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@SueAnnLevy, Sarah Palin, and freedom of speech | #TOpoli

Dear, oh dear.

The adolescent name-calling and misdirection are predictable enough, but our favourite Team Ford spear-carrier seems to be especially, er, “confused” about freedom of speech. 

Once again, friends: freedom of speech means you can say whatever you like, but it doesn’t mean you get a free pass. And when other people call you on your bullshit or otherwise take issue with you, they’re not censoring you. They’re holding you to account for your words.

It’s called “responsibility.”

You can look it up.

[View the story “@SueAnnLevy pulls a Palin | #TOpoli” on Storify]

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#TeamFord’s two-years-and-change horizon, and a proposed two-track strategy | #TOpoli

My friend @cityslikr’s got another fine piece at Torontoist today. In it, he neatly dissects the discrepancies between Team Ford’s apocalyptic predictions of fiscal disaster and the fact that our benighted city somehow manages to return an operating surplus year after year.

Matters aren’t helped, of course, by The Brother’s inexplicable characterization of Toronto’s financial condition as bankruptcy. JM McGrath’s already picked it apart for factual inaccuracy, and in terms of formulating a reasoned and measured response, I think Ed Keenan’s shown us the way. 

(Aside: while I like and respect Ed a great deal, I’m not sure I can commit to two years of daily Keenans.)  

Well, what is there to say, really? Can’t argue with Daren’s analysis, and since I can’t really add much to it, maybe it’s time to step back and, as I do from time to time, try to put this in a larger context. (Christ. There he goes again.)

That Rob Ford’s grasp of the workings of municipal governance or the basic principles of citizenship is somewhat, er, limited isn’t news by now. And it’s fairly straightforward to suggest that we should work to limit and contain whatever damage he can do between now and 2014. Council’s already doing that on several fronts: working with him when possible, working around him when not.

But that’s not all, because if we’re really interested in the good of this city, we need to pursue a two-track strategy. The first is already clear to most of us. The second — and this is where it gets tougher — is to do whatever we can to encourage him, to reinforce him, and to enable him in anything that helps him act like a better mayor. And that’s regardless of whether we think he merits a second term. (Kristyn Wong-Tam is showing us the way in that regard, too.)

No illusions. He’s going to backslide. He’s going to disappoint. He’s going to make us all want to do a Keenan from time to time. And this two-track strategy is a difficult path to walk. It demands much more of a commitment to civility, generosity of spirit (I keep going back to this piece wherein Hamutal Dotan sets the benchmark for that), and the greater good than anyone on Team Ford has displayed thus far, or is likely to display in the months to come. If it helps, perhaps focusing on the long view might make the day-to-day cringeworthy stuff a little more palatable.

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Sorry to go all Rumsfeldian on you, but you work with the council you have, not the council you might want or wish to have at a later time.
Me, on the suggestion that Team Ford’s “plan,” to the extent that it has one, for the next couple of years is to disengage and stamp its feet hoping to get a more pliant group of councillors next time around.

Fiscal discipline, @cityslikr and Toronto’s endless budget follies | #TOpoli #onpoli

Can-of-worms

My pal @cityslikr has a thoughtful post over at his place, riffing on the whole Moody’s municipal credit rating thing. If you’ve been reading his stuff regularly, as you should, and keeping abreast of the #TOpoli big picture, then you know: contrary to the edge-of-the-abyss picture regularly presented by certain political camps and their tabloid-media enablers, city finances are not one bad cheque away from fiscal Armageddon.

(I sometimes hesitate to talk about @cityslikr and his take on discipline. He’s got a tendency to stray occasionally, like that time he started talking about Karen Stintz and her safe words. But never mind all that just now.)

That we’ve been subjected to overwrought misleading language on the municipal finance file isn’t news, of course. The relentless pounding isn’t about informing us so much as it’s about softening us up and getting us braced for a nice tall glass of the Kut Kut Koolaid. If anything, the events of the past few months ought to have demonstrated that the whole thing is, like the Austerity Agenda (TM), a manufactured narrative. The lead spokesthingy, of course, is budget chief Mike “No cupcakes for you, widows and orphans” del Grande.

Daren’s analysis is dead-on, so I’m not going to repeat it here, but there’s one detail in it that bears a closer look, and that’s Moody’s call for 

a permanent solution to the existing operating budget pressures.

And that’s where this perennial bit of municipal theatre really challenges the audience; it’s in establishing and assessing the context. (Yeah, there he goes again.) Because you really can’t have a worthwhile and comprehensive discussion about “existing operating budget pressures” without addressing Toronto’s continuing structural deficit. And that goes beyond Team Ford, David Miller, and/or Mayor Mel.

Such a discussion must necessarily involve the role of senior levels of government, and the dysfunctional mess that governments of various political stripes have made of municipal finance — indeed, of the entire municipal-governance file. I like to start with the Harris government’s ill-advised municipal amalgamation in the 1990s, coupled with the uploading, downloading, sideswiping shemozzle precipitated with the Common Sense Revolution. But if you want to suggest that the fecklessness of the McGuinty approach hasn’t made things better since then, well …

You may very well think that, Mattie. I couldn’t possibly comment.

So, in order to make Moody’s really happy, we need to examine and correct the mistakes of previous provincial governments. And while we’re at it, we might want to revisit that whole constitutional municipalities-as-creatures-of-provincial-legislatures thing. 

Anyone want to give odds on how likely we are to see that?

Yeah, that’s what I thought.

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Team Ford to city staff: Keep your expertise to yourself, or else | #TOpoli

The mayor, a champion of car travel, went further on his Sunday Newstalk 1010 radio show, calling McKeown’s $290,000 salary “an embarrassment,” and promising to “look into it.” His brother, Councillor Doug Ford, calling in from Florida, asked: “Why does (McKeown) still have a job?”
via thestar.com

Goddamn those smart people with their facts and evidence and experience, anyway.

So Toronto’s medical officer of health floats an idea about reducing speed limits in order to make the streets safer for pedestrians and cyclists. Can’t have that, of course. Silly doctor — streets are for buses, cars, and trucks.

Forget all that facty, evidency, history stuff that Cityslikr’s citing about carcentrism being a relatively recent thing. (And what kind of condescending, elitist-type word is that, anyway?)

What’s Team Ford’s reaction? Can’t have a discussion about it, it’s just nuts nuts nuts. How much are we paying this guy, anyway? Let’s look into that. It’s an embarrassment. Why does this guy still have a job?

Got that, city staff? Zip it, or … well, shame about Gary Webster, innit. 

Perhaps council should take the board of health away from the FoBros. It’s pretty clear that they can’t be trusted not to break things.

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Conservatism: is it a label? Is it a brand? Or maybe just a little bit more? | #TOpoli

That smartypants fancypants @Cityslikr is forcing me to put on my crankypants. I warned you youngsters what would happen if you didn’t get off my lawn!

Bill-erwin

All right, all right, so I telegraphed that one. Indulge me.

The #TOpoli twittersphere / blogosphere / wankersphere (my usual preserve) has been all lit up over the past few days, thanks to John Michael McGrath and his thoughtful essay about legitimacy. We’ve heard from several folks in response, among them Ed Keenan, Hamutal Dotan, John Lorinc, and Adam Chaleff-Freudenthaler, for starters. All worthwhile reads, and I’d encourage you to click on every one of these links. 

But it’s today’s post from Cityslikr that’s prompting this grumpy-old-man lecture, admittedly because he’s all but dared me to correct him. Dude may be surprised, therefore, to learn that I agree with most of his argument today (probably because it’s substantially similar to the one I made yesterday). I think we’re all in agreement that while what’s been going on at City Hall over the past few weeks isn’t ideal, it’s a reasonable and workable response to a mayor who can’t or won’t work and play well with others. And it’s important to stress, as Ed and Hamutal have, that this isn’t a case of unworkable dysfunction. There’s a great deal invested, I’d submit, in advancing a narrative which paints all politicians as a bunch of fussy children squabbling in a sandbox, and in prompting exasperated voters to blow off the obligations of citizenship because, what the hell, they’re all crooks and liars.

Indeed, I seem to recall some young whippersnapper taking exception to that kind of talk some time ago. Where was it? Oh. Yeah.

But that’s not what the young scamp’s called me out about. And it’s here that I have to confess, it’s this particular debate that’s fuelled many late-night beer-enhanced conversations.

I’ll admit to a pedantic, perhaps even obsessive focus on the meanings of words. (One of my many annoying qualities, I know. Too much education and not enough wisdom, perhaps? Whatever.) But I fixate on it for a reason: words are the foundation of public discourse, and public discourse is the most basic currency of citizenship and civic engagement. If we’re to converse with each other like rational adults, we have to be able to agree on the definitions of the terms we’re using.

And by the same token, when we allow others to strip words of their meanings and repurpose them for their own ends, we’ve given away the game before it’s even started. It’s why I keep harping on winning back the words.

Which brings us to the term “conservatism.” Cityslikr’s already tried to anticipate where I’m going with this, with his fancy-shmancy Edmund Burke references. (Geez louise. You cite Reflections on the Revolution in France once, and the rest of your life, you’re shlepping around this giant freakin’ statue on your back.) 

But I’m not going there tonight, because for the purposes of this argument, there’s no need to get all academic and elitist-like. 

What is conservatism, at its heart? The way I’ve always understood it, it’s about identifying the best and most worthwhile parts of our history and our tradition, and working to preserve and enhance them. It’s informed, I’d submit, by a devotion to the principles of stewardship. We want to leave things the way they were when we found them, or preferably a little bit better, for the next group to come along. If that’s conservatism, and I believe that it is, then sign me up.

In Canada (pardon me while I get mythic), that carries elements of generosity, civility, caring, and community spirit. It’s something that we’ve worked for generations to build, to advance, and to extend to as many of our neighbours and our fellow citizens as possible. It hasn’t come without struggle, and it’s sometimes easy to gloss over some of the less savoury aspects of our history in honouring that, but the bottom line is: we’ve got something here - a culture, a national character, a way of relating to and caring for one another - that’s taken years to build, to develop, to foster. This is our identity. This is who we are. You don’t get to come along and sweep that all away for the sake of some ideological or financial agenda.

And that’s why it’s so important to reclaim the mantle of conservatism from those who have hijacked it over the past few decades. Because whether you’re talking about think tanks pushing the austerity agenda and lecturing us about tightening our belts, or tabloid screed-writers fulminating about waste and mismanagement and cultures of entitlement and gravy trains, what’s at work here is a focused and disciplined campaign to dismantle, to tear things apart, and to weaken the bonds of community. If these folks are conservatives, then I’m two steps left of Joe Stalin.

Tumblr_lg1ruya5qp1qby32yo1_500

So, while my pal Cityslikr is right about the sort of autocratic bullying we’ve seen from Team Ford passing for conservative orthodoxy, I think he’s wrong in the way he’s set it up. (But he’s such a nice boy. He means well.)

In his opening paragraphs, he gives a vivid description of the anti-democratic impulse, and the bare tolerance of democracy. You can see that at work every day, whenever people complain about how messy and inefficient it is and then vow to keep its practitioners away from their kids’ lemonade stands. Where I differ from him is in his characterization of it as conservative. Disdain for democracy or popular sovereignty has nothing to with liberal or conservative or right or left; fundamentally, it’s about power and privilege. In that context, those are just labels. And it’s because I don’t want to see honourable traditions and intellectual currents stripped of context and meaning, and reduced to mere labels, that I’m arguing against the misuse and misappropriation of the term “conservative.”

The folks currently losing their shit because Team Ford’s losing its grip aren’t conservatives. They’re not valiant culture warriors, and they’re not courageous champions of Joe Lunchbucket Subway-Wanting Beleaguered Taxpayer. They’re just part of the noise machine, and they don’t merit any more respect or attention than that.

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From Grover Norquist to Gary Webster: putting #TeamFord’s #TTC jihad in context | #TOpoli #Toronto

2012217-gary-webster-ttc

By now, the initial shock and outrage occasioned by the firing of Gary Webster has probably subsided. Most of the observers whose work I follow have had their say and given their analyses, and in truth, I can’t really add much to it. Yes, it’s vindictive, childish and grossly unfair, and based on a fundamental misconception of the role of an impartial and professional public service. And yes, it sends a terrible message, and yes, it’s going to have lasting and damaging effects upon the future of public transit and upon municipal governance.

So? Really, did we honestly expect anything different from Team Ford? We’ve seen the way they conduct public affairs. 

No. Once again, it’s time to take a longer view. We may be too late to help Gary Webster (although I suspect he’ll be fine), and we may not be able to save Team Ford from themselves, but if we are to save our city from their depredations, it’s important to understand the historical and intellectual foundations (such as they are) for their approach to governance.

Remember Grover Norquist? During the Reagan years in the 1980s, he was head of Americans for Tax Reform, a pressure group instrumental in helping the Gipper get government off the backs of the downtrodden rich. If you’re ever curious about how the tax-policy goalposts got shoved so far off-centre, and why we can’t have an adult conversation about raising taxes without provoking mass hysteria, Grover’s a big part of the reason. 

I’m citing him because of his motivations. Nothing encapsulates them better than my favourite Groverism:

I’m not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.

It’s not hard to draw the connections between that and more recent currents in governance and public policy. The common theme running through all of them is a hatred of government and the public sphere per se, expressed in pseudo-populist soundbites like “red tape” and “stop the gravy train” and “get government off our backs” and “more freedom through less government.” Always, there’s a carefully cultivated undertone of resentment, and a sense that the public sector is inherently wasteful, inefficient, and corrupt, if not actually evil.

And how does it play out in practice? Well, we’re seeing it now. Perhaps Team Ford, through its unique combination of clumsiness and tone-deafness, takes it to clownish extremes, but you don’t have to look too far for more illustrations. The Harper government’s hostility to inconvenient facts and impartial advice is revealed in its muzzling of scientists on the federal payroll and its approach to the long-form census. And we’re still dealing with the damage remaining from the Harris era. 

Invariably, there’s an impulse to make government as feckless, dysfunctional, and ineffectual as possible. Forget about advancing the public good. Norquist’s bathtub analogy may seem a little over the top, but when you see governments reducing their capacity to act for the common good, surrendering control over a huge range of issues and voluntarily forswearing a whole range of policy tools, it’s easy to see how things like Walkerton can happen.

Again, it helps to view things through the lens of class analysis. The discussion needn’t be academic or theoretical; there’s plenty of real-world evidence that kneecapping government and crippling its ability to act hurts everyone except the 1 per cent. (That’s why the Occupy phenomenon’s had the impact it’s had, and why it’s not going away.)

Just take a look around. Who benefits from this? Whose interests are served by a crippled government and a hollowed-out public sphere? By a frayed and disintegrating civil society? Who can afford to buy their own social infrastructure? Privileged enclaves? Private security? A captivated mass-media complex that drums it into our heads, over and over, that this is the way it’s supposed to be, it’s just the magic of the market at work, and if it’s not working yet, the only answer is more austerity, more free trade, more tax cuts for corporations and “job creators?” Ringing a bell yet?

Democratic and responsible governance is supposed to be the counterbalance to all that. A healthy and vigorous middle class doesn’t arise from the benevolence of society’s overlords, so it’s no surprise that the policies, social conventions, and progressive legislation underpinning it  - the products of decades, even centuries of struggle - are under attack. And we’re not going to be able to fight back effectively unless we recognize it for what it is.

The scandalous treatment of Gary Webster, and by extension, any other public servant with integrity, doesn’t have to be viewed as one of the front lines in class struggle. All I’m suggesting is that we consider it in context: a cumulative gutting of one of our most crucial public services, coupled with mindless repetition of discredited mantras about the efficiency of the private sector. All we need to ask ourselves is: cui bono? Because it ain’t us.

Related posts:

#TeamFord and our city: Can no one talk sense to these guys? | #TOpoli #transit #TOlabourdispute

Well, what a week. 

Over the past few days we’ve seen Team Ford apply its magic touch to transit, to labour relations, and in a more overarching way, to our whole sense of civic pride. I can’t sum it all up in the scope of a single blog post, but then in this context there’s no need. Anyone following the conversation through All Fired Up or Ford For Toronto or via the Tweeter already knows what’s been going on.

It’s useful, at times like this, to take a step back and try to see things in their proper historical context. Understanding how we got here from there is the first step in learning from our mistakes, and, god willing, avoiding a repetition of those mistakes.

Fortunately, in this case we don’t have to look back that far. It’s reasonably easy, I’d submit, to connect the dots between the 2010 mayoral campaign and the mess we find ourselves in today. 

Let’s set out the founding assumptions so that our biases are clear: we start, as always, with the affirmation of civil discourse and civic engagement as the most basic currency of citizenship. Effective public policy and democratic governance depend — always — upon thoughtful, respectful discussion. It doesn’t mean we all have to agree with each other and start singing ‘Kumbaya.” It just means hearing each other out and applying our critical-thinking faculties.

Now, hands up all those who think that’s a fair characterization of the 2010 municipal election, never mind Team Ford’s approach to governance.

Really, don’t all jump at once.

No. If we’re honest with ourselves, we have to acknowledge that the 2010 campaign wasn’t about thoughtful conversation, mutual respect, or sober, reasoned evaluation of competing visions for the city. The overarching theme was one of lingering resentment and sourness resulting from the labour disruption of 2009. And it was that toxic sludgestream of resentment that the Ford campaign tapped and rode all the way into the mayor’s office.

Really, it’s not that complicated. There wasn’t any reasoned discussion going on there — just a handful of thoughtless, simplistic memes calculated to appeal to that resentment and trigger a visceral emotional response. War on the Car. Stop the Gravy Train. Respect for Taxpayers. Nothing we don’t already know, but if I might add one more simplistic pop-culture meme: I’m Mad as Hell, and I’m Not Going to Take it Any More. Rephrase that, and it might just as well read: I’m Belligerent, Stupid, and Too Lazy to Think Things Through. 

The damaging effects of that campaign are still with us — not just in the seemingly endless series of shit sundaes Team Ford’s made out of public consultation, the city budget, transit planning, and labour relations, but in the very tenor of public conversation itself. The 2010 mayoral race did real and lingering damage to our ability to talk to each other like mature rational adults, and it’s a big part of the reason we’re in the mess we find ourselves in today. 

Once again, it goes back to the difference between campaigning and governing. Simplistic slogans that fit on bumper stickers and lapel buttons may be good at provoking emotional responses or channelling inchoate rage, but they’re no basis for effective democratic governance. Nothing new there either, but it bears repetition: effective and responsible government is an intricate beast. It involves multiple interests, finding balances among competing and sometimes contradictory objectives, allocating resources, analyzing options in a rational and comprehensive way, looking at issues from a variety of different perspectives, building consensus wherever possible, and above all, crafting public policy in a way that advances the public good. Bottom line: it’s complicated. It can’t be reduced to sound bites, bumper stickers or lapel buttons.

Now, contrast this high-minded talk of thoughtful reflection and rational discourse with the state of public conversation in Toronto today. As Ed Keenan argued last week, Rob Ford doesn’t seem capable of discussing ideas: 

No matter what the question, Ford has a bumper-sticker response that doesn’t really address it at all, and he’ll recite it aloud to you, again and again, as if the problem were your hearing rather than his failure to explain himself.

As Ed suggests, it’s the equivalent of clapping his hands over his ears and repeating “subways, taxpayers, subways, taxpayers … ” to himself until everyone else just shuts up. If he has the intellectual wherewithal for a genuine exchange of ideas, this is no way to show it. In an atmosphere like this, one fears that even the most thoroughly considered and non-partisan attempt to bring reason back to the debate over transit planning will be wasted.

(A brief nod to political realities: of course the province isn’t blameless in this either. But let’s be clear: if Rob Ford hadn’t declared Transit City dead the minute he took office, we wouldn’t be in this mess — regardless of how you feel about organized labour or Karen Stintz’s stewardship of the TTC.)

Back to the wider context. Anyone who follows the energy / environment debate or reads George Monbiot knows about Peak Oil and the state the planet is in, and understands the need to invest — at municipal, provincial and federal levels — in sustainable and energy-efficient public infrastructure, and in shaping our communities in ways that facilitate and take advantage of that. In the most prosaic terms, that means public transit. It is simply no longer possible to design cities and transportation policy around the private automobile. That’s not a matter of ideology or class warfare or right or left — it’s a matter of survival. Misrepresenting it with a stupid meme like The War on the Car is not only short-sighted — it is irresponsible, wasteful and incredibly destructive. 

I can’t say for certain, but I wouldn’t bet much on Rob and Doug Ford’s ability to grasp that. To this observer, their approach to transit policy appears based on little more than “get the fuck out of my way” resentment. They’re appealing to anyone who just doesn’t like streetcars or bikes or buses or anything else getting in the way of driving their cars Wherever and Whenever The Hell They Want, Goddamnit. As John Lorinc puts it, however, it’s pointing toward

the single most expensive infrastructure mistake in Toronto history.

One really wants to believe that a more sensible consensus is emerging at city council, regardless of what Team Ford says or does. I’m not counting those chickens just yet, but it seems that one of their most effective operators might be thinking the same thing:

We’ll have to wait and see, of course. But this is what comes of basing campaign strategy on such wrongheaded and selfish thinking, let alone using it as the rationale for billion-dollar decisions.

Anyway, enough about transit. It’s more important, at this point, to wonder whether there’s any way to get these guys to see reason.

It’s easy, in that regard, to take shots at their simplistic and clumsy approach to government, and I’ve been just as guilty of that as the next guy. This piece from Hamutal Dotan should be required reading for everyone who’s concerned about Team Ford, not just for its insight and celebration of the public good, but for its laudable generosity of spirit. As she argues:

The problem isn’t that the Fords are heartless, in other words. It’s that they have run up against the limits of their own experiences and don’t know how to get past them. It’s that they respond to the personal, to the individual case, and can’t see that the social programs they want to cut are made necessary by a large set of individual cases, all clumped together in one place and time. Put much more bluntly: the Fords want for insight, not empathy.

Ok, so they’re not heartless or evil, just a little … uninformed about the role of the public sphere and how democracy works. So let’s cut them some slack. But dear god, can’t anyone get them to see that winning an election doesn’t mean you just get to do whatever the hell you want?

Can’t anyone talk sense to these guys?

Someone?

Please?

Related posts:

Democratic governance and that troublesome ‘deserve’ thing | #TOpoli #cdnpoli

Earlier this week, my good friend @cityslikr shlepped out to Scarborough to take in a public meeting about the city budget. He wrote it up for Torontoist; you can read about it here. 

In brief, his account suggests that Scarborough residents are feeling screwed. Again. They voted for Rob Ford because they thought, finally, that they’d get a mayor who would stop coddling the downtown elitists and start putting some of their tax dollars to work in their own neighbourhoods. We’ve all seen how well that’s worked out.

Nothing new there. But something one of the readers said has stuck with me. In the comment thread, Matthew Harper argues that Scarborough voters 

fell for his populist sound bites and and they are getting fully what they deserve from it.

I’m not singling Matthew out for criticism here, because God knows I’ve been pretty self-righteous about disengagement, laziness and shallow thinking. If Rob Ford merits our scorn and resistance for his ignorance, his vindictive immaturity, his simplistic thinking, and his uninformed, inchoate resentment, not to mention what he wants to do to our city, then so too do the people who voted for him. His campaign did a ruthlessly effective job of tapping into those toxic sentiments, but voters who bought into his bullshit and enabled him are just as blameworthy. So you think Rob Ford’s screwing up the city? Boo fucking hoo. Should have thought of that before voting for him.

That’s the argument, anyway. I don’t really enjoy making it, because it comes across as facile, smug, and condescending. Moreover, it’s not especially constructive, and it’s not going to help build bridges to the people we need to reach. It doesn’t do much good to call people names because they didn’t vote the way I think they should have.

Someone once said that in a democracy, people get the government they deserve. I don’t know whether it was H.L. Mencken, Alexis de Tocqueville, Thomas Jefferson, or someone else, but the whole question of “deserve” keeps nagging at me. It’s easy to wonder, rhetorically, whether progressive citizens who take the obligations of involved engagement seriously really deserve to have a civic administration like the current one foisted upon us. We didn’t vote for these clowns. Why should we have to sit and watch as they attack the bonds of our community with chainsaws and blowtorches? Did we buy into their bullshit? Did we fool ourselves into thinking we could get something for nothing? Did we walk around telling each other that we could have respectable public services, well-maintained public infrastructure, and a functioning civil society without having to pay for it?

The quick answer to that is, no, we didn’t, but guess what? You voted, and you lost. If you can’t live with it, then maybe you have a beef with democracy. 

The rejoinder to that, of course, is that the game was rigged decades earlier when the Harris government smooshed the old City of Toronto into a soggy megacity mess, amalgamating it with Etobicoke, North York, East York, York, and Scarborough. We’ve been living with the consequences of that ever since. You can put five dogs and one cat in a room, let them vote, and call it democracy, but you can also more or less predict how things will turn out. 

And this brings us back to that nagging “deserve” thing. We didn’t ask for amalgamation. We didn’t ask for provincial and federal governments that ignore urban realities and urban needs. We didn’t ask for municipal politicians who like to torque downtown/suburban divides for short-term political gain. Why, then, do we deserve to suffer as our city is dismantled, damaged, and neglected by these morons? Why are we saddled with the consequences of other people’s shortsightedness, stupidity, or failure to show up?

And it’s at this point that I run out of the easy answers, because in truth I just don’t know a way out of this that doesn’t involve major logical and ethical dissonance. On the one hand, citizenship’s obligations require that we abide by the decisions our community makes, as long as they’re made openly and democratically. (You can certainly argue about whether they’re truly open or democratic when half the voters don’t even bother to turn out, or the choices left to them are basically set by the 1 per cent, or a guy can win a majority government with less than 40 percent of the vote, but I’m talking about first principles here.) We get to have our say, but if the decision isn’t one we like, we don’t get to just withdraw and blow off the decisions of the community. We’re all in this together. Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.

On the other hand, the obligations of citizenship also require thoughtful reflection, careful consideration, and genuine engagement. When you make stupid, thoughtless and short-sighted choices, you’re not just hurting yourself — you’re damaging your community and hurting your fellow citizens. They don’t deserve that.

I still haven’t worked this out. Anyone?

Related posts:

In defence of the public sphere | #TOpoli #TeamFord

There’s been some kerfuffle in the cybersphere about “radical conservatives” over the past couple of days, specifically in the context of Toronto politics, the city budget discussions, and the overall philosophy apparently motivating Team Ford. (Caveat: that’s assuming that you can call whatever’s behind their approach a “philosophy” at all. I’m not so sure it’s sufficiently coherent or well-thought-out to merit such a description.)

It’s prompted some good discussion, both in the blogosphere and on the Tweeter. You could probably do an entire dissertation on the precise delineations among “conservatism,” “principled conservatism,” “and radical conservatism;” indeed, I’ve been wrestling with this a fair bit over the past few days, but to some extent it’s been overshadowed by real-time events. It’s certainly a discussion worth having (and @cityslikr makes a good start), but for the moment I don’t want to get too hung up on labels. Ultimately, there’s something more fundamental at stake here, and that’s the very notion of the public good itself.

By no means do I want to reduce the definition of conservatism to a pissing match about labels. I’ve been quite adamant (some might even say obsessive, and they wouldn’t be entirely wrong) about the need for vigilance when it comes to the meanings of words, but it’s an argument I’ve made already. The last couple of days have made it clear that arguments over definitions are only part of the battle. 

So, what are we talking about when we talk about “the public good?” I’ve been meaning to address this ever since running across this piece by Robert Reich last week on the Tumblr. A sample:

What defines a society is a set of mutual benefits and duties embodied most visibly in public institutions — public schools, public libraries, public transportation, public hospitals, public parks, public museums, public recreation, public universities, and so on. 

God knows that’s been under attack, not just lately, but over the past three decades or more. Anyone with any appreciation of history can survey the intellectual currents dominating public discussion since the days of Reagan and Thatcher and draw the connections from those dark times to the current days of Harper, Ford, et al. And it doesn’t take much to discern the source for those currents, and whose interests they favour. (Anyone remember the so-called “tax revolts” of the mid to late 1970s? And their more recent echo in manufactured controversies like the “Tax Rage” so beloved of certain right-wing media organs, coupled with an unending drumbeat aimed at enshrining selfishness, insularity and resentment as civic virtues? You see where I’m going.)

Much as I love graduate-level seminars, though, there are more immediate triggers. The need for a spirited defence of the public good occurred to me again this past Sunday during an episode of the Josh Matlow show on NewsTalk 1010. (Yeah, yeah, I know. But Dave Meslin and Shelley Carroll were featured as guests. Disclosure: I didn’t listen to the show from beginning to end.) I won’t even try to recapture some of the arguments from people who called in, but I did post a somewhat intemperate message to @meslin and @shelleycarroll urging them to resist the contemporary framing and defend the public good. Easy for me, of course. I wasn’t there and I wasn’t on the spot. To his credit, Mez asked me to elaborate, and I followed up with:

the idea that public sphere, public infrastructure, public institutions need to be as cheap as possible.

While discussion of that principle has been pre-empted, to some degree, by the travesty visited upon the public library system by Team Ford over the past day and a half, that same travesty underlines the need for a reassertion of the public good more strongly than ever.

As is often the case, we can start by challenging the discourse, looking critically at the underlying assumptions, and changing the framing. For longer than anyone can remember, conversations about the public sphere have been dominated by relentless bashing of everything public per se as inefficient, wasteful, and corrupt — public transit, public services, public education, public infrastructure, public-sector unions, and so forth. Such bashing, accurate or otherwise, has invariably been coupled with the corollary assumption that the private sector is inherently better and more efficient. If the last couple of years have accomplished anything, they ought to have put the lie to that. The financial and industrial elites have been remarkably efficient at lining their own pockets (much of the time with our money), but at advancing the public good? Please.

And permeating this discourse, always, like a bad smell: the assumption that whatever we do in the pursuit of the public good must be done in as cheap, grudging, and utilitarian a manner as possible. Usually it’s wrapped up in empty sanctimonious rhetoric like, oh … Respect for Taxpayers (coincidence? mais, bien sur!), and we saw a good illustration of it recently when Councillor David Shiner complained about the cost of the Fort York Bridge. Matt Elliott’s discussed the intricacies of its revival, but let’s linger for a moment on the implications.  

What kind of statement are we making when we insist that public undertakings have to be as cheap and mingy as possible? To some extent, I’ve telegraphed the punch, but for the benefit of the so-called “budget hawks” out there, might as well be as explicit as possible: we’re saying that they don’t matter, that they’re not important. 

So, for instance, while in one breath we talk about the value of public education (there’s a whole subplot there about whether it’s supposed to be about job training or enhancing citizenship and teaching critical-thinking skills, but we’ll just leave that aside for the moment), in the next breath we convey our disregard for it by attacking teachers, cutting the funding for education at all levels, and leaving schools’ physical plant dingy, dilapidated, antiquated and poorly maintained. We’ve even elected governments determined to precipitate a crisis in the system, for Christ’s sakes. If those are the value choices we’re going to make, fine, but then we’ve got no right to complain about whatever conclusions our kids draw from those choices.

We can talk about the importance of maintaining public infrastructure, but in the next breath we’re attacking public-sector workers as lazy overpaid unionized thugs, looking for ways to contract their jobs out, and precipitating labour strife. And what do we get? Chunks of concrete falling off the Gardiner Expressway. Sinkholes. Ruptured sewer mains. Potholes. TTC vehicles held together with baling wire and chewing gum. Again, our choice, expressed through the ballot box, but then we’ve got no right to complain about the consequences of that choice.

Again, we’re back to first principles, specifically the whole “taxpayer versus citizen” dynamic. If we want to think of ourselves as nothing more than taxpayers, then naturally our whole relationship with the larger community is going to be shot through with resentment. If, on the other hand, we embrace the invigorating notion of citizenship, with its attendant rights and obligations, then we can reject the toxic demands of the race to the bottom. We can assert a preference for a healthy city wherein public-sector jobs carry decent benefits and pay a living wage, thus setting an example for the private sector to follow. Lord knows, that’s an example that needs to be held up these days.

(And incidentally, could we dispense with empty talk about “the market?” In the first place, it’s a rhetorical contrivance, because there are no unfettered markets in operation anywhere. In the second place, even if it’s not just a contrivance, when was it elevated to the status of an end in itself? If the precious “free market” can’t ensure a living wage and decent benefits and a healthy community, then what fucking good is it? It’s a hollow concept, long past its shelf life.) 

It’s time to reclaim the discursive and intellectual turf by promoting and defending the public sphere as something having value in and of itself. It is intrinsically good — not because some well-connected insider can make a buck from it, not because it advances certain private interests, but because it benefits society as a whole. It enhances our sense of community, it facilitates our connections and the things that hold our society together, and it contributes to our collective well-being. It’s the concrete realization that we are part of something that’s greater than ourselves, that we can accomplish more by pooling our resources than we can on our own.

Healthy community or resentful atomized individuals? I know which way I’d go.

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