Tory wins, Mammoliti out, little changes -- Toronto's election brings neo-liberal continuity

After the drama of Doug Ford's undemocratic downsizing of Toronto City Council mid-election, the new, smaller results represent neo-liberal continuity. Very little of any fundamental significance has changed.

John Tory won a landslide victory over his main opponent, Jennifer Keesmaat, which is unsurprising given that there was almost nothing that separated them. Disappointingly, neo-fascist candidate Faith Goldy garnered more votes than leftist candidate Saron Gebresellassi, though neither broke 3.5% of the vote.

Meanwhile, council races were a mixed bag.

Michael Ford's result in Ward 1 has to have been uncomfortably close for his uncle given all the political resources he invested in it. A loss would have been politically catastrophic for him though it did not happen. Ford beat another reactionary Vincent Crisanti by almost eight percent of the vote.

In a silver lining Giorgio Mammoliti, who ran a disgraceful, dog-whistle campaign and who has been a disruptive far right presence on council for all too long, went down to a richly deserved defeat. He lost to Anthony Perruzza by nearly 12 points. This was, at least, a minor setback for Ford style bombastic stupidity at City Hall.

Many of council's "progressive" establishment "heavyweights" have been returned for what that is worth.  Family heritage crew Mike Layton and Joe Cressy are still there, as are centrists like Kristyn Wong-Tam. Gord Perks won easily in Ward 4 which is a positive given that he is likely the sole Councillor that can honestly be described as a leftist. Labour Council endorsed (surprise, surprise) Paula Fletcher defeated fellow progressive Mary Fragedakis whose personal connections were perhaps not quite as close.

In a fascinating example of the paucity of politics now, Josh Matlow -- a liberal notable largely for his fierce and correct resistance to Tory's inane Scarborough subway plans -- handily defeated the supposed New Democrat Joe Mihevc in Ward 12 by over 10 points. Mihevc might be remembered by The Left Chapter readers for his relentless nonsense about alleged TTC fare evasion and his musings on making sure kids get on the Presto train. He also, in what was a truly cynical and telling move, asked for John Tory's endorsement and received it. It likely, and deservedly, did more harm than good.

Deeply ironically Labour Council endorsed Jennifer Keesmaat ganged up with John Tory to back Brad Bradford over Labour Council endorsed former NDP MP Matthew Kellway in Ward 19. Bradford won. Sadly, I doubt this will cause the Labour Council to reflect on its pattern of often terrible, short-sighted decisions.

Overall, despite the hyperbole and the Ford machinations, the results indicate continuity. They do not appear to show any shift significantly to the right or ideologically otherwise at all. In fact, only 12 of 25 candidates endorsed by Doug Ford's de facto official organ the Toronto Sun won. The composition and balance of power between what passes as a left, the centrists and the right remains largely the same.

The lack of an organized socialist civic movement, though, is as glaring as its consequences are telling.

The council also continues to lack anything remotely like the diversity of the city it supposedly represents.

With this council we can anticipate little serious or significant resistance to the Ford provincial agenda municipally. When understood within the broader politics of disillusion in Ontario, it is clear that any fightback will have to be organized outside of and in spite of existing mainstream electoral channels.

See also: Ontario’s 2018 Election: Pessimism Today, Strategic Organizing Tomorrow

John Tory's austerity regime triumphs in latest Toronto budget

Toronto Mayor John Tory's austerity budget passed Wednesday night after a variety of attempts to soften its impact or to increase property taxes above the rate of inflation failed.

This is a budget that is part of a broader austerity agenda and a larger pattern that prioritizes the better off, drivers and homeowners over people living in poverty, tenants, transit users, community housing, community programs and making Toronto a fairer and better place to live for everyone, and that does so in some pretty obvious ways.

Tory and most of council's obsession with keeping residential property tax increases at the rate of inflation continued to much detrimental effect. In fact this longstanding history in the post-amalgamation city of tying property tax increases to inflation or freezing them altogether -- as happened at some points under both Mel Lastman and Rob Ford -- has lead to the increasingly grotesque divergence in increases in these property taxes versus the increase in tolls and user fees of various kinds like TTC fares.

For example, while inflation in Ontario between 2006 and 2016 was 17.65% the cost of a TTC monthly Metropass increased by over 40%. During this entire period increases in the residential tax rate, with the exception of one year, remained either close to or below the rate of inflation. In 2011 they were frozen altogether.

User fee rates for garbage containers, water, community programs, etc, have also seen dramatic increases.

In the 2015 budget, which was supported by all of Toronto City Council's nominally progressive Councillors, this capping of residential tax rates at the rate of inflation led to the annual cost of a Metropass increasing more than annual taxes did for the average homeowner in absolute dollar terms! 

Showing a little more fortitude this time around council's left, led by Parkdale Councillor Gord Perks on this front, tried to push for bigger residential property tax increases but failed:

Councillor Gord Perks, who has long argued that residents can afford to pay more to help the city’s most vulnerable, put forward a 4.26 per cent increase. That motion failed 10-32.
“What I am proposing is that we ask those people in the city of Toronto who have the most wealth to put more money back into the system and the reason I want to do that is so that we can afford the programs that help the people who truly are struggling to live in the City of Toronto,” Perks told his colleagues on the council floor.
His motion would have meant the average homeowner would see their taxes increase by $152.50 this year instead of the approved $90.

Notably his motion was opposed by the new darling of the NDP wing of council -- whose victory was celebrated by Councillors like Mike Layton and others -- Neethan Shan who ran in part on the not terribly progressive platform of towing Tory's line on taxes and supporting the Scarborough subway boondoggle. Likely to appease his alleged allies Shan did, in the end, vote against the budget as a whole despite this, which makes his position on residential property taxes basically incoherent.

The fact is there is no path towards actually building a broad progressive platform around transit, housing, community and social programs without above inflation property tax increases in the present context given what City Council can actually do to raise revenues in a serious way

As the Torontoist pointed out in a detailed article on the subject in 2014, residential property taxes in Toronto (and elsewhere in Ontario) are not, actually, tied directly to the value of an individual property and how it increases or declines in the way most people think. They are tied to the value of any individual property versus everyone else's property set against the municipal average.

If a given residential property increases in value at the same rate as other properties in the city its property taxes will remain the same unless the city raises the overall property tax rate generally.

Ontario's Municipal Property Assessment Corporation, who are responsible for working out the municipal property taxes owed in every municipality in the province, has a handy short video (which apparently almost no one has watched), explaining this:




This is a key point which many people, including Councillors, either do not seem to grasp or do not understand the implications of. Property taxes in Toronto are ultimately revenue neutral over time -- and are based on the total revenue Toronto needs to raise relative to the total number of paying households relative to each other's value relative to non-residential property tax revenue -- unless council increases the general rate overall to fund new expenditures/programs/costs which is part of the reason that raising property taxes at the rate of inflation if Councillors want to expand overall expenditure is a no starter and that freezing them is disastrous.

It will inevitably mean that city council will have to either increase user fees or other taxes/fees of one kind or another, or that it will have to make cutbacks and start down the path towards austerity as Tory did with his cookie cutter idiocy demanding that every city department trim an identical 2.6% from their budgets. If the city wants to increase or expand programs, to create new infrastructure, or even to maintain what it has given expanding population and needs it cannot be done by keeping residential property taxes at the rate of inflation. Period.

It is simply not possible and it is crucial to understand this when discussing property taxes in Toronto.

All talk of gigantic new downtown parks, vastly improving transit, truly dealing with the crisis in community housing, and so on is pure fantasy otherwise.

Both Rob Ford and John Tory have de facto admitted this with the special and supposedly temporary property tax levies that have been put in place to fund things like the Scarborough subway.

And while shelter workers were cut and while community program user fees will rise above the rate of inflation the city will spend hundred of millions of dollars to keep the eastern extension of the Gardiner Expressway in place entirely toll free thanks to the political cowardice of the Wynne provincial government which wants Toronto to continue to be exclusively responsible for paying to maintain this infrastructure without being allowed to decide how to, while drivers in regional municipalities who do not contribute to Toronto's revenues get to freeload when they use them!

But keeping the Gardiner in place still remains a decision that Toronto politicians made and, as Desmond Cole pointed out in the Toronto Star, specifically about the lack of commitment to housing,:

...when the voters who put Tory in office want costly roads and subways, he goes to the bank. Tory is right to say the property tax base was never meant to fund housing, and that Queen’s Park and Ottawa aren’t paying close to their respective shares. But these governments use Tory’s rhetoric against him. They similarly claim a responsibility to fuel prosperity by keeping taxes low, even if people are thrown from subsidized housing as a result.
Metro columnist and city budget enthusiast Matt Elliott told me bluntly this week, “I don’t have any time for politicians at city council who say the city is broke.” Elliott pointed to debt-financing for transit and roads as proof the city is choosing some investments over others. “The money is there if they want it to be, it just comes with trade-offs,” said Elliott.

This is true, of course, though it is also linked with a terribly destructive notion that the goal of government on all levels is to somehow keep life "affordable", a goal that actually applies only to some and that actually makes life less "affordable" or even less basically livable for others.

For when these politicians talk about "affordable" they are not talking about transit users, tenants (who end up paying via their rent for the much higher property tax rates on apartment buildings)  or those who rely on community services or social programs, they are talking about middle, upper-middle and upper class homeowners and car drivers who actually benefit almost exclusively and massively disproportionately from these policies to the detriment of those who truly need government to intervene in the economy, in the building of public infrastructure and in society on their behalf.

And that is a fundamental travesty that is a basic feature of neo-liberal economics and taxation policies.

See also: What is with all the Ontario left ranting about road tolls and Toronto 'elites'?

See also: Full austerity jacket -- The gloves come off in Tory's Toronto

See also: 42-2: John Tory, Toronto City Council and the austerity consensus

42-2: John Tory, Toronto City Council and the austerity consensus

Remember how, during last year's municipal election in Toronto, supporters of Olivia Chow and progressive activists and organizations warned that John Tory, were he to be elected as Mayor of Toronto, would simply be a more effective version of Rob Ford?

How we were told his agenda would represent the Ford agenda without the antics, drugs and buffoonery?

This position was expressed in many forums, from articles, to blogs, to countless online comments. A good example of it can be found in a newsletter article put out by the Toronto and York District Labour Council entitled  WHAT’S AT STAKE IN OCTOBER 2014. In it they stated:

The challenge this fall is to make sure people identify this election as a referendum on the austerity agenda. The fact is there are two Conservative candidates [Tory and Ford] whose politics line up with Stephen Harper and Tim Hudak. On the other side is the progressive choice of Olivia Chow

After pointing out that much of what prevented Ford from getting his agenda implemented was his inability to work with other members of council, they went on to say:

John Tory, on the other hand, would be able to cobble together the votes to pursue an agenda favoured by Bay Street – including privatization and outsourcing. His endorsers include antilabour heavyweights such as Case Ootes, Ford’s former campaign manager Nick Kouvalis, and a smattering of Liberals among a solid core of Conservatives. If Tory were elected, it would boost the political fortunes of both the provincial and federal Conservatives, and be a real step backward for the people of Toronto.

I think there is a lot of truth to this position (although many of Chow's online partisans frequently would predictably overstate their case) and said as much when interviewed by the Toronto Star during the election in an article in which I said people should reject strategic voting (though not necessarily support Chow).

There is, without any doubt an austerity agenda at work at Toronto City Hall, and Tory's politics embody that agenda.

And yet, when Tory's first budget recently was presented to council, it was passed by a vote of 42-2.

The two dissenting votes on the budget on council were from Rob Ford and Giorgio Mammoliti, who are firmly on the council's far right. The other 42 votes were "cobbled" together, in the end rather easily, from across the alleged political "spectrum", encompassing those seen as on the right like Denzil Minnan-Wong, and those perceived as on the left like Mike Layton.

Every single Councillor endorsed by the very same Labour Council whose newsletter was quoted above, voted for Tory's budget.

Every single Councillor associated with the Liberals or NDP (technically there are no parties in Toronto politics) voted for Tory's budget.

All the electoral rhetoric aside about how catastrophic Tory's agenda would be for the city, its labour movement, workers, those living in poverty and so many others, Tory's budget faced no serious opposition from the left or from "progressive" Councillors.

While the budget (this time) is not as terrible as some might have anticipated, it remains a budget firmly rooted in austerity and right-wing premises. For example, it contains an annual property tax increase on the average Toronto home of only $83,  a figure that is lower than the recent $93 annual TTC Metropass fare increase for transit users, which is a truly telling and shocking fact.

While some Councillors did call for higher tax hikes in the lead up to the budget, opposition to the fundamental premises of Tory's budget would be most kindly described as muted at best and perhaps more accurately described as basically non-existent.

There were no calls to scrap the fundamentals of the austerity, anti-tax, pro-car framework that this budget exists in. No calls for anything like, for example, ending user fees for city programs, for placing surtaxes on the homes of the wealthy or for the implementation of a truly progressive municipal income tax or for any number of other more transformative ideas that leftists once advocated for.

In other words, there was no significant and vocal opposition from what the public would see as a left perspective.

Ralph Miliband, the great British Marxist thinker, once wrote, in a quote I frequently cite, that "one of the most important aspects of the political life of advanced capitalism is precisely that the disagreements between those political leaders who have generally been able to gain high office have very seldom been of the fundamental kind these leaders and other people so often suggest".

This is more true now than when he wrote it in 1973.

This fetishistic desire in Toronto politics (as well as, in different ways, more broadly in Canadian politics) for "consensus" and the idealization of the false god ideal that politicians should somehow "work together" to get "things done"  both ensures that the administration of bourgeois, day-to-day austerity politics will continue as a given and is ultimately self-defeating for the left and progressives especially.

A lack of vocal and consistent opposition to Tory from the start of his term has already begun to cede the ground, again, to Ford positioning himself as the lone voice against the political establishment and as, therefore, the populist representative of the "common people". He was seen as such by many whose class and economic interests he actually actively worked against.

By embracing both the framework and, as I have argued in the past, the language and logic of the austerity consensus, "mainstream" left politicians help to enable this. They are widely perceived, and not without justification, as a part of a political establishment that many people feel is very distant from and unconcerned with their day-to-day struggles and realities. This situation explains why, again as Miliband put it, "large numbers of people among the public at large, despite the political rhetoric to which they are subjected, recognize...‘politicians are all the same’".

This reality of often active collaboration between the mainstream left and the right in the administration of austerity, neo-liberal and bourgeois government, as well as the acceptance of all of the essential elements of capitalism and capitalist "parliamentarianism" as a given and fundamentally unalterable reality, highlights, more than ever, the need to build new and truly anti-capitalist left political forces and parties.

These could include, for example, a Left Front municipally in Toronto, and would, as other movements and parties are doing in Europe and elsewhere, reject the austerity consensus and neo-liberal politics entirely and work actively and vocally in opposition to them both during elections and if elected.