Subways and Spending Cuts....

It has taken the media, and his opponents both within city council and outside of it, all of about a year to help create the image of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford as that of a fat ogre, intent on forcing budgetary cuts (that no one seems to comprehend are needed) to keep the city functioning without going into severe debt. There have been continuous jests aimed towards his weight and his politics over the last 14 months that in some ways, many people don't even take him seriously anymore.

Even now as he continues to try and steer the City of Toronto into a mass transit plan that would bring the city into the 21st century (and beyond), there are countless opponents who can't grasp the concept he is trying to bring into reality; we need SUBWAYS not Light Rail Transit!

In his most recent post for the Globe and Mail, Rob Ford expressed the exact same sentiment (as you can see here http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/a-better-way-to-retool-torontos-ailing-ttc/article2346836/ ). Toronto and the surrounding area deserves better then just a stop gap measure to help our ailing infrastructure and mass transit system. Despite his conservative leanings with regards to his fiscal policy, the fact that Mayor Ford is trying to have the TTC modernize and build more subways (a costly venture to be sure) shows that the man is a progressive thinker. I have already stated the case for subways in a previous blog but let me reiterate one major point; We will never be a World Class City until we have a real mass transit system that connects and moves people smoothly and efficiently. Stop focusing so much on the messenger and focus on the MESSAGE instead!!!!

Still along these lines, the Ontario Government had an independent report released this week with regards to "suggestions" to help make the necessary cuts and adjustments to the 2012 Ontario Budget. I understand the need to have someone with a background in Economics do the report but the man they hired to do this report, a Mr. Don Drummond, was the former head of TD Bank. The only thing he was ever going to do when it came to its content was to look at cold, hard numbers and go from there.

Logically, some of his recommendations make sense, such as having full day kindergarten delayed before being fully implemented so as to save costs, increasing some class sizes in high schools (which had dropped from around 30 when I was in high school to around 24 nowadays) to 26.5 on average. But some of them reek of nothing more then someone who worked in the banking industry and would rather make one person do 10 things then hire a 2nd person and split those same 10 items in half. His suggestion to cut EA's (Education assistance) and other support staff by over 70% tells more about the man and what he values then anything else.

Anyone who knows a teacher knows that if anything, they need MORE staff, not less. Kids today are pretty much a mess. We bombard them with so many different forms of stimuli and mixed messages about them, their families, our environment, gender roles, etc, that they come to school and really don't have a clue what to think. Some are so messed up that they start displaying different syndromes which only leads to more problems both for them and the other kids around them as they take away from the ability of a teacher to educate all the children in their class appropriately. When you add to that the fact that Mr. Drummond is suggesting that there is a need to both increase classroom size and remove support staff, he is following the same banking model he instituted while at TD Bank; who cares about the teacher, make them do more and work harder then they already do with less support. Typical banker.

Still with bankers, have you ever noticed how the Bank of Canada is the one that comes out and says things like there may be a housing market bubble or how they say (like today) that we are still having way too much debt accumulation as individuals and as households. You never hear one of our major banks come out and say either of those things or support either of those ideas, quite the opposite in fact when it comes to the housing market. They will NEVER come out and say that there may be a housing market bubble as that would cut right into the heart of their main market; mortgages and their combined value and worth.

While we will never have the kind of housing market crash like we saw happen in the US, the simple idea of a housing market bubble will never be tolerated by any of the banks and will always be refuted because of the simple fact that as prices for homes continue to rise disproportionately to the amount of income each of us earns (except for CEO's of big businesses all over the country of course, who are still earning WAAAAAY more then they should), the need for people to "keep up with the Joneses" means that families will continue to plunge themselves further and further into mortgage debt to own that larger home, that newer car, that 80 inch 3D Plasma TV. You get the point.

They create goals and targets for their employees (both in branches and in their call centers) around (almost) force feeding customers with their products at every turn be it credit cards, mortgages, investments, you name it. They will never back the Bank of Canada's assertion of Canadian households overreaching with regards to having too much debt because just like an addict needs a dealer to supply them, the banks are our credit  "Dealers", insisting that there isn't a problem and trying to get people to move along to something else by insisting that there is "nothing to see here" with regards to this concept.

If Canadians drop their total debt ratios, that cuts a huge amount of profit out of the pockets of the big banks and their CEO's who earn millions of dollars a year (while their staff has to fight it out for the scraps left over). Which leads me to my final point today; There should be a new tax bracket created just for CEO's who earn ANYTHING over $100,000 a year which would see them pay a 65% tax on every dollar they earn over the $100,000 base salary. They are getting paid an exorbitant amount of money and, to be blunt, the vast majority of them don't deserve it.

The heads of all our major banks combined earned over $12 million last year...JUST IN BONUSES!! The heads of the biggest hospitals in the GTA all make well over $750,000 a year at a time when they are laying off nurses (despite DESPERATELY NEEDING THEM) who earn no more then $35,000 a year. The head of one of the local community living residence programs in Ontario (a non-profit organization dedicated to helping the mentally and physically disabled) is the richest woman in her city and earns well over $100,000 a year while the program she is in charge of struggles to make ends meet and has (in some cases) 1 manager for up to 3 facilities (all poorly run by these middling middle managers with facilities that are in need of more funding).

How is it possible that a non-profit organization actually pays someone $100,000 to head their organization when there are funding shortages just about everywhere else within the organization? And they wonder why they have issues with keeping their staff happy and working for them without burning them out.

So many issues, so little time.

Until next time....