives: A panhandler is a one-person unauthorized business, requesting donations from individuals by accosting them in the streets; and apparently offering nothing in return except a 'thank you'. The money earned by that one-person entrepreneurial effort mostly goes to worthless things like drug and alcohol abuse.

Most panhandlers (not all) are crack addicts --even when they don't "look like an addict" to the casual observer, merely roughly unkempt-- and must make money to pay not only for drugs but for the food they need to feed their drug-ravaged bodies. Crack addicts need to eat up to ten times a day to replenish the energy crack addiction loses them.

Most, if not all, squeegee people and traffic beggars are ecstasy addicts.

Panhandlers who just sit and stare into space with a paper cup in front of them earn the least of all types, and are most often placed by "bosses" who take a greater part of their earnings by right of force. Those bosses also take earnings from many other panhandlers as extortion enforced by violence to 'allow' them to panhandle. They are a kind of 'panhandler pimp'.

Now, What You Probably Don’t Know About Panhandlers: Panhandlers Make More Money Than Most Wage Earners.

They work hard for it, often more than 8 hours a day, at menial tasks like walking up and down traffic stopped at a light with an empty coffee cup and a sad look: Work that is boring, repetitive, and filled with rejection, insult, and danger. In all kinds of weather.

Take, for example, traffic-light panhandlers: those who morosely wander up and down lines of traffic stopped at a red light with an outstretched old coffee cup or a sign requesting a handout. A stoplight changes every 30 seconds. Let us conjecture that on a slow day, such a person might make one looney* every four lights, or two minutes. That’s $30.00 per hour. An 8-hour shift will earn the panhandler $240.00 per day. (*For those unacquainted with Canadian currency, we have replaced our one and two-dollar bills with coins. Our one-dollar coin is termed a "looney" because it features the engraving of the common loon on one side of the coin. This suits our sense of humour about ourselves. The two dollar coin was minted after the one dollar coin became accepted in lieu of the dollar bill, and replaced the two dollar bill. It's called a "twoney" [2-nee to rhyme with looney].) Coins may cause a weighty jangle in the pocket, but it is a strange fact that they are easier to give away to beggars than bills used to be because they have become equated with the coins we always used but placed little value upon: the penny, nickle, dime, and quarter.

The fact is that’s a low estimate, and traffic light panhandlers actually earn (and make no mistake: it is 'earnings', gained by hard work) between $250 and $750 per day. Their largest contributor demographic is single female drivers between the ages of 25 and 45 followed by vehicles containing families of up to four persons, mainly of strong religious beliefs concerning the giving of charity. Out of all the panhandling styles, this gives back to the donors more in the form of 'entertainment' than the others, because the stoplight panhandlers pay a great deal of attention to appropriate signage, modes of shabby and interesting-looking dress, location, etc., to affect their incomes, whereas most other and less skilled at this kind of work just dress to look poorly.

Highly-skilled panhandlers and those with a well-developed story and clothing to match, who accost you on the street on a busy day can make as much as $240 in an hour, depending upon their story or the degree of assertiveness they apply to their work; although none makes so much on a consistent basis. Street panhandlers typically earn between $400.00 and $900.00 per day. Again, I use the word ‘earn’ because even though they are asking for free handouts, they are working hard at getting them. Street panhandlers are more susceptible to physical abuse and rejection than traffic light panhandlers because they actually come in contact with their public.

If they were not drug peddlers, addicts or alcohol abusers, and actually saved their earnings and invested as ‘normal’ working citizens did, panhandlers would earn on average about $150,000.00 - $200,000.00 per year. Much more than the average wage earner.

What Can Be Done About Them?

My 2010 Mayoralty Platform Regarding Panhandlers

As long as poverty is encouraged by the elimination of the welfare safety net, panhandlers will not be an easily resolved problem. But there's an old saying: "When life hands you a lemon, make lemonade!" In other words, make a positive from the negative with which you have been saddled, rather than being overcome by it.

The GTA (Greater Toronto Area) could combine new tactics that would rid our streets of belligerent and threatening panhandlers, and simultaneously tax some of those earnings in a very positive and constructive way. It might be possible to remove the sting and the stigma of this blight on the streets and blow to our civic conscience, making people on both sides of the panhandling business safer and happier with its existence. Panhandlers could be made a civic asset, and a tourist attraction rather than a burden.

Or, believing that either nothing can be done about panhandling on the streets or that the police should arrest them all and put them in jail and getting yourself all sad or angry and self-righteous about their existence, we can dismiss everything I propose on this page as nonsense, throw our hands up, and accomplish exactly what we've accomplished to date, which sad to say, in spite of the best efforts of social workers hired by the city to help alleviate the problem, is still basically next to nothing: starkly witnessed by the numbers of panhandlers living and eking out their existences in plain view on the streets.

I freely admit that the following is an unusual and innovative approach; but if you follow it along without pre-judgement and think it through, there may be aspects of it that make sense to you. And while you're at it, try to find another political aspirant who's done any resolution-style thinking about it at all.

Using certain tactics, the panhandling occupation would be able to generate as much self-respect as any other, and enable the public to appreciate them as business people.

How?

By legislating Panhandling as a recognizable business.

By turning panhandlers into pseudo-Buskers.

And by educating them as to what they may and may not do to earn their donated income.

What kind of process would accomplish this? A simple three-step program.

licence Panhandlers,

educate them in the limitations of what they may and may not do under the law, and

require them to earn their income through being entertaining in some fashion or other. In other words, to give value back for the donations they receive.

This is the process for accomplishing those objectives:

In order to receive a licence, [which a panhandler must wear prominently (perhaps as a lapel button) or risk being arrested, fined or sent to jail for panhandling without a licence], a panhandler must first · attend a course that instructs him/her as to what he/she may and may not do to earn panhandling money, and in what way it can be done without any threat to the public. · Then, purchase the panhandling licence from the city (which contributes to city income). · Be prepared to offer some form of service or entertainment to their donors.

It's not a new idea, aside from its licencing and monitoring components. Street vendors and pseudo-buskers exist in every country in the world and all the major cities including ours. In Toronto, the Toronto Street News offers panhandlers an opportunity to earn a living by providing a service as newsies, selling the paper on the street in front of busy commercial establishments.

The Entertainment/Service Component

GENUINE BUSKERS are skilled entertainers who perform for the public in a licenced opportunity in order to earn an income. They give back to the donating community genuine entertainment value for donations the public pays them. Licenced street vendors are a ubiquitous sight in our city. Presently, panhandlers have not been required to offer the donating public anything other than the nuisance value they present. They beg for their income and give nothing back except to a few people who get to feel charitable by giving money, food, clothing, or a coffee to them.

Under the above suggested conditions, a panhandler would become not a Busker or Vendor, but something more akin to one. Panhandlers would be required to earn their money not by begging alone, but by giving something back to the public in order to deserve it; not by just passively offering empty cups or accosting persons in the streets. Panhandlers could be encouraged to follow the example of their traffic-light lines confreres by wearing interesting outfits, doing services, performing or otherwise entertaining by dressing and acting a part in order to give something back to their donors. They might perform some pseudo service, or actually entertain while panhandling.

[One panhandler I know has tried this method. He always earned his money by offering a cheery smile, and a "good morning" or "hello" to his passers-by at the same location each day. He knew most of his donors by name, and something about them or their families. Until autumn 2007, that was the total value he provided for his customers. But he still looked dirty and sat on the street with a sign asking for work or a handout. Even though he would earn less money for working than he would on the street, he had always chosen to take the jobs offered him rather than panhandling if they became available.

That year, he added entertainment value to his business with a little musical Elmo (a Sesame-Street muppet doll) on a blue-bin crate for kiddies (and adults!) to push a button on, and watch as it sang and played its guitar.
People daily gave him a standard handout. When he wasn't present to greet his regulars, they left their usual contribution in his baseball cap next to the Elmo. Adding the Elmo to his business increased his income by eliminating much of the stigma attached to his panhandling. The location and methodology of his approach did not otherwise change. He even had co-developed a website with one of his regular donors! In it, he gave his views on life in general and on public events as he saw them. (http://homelessmanspeaks.com)

By adding entertainment value, he became a pseudo-busker, akin to a street musician; except in his case, the Elmo played the guitar and sang...and only upon request, since you had to push a button to get it going. But it was he who still provided the cheery smile and greeting and light chat with you even if you didn't push Elmo's button. Because of his age and physical infirmities caused by a drug-ravaged lifestyle in the past, he no longer accepted odd jobs. And, unfortunately because he was stationary and didn't offer any other services except a cheery greeting, smile, and conversation, his income became very sparse outside of regular shopping hours when the streets emptied. But he had become a full-time pseudo-busker, advertising his website on the side of his blue Elmo crate. [Tony Clemens passed on October 18, 2011. There was a short obituary article about him in the Toronto Star newspaper, and the neighbourhood (business included!) dedicated a bench with a plaque on it in his memory.]

Even those just sitting and staring straight ahead with a cup for donations could be dressed to entertain, offer weather report updates placed on a chalk board by helpers or friends, or otherwise 'earn' their income, as in the above example, just by saying "good morning" or "good afternoon", offering pencils or combs in a cup, etc., if they are capable of doing that much, to passers-by in return for a donation. They would wear a licence that proclaims to the public, "this person is trained to not bother you, but rather to offer you a service in order to earn his/her income."

Initially, many panhandlers will be resistant to this idea of giving back; but when they see that those who conform are earning more money (and with less hassle from the authorities) than they, they will come around to appreciating the idea. I've suggested it to panhandlers I know (including the example above), and they've tried it, and it works. "Bosses" will be dealt with as the extortionists they are: reported by law-abiding panhandlers, and arrested, fined and/or jailed on charges of extortion.

The city will then need to set up a school for panhandlers to learn the law and their limitations within it (pass an oral test), obtain a licence, have an opportunity if they so desire to learn juggling, unicycle riding, shoe shining, portable street coffee vending, harmonica or guitar playing, etc. As well, a commercial panhandling outfit depot which will eventually be paid for by the licence fees [of, say $600.00 per year per panhandler (ranges anywhere from a day’s to a week’s earnings)], can provide them with work wear they can purchase.

Thus, a panhandler ‘doorman’ at a restaurant or convenience store might be attired as a formerly dignified but now tattered doorman, down on his luck, with a beaten-up top hat, (wearing a licence on his/her lapel,) and most importantly in the eyes of the public, be earning a living by opening the door and very politely (or perhaps tacitly with a proffered doffed top hat) --depending upon the agreement made with the proprietor about how the 'doorman' would be permitted to request the donations -- or 'tips' -- with the full and glad agreement of the proprietorship based upon the added entertainment value provided to its customers of the self-employed "doorman". (Such ‘doormen’ can also be handy eyewitnesses to criminal activity such as robbery or shoplifting; and possibly assist a store operator or female clerk in trouble by alerting police.)

Squeegee persons at a stoplight might dance up to a car in twos, dressed as squeegees, clowns, etc., (wearing their licences prominently on their costumes); and proffering their squeegees, ask with expressive facial gestures if you would like your windshield cleaned. You, knowing that the contents of their squirt bottles were required by law to be clean, fresh windshield washing fluid and that they were earning a living and knew they should not insist or wash wherever the driver indicates not to, might be more tempted to invite a wash from time to time, be willing to pay a looney or two for it, and smile while your windshield was being well-cleaned with deft, professional strokes. Not only would I hire such a squeegee person, I'd feel sorry for the person who missed out, or for myself if the light changed before I had a chance to enjoy the show. Good shoe-shine 'boys' would be sought-after by business people on a daily basis. Even someone just dressed up as a clown or a giraffe, walking down the street and proffering a hat to passers-by for donations, would make for an interesting sidewalk-scape.

Panhandlers approaching you on the street would be thereby transformed into pseudo-'buskers' of a sort. The entire stigma of panhandling would be replaced by a street entertainment value. They would contribute to the GTA’s being an entertaining place to live and visit. Visitors would exclaim about how entertaining our streets are. Very many fewer panhandlers would feel the need to camp on the streets, since such activity as approval in earnings style gives the earner more dignity.

When I was a child growing up in the mid-1900s in Hamilton, there was a blind man who panhandled in the pseudo-busking style at Gore Park square downtown, playing the violin and selling pencils and combs from a cup. When people dropped coins into the cup and took a pencil or a comb, he smiled and bowed while playing. He was a treasured part of the city, not reviled; and when he died, the city mourned him with radio and TV reportage, and a lengthy newspaper obituary about his life. More recently, our own respected and beloved Ben Kerr, after whom the city named a lane-way just south of Jones and Danforth Avenues near his home, pseudo-busked at the corner of Yonge and Bloor where he met and became acquainted with visitors from all over the world. Ben built on his past career as a country and western entertainer by singing tunes with a portable karaoke system he brought from home each day. When he passed away, Toronto honoured him in a similar manner to the way Hamilton had honoured their blind violinist fifty years earlier.

One doesn't need to know how to play the violin or sing to provide appreciated services in return for donations. Perhaps by giving even semi-skilled panhandlers more dignity as they earn their livings, we might give them a reason to improve their lifestyles outside of work as well.

What Are The Alternatives?

It's certain that if panhandlers were not panhandling an income on the streets, they would be forced to turn to a life of more violent crime to pay for their addictions. With robbery, prostitution, and burglary as the favoured choices for drug addict earnings sources, the real sufferers would be the general citizenry. Fortunately for the rest of us, the panhandlers have calculated that there is more money to be made from the panhandling business, and less jail time as well.

How has the city treated panhandlers to date? City council has postured with anger about the large problem of panhandlers and threatened police intervention to get rid of them every time the issue of poverty comes up in the press in order to side-track that real issue with something more interesting, because they won't employ the necessary imagination to figure out how to remedy either issue. Police, overloaded with real crime prevention, have not massively enforced the postured angered proclamations of the politicians. There are as many panhandlers as there ever were, perhaps more because police departments from other cities have been known to pay the fare to send their vagrants to Toronto where the charitable nature of the welfare system will take care of them.

The city paid social workers out of a specially established $2million annual budget that has since skyrocketed to more than double the amount to move annoying panhandlers off the streets, where downtown business owners can't tolerate the tone-lowering contribution they make to a business neighbourhood, into shelters, and rehabilitate them into upright citizens. While this might be a worthwhile effort in terms of housing only one segment of the population that desperately needs it (although perhaps there are other poor who need the housing more than the panhandlers), it will do nothing --as Toronto police have already pointed out-- to ultimately remove panhandlers from the streets. I surmise that this is because the living they make is just enough to support their chosen lifestyles. The social workers whose job it is to convince panhandlers to move off the streets have an unenviable task. The $2-plus million might have better been spent setting up a program such as the one suggested above, which presents a win-win for both concerned citizenry and those who panhandle, perhaps administered by those same social workers.

Despite the new social worker program, which touts itself as saving our poor panhandlers (by removing them from a very handsome source of income), nothing has been done to either relieve the situation for the general citizenry or to render the panhandlers themselves harmless and useful. By taking their posture of mindless intolerance, the city elders have ensured that Toronto will continue to stay exactly as it is, or continue to deteriorate.

Again.

ICE TIME FOR THE LITTLE LEAGUES

MarkState — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:02:52 CST

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THE STATE OF OUR TORONTO.

Say the names, "Hayley Wickenheiser", "Caroline Ouelette", "Marie-Philip Poulin", "Becky Kellar", or almost any other of the 18 members of Canada's Olympic Women's Hockey Team; and every proud Canadian will tell you that our women excel in hockey on an international scale, just as our men do; and that Hayley, (2010 team captain) and the Canadian Women's Hockey team have brought home two straight Olympic Gold Medal victories to justify that pride. (Since the writing of this essay, the Canadian Olympic Women's Hockey Team has earned its third Gold Medal in The 2010 Vancouver Olympics.)

So it's no wonder that more and more little girls aspire to be hockey players --an aspiration that for many years before the advent of women's professional sports had been the province of the men of the NHL and boys getting up early to shovel off the rink for a game of shinny, joined by the occasional tomboy kid sister who showed remarkable talent --for a girl.

That remarkable talent is showing up more and more on home ice nowadays with the advent of Little League Girls' Hockey; and now we have three sets of ice time to distribute to worthy players: Little League Girls Hockey, Little League Boys Hockey, and --the thing that keeps a lot of older non-pros in shape (or the thing that they keep in shape to play)-- pick up or shinny hockey. These are in addition to scheduled league games for young adult and adult leagues.

And the numbers and sizes of ice rinks have been expanding to keep up to the demand, while still providing needed time for our outstanding figure skating programs and just plain good-old recreational skating to the blare of a set of speakers and more hot chocolate than one would think humanly possible to consume in the course of one year.

But in spite of the increase in rink numbers, there still is not enough ice time for the Little Leaguers to apportion fairly to all players. There is enough time for the games, and if the team is lucky enough to get a rink for practice, for maybe one practice between games. Some Little Leagues also have time for one teaching session, but that is restricted, due to a necessary coach-to-child instruction ratio, to only children who have shown promise as hockey players. Coaches might be available for other children who need more time spent learning skating skills as well as hockey skills, but rink time isn't.

Where is this shortage of rink time being felt most severely? In Toronto.

Is it fair that the children who do not show hockey-player promise don't get the coaching time they need to at least learn the basics so they can play with their more fortunate friends? No. Nor is it fair to their teams, because the untutored players are more likely to fumble around the ice ineffectively while their more skilled buddies dipsy-doodle in and around them easily to get the length of the ice and take a shot. But that's the case, and we can blame the situation squarely on the lack of ice time for children learning to play.

The leagues are upset by this, hockey parents who have less skilled kids who can't get coached at home by a Walter Gretzky dad or grandpa wonder why their kids can't get that extra help, and we as Torontonians should be upset by the inequity and injustice caused our kids by the lack of ice time.

I've been thinking about this problem. Is there really a lack of ice surface; and if there is, what can be done about it?

The answer is yes and no. There is enough surface. But not all the surfaces we have are reliable enough to host those extra rink times. I write of the myriad outdoor rinks run by the city's parks and recreation department in addition to the many expensive indoor ones we already have and continue to build and expand. In many cases, these are sophisticated surfaces, with their own refrigeration units powering ice even in slightly warmer temperatures.

They are, however, out-of-doors rinks. They are subject to freezing wind conditions, snowfall, ice that's been scarred up by heavy recreational use, warm days too hot for the rink refrigeration to continue working, lack of change rooms, skate sharpening facilities, and that all-important hot chocolate addition that makes practice even more fun.

I've said all along that I'm all about solutions.

So, if our new Mayor wants some good advice regarding a solution to this problem, it would be to ask city council to approve complete enclosures for those outdoor skating rinks as a priority; and use inflatable tents of the kind one might find being used for winterized tennis courts for the purpose. Every inflatable will have change areas, a mini Zamboni to clean the ice, refrigeration units to keep the ice usable, generous ice time apportioned strictly to teaching unskilled kids hockey within its schedule, and --wait for it-- yes, even a hot chocolate vendor. As an active participant in other sports, he should be working with the Little Leagues to make certain that there are enough outdoor rinks to cover the current deficit in case we need to put a couple more in our parks.

This means that the kids who want to learn to skate and play hockey will have more opportunity, kids who want to learn figure skating will have more space for inexpensive beginners' classes, shinny players will get more space to play pickup, adult learn-to-skate programs will have more places to grow, and we can all enjoy the free rink time locally, including hot chocolate. We'll see what we can do about converting the H.C. to something colder in the summer months when a lot of those Park Rinks can be used for myriad other purposes as well.

Will there still be places to skate under the stars? I don't think we need to put an inflatable over the city hall ice rink, which already has refrigeration, its own Zamboni, music, change benches, and lots of H.C., but is reserved for recreational skating alone. Perhaps there are other places that are also favoured by remaining out of doors. If so, they might remain thus.

[The following article was written in the Toronto Star Thursday, Jan 28th on pg GT 3 by 'Donovan': http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/756928--city-urged-to-control-prime-time-ice :

City urged to control prime-time ice

Parks department says central system is best way to guarantee girls' hockey gets more arena time

Published On Thu Jan 28 2010

Donovan Vincent Staff Reporter

Ice time at all city-owned rinks, including those operated by independent boards of management, should be divided up through a new centralized system for the 2011-2012 season, a parks department report urges.

The report says such a system is the "only option" to successfully implement the city's ice allocation policy.

The recommendations, which go before next week's meeting of the city's community development committee, come after a series of stories by the Star explored complaints from organizers of girls' and women's hockey who say they're being shut out of some rinks.

The rinks at the centre of the controversy are eight that are city-owned, but operated by independent boards of management.

Late last year, after the Toronto Leaside Girls' Hockey Association threatened to launch a human rights complaint over being denied prime-time ice at some board-run arenas, the city demanded all independent arenas come up with plans for next season so that "all children and youth activity for both girls and boys receives its proportionate share of prime-time ice."

Prime-time ice is during weekday evenings and weekends.

Aside from the eight independent arenas, which operate 10 rinks, there are 40 other city-run arenas operating 48 ice pads.

Under the proposed changes, the eight board-run facilities would be lumped in with the other 40 arenas, and ice time would be divvied up city-wide.
Under the city's ice allocation policy, 60 per cent of ice time should be set aside for community youth, 25 per cent competitive youth, 1 per cent competitive junior hockey, 13 per cent community adult use and 1 per cent private commercial use.

But according to information submitted to the city by the arena boards for last season, only three were above the 60 per cent threshold for community use: Leaside Memorial Arena (95 per cent), North Toronto Arena (67 per cent) and the two pads at McCormick Arena (67 per cent).
The others were at 50 per cent or below.

North Toronto currently sets aside no prime-time ice for girls' hockey, which has incensed officials with the Toronto Leaside Girls Hockey Association. Ron Baker, president of Leaside Girls, said if the proposed changes are adopted there will be fairer ice allocation across the city.
But city Councillor John Parker, who sits on the board at the Leaside arena, is opposed to the recommended changes, saying they will "undercut" a system that is already working at the arena boards.

"It will mark the beginning of the end of any useful role the boards can play in supporting neighbourhood activity and local rinks," Parker said. The proposal would still require approval by city council.]

Crime Prevention

MarkState — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:02:02 CST

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THE STATE OF OUR TORONTO.

CRIME A coherent future vision for the city must include its being a crime-free place to live. Thanks to our police department, the GTA is largely a safe and peaceful place to live for most of us.

I suppose the rosiest possible future would be a city with no crime in it at all. It's an attractive idea, and we can plan for it with a future vision that will help to take us there.

Other politicians have supported increased policing and gun bans in an attempt to reduce the numbers of crimes such as murder, kidnapping, molestation, rape, vandalism, drug peddling, home invasion, extortion, beatings, and robbery being committed by gangs and individuals dedicated to bringing anarchy and evil into common rule through their own twisted sets of rationalizaton.

The net result of these actions has been a police force stressed by lack of personnel and (with apologies to the anti-gun lobbyists, whose point of view is not at issue when discussing the results of current governmental activities) responsible gun owners who have been licenced by the RCMP to own and use their firearms in shooting matches, where Canada has excelled in world competition, feeling rightfully persecuted for their sport and hobby activities.

These two approaches are only pseudo-solutions, and are raised by politicians when the public is outraged over the criminal activities of what might be termed 'the armies of evil' (for, let's face it, that's what they are), in order to re-focus public outrage on a red herring whose head looks like more policing and whose body looks like removing licenced firearms from responsible people; and away from the fact that these nefarious activities against our peace and well-being persist.

The sad fact is that both the current civic government and the other candidates for Mayor have no real handle on what might be done to eliminate crime in Toronto. Listen to them try to dress up tired ideas in new clothing.

While working through several issues in preparation for running to be your Mayor, I examined this issue, and propose the following three-fold solution:

Increased violent crime can be stemmed and perhaps completely eliminated if it is addressed on three fronts: removal of the felons from the streets; education of children in all school districts to emphasize self-motivation skills and rewards for projects undertaken from inner direction; and more outspoken reportage in the media.

The first may be addressed by an increased visible and invisible police presence and available crime-fighting technology. While the outgoing city government has made arrangements to provide additional membership to the police force, it's the effective means of deployment, as well as the numbers of officers available, that will make the difference to our crime statistics. Deployment in a way that will almost instantly stem crime, or even better, prevent it, is an avenue to ridding the city of this serious blight on our city.

The second --teaching children to be self-motivated and inner-directed-- is designed to create a future generation of latchkey kids, who upon returning home will get involved not in gangs, but instead join interesting community groups, pursue engrossing hobbies, care for the younger children in their families or in the neighbourhood, prepare dinners for the family when they arrive home, study and do homework, and other worthwhile pursuits that children who can appreciate their own interests and abilities and sense of self-worth are more likely to do. Kids who decide for themselves what kinds of positive activities they want to pursue (self-motivation), and need no prodding from anyone to take on that expression of their interests (inner direction) do not engage in joining gangs in order to acquire a feeling of self-worth or security.

The city needs to protect itself by a system of grants to schools that set up curricula designed to inculcate self-motivation and inner direction.

And the last by encouraging the media to stop aggrandizing the perpetrators with names they love. Criminals in street gangs love to read and hear reports on themselve describing them as gangsters, shooters, etc. etc. Replacing this sanitized language with epithets like slime, pukes, murderers, damnfools, etc. would be an awakening and system shock to the criminal mind these sub-humans possess. When the rewards are lessened in the media, the acting out to receive those rewards will likely diminish as well.

Toronto's Current Waterfront Plan

MarkState — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:01:15 CST

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THE STATE OF OUR TORONTO.

Actual Rendering Of Proposed Waterfront Development

The picture at left shows city council's current plan for waterfront development. Where did this plan come from? It was paid for and promoted by Ottawa, the province, and city hall in support of a strong condominium builders 'shadow' lobby. Could this have been for the purpose of paying off a huge city deficit, including a new 2-3hundred million dollar deficit incurred by the city through 2009-10?

The buildings envisioned here are mainly residential/commercial condominiums. The lighting in the picture is very effective, and the carefully laid out rectangular buildings look reassuringly solid and new.

One of the nicest things about condominiums is that they are owned by the people who live in them.

Another really nice thing about condominiums is that if you are a developer (a person who builds and then rents or sells the buildings you have built; and do this for a living) interested in making a good profit from building a condominium, it's a really great investment. Once permission has been granted by the city to build it, your company, along with supporting financial institutions, pays construction companies to erect the building. Real estate companies who bid to you for the right to be your sales agents, sometimes by offering you a piece of their commission on every sale, then will sell the units to their new owners; and when the building is completely sold, it falls under the Condominium Act, which tells the residents how to maintain it. That means you as the developer, bank, construction, and real estate company can walk completely away from the project with a very comfortable profit in your pocket. One can easily understand why developers, banks, construction, and real estate companies like to erect high rises. It's a legitimate way to make lots of money.

Of course, if the high rise condominium (high rise here indicating ten stories or more) is located in a prime area with a beautiful view, you as a developer can charge more for the units; while the construction costs remain approximately the same. So it makes good sense for you as a developer to try to obtain the nicest areas with the nicest views in which to build your condominiums; because the profit you make will be much bigger than if the condominium is just --say-- in the middle of a field somewhere.

The downside

The downside of this is the effect it has on the rest of us. If the condo developers use up the lands with the beautiful views, it means we have to move in to one of their condominiums to enjoy them. And what if we either can't afford the very large prices of the condos with the nicest views, or we kind of like where we are living now, but would also like to have the views available to us?

Perhaps it means we are out of luck, because there just won't be any views not taken up by development.

The other down side of developing the areas of the city with beautiful views is that development means they will become covered with concrete buildings. Using concrete is the way in which we put up buildings to last a long time. But concrete development is not as beautiful to look at or enjoy as flowers, trees, parks, activity areas, and walkways; despite the attempt of architects to embolden designs to make them unique and interesting.

The developers choose

In fact, the proposal offered to the city by the Waterfront Development Board was chosen because it is more populated and less green than a second counter-proposal submitted to them for consideration.

This idea of a development board considering two choices and requiring a decision between them has a name. It is called "false choice", because those making the decisions are fooled into thinking there are only two choices when in reality there are very often other choices that aren't presented. The waterfront design that was chosen by the developers’ committee was picked because it is ‘more populated’.

To many of us, if both designs are crowded the less crowded one looks better because it is closest to ‘completely uncrowded’. If we'd really like ‘completely uncrowded’, but that was not given us as an option, we'd pick "less crowded" because it's closer to what we really want. The developers’ committee chose the more heavily populated version because they will make more money from it. They then sent their recommendation to city council to adopt their preference. The developers had only paid for two choices, and neither of them was ‘completely uncrowded’. This leaves the city with a false choice. But it doesn't, really, because a few years ago, the original environmental assessment that recommended 'completely uncrowded' was changed to allow development by a process known as 'bumping up'.

Will city council agree?

It's a fair question to ask why the developers believe city council would choose the heavier condominium development and not a parkland waterfront. The answer is that the city is extremely cash-strapped; and the sale of those lands to developers will bring a very large dollar to help alleviate the city debt. And since the city is now allowed by the City Of Toronto Act to levy new taxes, every condominium that is built is subject to a brand-new and substantial "development tax", demanded by the city for new buildings and paid by the builders. Of course, the builders download a price that includes all the expenses of building their new buildings, including the development tax, to whomever purchases them. Every condominium to be built is charged the development tax before the first concrete is poured. [The reason for the city being cash-strapped is that it spends more than its income, which means that either it is not earning enough money or that its spending is out of control.]

This means that the city is willing to sacrifice waterfront lands to development as a quick cash grab, and that new condominium purchasers will be paying the city's development tax when they buy their new homes.

If I were a developer, I'd be happy as clams about paying the development tax; and I'd encourage the city to develop new homes and especially condominiums anywhere and everywhere it could so that my buyers could pay that tax and so the city would think that --because it's making lots of money to help cover its enormous debts-- it should give me every possible opportunity to develop more condos. In order to develop a 'shadow' lobby, I'd get my people on city planning committees and economic development committees and greening the city committees, and, really, anywhere I could in order to foster the idea that lots of development is what the city needs. I'd sweet-talk a mayor who wants to spend a billion dollars leaving a 120-year-old "legacy" of traffic-jamming streetcar right-of-ways to the city rather than a beautiful unobstructed waterfront into thinking that more development was a wonderful way to pay off the couple of hundred million my "legacy" leaves the city in debt easily over time.

But I'm not a developer; and this article is coloured by my concern (as is rightly the concern of a future Mayor) to the city's well-being. In this instance, my concern rests with what we in 2010 are leaving for generations yet to come. Are we leaving grace, beauty, open spaces, waterfront views, flowers, trees, birds, a clean environment, and a luxurious lifestyle for all, or a great view for just a few based upon a frantic cash grab opportunity to make up for misguided budgetary expenditures?

Can we begin to look at what we are doing now in terms of the future, or must our vision be mired firmly in the present alone? Other candidates are so favourable to cash grabs that they are willing to sell off the city's assets, such as Hydro or city-owned properties, with no in-depth thought about the consequences of those ill-conceived actions on the city's ability to flourish as an independent entity into the future.

Think about which kind of vision you would rather have leading your city.

What are the alternatives?

Here are some pictures of cities that have developed their waterfronts. To be fair, some of them are in the process, after discovering their mistakes, of slow re-purchase and tearing down the built-up areas. Developers don't care if you tear down their developments, because by the time that occurs, they have already walked away with their profits. They really dislike, however, the idea of preventing the developments; because that means their profits will have to be made elsewhere, and perhaps not be as large or easy to earn.

Toronto, having established a committee to help guide its growth on which both developers and tourism-driven business consultants play a major role, is in the process of covering our waterfront area with a wall of concrete buildings. The advice given to the city by this committee has been unequivocally to seek new development, infrastructure, and tourism. I'm not certain that the advice coming from those folks is entirely in the interests of the future of our city, but I'm sure as shootin' sure that it's in the interests of the folks who are in the building business.

I think the BIG question that hasn't been asked is, "Which waterfront would we like to leave to future generations?"

Will we leave our children and their children Brooklyn?

NASA Photo of Brooklyn New York's Waterfront

Image courtesy of the Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center

Or will we leave them Chicago?
Google Photo

(Yes, it's true. Chicago's entire waterfront has looked like this since the
early 1900s, when infilling of the shoreline extended it a full half-mile into the
lake. Toronto's shoreline is thus far mainly vacant. Do we want to save it
as it is, and make it more beautiful; or do we want to develop it into a
condo section of town?)

Perhaps the answer is, "where is the vision"?

Google Photo

TTC Fare Smart Card

MarkState — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:52:16 CST

--By Mark Mañuel State

Note: The following idea has been implemented in terms of card style and usage with the "Presto" card now gradually being made available throughout the GTA and effective up to as far away as Hamilton. Remaining difficulties to solve are: 'what happens if a passenger boards without using the card, or boards after the card is refused', and 'how is the price of the card determined for each transit system on which it is valid,' which is discussed below. Perhaps the fare checkers who now look at riders' tickets and "proof of purchase" will carry an electronic device capable of determining if the Presto card had been used to pay for their current ride. For more information on the current technology, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presto_card.

The Problem

The cost of TTC fares have gone up each year, and the one-shot annual increase is painful for riders. A new transit pass, the “Metropass” must be purchased each month.

Considering Various Proposals From Around The World

The use of smart card transit access through the 'touch' or other PIN-unprotected system would deduct the amount of the ride from an account held by anonymous persons holding the smart-card pass.

Using this approach, if the card is lost or stolen, and not protected by a Personal Identification Number or other ID verification, the loss could be costly to the owner. Reporting of the loss of the pass-card and its effective cancellation would potentially involve a network connection between a central reporting agency and all card readers, whether land-based or on vehicles.

Currently, some Charge Cards are read by pass-over or touch readers; and others are implementing the PIN approach. If transit pass cards are used for shopping, etc., then they are de-facto banking cards; and either the transit system or a local bank is sponsoring a banking benefit to the card holder. In Canada, a surcharge is normally added for the use of the card (unless the use is confined to banking procedures conducted via a sponsor’s Automated Teller Machine).

In the case of the card being owned by banks who ‘top them up’ in order to turn them into a cash substitute, implementing such a ‘cost per use’ by employing the bank card for public transit access means that the fare on a public transit system may also be subject to a surcharge fee for use.

A Solution For Toronto

What are reasonable guidelines for public use of a smart card system, which will protect the users, yet still serve the system adequately?

One answer may lie in the employment of a universal smart card system that may be automatically updated strictly for the coming month on a monthly basis...at a fixed fare cost that perhaps reflects the projected cost of transit authority increased/decreased revenues for the current month...and for a fee that may only be charged for a ride pass. The card could be purchased and/or used anywhere by subscribing transit companies who have entered into a reciprocal agreement, and the amount of the fare shunted automatically into the accounts of the transit service where the card is used.

Local Toronto ridership would be either charged a surplus --or a lowered-- fee per ride rather than paying a one-time annual fee increase depending upon the fortunes of the public transit system as charted during the interval of some previous months. Each month, the fee savings or increase would be minimal, and the consumer would understand that it is directly reflective of operational transit costs.

The initial costs and ongoing expense expected in operating such a system would consist of the installation and maintenance of readers in all the vehicles and at all connecting transit stations, and fewer repeat printings of cards. Charging-up points for the card would still be at specific stations or via the station sales points.

The savings for the transit company using such a pass would be in the reduced cost of manufacturing and selling a tremendous number of new cards every month. The initial cost of systems installation to handle the new card will be recovered over time in the reduction of card manufacturing costs.

Losing a card could still be reported with a phone call or via the internet with sufficient security data attached to its ownership. Lost/stolen cards would be entered into the system on a daily basis, either as transit vehicles come into their storage facilities for overnight cleaning etc., or instantly, depending upon the sophistication of intra-transit communications.

Each vehicle’s card reader can be updated electronically to reject lost cards being used by unauthorized individuals.

Cards could be distributed with a key ring attached, similar to the ones issued by casinos. A mail-sorter’s reader at the post office could locate the real owner and return lost cards dropped into a local mail box.

The entire printing of new cards might be administered through the Veterans' War Amputees organization. Locally, the 'War-Amps' currently protect lost key returns by sending householders an identity tag. The proceeds from voluntary donations attached to reception of the tag allow them to carry on a prosthesis manufacturing facility for children. Attaching keys to the transit smart card could similarly ensure the return of lost keys. Having the cards manufactured through the local veteran’s associations could guarantee them a small percentage of each card’s monthly transit authority's purchase price as a fund-raising enterprise.

The Billboard Tax--Guess Who Pays It?

MarkState — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:51:31 CST

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THE STATE OF OUR TORONTO.

NOT ALL THE MONEY REQUIRED FOR THE NEW RIGHT-OF-WAY STREETCAR SYSTEM TORONTO’S DEPARTING MAYOR DAVID MILLER WANTS TO LEAVE THE CITY AS HIS "LEGACY" HAS BEEN DELIVERED BY THE FEDERAL OR PROVINCIAL GOVERNMENTS. THE CITY IS STILL SHORT A FEW HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS AND NEEDS TO FIND WAYS TO GET THAT MONEY. FROM YOU.

The billboard tax will be paid straight out of your pocket.

Congratulations to the current city council for coming up with yet another way to squeeze money out of the citizens of Toronto. A new tax entitled the Billboard tax is a disguise for the new money grab.

Ostensibly, billboard owners will pay the tax, which they will be able to afford by raising the advertising rate to advertisers.

The advertisers are companies that sell things to you. The advertisers will be able to afford paying higher prices for billboard space by raising the price of their goods and services to the consumer.

The consumer is you. This means that the city will, in the long run, be dipping into your pocket for more money. Not very nice.

If the city wants more of my money, why can’t it ask for it in a more straightforward manner?

Take a look at who’s advertising on the billboards now, and watch their prices go up. And never come down, even if the billboard tax were to be removed some day.

But it’s a neat gimmick.

The city could impose a "city travel" tax on fuel trucks delivering in town. Then, the trucks would have to charge more money to the gas companies, who would have to raise the price of gas to cover their potential losses. So, they’d charge more for gasoline. And you would pay the freight. Literally. The city could then blame the raise in the price of gas on the Federal Government, since the Feds are the ones sort of "in charge" of gasoline sales; and walk away undetected. Whoo-ee--ooo! Do you think they've done other things like that Billboard tax already? It seems like too good an idea to miss.

I'm all for creativity. Let's get in on the game. We can have fun finding ways to disguise more taxes on Toronto’s population.

The city could impose a tax, for example, on cardboard packaging. Just think of the numbers of things that come in cardboard packages. What a windfall!

This is an easy game to play. Think of something you need, like an occasional drink of juice, milk, or water, for instance. Then, something that the manufacturer of drinking fluids needs, like plastic bottles, for example. Then, think of something the plastic bottle manufacturer needs, and tax that.

Simple.

An answer might be that plastics manufacturers in general need plastic extrusion machines. Find a way to tax those machines, (how about higher electricity prices on factories that use heat-processing systems?) and everything that comes in a plastic container will cost more to the consumer in the long run.

Pretty neat, eh?

And sneaky too, wouldn’t you say?

How about a name for this con game, like “Third-hand taxation”, so there can be a charge against it in case the cops ever catch on?

Of course, instead of being creative in terms of finding ways to gouge the citizenry to make up its "legacy to Torontonians" shortfall, it might be possible to get creative in finding ways to eliminate the shortfall altogether, by not incurring it in the first place.

But what would the fun in that be?

[Linked to this linked topic page are other pages whose contents cover more topics in which you may have a personal interest. Connect with any of them by clicking on its blue link provided in the box at the top left of the page.] There you may read some of my other views on current civic affairs and a range of other topics.

Mark State, presenting you with the straight goods.

SCHOOL PROPERTIES SELL-OFFS: A PREVENTATIVE SOLUTION

MarkState — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:50:50 CST

Closing And Selling Off Toronto’s School Properties
what can be done?

Welcome to my website.

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THE STATE OF OUR TORONTO.

In this instance, Toronto can take a lesson from various churches that now are at least partially supported by attached residences. The church-attached residences vary in nature from seniors’ residences to parishioners’ residences, but they all support and are supported by the church of which they are a part.

The school properties are owned by the city, and the city can build on them. The schools in question are not well-attended enough to warrant keeping them open. We don’t want to lose the city-owned properties.

Putting one and one and one together would have the city building long-term varied lease residences on the school properties specifically for families with school-aged children. Two good-sized buildings can house a thousand three-and-four-bedroom residences, each leased only to families of that description.

Perhaps, based upon the age of the youngest child, a “maximum residency” annual lease for a family might run five years beyond that child’s eighteenth birthday. This would leave the family free to renew its lease annually, but after the youngest child attained the age of twenty three (which would allow the family to stay on until that child graduated from elementary school, senior school, and university if need be), the family would be required to move out and make room for another. Condominium use would be counter-productive because it would turn the property to a non-school-feeder residence over time.

The buildings would take on the name of the school. For example, “Brookhaven Elementary School” would indicate the school itself plus two 500-unit three and four bedroom residences built directly where the school buildings are now, to preserve their playground and green park use areas.

Let’s fantasize for a moment about the nature of those residences. We are starting anew here, so we can allow our imaginations to roam.

First, each should be designed as an award-winning piece of architecture, chosen through world-wide competition. The criteria should be the sustainability of the design as a contribution to the city’s future generations. Would they be favourably impressed by the design? Would it contribute to Toronto remaining a beautiful city?

Second, they should be owned by a city corporation. This would enable the city to not only retain the land and school fed by the residential children but also to collect rents and property taxes on the units. Each unit should be sound proofed, well ventilated, and built with a firewall separation from its neighbours.

Next, as new buildings, they can be built using environmentally efficient heating and cooling assistance. Each could also contain the necessary electrical generation support systems that would reduce the amount of electricity it utilized from the hydro grid. Each can contain a required amount of abundant external year-round greenery throughout its height, walkways, and roof development. Transportation corridors designed for a future PERT system should be included in the floor plans.

The new buildings could serve not only as publicly-owned schools and apartments, they could also serve as a community hub. Multi-level underground facilities attached to the buildings can contain parking, shopping, public transit drive-through stops, and community-use levels containing hobby, daycare, swimming pool, club, meeting, auditorium, cinema, gymnasium, dojo, and music rooms of several descriptions, graphic and ceramic art studios, medical services, and multi-purpose rooms –all for use by not only building residents, but by the entire surrounding neighbourhood as well.
Commercial tenants should be chosen to not interfere with the existing neighbourhood commercial services, but rather as a supplement to it, and existing commercial enterprises in the neighbourhood should be given first opportunity to lease them.

Emergency service vehicles and personnel could be stationed in the new buildings, allowing building security and neighbourhood security to be heightened by resident police, fire, and paramedic services.

Thus, not only do we save the school properties as city-owned, but we also develop a very good source of long-term income for our currently cash-strapped city through a city-owned corporation that manages the buildings, leasing premises and commercial enterprise space. We attract international attention and subsequent immigration especially of families with children, and we provide for the future of the city.

Mark State
Presenting you with the straight goods.

WHEN TORONTO MEDIA CHOOSE YOUR ELECTED OFFICIALS FOR YOU BASED UPON THEIR SALES, IS IT HEALTHY?

MarkState — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:50:04 CST

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THE STATE OF OUR TORONTO.

EVERY FEW YEARS, CANADIANS VOTE FOR EITHER A BRAND-NEW SLATE OF LOCAL, PROVINCIAL, OR FEDERAL PUBLIC OFFICE CANDIDATES OR TO RETURN SOME OF THE PREVIOUS ONES BACK TO OFFICE. WHEN I'VE ASKED VOTERS WHETHER THEY HAD HEARD ABOUT ONE OF THE SO-CALLED "FRINGE" CANDIDATES RUNNING FOR OFFICE DURING THOSE ELECTIONS, THE ANSWER IS USUALLY "NO. I'VE NEVER HEARD OF THAT PERSON. WERE THEY RUNNING FOR OFFICE?"

WHY DIDN’T I HEAR ABOUT
ALL THE OTHER CANDIDATES WHO WERE RUNNING ?

--Taking Care Of Your Concerns About The Lack Of Coverage By The Press

Torontonians are fortunate.

Every single candidate who steps forward for elected office in every election has something different and interesting to offer.

Perhaps a Toronto civic election race should come down to who has the most or best to offer Torontonians.

That would not be an easy decision to make. It requires becoming informed about the candidates, and that means research.

Most people don’t have the time or resources to do the research themselves. They depend upon the mass media to keep them informed as to what the candidates stand for and how each of them would be suited –or not—to become a candidate of choice.

The reason you may not have heard much about some of the candidates is that media businesses such as newspapers and broadcast stations choose to not cover those candidates. It’s a financial decision based in the sale-ability of news coverage. Not interesting? Won’t sell? Don’t cover it.

Most people are unaware that the election process is flawed because they think they are choosing the candidates they are voting for. But the truth is that if you are an ordinary voter, you have no freedom of choice, and elections are rigged. Moreover, the rigging of elections is completely legal!

HERE'S SHOCKING BUT TRUE INFORMATION ABOUT HOW ELECTIONS ARE REALLY DECIDED:

IN EVERY CIVIC ELECTION, IT'S ACTUALLY LOCAL MEDIA WHO DECIDE

WHICH OF THE SLATE OF CANDIDATES YOU WILL VOTE FOR, AND ALSO

CHOOSES THE ISSUES UPON WHICH YOU WILL DECIDE THAT VOTE.

EVEN THOUGH YOU CAST YOUR VOTE, YOU DO -NOT- DECIDE WHO WILL WIN THE ELECTION

IS THIS TRUE? IF IT IS, THEN HOW DOES THE MEDIA RIG ELECTIONS, AND WHY?

AS AN ELECTOR, YOU GET ALL YOUR INFORMATION ABOUT THE CANDIDATES THROUGH THE MEDIA BECAUSE YOU DO NOT HAVE THE TIME OR INCLINATION TO RESEARCH THE MERITS OFF ALL THE CANDIDATES FOR YOURSELF. THERE ARE JUST TOO MANY, AND SOME OF THEM ARE LESS INTERESTING THAN OTHERS. THE MEDIA MAKES IT EASY FOR YOU TO READ, LISTEN, OR WATCH THE "TOP" CANDIDATES, WHILE NOT WASTING YOUR TIME CHECKING OUT THOSE YOU HAVE BEEN TOLD ARE "FRINGE" CANDIDATES.

BUT DO YOU KNOW WHO DECIDES WHICH CANDIDATES ARE TO BE FEATURED, AND WHICH ARE RELEGATED TO THE FRINGES OF THE ELECTION, AND WHY?

ALTHOUGH THERE ARE MANY CANDIDATES RUNNING FOR OFFICE IN ANY ELECTION, THE PUBLIC REALLY GETS TO KNOW ABOUT SOME OF THEM, AND IS KEPT IGNORANT OF THE REST BECAUSE MEDIA EDITORIAL STAFF BEHIND CLOSED DOORS HOLD MEETINGS TO MAKE DELIBERATE CHOICES ABOUT WHICH ONES TO FEATURE AND WHICH ONES THEY WILL IGNORE. THIS IS DONE FOR EVERY TYPE OF ELECTION FOR PUBLIC OFFICE.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/why-the-TV-consortium-excluded-Elizabeth-May/article1966583/

https://www.google.com/search?q=FIVE+CANDIDATES+DEBATE+TORONTO&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

DO THEY DO THIS IN YOUR BEST INTERESTS? NOT AT ALL!

THESE CHOICES ARE MADE ON THE BASIS OF WHICH ONES THEY HAVE DECIDED TO SUPPORT BECAUSE OF THEIR OWNERS' POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, OR WHICH THEY DECIDE WILL HAVE THE BEST CHANCE OF WINNING, AND/OR WHICH ONES, IF FEATURED, WILL BRING MORE READERS TO THE NEWSPAPERS, LISTENERS TO THE RADIO STATIONS, AND WATCHERS TO THE TV SET, AND WHICH CANDIDATES ARE RUNNING THE MOST EXPENSIVE ELECTIONS.

THE IDEA IS TO ATTRACT MORE USERS TO THEIR NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES, RADIO STATIONS, OR TELEVISION STATIONS. WHEN MORE USERS ARE ATTRACTED TO ANY OF THESE MEDIA, IT'S VERY GOOD FOR THEIR ADVERTISING SALES, BECAUSE THEIR SALES FORCE CAN SHOW POTENTIAL ADVERTISING PURCHASERS A LARGE READERSHIP, LISTENER-SHIP, OR VIEWERSHIP. ADVERTISERS WANT TO REACH THE MOST PEOPLE FOR THEIR ADVERTISING DOLLAR, AND WILL CAREFULLY CHOOSE WHICH MEDIA THEY WANT TO ADVERTISE IN BASED UPON NUMBERS OF USERS.

UNFORTUNATELY FOR YOU, THIS MEANS YOU WON'T GET TO KNOW ABOUT ALL THE CANDIDATES, JUST A FEW WHO HAVE BEEN CHOSEN FOR YOU BY AN EDITORIAL STAFF WHO ARE ONLY LOOKING OUT FOR THEIR MEDIA OUTLET'S BOTTOM LINE. AS THE ELECTION DRAWS NEARER, VARIOUS MEDIA WILL ACTUALLY CHOOSE A SINGLE CANDIDATE AND FEATURE HIM/HER MUCH MORE THAN THE OTHERS. REGARDLESS OF WHETHER THE CONTENT OF THOSE FEATURE ARTICLES IS NEGATIVE OR POSITIVE (SO LONG AS THERE'S NO CRIMINAL ACTIVITY FOUND SURROUNDING THE FEATURED CANDIDATE), REPEATING AND FEATURING THE CANDIDATE'S NAME ENSURES THAT THE VOTING PUBLIC WILL VOTE FOR HIM/HER , BECAUSE WHEN THEY GET TO THE POLLS THE NAME OF THAT CANDIDATE IS UPPERMOST IN THEIR MINDS, AND THEY KNOW A LITTLE ABOUT THAT CANDIDATE'S PLATFORMS, BUT NOTHING AT ALL ABOUT THE PLATFORMS OF THE LESSER OR NON-FEATURED CANDIDATES UNLESS THEY ARE ACTUAL BACKERS OF SOME PARTICULAR NON-FEATURED CANDIDATE THEMSELVES.

HOWEVER, MOST PEOPLE DO NOT GET INVOLVED IN BACKING A PARTICULAR CANDIDATE THROUGH PARTICIPATING IN A CANDIDATE'S CAMPAIGN. MOST PEOPLE INSTEAD LISTEN TO THE MEDIA AND VOTE AS THE MEDIA SHOWS A PREFERENCE ONE WAY OR ANOTHER. EVEN THOUGH YOU THINK YOU ARE VOTING FOR A CANDIDATE YOU HAVE PERSONALLY CHOSEN, YOU HAVE ACTUALLY BEEN INFLUENCED INTO CHOOSING THAT CANDIDATE IN A WAY THAT IS BEYOND YOUR CONTROL. YOU HAVE BEEN TOLD HOW TO VOTE.

THE MEDIA CONSIDER THIS TO BE SOUND BUSINESS PRACTICE, AND IT IS.

THE RIVALRY FOR ALL MEDIA TO ATTRACT YOUR ATTENTION IS DRIVEN BY DESPERATION. BECAUSE OF THE NUMBERS AND VARIETIES OF MEDIA OUTLETS, RIVALRY FOR YOUR READERSHIP, LISTENER SHIP, AND VIEWERSHIP IS INTENSE. MEDIA KEEP TRACK OF A STATISTIC CALLED "DEMOGRAPHICS", WHICH TELLS THEM WHO ARE THEIR FANS, INCLUDING AGE, SEX, INCOME LEVEL, PROGRAMS, ARTICLES, AND ACTUAL NUMBERS OF READERS, LISTENERS, AND VIEWERS AT ANY TIME OF DAY ALL YEAR LONG. THEY WATCH THIS PUBLISHED INFORMATION LIKE HAWKS AND DELIBERATELY PLAN THEIR PUBLICATION TO ENRICH THEIR DEMOGRAPHICS IF POSSIBLE. BUT THERE ARE JUST SO MANY READERS, LISTENERS, AND VIEWERS TO GO AROUND. THUS, AN INCREASE FOR ONE MEDIA OUTLET MIGHT WELL MEAN A DECREASE FOR ANOTHER. THIS IS WHY THEIR CORPORATE LEADERSHIP (EDITORIAL STAFF, STATION MANAGERS, OWNERS, ETC.) CHOOSES WHICH STORIES TO FEATURE AND WHICH ONES TO IGNORE. IT'S REALLY ALL ABOUT EARNING YOUR DOLLARS, AND COMPETITION IS FIERCE.

HOW CAN I BECOME AN INDEPENDENT VOTER?

IN EVERY ELECTION, A LIST OF CANDIDATES IS PUBLISHED IN ADVANCE OF THE ELECTION BY THE COUNTRY, PROVINCE, COUNTY, OR MUNICIPALITY HOLDING THE ELECTION. THAT LIST CONTAINS INFORMATION ABOUT HOW TO CONTACT THE CANDIDATE TO FIND OUT ABOUT HIS/HER PLATFORMS. OFTEN THE CANDIDATES WILL HAVE A WEBSITE YOU CAN LOOK AT.
PRIOR TO THE ELECTION, THERE ARE ALL-CANDIDATES' MEETINGS. DO NOT ATTEND THOSE MEETINGS THAT DELIBERATELY SNUB SOME OF THE CANDIDATES BY NOT INVITING THEM TO PARTICIPATE. TRY ALSO TO AVOID THOSE MEETINGS WHERE SOME OF THE CANDIDATES ARE FAVOURED BY GETTING A LOT OF TIME TO SPEAK BUT OTHERS ARE GIVEN JUST A COUPLE OF MINUTES. INSTEAD, ATTEND MEETINGS ORGANIZED ALONG EGALITARIAN, DEMOCRATIC LINES.
LOOK FOR MEETINGS WHERE ALL YOUR CANDIDATES HAVE BEEN INVITED AND HAVE EQUAL TIME TO SPEAK OR RESPOND TO QUESTIONS, AND LISTEN TO WHAT THEY HAVE TO SAY. SOME OF THEM WILL BE SAYING THINGS YOU REALLY LIKE AND WILL WANT TO VOTE FOR, AND THEY MAY NOT BE FEATURED CANDIDATES. WHEN ALL CANDIDATES HAVE EQUAL TIME TO SPEAK, THEY CAN ALL GIVE YOU AN IDEA OF WHAT THEY STAND FOR. YOU WILL GET THE WHOLE STORY.
BE WARY OF "ALL-CANDIDATES" MEETINGS WHERE THE SPONSORS TELL YOU THEY CAN'T PRESENT ALL THE CANDIDATES BECAUSE THERE "ISN'T ENOUGH SPACE OR ENOUGH TIME". WHAT THEY ARE REALLY TRYING TO DO IS TO RIP-OFF YOUR VOTE ACCORDING TO THEIR PREFERENCES WHILE PREVENTING YOU FROM FINDING ABOUT OTHER CANDIDATES THEY DON'T WANT TO PRESENT TO YOU. IF YOU ARE A POLITICAL ACTIVIST, YOU MAY BE INCLINED TO PICKET OR BOYCOTT THOSE MEETINGS/SPONSORS.
WHEN YOU DISCOVER A CANDIDATE WITH SOMETHING INTERESTING OR VALUABLE TO OFFER, ENCOURAGE YOUR FELLOW- VOTING ACQUAINTANCES AND FRIENDS TO CHECK HIM/HER OUT. YOU MIGHT BE DOING THEM A FAVOUR.
BEGIN PAYING ATTENTION TO WHY THE MEDIA ARE RUNNING A STORY ABOUT ONE OF THEIR FEATURED CANDIDATES. IS IT BECAUSE THEY ARE PROPOSING SOMETHING ENORMOUS, PREPOSTEROUS, SILLY, OR REQUIRING BIG BUCKS TO PAY FOR AND ENGENDERING AN EVENTUAL TAX INCREASE AS A RESULT? OR BECAUSE A COUPLE OF THE FEATURED CANDIDATES GOT INTO A RIFF OF SOME KIND? IS THE STORY OBVIOUSLY A WAY TO INCREASE USER-SHIP AND ATTRACT ADVERTISING DOLLARS? DOES IT ADDRESS YOUR PERSONAL CENTRAL ISSUES? OR DOES IT ADDRESS SOME ISSUE THAT HAS BEEN CREATED FOR THE ELECTION BY THE MEDIA OR ONE OF THE LEADING CANDIDATES?
REMAIN AWARE AT ALL TIMES THAT THE MEDIA IS TRYING TO INFLUENCE YOUR VOTE. KEEP AN INDEPENDENT MIND AND TRY TO EXAMINE ALL THE ALTERNATIVES BEFORE CHOOSING YOUR FAVOURITE CANDIDATE.

NOW, THE READERSHIP OF THIS PAGE CAN BE DIVIDED INTO TWO CAMPS:

THOSE WHO WISH TO BECOME INFORMED VOTERS, AND
THOSE WHO WILL REMAIN HAPPY TO ALLOW THE MEDIA TO DIRECT THEIR VOTES.

IN EITHER CASE, HAPPY VOTING!

REPAIRING TORONTO'S BUDGET

MarkState — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:49:03 CST

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.

* FROM THE ARTICLE:

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.

ABOUT MARK STATE

MarkState — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:45:57 CST

Mark State is a constructive thinker and --like yourself-- a person with a certain amount of intelligence who is concerned about the state of affairs in the world in general.

He is also blessed with a certain amount of ability to recognize discrepancies and difficulties that emerge between humanity and the structures human society has established to serve it; and is skilled in developing ways to repair them.

If your organization would like to invite Mark as a speaker, you may Email your request to bgogia@yahoo.ca.

Mark State's Bio

Born: November 14th, 1942 in South Porcupine, a small gold mining town in Northern Ontario, now part of Greater Timmins.

Raised In: Hamilton.

Toronto Resident: 46- Year Toronto Residency Since 1964. Currently Resides (since 1981) in Toronto's South Parkdale.

Family: Divorced (1979). Grandfather.

Education:

George R, Allan Elementary, Dalewood Jr. High, and Westdale Secondary Schools, Hamilton.
Canada Business College, Hamilton: Clerk-Typist.
Emerson College, Boston Mass: Broadcasting Major
Seneca C.A.A.T, North York: Library Technician; CADD Operator
Toronto Teachers’ College: Elementary Teacher [Vocal Music Specialist, Media Specialist & Teacher Librarian]
York University Faculty Of Environmental Studies: Graduate Degree Candidate [Education Planning, Administration, And Curriculum Development]
York University Faculty Of Business Administration: Cross Appointment In Graduate Studies
University Of Toronto OISE: Cross Appointment In Education Planning Studies
University Of Toronto Faculty Of Media And Society: Cross Appointment In Graduate Studies
Ontario Construction Safety Association: Site Supervisor's Diploma
George Brown C.A.A.T., Toronto: Engineering Management Systems
Erickson Institute, Toronto: Master Track Neuro-Linguistic Programming [2]
Ryerson University, Toronto: Architectural Rendering
Great lakes School Of Marine Technology, Port Colbourne & Owen Sound: Marine Engineer
Toronto Adult Learning Center, Toronto: AutoCADD
Frank Horvath, Toronto: Piano
Dixon Hall Regent Park Learning Center: Developing Business Plans
Toronto Department Of Health: Food Handler
Doug Abbott, Toronto: Jazz Piano
Randolph Kamaranth, Cedarbrae Collegiate, Toronto: Steel Pan (6 Bass, 4 Bass)

Employment History:
Casual Worker, Posty, Telephone Tracer, Mammy’s Wonder Bread Door-To-Door Delivery Man, Muffler Plant Machine Operator, Trucker, Scuba Instructor, Broadcaster, Cabby, Library Technician, Teacher, Teacher Librarian, Teaching Master, Architectural Designer, General Contractor, Construction Site Supervisor, Advertising Creative Director, NLP Practitioner, Private Investigator, Security Officer, Marine Engineer, Naval Architect, Corporate Vice President (Engineering & Industrial Relations), Professional Handyman.

Former Union Memberships: CUPW, IBT ('Teamsters'), CAW, NABET, Ontario Elementary School Teachers Federation, CMOU, USWA ('Steelworkers') .

Commercial Representation: Canadian A.I.A. (Automobile Industries Association) Trade Mission to Mexico 2001.

Strengths:

· Creativity
· Intelligence
· A very personal understanding of both Self-employed and Job-oriented working life starting from the worker receiving minimum wage, to the small businessman, to the executive responsibilities of a major player in the pollution abatement industry
· Integrity

Hobbies:

- Outdoors-man
- Inventor.
- Musician (Piano, 6-Bass)

Volunteer-ism (Past & Present):

· Scouts Canada
· Toronto Distress Centers
· First-ever volunteer hospital visiting clown at the TGH.
· Out Of The Cold Winter Overnight Hostels
· Hadassah Bazaar
· Masonic and Shriner community service
· 6-Bass Player for Scarborough Naparema and Oakville CCAH Steel Pan Bands

LINKS: Alternative source of links to State's essays On Remedial City Politics

MarkState — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:31:50 CST

SOME OF THESE LINKS MAY HAVE EXPIRED FROM OLD AGE. MY APOLOGIES IF THE ONE YOU'RE LOOKING FOR IS IN THIS CATEGORY.

VISION

Mark State, Toronto's New Mayor? Leadership & vision
Reply to Eric Mang's "Toronto Mayor Must Offer Vision" in Rabble Commentary by Mark State

ECONOMY

How Toronto Might Improve Its Economic Prospects During This Downturn...And How It's Being Frustrated From Pursuing A Turnaround Undoing the damage of a runaway Toronto economy, creating jobs

REPAIRING TORONTO'S BUDGET Restructuring decision-making at city hall

Toronto Budget...What The Mayoral Candidates Say Reply to National Post Article underlining budget reform at city hall.

SELLING OFF PUBLIC ASSETS

SCHOOL PROPERTIES SELL-OFFS: A PREVENTATIVE SOLUTION Closing And Selling Off Toronto’s School Properties. what can be done? Keep the properties, make the schools work again

SELLING OFF HYDRO & OTHER OF THE CITY’S FIXED AND LIQUID ASSETS Selling hydro is a bad idea: commentary by Mark State in National Post Feb 20 2010 7:34 AM

What Are The Facts About Selling Off Hydro? Hydro Unions Tell you why Toronto loses if Hydro is sold. FYI only

The Billboard Tax--Guess Who Pays It? Hidden ”third party” taxation schemes: “billboard tax”, “development tax”, …invent your own hidden taxation scheme

TTC

TTC Fare Smart Card Replacing MetroPasses with one smart card and geared-to-expense ridership cost

MULTIPLE SUBWAY EXTENSIONS Commentary to Globe and Mail article: (at 2008 subway-building prices, and 55 million toll payers per year, it would take generations of road tolls at $5.00 a ‘pop’ to pay for Thomson’s proposed subway system)
IS THIS THE LEGACY THAT DAVID MILLER WANTS TO LEAVE TORONTO? critical discussion of the ‘Transit City’ concept
(See Also: Other Websites at bottom of this page.)

TOLL ROADS

TOLL ROADS Response to Wellington Fund against toll roads

WATERFRONT PLAN

Toronto's Current Waterfront Plan How and why our undeveloped waterfront is being populated by condos instead of a waterfront park

Commentary re Waterfront Development Board sent to National Post

FIGHTING CRIME

Crime Prevention A three-pronged approach to ridding the city of its criminal youth problem

ICE TIME

ICE TIME FOR THE LITTLE LEAGUES Solving the prevailing lack of ice time for all rink users at minimal cost

Commentary sent to National Post re the problem of ice time,

STRIKES

Visibility In The Public/Union Bargaining Process Enabling quick resolutions to short strikes by applying both public and rank-and-file pressure at the bargaining table

BICYCLE ROUTES

The "SHARROW" Rant (For Dave Meslin) Solving the bicycle route problem

PANHANDLERS

PANHANDLERS: A Very Positive Solution To The Problem [This article has currently being viewed ten times by interested parties all over the world]…an innovative idea for ‘making a (pervasive) lemon into lemonade’

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ABOUT Mark State

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION Who is Mark State?

TORONTO LIFE: MAYORALTY CANDIDATES RECAST AS FOOD What food would Mark State be? Commentary in Toronto Life.

OTHER WEBSITES BY MARK STATE:
http://feedbacktomark.wordpress.com Commentaries about remedying the TTC's problems
http://ecofriendlypower.wetpaint.com Solving the world's electrical energy supply problems

How Toronto Might Improve Its Economic Prospects During This Downturn

MarkState — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:19:09 CST

...And How It's Being Frustrated From Pursuing A Turnaround

Welcome to my website.

I'm Mark State, and you've logged into

THE STATE OF OUR TORONTO.
The following describes a potential innovative economic turn-around package designed to help unemployed Torontonians get back to work, and entrepreneurial Torontonians to provide that work. Its approach is innovative, and although similar programs are in action in some parts of the world, and they have been recommended by Ontario's Economic Development research, nothing like the following ideas has been employed here yet. I believe it is incumbent upon a future leader of this city to examine its economic situation and, where questions are found about current difficulties, propose solutions for them. Others, reading this or coming from a background where such things are noticed, may point out that we need to get Torontonians "back to work", but will have no idea, innovative or otherwise, about how to get that done. This piece not only proposes one possible solution, but relates it directly to the economic well-being of the city, so that both the city and its citizens can get back on their feet economically.

Proposing these kinds of solutions shows the vision and leadership that should be provided by Toronto's Mayor. Running away from difficulty by reacting to problems with a cut, slash, and burn policy rather than facing it with positive solutions is an established procedure and a direct result of a Mayor having learned governing city procedures while serving in civic government because civic government is a mainly reactionary body; not, in general, a proactive one.

Some pundits and many former members of city council believe that a Mayor should be someone who has served in city council before being elected as Mayor because that would prove dedication and provide the experience of sitting on council.

These people apparently mean well; but in actuality, their thinking is halting and limited, and extends to limiting the governing success of the city as well. Successful major corporations continually prove that kind of thinking to be incorrect.

When hugely successful private corporations are in need of new leadership, they extend their search outside of their own personnel to fill the vacancy with someone deemed capable of providing the necessary leadership, not the current traditional line of thinking. This is not only because the best people are not necessarily already aboard the corporation, but also because new vision dedicated to furthering its success helps it move ahead unhampered by stale or counter-productive thinking. "We can't solve problems by using the same king of thinking we used when we created them." --Albert Einstein

And the notion of having served on city council proving more dedication than not having previously served is disrespectful to those who prior to serving step forward to run. They volunteer to spend a part of their lives in public service by running for office because they think they can make a difference to the successful management of this city. The idea that Dedication to city leadership is only proved by having already served in council is logical nonsense. "...the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen.” -- Frank Lloyd Wright, architect.

WHY TORONTO IS STUCK

On the matter of setting Toronto back on course, two basic flaws in economic approach make the current civic government’s ability to come up with a plan to alleviate the threatening economic downturn’s effect on the city impossible.

First, our civic leadership seems to believe –if one takes as evidence their continual approach to senior government for additional funding—that the province and/or federal governments should freely provide a steady source of additional financial help over and above their established budgetary transfer payment allotments for cities when the cities have too few fiscal resources either to balance their budgets or get enough infrastructure maintenance done to keep the city on a healthy course.

Seeking support from senior government to make up for an inability to identify and manage a viable budget is a less-than-optimal manner in which to govern one of the largest and most important cities in North America. Inability to manage the city’s budget within its income sources is the result of either fiscal irresponsibility or poor planning. An example of the former is the 2009-2010 budget item of over a billion dollars the city didn’t yet have for new (not Eco-friendly) streetcars; and of the latter, the TTC’s tunnel visioned ambition to rid the city streets of automobile traffic flow in a manner oblivious to the automobile’s evolution and importance in the life of the city and the entire country.

And second, city council’s current priorities lack the foresight and leadership necessary to provide Toronto with a cogent direction towards its rightful future because it concerns itself solely with issues and plans that occur only within a forecast of a very few years; in other words, in the present.

It is inevitable that short term planning requires a constant feeding of additional money from outside sources as limited-vision decision-making direction ignores longer term consequences and priorities. City government is aware of this shortcoming in its fiscal policy due to its obviously unproductive outcomes, but not of why it is occurring.

In 2008, asking for a set of out-sourced thoughts and ideas with economic measures to “fix” this problem, David Miller established a committee of experts and entrepreneurs called ‘Toronto Mayor’s Economic Competitiveness Advisory Committee | January 2008’. Their conclusion reads like pointless rhetoric, exhorting as it does the city to continue doing more of the same to overcome its economic woes [emboldened words to emphasize the point]:

“We need to do a better job of promoting, integrating and aligning our competitive advantages into a unified whole. Renewed public and private investment is essential to fuel growth in Toronto’s economy, improve the health and vitality of our community, and position Toronto as a leading global city. Toronto has choices to make that will define its place in a globalized world. Economic competitiveness must be enhanced through internationalization, creativity, and inclusion, supported by a business climate that fosters private and public reinvestment. Investment in the future fiscal health of this city is mandatory. By taking action now, through renewed private and public sector investment, Toronto will be bold, energetic, connected and collaborative in the 21st century.” The next 18 pages of recommendations are a list of building on more-of-the-same infrastructure and outreach programs like suggestions for increasing tourism, with regard paid only to the city’s immediate future (i.e., augmenting its present situation).

Assembling a special group of advisers is an admirable admission that governing in city council's current fiscally irresponsible manner can benefit from outside help, whether the search for advice is, as above, initiated by the civic government inviting successful business people to participate in a committee about it; or more currently by the observing media noticing that outside help is needed--as exemplified by an appeal to the general public for solutions to Toronto’s economic woes made in April 2009 by the Metro newspaper's senior editor. I wrote the following with the latter appeal in mind.

"The difficulty with asking a group of people whose vested interests, one way or another, lie with the expansion of the city is that --surprise!--their conclusions will address more expansion as a means of sustaining a growing Toronto. This means more investment in the style of infrastructure and development growth we now enjoy; but doesn't address a path or direction with which Toronto can envision where it wants to go. Hence an unsupportable purchase of hundreds of new streetcars...retaining an outmoded form of public transit; and the closure of lanes in the center of rush-hour routes to allow them passage without regard to the importance of automobile traffic to the city's transportation needs, while an entire list of citizen-centered infrastructure goes unexamined or even unthought-of, crucial environmental issues remain unaddressed, Toronto's economic woes are enhanced by more and greater spending, and the nature of the city's future falls into the category of "more-of-the-same" for the next forty years.

Not only is the advice given thus far by the ‘special advisory group’ severely limited by basing its conclusions in the ‘now’, but also the City of Toronto's current 'Official Plan' addresses no thought for alternative futures, and is therefore directionless: an inadequate and rickety base on which to mount useful budgetary expenditure decisions.

You may have noticed that when the city goes to senior government for additional project funding, it is always for the same old things; and the city is not growing or developing to its potential as a direct result of the fact that it has not laid out that potential. This year's city budget is a dreadful and dreary example of a lack of forethought necessary to lead the city somewhere, anywhere, presenting an object lesson in how cities suffer without philosophical leadership.

Toronto's push to growth for growth's sake is not useful growth; and, while profitable for our developers, leaves the city suffocating in repetitive, unattractive and Eco-unfriendly concrete. Expanded infrastructure for infrastructure's sake is not always useful infrastructure. Increased anything in the city for its own sake, without regard to its impact on the city's future, is no more useful than our city government's more-of-the-same strategy to budgeting.

Belonging to the class of actions entitled “begging”, our civic government’s applications for additional funding from senior government invariably meet with difficulties, delays, deficiencies, or re-direction of the funds. They are a constant source of frustration and initiate an aggravating spiral of repeated futility.

While city council might adopt suggestions raised in this article and elsewhere, be assured that no member of that august group has the vision or creativity to independently conceive or carry out economic solutions to the city’s woes. Very few of them even have the ability to evolve into a different approach to city’s government because they are locked into a belief that there is no other way of governing a city than the current dis-enabling model.

They all work very hard for us, basically trying to reduce the city’s governance to issues that can be passed or tabled or committeed; but a genuine solution, moving Toronto into the future in both the planning and economic sense, must include replacing the philosophy of Toronto’s governing style, and quite possibly its current complement of councilors as well.

WHAT TO DO

One remedy to a situation in which a municipality continually finds itself in arrears, under-budget and unable to manage with available funds is to identify independent revenue generation solutions as an alternative to the 'hat in hand' mendicant method of approach to senior government for additional funding over and above standard revenue streams.

The city already receives certain reliable amounts from taxation, transfer of funds, licensing and fees. After that, we are expected to cover our expenses. If we cannot do so, then we ought to be able to generate additional funding without having to approach senior government for it.

It is not impossible to turn Toronto around economically by putting people back to work using the city as a formal cause in that effort. The idea is not new, and it has been applied before with great success. The Ontario Government has made some small steps in that direction as well:

ecdevjournal.com link

Here's one of a group of potential economic turnaround packages:

There are few jobs available in today's ravaged economy, and many, many applicants. In addition to the currently unemployed, there are also homeless people who according to the previous homeless census in Toronto (±5000 out of ±5800) stated unequivocally that they would rather be working and off the street.

When jobs are not available, people must become entrepreneurial in order to live. Our latest entrepreneurial class is panhandlers, who can make on average $100,000.00-plus tax free** per annum during economically prosperous times. Unfortunately for most of them, they are unable to keep the money because they are subject to costly addictions, robbery, coercion and extortion rackets by panhandler hierarchy. While they will hedge about the terminology, they have a strong work ethic.

[**For the incredulous, I invite you to do the math: Panhandlers work 8 or more hours a day doing mundane repetitive tasks and subjecting themselves to violence and abuse in the process, but earn an average of $20 to $60 an hour depending upon their location, panhandling style and time of day.
Example: the stoplight panhandler. Looking extremely poor & morose, and walking up & down lines of stopped traffic with a cup outstretched and a sign asking for help, how much does he earn?
Traffic lights change every 30 seconds. One looney on average for every 3 lights is $40.00 per hour.
Except that every hour there are at least two people who hand over a five dollar bill, making it $50.00 per hour. That’s $400.00 per day, $2,000 per week, $104,000 per year.
Do they work a full day all year long? I don't know. For $400 a day, would you? Maybe they go south for the winter and panhandle there.
Street ‘accosting’ panhandlers can make more than twice as much as stop light panhandlers if they are skillful with their approach. Make up your own math].

What do panhandlers actually do to earn their living? They shed their human dignity. That’s hard work. Try it some time. The unemployed's work ethic and entrepreneurial spirit is not limited to panhandlers. There is a huge resource of people in the city willing and able to apply themselves in some entrepreneurial effort -- if only they could have an opportunity to do so.

Every entrepreneur in business has the potential to hire others to work for him/her, so assisting one person to become an entrepreneur creates opportunities to put many others to work. There are also literally thousands of people out of work whose total conception of employment centers around the concept of ‘job’, where somebody else takes the entrepreneurial chances and job seekers accept a salary to work for them.

To an entrepreneur, these job seekers are untold wealth. The more people they can put to work making money for them, the more they will earn; and the job seeker only wants a small portion of what he earns on behalf of the entrepreneur as a reward for his knowledgeable labour. The person holding a job is happy because he or she is earning a salary, has benefits and an option for retirement earnings. Everybody wins.

People who are working earn money. Money buys housing, food, and gives an opportunity to practice charity on a grander basis than giving somebody in greater need than you, your last quarter.

The city needs more money than it can get through its transfer-of funds allotment, raising taxes, charging parking fines, licensing and permitting. Traditionally, it applies for this extra money from the province or the federal government. The issues associated with requesting money from senior government (not unlike panhandling, but without its proven efficiency) are wide-ranging, but may be summarized as 'overall not satisfactory' for a host of reasons, some of which are listed above.

One unorthodox solution to this quandary could very likely be for the city to become entrepreneurial as well.

The city might start off its entrepreneurial career with the establishment of a Trust Company or Caisse -- whichever is the best route for a city that also wishes to float its own low-interest, borrower-centered mortgages and charge cards; and offer an automatic discount for the cardholder if it is used within the city limits-- in every neighbourhood offer full banking services, offer ATM's that are differentiated by giving out small change to any bank card holder with a very minor surcharge based entirely upon their home-banks' or location-providers' charges, and group-supported micro-loans.

[A CAISSE is a type of credit union where every depositor is a shareholder in the company. It is very depositor-friendly, and as a payday loan arranger can manage credit based upon pay cheques used as collateral without cashing them at additional expense to the depositor, while offering money management counselling to the depositors that would enable them to get off the payday loan habit. A City Of Toronto Caisse would be composed of any Torontonian wishing to deposit in it. Management of a Caisse is conducted by the depositors who elect managers and approve the Caisse's financial direction at shareholder meetings. A TRUST COMPANY is a privately-owned savings, mortgage, and lending company, with rules that are more relaxed than those governing federally incorporated major Banks about how their money and business is managed. The advantage of a Trust Company is that it can emulate the generosity of a Caisse, but that its investors and owners must purchase all its shares. This would allow a Toronto wholly-owned trust company to direct all its profits to the city.]

Part of the business of the projected Trust Company or Caisse would be the business of strong qualification, low-interest loans and micro loaning.
Ignore
Suppose the city were to offer potential entrepreneurs (identified from groups of small business people wanting to expand, the less-than-successful ones struggling to make a go of their enterprises, the Self-Employment Benefit "SEDI" grads, and persons with a realistic business vision) start-up money for premises and equipment, expert managerial advice, accounting and legal help in maintaining those businesses, etc., ‘grub staking’ in return for becoming a full partner in the businesses and taking 50% after-tax profits as a full partner share. Funding might come partially from the city's Trust Company or Caisse banks, and a strong financial institution eventually built through a careful enterprise over the first few years into a place from which Torontonians could expect financial services oriented to them.

The entrepreneurs would be assisted to eventually purchase back the city's initial investment at its original cost with the partnership profit-sharing period considered as its sole means of gaining by the transaction. Much of the new entrepreneurial energy might be devoted to service industries focused on improving the lot of the city, thus saving the city in infrastructure and maintenance cash outlays.

Expert managerial assistance for new start-ups might come in part from the existing professional community, and also from business and accounting professionals who may themselves have been out of work when such a program started, and who can work in an entrepreneurial consultative capacity, financially aided initially by their own silent partner: the city, in much the same way as their clients.

A bootstrap program of this nature will eventually enrich the city so that not only will its citizens be able to afford their homes, but there will be enough additional income over the property tax base (currently 36% of budget funding) and regular 'senior government'-paid programs (about 28%) to assist the city to begin to thrive financially on its own and begin the expensive task of repairing the damage caused by past civic governments, and the more bizarre programs of the most recent ones, to a strong future.

Meanwhile, implementing a good future planning paradigm in the city council decision-making process will cast clarity upon areas of continued foolish budget expenditures, hodgepodge infrastructure enhancement, and unfocused development by evaluating the city's growth with the future as guidance.

This is just one of many innovative plans in a diverse group of current difficulties that could be implemented to manage various problems facing the city.

The unfortunate fact is that some resolutions are moved ever more distant by the mess our current misguided civic government makes larger each day due to its mistaken conviction that more infrastructure and more development is equivalent to a healthy city, and led by politicians whose defensive reaction to public complaints of inaction in a host of important areas is to pile on huge and expensive, but poorly thought out projects .

The fallacies are obvious to the informed observer . Not repairing our rivers, lakes and streams ignores the future of fresh water availability to the city. More of the existing styles of public transportation (adding 400 GO trains/day, building LRT Right-Of-Ways up the center of city rush-hour street routes) are not better, more efficient, or state of the art solutions to moving commuter populations. Not developing a regulatory facility to incorporate inverted uploading into the hydro system ignores potential electricity contribution from the community. Continually having to approach senior government to divert funds intended originally for other municipalities to cover our own inadequate income is a no-win situation for all involved. Placing seniors in drab hospital-like retirement institutions is ungrateful and behind-the-times. More garbage landfills are not better or more efficient ways of managing the city's waste disposal. So-called environmental plans that when more closely examined are not ecologically friendly (nickle shopping bags, CFL light bulbs, 1.6 litre flush toilets, etc.) just shows a bandwagon approach to environmental issue solutions. Looking at excellent advances in other international cityscapes and not paying attention to, or missing out somehow, the various manners in how they encourage 'less' rather than 'more' is indicative of addiction to a false idea of the components of progress being found in added infrastructure. Development without a cogent idea of where it's all going, just to be able to say, "we must be doing right, because we are doing more!", is irresponsible and wasteful.

Mark State

Elections: Where Voters' Fantasy Becomes A Reality

MarkState — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:17:39 CST

Or, How To Get Toronto Financially Back On Track !!

Welcome to my website.

I'm Mark State, and you've logged into

THE STATE OF OUR TORONTO.

Well, here you are, and you've chosen your Mayor. And you've made that choice based on his promises or ideas for fixing things up.

Good. The man you chose for the job was, fortunately for you, someone who is dedicated to reigning in the super-spending coalition in council.

Now, please just add this one small piece of reality to your support.

Just remember that:

After the Mayor is elected, he or she becomes a member of city council with one vote, same as all the other members of council

and can only accomplish reforms that are agreed-upon by a majority of the other elected representatives of the city
after a recorded vote in a council meeting
during which everyone may express their views
and vote according to them.

Can a Mayor --after presenting his/her great ideas to council-- with his or her one vote out of 45 (in Toronto we have 44 Councillors and one Mayor) be one-hundred per cent counted on to keep his/her promises, or to bring about the reforms he/she proposes when those reforms depend upon a majority of agreement by all members of council?

No! Of course not!

Nothing any Mayoralty candidate promises or proposes by way of making changes during an election campaign may be guaranteed, because anything that happens after the election depends on that Council vote; and when 45 people are voting for any changes or non-changes in the city, only the vote and not the candidate's promises will determine what happens.

Let's just say that your best chance to evaluate your new Mayor's performance is by examining his or her promises as good intentions as illustrated by what he would like to do rather than what he says he will actually do, because in all likelihood, actually doing it may prove to be a real challenge, and may not happen at all.

When choosing your champion candidate in any election, it is wise to stay away from someone who guarantees to keep promises they can't keep.

If after the election you change your mind about your formerly-favourite winning candidate because you believe his or her promises now seem pretty rash , it's too late to change your mind.

So, to prevent that catastrophe in future, do not choose your candidate because he or she promises certain things will happen if they get elected, because, in a very real sense, you are involved in a true-life contradiction.
You have chosen to face reality by picking the best fantasy.

For example, in the 2010 election,candidate Rossi told you he'll sell off hydro. It doesn't matter that Hydro Corporation is the former Toronto Hydro Commission and selling it off would be tantamount to selling off a part of the city's operation to private interests. Even if it were legal to sell-off parts of the city, he couldn't have done it unless a majority of the 45 councillors agreed to it and after that the provincial legislature, who originally created the Toronto Hydro Corporation to protect us from having it removed from our service agreed to the sale as well. When candidates Thompson and Smitherman told you they wanted to build billions of dollars worth of subways and charge automobile drivers a highway toll to pay for them. It doesn't matter whether the concept of charging one form of transit users exclusively for the benefit of another form of transit user makes any sense or not... they douldn't have done it unless council agreed to go ahead with the toll under the stress of hundreds of thousands of drivers that would be protesting loudly and bringing pressure to bear on their representatives in council to defeat the idea.
candidate Smitherman told you that he'd have completed Transit City for an additional 7 Billion dollars the city would then go into debt --for several generations-- to pay off with increased taxation. But in reality, he couldn't arbitrarily announce that the city would definitely have done it because his desire to go into those kind of deficit numbers depends upon the city council and what they would have wanted to do about it.
our new Mayor, Rob Ford told you that he'd cut the number of councillors on city council by half --in spite of the fact that in the preparation of the Toronto City Charter, the Ontario Legislature actually proposed that Toronto double the number of councillors to two per ward instead of just one in the 2010 election because elected councillors have typically been crushed under their workload and Ontario wanted them to be able to share it with an additional councillor in each riding. In addition to the negative (more difficulty in accessing one's representative directly due to the greater workload producing unavailability) effect of cutting the number of councillors available to serve residents of the city in half, Mayor Ford's plans are going to go for a vote before a new city council that, after they realize the implications of lessening the number of elected representatives on city council, is not going to be thrilled with the ideas of increased resulting workload, eliminating their own positions in an upcoming election, or reducing services to voters. In fact, any candidate can't just march into office and bingo! cut any numbers of anything he or she 'promises' they'll do. Election PROMISES all just hopeful nonsense and flim-flam, designed for the purpose of publicity; i.e., that --in Ford's case-- when you see a candidate desperately floundering about to find ways to cut costs, you'll think he's a really good guy to put in the Mayor's chair because he's cost-conscious without adding the floundering-about factor as a measure of how good a Mayor he might not actually turn out to be.

If you vote for any candidates based on promises they can't guarantee to keep in order to eliminate a deficit they can't eliminate with their proposals, the fantasy you're voting for is an impossibility and, sadly, just a sham.

This is not the entire story, however.

The Mayor is the most powerful member of City Council.

He is automatically a member of the board of directors of all city corporations and all standing committees, in most cases with the power to hire and fire any other member of either variety of city board or committee members.
He appoints the heads of all city departments in conjunction with the city Manager.
He runs the one committee whose responsibility is to choose elected politicians to head the city's departments, and commands the loyalty (and very often the votes) of those politicians, numbering about 25 out of the 45 on Council, who become his caucus.
This means that on any issue he requests to be put before Council, he has already discussed it with his caucus, who have voted to support it or not, and he walks into city council with an automatic majority vote.
The only thing the opposition to any of his proposed bills can do to fight them is to show really good arguments why they should not be passed. 99% of the time, the arguments are not good enough.

Be glad you got a Mayor who is strong enough to stay the course through mounting criticism organized by the spendthrift "left" faction on council. Although, had I been elected instead, I would have done things differently; taking a proactive rather than a reactive approach to the office.

As A Matter Of Curiosity, How Might I Have Conducted Myself In The Mayoralty?

I would have done my best --using the power of the Mayor's office-- to remedy various topics you can read or hear about throughout my various websites.

Made all initiatives that will benefit you and the city without driving up the deficit a priority after becoming Mayor.
Established a course of doing city business that would rid the city of its deficit and enable it to increase its income as a financial power base to serve citizens as they justly deserve to be served without unjustly raising taxes.

These are promises I could have kept. And I had some more.

I have consistently pointed out that the voters' chief concern for the 2010 election needed to be the removal of a crippling deficit the city has accumulated over the past 14 years. Just paying the$200 Million in carrying charges we taxpayers dump into that debt every year takes away our opportunity to improve and grow in a reasonable fashion. If our tax money goes to carrying charges on that deficit it can't be spent on needed city services.

As we accumulate more deficit to pay for things for which we don't have the money, that $200 Million carrying charge will balloon, and cause us to have to pay more taxes to cover the increased deficit.

I've also shown you quite clearly, and will repeat for you in this series of website essays why the deficit problem can NOT, sadly be fixed by my opponents' clever money-making schemes, and how they might be otherwise effectively addressed.

Most of those candidate promises would, truthfully, have added to our future financial woes for many years and may, in all likelihood, have never shown any real benefit. I make the analogy of the expressed vain promises other candidates have made with wild schemes to end or vastly reduce the deficit in a single blow, of woodpeckers cutting down a rotten tree. No woodpecker ever chopped down a rotten tree in a single peck; and that's true about removing the position of deficit finance the city lives under as well. Like the woodpecker, if we want to chop down the rotten tree, we just have to keep pecking away and pecking away at it until it comes down.

Conservative spending cuts,
Generating additional capital,
Making saving money a priority over spending it,
Getting rid of the deficit as a city-wide project with everybody getting on the deficit reduction team,

will get the job done without extra discomfort and without adding any additional taxes.

So now that I've completed reminiscing about what could-have-been, what proactive steps can city council begin taking to fix things up financially?

WHERE CAN WE BEGIN TO BEGIN REDUCING THE DEFICIT?

There are expensive things we do that maybe can be done less expensively, but we will all have to pull together to do them.

1. Planning. I want to influence city council to stop new spending we can't afford. Where essential new initiatives must be proposed, I would like them to meet two criteria:

can they be fashioned in such as way as to serve citizens of the city magnificently far into the future ? and if they will, then
how do we make the funds available for them without increasing the deficit? Are there trade-offs that will not rob Torontonians of the benefits due to them as taxpayers?

In other words with the agreement of council, new spending will be considered not from the point of view of growth, development, and expansion but rather from the narrower focus of direct benefit derived from it for the city. In other words, city council will be encouraged to re-assume its status as servant of the people rather than assuming as it currently does that the people are the servants of the city.

I also want the city to begin creating wealth for itself. Too long have we been battling with senior governments who are just as fiscally challenged as we for additional funding to cover projects we can not currently afford. Rather than handing new development over to others, the city needs to consider whether and how it can retain ownership of its building renewal projects so that it can become a landlord of a greater number of dwellings than it currently does. This will mean a reduction in the amount of money collected by the new development tax, but will be more than made up for in the value of the land being retained by the city, rents collected monthly, and city services installed gratis in the developments.

A means of making more money assisting entrepreneurs by partnering with them needs to be examined, as does the establishment of the city's own financial institution under existing securities and exchange commission guidelines. The establishment of a city financial institution credit card with strongly discounted buying power within the city limits, and the establishment of group-secured micro loans can be a part of that initiative. The city needs more parking space in the areas serviced by its business districts and it needs more entertainment venues...all of these can be additional sources of ownership income.

Until now, all advisory groups established by city hall have been created to find ways to spend money or to maintain the status-quo. A re-examination of current city funding of potentially unrewarding expenditure also needs to be undertaken by a group of knowledgeable citizenry on behalf of Toronto, and the city's official plan needs to be adjusted to reflect their recommendations.

2. Overtime. People employed by the city will have to try to accumulate less overtime. This would include things like restricting the writing of Activity Reports to Pay Period Time. I think we can save a great deal of money if such reports were to be completed during normal working hours only; and if they are not, then rather than paying overtime for them, an appropriate amount of time will be allotted each day for employees who must write reports in the normal course of their work. Employees who constantly seem to be using more time than deemed necessary to write reports during normal business shifts would be subject to review, as they would be in any non-governmental service sector or private business. Cutting back on work reports completed in overtime will also result in the cutting-back of extra make-work projects I have heard some employees embark upon just for the overtime.

3. More efficient use of Electronic Inter-connectivity. All city departments and public utilities companies will be interconnected with an intranet announcement system to be checked on a mandatory schedule to ensure that each department is aware of what the other departments are doing in case any activity impinges on more than one, and to save any unnecessary duplication of labour. My fourth cash-saving platform: "Road Construction" is an example of how this idea operates as a huge money-saving benefit to the city.

4. Road Construction. Currently, the gas company may dig up the street in a narrow line and fill it back in order to repair an existing pipeline or install new feed lines. Instead of checking the line for leaks before it is filled back, the gas line is buried first, then checked and re-dug up in case any leaks are detected. Within the next several years, the water line will be dug up and filled back. Instead of checking it for pressure capacity before reburying the new piping, the water department workers will bury the lines and then test them for integrity, digging them back up when and if they prove weak anywhere. Sometimes the sewage lines are old and need to be replaced or one sewage line exists for both rainwater runoff and sewage instead of the required two. In those instances, the sewage piping will be dug up, replaced, and the excavation filled back. Within the next 15 or 20 years, the hydro people will be moving some lines underground, and have to dig to install new conduit for them. Sidewalks will have to be repaired over time, necessitating the breaking of the street surface to install curbs and gutters.

All this activity amounts to more money in the pockets of construction companies, but it costs the taxpayer unnecessary dollars through unnecessarily repetitive labour. It costs businesses their livelihoods as streets are closed to allow for the digging. Public transit has to be disrupted several times over several years instead of just once in a predictable time period. A useful new policy would be: "One break, one dig, one job, one refill." This means that when a road is broken or removed for repair, I propose that every single department of the city and companies using below-grade conduits of any kind will be required via a new policy of public works to participate and to renew their underground and resurfacing facilities at that time alone; because if anyone --short of attending to an emergency-- has to re-dig into a completed street within 30 years, they will be required to compensate the city financially for impeding normal traffic through the area, businesses for business lost through the re-digging, and the TTC for re-routing service through the neighbourhood rather than changing the entire route as is currently done. So, when there is a new sewer line being installed, the gas, water, and hydro as well as sewage people had better be on the job installing new conduit . No matter that overhead wiring above street level may not scheduled by hydro to go below grade for some time: the conduits will be ready and waiting when that time arrives. And that work needs to be guaranteed. Re-cementing the underlay and repaving of streets and sidewalks at the same time should be done by bonded paving companies correctly the first time, and guaranteed for thirty years against cracking or crumbling surfaces. Their guarantee in the form of a performance bond will appear on their tendering documents as well as a contribution for voluntary service to the Metro Conservation Authority, which I'll discuss later. In order to avoid having to pay for re-digging, the gas, hydro, water, and sewer contractors will have to make certain that all residential connections are included in the work and no new connections before 30 years have passed will necessitate new digging before the end of the mandatory period.

Let's think into the future of snow removal. While re-paving is going on, an ethylene glycol heating array should be installed and paved in below the road and sidewalk surfaces. Its operating humidistat/thermostat combination would start the glycol warming and flowing instantly when snow or hail falls, using battery-powered circulating pumps recharged by small, silent helical wind generators located on the light posts. The result would obviate the need for shoveling the public sidewalk to make it safe for walking and for clearing city streets with snow removal equipment. Over time, the reduced need for snow melting lake and river-polluting salt and chemicals and sewage-system blocking sand, and the end of snow-clearing machinery consisting of a battalion of noisy, polluting gas powered vehicles and street-destroying ploughs, will pay for the materials and labour required to install the heating systems. The 30 year surface guarantee will protect the heating conduit from being damaged by cracking or the necessity of repaving. After 40 years, the city may begin awarding a points system of tendering meritoriousness to companies whose work meets or exceeds the guarantee period. This will ensure that experienced companies who produce quality workmanship will be given a competitive edge in the tendering process over those whose work in the past has proved --by visibly crumbling-- to be shoddy.

Until all public and private utilities services are co-ordinated this way, a committee of the various services will have to be set up to prioritize where the jobs will be commenced and in what order. Eventually, all concerned services will be able to work in a concerted effort without conflicting over where priorities are located. This may take some time.

Any business adversely affected by the street construction activity will be permitted to apply for tax relief by showing reduced income due to that activity prepared by a chartered accountant or notarized under the Ontario Evidence Act. In cases where a business loss is shown, a reduction in property tax will be given to the business as a relief proportional to the amount of business lost compared to the amount of business during the same period in the year prior to the claim. The claim must be made within six months after the date of opening the road closure to normal traffic flow.

When paving contractors tender for the 30-year guaranteed work, in addition to being bonded for the time guarantee, they will be required to donate personnel or construction equipment to the value of a fixed percentage of the contract to the Metro Region Conservation Authority. Those personnel and equipment will be used to clean and rehabilitate all natural city waterways from wellspring through to delta by permanently blocking all sewage line runoffs of any kind into them as those lines are replaced by runoff management piping into a restoration facility prior to runoff being introduced back into the wild, building walls along grazing lands abutting them, providing spillways, dams, digging logs, rip rap and Gabion baskets to reinforce their banks, removing their concrete ditches, replanting, reforesting, and restoring their banks and marshlands to the extent of the upper edges of their floodplains, dredging their deltas, and flushing them out, and providing pleasing human access to them. The city will partner with other concerned municipalities in this effort, because our natural waterways are an important part of the city's future, and will be the source ultimately of our drinking water.

5. Transit City. The currently proposed "Transit City" is a misnomer, since it does nothing at all to improve public transit in the city. Anyone who takes the trouble to read a commonly-available transit map will discover that all routes to be "improved" by the installation of new streetcar lines along reserved tracks down the center of certain rush hour routes (glorifyingly referred to as LRT, or light rail transit in ROW's or right-of ways) will immediately notice that the streets where the lines are to be installed are already very adequately served by bus and streetcar routes. The skeptical would discover if taking these routes that the most severe jamming of passengers like sardines in a can occurs in the subways and the streetcars, where relief can be provided by adding just a few more vehicles --in this case, buses-- as could be done along the much less crowded bus routes being targeted for the mis-named 'Transit City'. Moreover, since 2006, all diesel buses have begun to be phased out and replaced by hybrid diesel-electric buses whose pollution carbon footprint is a fraction of the diesels; and bus motivation research (including Bombardier's) is currently developing totally electric battery-run vehicles, so the idea that the new LRT lines will be far more pollution free lacks substance.

Toronto does need a Transit City, but one that serves the riding public by making sure that they have adequate service within one or two blocks no matter where they live and that they don't have to wait in the heat or the cold longer than 10 minutes to get a ride.

This means adding some buses onto existing lines, getting rid of streetcars and replacing them with buses that don't get held up if the one in front is stopped and that don't hold up traffic while passengers get on an off and let passengers on and off safely at the curb. Of course streetcars hold more passengers than buses, but that's a red herring. One streetcar doesn't hold more passengers than an extended bus or a double-decker bus, or two buses that run twice as frequently and are more reliable mechanically and easier to repair with aftermarket parts. Streetcars can't go into the side streets after passengers. Streetcars can't do express service runs. Streetcars can't be downsized to accommodate service routes that have fewer passengers using them. Transit City --a real transit city-- won't cost billions of dollars to install, dig up streets and cause businesses to lose custom through lack of parking caused by ROW's and street close-downs while they're being built. A real Transit City will end up serving everyone with great service, keep the roads shared by all kinds of traffic, and cost a small fraction of the proposed phony project.

The problem with the phony 'Transit City' is not just that it doesn't serve to improve Toronto transit service in any way. The major problem with it is its cost. For certain, the cost of installing unnecessary streetcar ROWs down our rush hour routes is going to be a
minimum of 2 Billion dollars; and quite likely to require $7-to-10 Billion to complete. That's only the cost to our city. The province will kick in at least that much again because it is funding the part of Metrolinx that lies outside the city proper, and the phony Transit City is just a misguided version of its in-town component's makeup, composed without taking a careful look at the alternatives.

6. Begin eliminating the debt deficit. Neither the city nor the province has the ready cash to spend on new ventures. Does this worry them? No, because both practice a form of economics called "deficit financing". In its simplest terms, deficit financing means borrowing the money to cover the costs of something you want but can't afford, and paying interest to the lender over time. The lender often doesn't care to recover the principle of the loan so long as it's well secured by the borrowing city, province, or nation, so long as the interest continues to be paid. At any time, the borrower may decide to pay off the loan or keep paying interest instead --which is usually low when the loans get very large-- but until it decides to pay off the loan, the interest is a ready flow of good cash to the lender and the longer this flow of cash continues the better as far as the lender is concerned.

Keeping in mind that the costs for running the city, some 9.2 Billion dollars annually, doesn't really diminish all that much, how does the deficit get paid back? Up until now, where have the city and the province been finding money they didn't previously have so that over and above the cost of running normal business they can also pay back their deficit loans?

Silly question. Of course, it's done by additional taxation. Nowadays, increased property taxes, the car tax, land transfer tax, the property development tax, the billboard tax, the garbage bag tax, increased TTC fare and metropass ridership costs, harmonized sales tax & GST, TIA, recently removed eco Tax, increased Hydro rates are recent additional taxation sucking money out of your pocket to pay for bad fiscal decisions. Additional gas taxes, tobacco taxes, tax on admission to places of amusement (sporting events, theatres, fairs, cultural celebrations, galleries, golf and other recreational pay-as-you-go pastimes, and circuses) and alcohol taxes (including beer) are within the city's power to levy, so you can expect those taxes to be instituted in future . And, of course, $200 Million of that already heavy taxation is directed annually towards carrying the deficit, which stands today at about 3 Billion dollars. Think about it. When the grandiose and totally unnecessary phony Transit City scheme becomes fully funded, the carrying charges will triple to meet the new size of the tripled deficit, and so will the taxation with which to pay them. That kind of deficit and that kind of increasing taxation will continue to be paid by your children and your grandchildren if you are of voting age today. Meanwhile, the city's streets will continue to remain in rough shape with people who have no place to live sleeping on them, and half the community centers and swimming pools will remain closed. Is closing swimming pools a serious matter? Not unless you have lost family members to a drowning who could otherwise have been saved by swimming lessons, and not unless swimming or aqua-fit is your preferred way to recover from injury or stay in shape, and not unless you don't care to learn scuba diving, kayaking, synchronized swimming, boating or lifesaving skills. Recently, the city appointed one of its cleverest and most adroit former Mayors, David Crombie, to head a committee established to find a way to keep swimming pools open. They couldn't do it because there is no money available. Yet the city is committed to spending $200 Million a year to fund a deficit it is bound to increase to build a brand-new streetcar line it doesn't need.

Rather than embarking on such an expensive course, I think Toronto would be better off creating a genuine Transit City, and not going into a debt that will be as much as our entire city budget today. It's important to note that such a debt would make our operating budget-to-deficit ratio 1:1, or about 100%. There are no words to express the insanity of such a move.

7. Citizen participation. One day a year, the Mayor throws a big cleanup party. The rest of the year, people throw their gum on the floors of the TTC stations and the sidewalks all over the city.

How may this be stopped?

Does the city have the power to ban chewing gum sales within city limits? Or to impose sever taxation on gum purchases? After all, a precedent has been set by charging for plastic bags in the supermarkets to prevent pollution. Perhaps the gum manufacturers would like to avoid the city investigating such a possibility by providing Toronto with liquid nitrogen spray equipment and gum scrapers, and specially designed gum disposal baskets. Then, combined with a harshly enforced bylaw against littering, vandals making the gum mess might be stopped. Like the groups who adopt highways and keep them clean, various groups in the city might be interested in adopting a subway station and keeping it gum free in return for having their name as publicity all over the station, even renaming it temporarily for the adoptive group as some major theaters do for their sponsors. An adoptive group might even wish to re-design and renovate its station, which would be fine with me because a great many of the stations are in disrepair, and even if the city paid for materials to do the renovations, the volunteer group would provide the organization and free labour to do the job --assisted, where necessary, by TTC skilled professionals.

Toronto spends large amounts of money each year on planting annuals on the boulevards and planters beside the roadways throughout the city, and on city employees and contractors who do the gardening and maintenance. Meanwhile, there are civic garden groups who tend gardens in the city's parks because they live in the neighbourhood, want their environment to be beautiful, and enjoy gardening. All annual plants need to be replaced with perennials in order to save money spent on both new planting and also on removal of the annuals at the end of the growing season. Interested civic groups could adopt gardens throughout the city, design and plant them with expert city help wherever needed, and hold a competition at the end of the year with cash awards granted to the most impressive groups. Cash awards, new perennials, organization and all, the city will make money on this project from the start, and the amount of money it saves will grow every year.

If the city embarks on a Toronto beautification project, with tax relief given to home owners who beautify their homes with trees and gardens, it will over time become quite a beautiful place to live. I hope that people who live in places that are beautiful tend to be prouder of those places and less likely to destroy their beauty through deliberate vandalism and pollution that currently costs the city an unnecessary expense. People who visit the city will be more encouraged to establish their own homes here. Who wouldn't prefer to live in a city of beauty compared to a city of squalor and unimprovement?

In summation of this series, I have given you three promises I can keep if you choose me as your new Mayor; and what you have been hearing are seven of my ideas for reducing and eventually eliminating our $3 Billion deficit altogether.

Accomplishing any of those ideas will take partnership from the new city council, from you all working towards making Toronto into a beautiful city as it becomes a financial powerhouse, and from the city's business associates. Hopefully, those associates might go along with what I think are commonsense moves for the city, but the real truth is that I don't know for certain how much they will understand that it's all about cutting back spending wherever that spending is unnecessary.

If it wasn't about saving a city drowning in deficit overload, it might not pay to try to make any changes in the existing agreement, for example, withBombardier and the Ontario Government to step back from streetcar orders that were contracted for in 2009. It's a cinch that if some reaching out to their corporation to honour whatever part of the contract has already been honoured by them is not made, and they are not persuaded that it is in the best interests of the city to rewrite that contract we'll have to accept delivery of all 204 of the beasts or end up being the focus of a lawsuit. All we have to offer these business partners in return is accepting delivery of already-started production vehicles and guaranteeing performance of the remainder of the contract in the production of some other kinds of new vehicles to replace the proposed big ungainly streetcar LRT before too many of them are made. Our deal would be as fairly as possible to cover the expenses already laid out by them and to divert the remainder of those funds to other more sensible and money-saving expenditures.

We learned that stopping a deal in mid-performance and not offering compensation ends up costing us dearly when the federal government was successfully sued for $35 Million to cover the costs of the construction companies who did not build the island airport bridge that David Miller claimed would cost us nothing to stop.

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