Olivia Chow wants to be your kids' role model

Chow demonstrating with Islamist hatemonger and antisemitic al Quds Day organizer Zafar Bangash

NDP MP Olivia Chow has been making the rounds pushing her memoirs and in an effort to boost sales, is coyly hinting about her widely presumed entry into Toronto's 2014 mayoral race.

Part of the purpose of Chow's tedious exercise in narcissism, titled My Journey, is to whitewash her past with some revisionist history.

As The Globe and Mail reports:  

Ms. Chow also tries to clear the air on the accusations that she and Mr. Layton lived in subsidized units when they both had apartments in a downtown Toronto co-op housing building before and after they were married.

“Both Jack and I paid full market rent for our apartments,” she writes, later adding, “The self-appointed lynch mob sought to destroy the safe haven Jack and I sought not just for our family but for the community. To this day, the slander is repeated by people who mistakenly believed it at the time – as well as by opponents who know better.”

Since Ms Chow is claiming it's "slander" to accuse her and her husband, who were making a combined annual income of almost $150,000 of exploiting taxpayers and abusing their position by helping themselves to subsidized housing, then she may want to take issue with the official record of the Legislature of Ontario.

According to Hansard (the Legislature's official transcripts), a 1998 exchange between Provincial Housing Minister Al Leach and MPP's Rosario Marchese, Terence Young, and John Gerretsen went as follows:

Mr Young: In New York City today, I'm sure you're aware, Minister -- I don't know if the committee members are aware -- there are rental control units occupied by wealthy movie stars, $2,000 a month or whatever. We've seen a situation here where two Toronto councillors with the combined income of I think over $130,000 to $140,000 a year were both living in government-assisted housing. How do we prevent wealthy people from living in housing subsidized by their fellow taxpayers and just get money to the people who have the need?

Mr Marchese: They were paying market value, Terry.

Mr Gerretsen: Those people were paying market value.

Hon Mr Leach: I'm aware of the councillors in question. I understand that they are no longer living there but they were paying market value. But as I pointed out earlier, the market value that was charged to a co-op was about $900 a month where the actual cost of operating the unit was $1,200 a month, so that people who claimed that they were paying market value were still getting a substantial subsidy from the taxpayers of Ontario. There is no doubt about that whatsoever. I believe that the individuals you are talking about, who will go nameless, are no longer in that circumstance.

Mr Marchese: Would that be Jack Layton and Olivia Chow?

Hon Mr Leach: I think if you look around the city of Toronto council, you might find that there are still a couple who are living in co-op housing units.

Mr Marchese: I used to live in one too.

Hon Mr Leach: It's a good concept as long as you pay your full share. If you want to pay $1,200 a month, which is the actual operating cost, be my guest, but don't live in a co-op saying you're paying market rent of $900 when it costs $1,200 to operate and you're getting a subsidy of $300 from the taxpayers of Ontario.

When asked about Toronto's current mayor, Chow's pat line, which she has repeated in a number of interviews, is that she doesn't 'think Rob Ford is a very good role model for the kids.'

Oh. So is that what we elect our mayors to do, be role models for 8 year olds?

Actually, 'a role model for the kids'  isn't a consideration when I cast a vote. I want a politician who tries to keep election promises and takes the use of public expenditures and the wishes of constituents very seriously. As long as he or she is doing a good job representing my interests, as far as a politician's personal life goes, as the expression goes, I couldn't give a toss.

If being a role model is the case, then one could as easily question the value of the leadership of a dopey pothead who only got his job because he has a famous last name. Or that of a pompous liar who frequented hand job parlors.

Ms Chow's repeated criticism of Ford's adequacy as a role model suggests she thinks that she would make a suitable substitute in that department.

There probably aren't a lot of people who would want someone for a role model who is a rich person who shrilly accuses people of "slander" for calling her out for milking taxpayers for $300 a month.

For that matter, I'm not sure how someone who has spent almost all her adult life in the public trough as a professional politician, with no notable political achievement to her name other than being the junior partner in a political marriage, qualifies as a role model. But you wouldn't know that from the way the liberal media fawns over Ms. Chow.

While they were both MP's Jack Layton and Olivia Chow could be described as Mr. & Mrs. Gravy Train. The pair of them charged over $1.1 million per year to Canadian taxpayers in expenses alone so they could maintain their lavish lifestyle.

Rob Ford has voluntarily returned his salary increases back to the City each year and cut his own office budget and expenses. Considering that, Olivia Chow may want to stop using her "role model" line, because upon closer examination, compared to Rob Ford, she may not do too well in that area either.

h/t Sanwin

Toronto District School Board officially gives you all the finger

Senior staff at the Toronto District School Board received $1.29 million in salary increases despite a wage freeze between March 2010 and August 2013, according to a forensic audit released by the province Tuesday.

The improper raises, as well as unapproved contracts and misspent funds, were contained in a damning audit conducted by Ernst and Young LLP.

Some of the key findings: 

Wages for senior staff and supervisors paid in excess of the wage freeze for the period between March 2010 to August 2013.

Under procurement, 45 per cent of 20 sample transactions reviewed did not use a competitive bid process; almost half of those did not meet the approval requirements.

79 per cent of the transactions reviewed in the director’s office expenses did not use a competitive bid process.

Potentially ineligible trustee expenses, including a duplicate reimbursement for home internet charges, purchase of a tablet computer for over $100 more than what is allowed, and hotel expenses for a one-night stay in a downtown Toronto hotel.

$3.2 million in education programs spending may not have “been used in accordance” with ministry guidelines.

More at CTV NEWS 

h/t Robyn Urback & Melissa Schultz

Democracy doesn't seem to exist in Ontario anymore

TORONTO - Witness 73 testified at the committee probing the gas plants cancellations Tuesday.

If that sounds a tad Orwellian, it’s nothing compared to the perversion of democracy that’s happened in this province.

Witness 73 is Premier Kathleen Wynne, who returned for a second time to tell the committee she knew nothing, and was not briefed before she signed a “walk-around” order cancelling the Mississauga gas plant in October 2011.

You thought you elected a government to make rational decisions?

h/t Marvin W

The tree that was killed so you could read a Toronto Star editorial was smarter than the person who wrote it

By producing oxygen, the trees killed to produce print copies of The Toronto Star contribute far more to society than the nitwits who currently write editorials for that egregiously biased newspaper.

Apparently the trees are also more intelligent.

In The Huffington Post, Mitch Wolfe rips apart al Starzeera's latest display of idiocy in which they try to compare the Wynne/McGuinty Liberal government's cancellation of much-needed Gas Plants for political purposes to Ford's cancellation of the unwanted LRT in order to get a much-needed subway extension in Scarborough.

The most ironic part of the al Starzeera editorial is the way in which the tax-and-spend socialists who head up that rag have miraculously transformed into fiscal conservatives when the issue is a small property tax increase to fund essential infrastructure.

There is one sentence in Mitch's column in The HufPo I do do find puzzling, however.

He concluded with: "Ironically, the more the Star goes after Ford, the more its reputation for fairness and objectivity is undermined. "

At what point in this decade did al Starzeera have a "reputation for fairness and objectivity"?

The real "shame and embarrassment" of being a Torontonian

Olivia Chow, a Member of Parliament for a downtown Toronto riding and a presumed candidate for the position of mayor in the city's next election, spoke recently of the "embarrassment" that Rob Ford had brought upon her by his antics. "We are being embarrassed" she professed at a recent media scrum. This is the same Olivia Chow who is the widow of Jack Layton, who led the New Democratic Party from 2003 until his death, and about whom it was revealed that during their marriage he was caught by police in a dingy Chinatown brothel after receiving a hand-job (at the least) from a hooker.

I don't recall Ms Chow professing her embarrassment about that, just as she did not proclaim her "shame" about being exposed for taking advantage of subsidized housing while she and her husband were making a combined six-figure salary.

But because of the current Toronto mayor's occasional drug use and his intemperate remarks, now, finally, Olivia Chow has come to learn what it is to be humiliated.

If you say so, Olivia...

Toronto Ward 21 Councillor "Fiasco" Joe Mihevc sent out an email to his constituents a couple of weeks ago in which he bemoaned "the shame and embarrassment Mayor Ford has brought upon us."

The very same Mihevic whose advocacy for, and bumbling oversight of an unnecessary dedicated streetcar lane along St. Clair Avenue in Toronto became the exemplar of how not to do a civics project. Disruption from the lengthy construction, which went more than twice the planned time at almost three times the cost to taxpayers, caused some local businesses to go bust. The resulting lane divided the neighborhood, created a nightmare of traffic congestion, made a number of intersections death-traps for pedestrians, and resulted in only a minimal reduction in travel time for public transit patrons.

I haven't been able to locate any expression of "shame and embarrassment" for his role in causing that fiasco. Last time I checked, Mihevc was still praising himself in the face of his incompetence.

But now, because of Rob Ford, a man for whom Mihevc has frequently and very publicly expressed his detestation, suddenly, a grotesque, enormous blot of shame has enshrouded "Fiasco" Joe.

A couple of days ago, I had a long conversation with an old friend in Los Angeles who is a film producer who has worked with people such as Steven Spielberg and Michael Mann. He asked me about Toronto and rather than shame, there was quite a bit of laughter in recounting the recent goings-on in my city's municipal politics.

One thing that did seem to surprise him was the increase in support for Ford since his confirmation of having smoked crack cocaine. It's easy to understand how someone not familiar with Toronto politics would find that unusual, and to explain that, I had to describe the Rob Ford phenomenon.

Despite the obvious problematic components, Rob Ford, at least in his role as a public servant and politician, is completely forthright, which places him in stark contrast with his opponents. He may tell stupid lies about his personal behavior, but when he says he wants to do something in the political arena, you know he means it and isn't saying it just for public consumption as is so often the case with his rivals. Ford may me prone to bizarre outbursts, but he is genuinely passionate about his concern for the average citizen.

After years of the city's being run by a wasteful nanny-statist, Ford was in large measure a reaction to the paternalism and deceit coming from our city's "mainstream" politicians.

Conrad Black put it well earlier in the week in an editorial for the National Post when he wrote that the people who support Ford "are not scandalized by obesity, occasional cocaine use, occasional drunkenness, or the odd whirl at the wheel of a car when a breathalyzer, if applied, could be problematical. They are, however, scandalized by rank hypocrisy from mouthy journalists and gimcrack municipal politicians, and by the confected and inflated sanctimony of prigs and twits."

Ford`s supporters are frequently portrayed by some of the stupider pundits and political prognosticators as only being concerned with keeping taxes down. If that were the case, then that fails to explain why Ford`s support held firm despite the need for a tax increase to help pay for a much-needed subway expansion in Scarborough. What those ideological enemies of Ford fail to grasp is that the mayor`s support is not based from people who hate taxes, but those who hate seeing taxes used wastefully, as they are so often by Toronto politicians who want to double as social engineers.

Last week, in what some have described as a palace coup, Toronto`s City Council stripped Ford of most of his mayoral authority, even though the excuse was little more than that they dislike and claim to be embarrassed by him. Ford has neither been charged with nor convicted of a crime while in office.

Then, as if on cue, only a couple of days later, the idiots on City Council started talking about imposing a property tax increase well above the limit Ford would have ever proposed. The backlash was swift and immediate. Ford`s opponents fell right into his hands, playing to his strength as a champion of taxpayers and his narrative that the rebellion was motivated entirely by ideology.

Ford is now rising even more in the polls, with him being favored more than any other candidate to be best qualified to manage Toronto`s budget.

Explaining Ford`s rise in popularity to my LA friend, I said, given the pathetic alternatives we have among municipal politicians here, the idea of a guy who takes the occasional puff of crack and goes on weird drunken tirades is still a lot more attractive than anyone else we have on offer.

"Wow," he replied, "things must be really bad there."

It was then that I felt a tinge of embarrassment. "Yeah," I said back, "they are."

Plus : No comment on this

More public masturbation by the Toronto Star over Rob Ford

CBC radio's Q had a panel with three of Toronto's media personalities, including Toronto Star publisher John Cruickshank gloating about the Rob Ford video.

More interesting is the obsessive hate and sanctimony that has him in in a ridiculous denial of the obvious vendetta his paper has had against Ford for the last 3 years.

My buddy Jon Kay makes some good points on the panel, but I would add to an important observation he made. Jon says, in essence, that there is a crisis in conservative thought reflected in the election of Rob Ford and his like in a single-minded focus on low taxes and reducing government spending.

There is a lot more to it than just that.

Ford is also a reaction to the paternalistic, sanctimonious social engineering foisted by incompetent politicians on a public outraged by a lack of their ability to simply provide competent management.

We have an incompetent provincial government that has wasted, and for all intents and purposes stolen billions in public funds, while imposing radical nanny-state social policies.

Ford has not wasted any public funds and is someone who is genuinely concerned with the wishes of his constituents, in contrast to wanting to impose a "vision" on them.

Yet The Star is, as it has been, primarily concerned with the superficiality of image. Which is why as a media source, they still have little credibility and as Kay astutely notes, Ford may indeed get reelected.

You can watch and hear the panel below:

Amid corruption allegations, union members want to know how dues money is spent

 

OTTAWA - Union funds used to rebuild a biker strip club, false expense claims sometimes totalling $4,000 in a day for a single executive and plenty of connections between top union officials and organized crime. These are just some of the shocking revelations to come out of Quebec's Charbonneau Commission into corruption in that province.

The allegations might also explain why union bosses have fought so hard against disclosure laws that their members support in droves.

More HERE 

We live in a time of the most corrupt, incompetent provincial government in Ontario`s history

It would be hard to imagine a report more damaging to the credibility of Ontario's Liberal government than the one released Tuesday by Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk on its decision to cancel the Oakville gas plant.

First under former premier Dalton McGuinty, and later, under Premier Kathleen Wynne, the Liberals estimated the cost of cancelling this plant was $40 million.

Lysyk found it will cost up to $1.112 billion, with the most likely final figure being $815 million, after future savings and cost add-ons are factored in.

Even more devastating to Liberal credibility, Lysyk found that despite McGuinty's insistence he had no idea of the costs of cancelling the Oakville plant, his office was directly responsible for decisions that dramatically increased those costs.

"On cancelling the Oakville plant, the Premier's Office assured TCE (TransCanada Energy Ltd.) that it would be compensated for the full financial value of its contract for the Oakville plant," Lysyk found, "instead of relying on protections in that contract that could have minimized the damages paid to the builder following cancellation."

In other words, the Liberals were so desperate to cancel the politically unpopular Oakville plant leading up to the 2011 election, they wasted hundreds of millions of public dollars in order to do so.

More HERE 

Foreign Minister Baird discusses Canada's new foreign policy & the moral collapse of the United Nations

The need for massive reform in the role of Unions

The rationale that led to the creation of unions hasn't gone away.

For those of us who have been employees, at one point or another, we've been in a job where the boss was an absolute piece of shit. One of those wretches who is not only stupid and unreasonable, but compounds the misery of having to answer to them by demonstrating the pleasure they take in exercising authority over other people.

There is nothing more soul-crushing than being a parent with a family to feed and enduring the feeling of being trapped in such conditions.

Situations like that are among the reasons why unions emerged and why they continue to play a valid, valuable role in the workplace.

Under the watchful eyes of the sadistic totalitarian
Che Guevara, CUPE shows solidarity with
Communist dictators
(photo from CUPE annual report 2005/6)

If protecting the rights of workers what what unions did, then there would be little reason to argue against them. But in 2013,the people who run the unions, the union bosses, have ventured into areas which make them more reprehensible than anything the most sadistic employer and vile corporation would dream of.

Bringing to life caricatures of the pig Napoleon from Orwell's Animal Farm, reveling in their puffed-up pomposity, union bosses are bolstered by control over cash culled from workers' paychecks that they use to promote their own petty tyrannies.

Canadian public service unions, including CUPE, CUPW (Postal Workers) and OPSEU have poured money into causes like the racist Occupy protests, degenerate support for the terrorist government in Gaza, and support missions to show Communist solidarity with the totalitarian dictator Fidel Castro.Other unions, like the United Steelworkers and The Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation, have used dues paid by their members to subsidize the website rabble.ca which is the media voice of the anti-Semitic, so-called "Israel Apartheid Week" and has produced depraved videos comparing Canada's Prime Minister to Adolf Hitler.

Very few union members want their funds diverted away from workplace issues to promote the deplorable ideological tyrannies of the union bosses. Most don't even know their funds are used for such purposes, because the union bosses don't tell the workers how their dues money is spent.

A few months ago. some rouge Senators derailed Bill C-377, which would have forced the unions to tell the workers how the use their dues. Perhaps the unelected patronage appointees of the Canadian Senate felt solidarity with sleazy union bosses as the two share a resistance towards being held accountable for their inflated, self-serving expenditures.

Members of Parliament have said they will reintroduce the union accountability Bill in the future.  The Senate should take care if it hopes to sabotage the Bill again, since their obstructionism highlights the corruption in both institutions.

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford: “If you don’t want to vote Conservative, vote NDP. We cannot reward these Liberals with this corrupt behaviour, enough is enough."

During a stop in Scarborough Tuesday, Ford said that voting Liberal was like “just giving a bank robber another gun and saying, ‘Go rob another bank.’”

There are 5 by-elections in Ontario today.

h/t Blazing Cat Fur

Toronto Mayor Ford's statement on the slimy, lying, incompetent government of Kathleen Wynne

Kathleen Wynne's government "told me to raise taxes on the backs of hard working Torontonians"

McWynnety's F-you message to Toronto: "Raise taxes"

Kathleen Wynne's Provincial Liberals have reneged on a promise which the Globe and Mail had reported verified in a letter to the City of Toronto, to maintain annual transfer payments until 2018.

The clear reason is to punish the city for electing a capable fiscal conservative who highlights Wynne's inept, unmandated government's incompetence.

The incredibly biased Toronto Star, which inserted a gratuitous crack cocaine reference in its article, reports:

“Relationships involve more than one party,” Wynne said curtly Tuesday.

Her comments came after the mayor’s tumultuous one-hour meeting Monday with Finance Minister Charles Sousa at Queen’s Park.

Ford left saying he was “furious” at a change in funding arrangements that will leave the city with a $50 million budget hole to fix next year.

“He told me to increase taxes. This was a complete waste of everyone’s time today. I’m very disappointed,” a visibly seething mayor said afterward.

Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne's inept Liberals determined to screw over Toronto to punish city for electing Rob Ford

TORONTO — Toronto Mayor Rob Ford says he’s furious that the province won’t reconsider its decision to make funding changes for Toronto’s social programs.

He says the changes will mean cuts to vital services that affect the city’s most vulnerable residents.

The conservative mayor was fuming as he left his meeting with Finance Minister Charles Sousa, saying the province is trying to make him raise taxes.

Ford says he’s being punished for running an efficient government, while the governing Liberals continue to spend in the red.

Sousa announced last week that the province is ending a special “pooling” arrangement for Toronto to pay for welfare and disability support programs.

More at The National Post

Liberal Liar? Public Service Union's $20,000 payoff to Justin Trudeau

Justin Trudeau claimed he never took a penny while speaking as an MP. Any reasonable person could conclude he lied.

Canada's mainstream media has given up its role as journalists to work as Liberal Party press agents

Kathleen McWynnty offers Ontario a new face but the same old lies and corruption

More HERE

How Ontario's Liberals ripped off taxpayers for $585 Million

McGuinty/Wynne Liberals broke law in Gas Plant cancellation cover-up scandal

Art by Blazing Cat Fur

TORONTO -- Opposition accusations that Ontario's Liberal government intentionally deleted emails to cover up the cost of cancelling gas plants in Oakville and Mississauga were given more fuel Wednesday by the province's privacy commissioner.

Top Liberal staff in former premier Dalton McGuinty's office broke the law by deleting all emails related to the cancellation of the two gas plants, Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian reported after conducting a special investigation into NDP complaints.

"It truly strains credulity to think that absolutely no records ... responsive to the Speaker's ruling were retained," Cavoukian wrote in her special report called "Deleting Accountability: Records Management Practices of Political Staff."

"It is difficult to accept that the routine deletion of emails was not in fact an attempt by staff ... to avoid transparency and accountability."

It will be interesting to see if The Toronto Star undermines its now almost non-existent credibility by minimizing the corruption in the Ontario Liberal provincial government, which effectively embezzled half a billion tax dollars for political purposes, while obsessively pursuing Toronto Mayor Rob Ford over an unproven personal matter that cost taxpayers nothing. 

The Toronto Star's battle against democracy discredits journalism

First they lied about him repeatedly. Then they tried, and failed, in every effort to prevent Rob Ford from winning Toronto's mayoral race in 2010. Since then, The Toronto Star has been relentless in its campaign to discredit Ford. What The Star's editors don't realize is that rather than discrediting Ford, they have managed to discredit themselves and have irreparably harmed the Toronto public's confidence in journalism in general.

If you were to believe what you read in The Star, the city is in chaos and goings-on at City Hall are in total disarray, all because of their allegations about Rob Ford having allegedly smoked crack cocaine.

The Star is lying to you.

I was at City Hall myself on Tuesday. Other than the press acting like a gang of paparazzi, it's business as usual there. Permits are being issued as always, civic matters are being attended to as they have been before the recent media drummed-up outrage. At a meeting of the City's Executive Committee chaired by Ford which I attended, the mayor acted like a consummate professional. He was polite and effective, and not once was he jonesing for a hit of crack, despite any impression The Star might like you to have.

There was nothing resembling chaos.

Permits are being sold, municipal employees are doing their jobs, the sewers are running, street lights are working, the water is being purified, Council is dealing with public matters.

But were The Toronto Star to be believed, the world is falling apart, democracy should be suspended and a national emergency declared.

Yesterday an article published in The Star, they were adulating a Liberal politician they adore, who clearly appears to have been engaged in corruption in public affairs, in order to malign one whom they allege, without substantiation, has a personal problem.

Because The Star is more interested in undermining Rob Ford, whose values they detest, than they are in serving the public interest or telling the truth.

In the article, titled: Rob Ford video scandal: Premier Kathleen Wynne, city councillors grapple with fallout, the Star put forward this incredible statement:

Premier Kathleen Wynne said Wednesday she would like to see Ford deal with his “personal” issues sooner rather than later, but shied away from saying the province was prepared to step in.

Evidently The Star reporters asked the Premier if the Province was prepared to step in to remove Ford as mayor.

"The Province was prepared to step in"?!??

On the basis of what? Toronto Mayor Ford has not even been charged with a crime, let alone been convicted of one. But The Toronto Star expects Kathleen Wynne to undo a democratic election based on unproven allegations from a media outlet with demonstratively malicious motives against Ford.

Clearly The Star's editors think their will supersedes trivial things like due process of law, democracy, and free elections.

Another Star article made the charge that Ford had illegally ordered emails of City staff to be destroyed. An article they had to quickly revise when it became public from other news outlets that Ford had not made any such request or attempt.

City spokesperson Jackie DeSouza says "I can confirm Mayor's Office did not ask the City to destroy records from any staff in their office"
— CP24 (@CP24) May 29, 2013

But The Star's rush to publish lies based on rumor, innuendo and unverified reports was irresistible when those lies were about Rob Ford.

When it comes to the illegal destruction of government correspondence, it was Kathleen Wynne and her predecessor as Premier, Dalton McGuinty whom,  it has just emerged, are guilty of this serious transgression and betrayal of public trust.

Yet is there any front page headline about this major scandal in today's Toronto Star?

Of course not! Just more about Rob Ford.

Because the Toronto Star has an agenda. But when it comes to Rob Ford,  journalist integrity and truth aren't part of it.