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:
EYE ON A CRAZY PLANET
Um, Ford's wasted a shitload of money. Take, for example, the already-started Sheppard LRT extension, the hole from which Ford filled with some $30 million in cancellation fees?
ReplyDeleteIsn't that the sort of thing you're pissed at the provincial Liberals overs?
Didn't Ford turn the budget surplus Miller left him into a deficit?
ReplyDeleteMiller jacked up property taxes by about 25% and spending also skyrocketed.
ReplyDeleteFord has flatlined city spending and kept taxes to the rate of inflation.
Anyone can fill coffers if they're prepared to gouge the taxpayers to do it, the way Miller did. And Miller was incapable of effectively managing the City's structural deficit.
Actually, the only thing keeping Ford's budgets anywhere near something he could plausibly brag about is the land transfer tax that he vowed to abolish.
ReplyDeleteAnd since he's only raising about 50% of the city's share of his mystical subway to nowhere, his fiscal legacy very much remains to be seen.