For those fans of Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?, here is your pop quiz for the morning:
What city is this?
Its unemployment rate stands at 29%. One third of its homes sit empty. The average house price is US$7,500, with some houses going for a few hundred dollars – if they can find a buyer. The city is cutting bus lines, electricity, and other services. Schools have ordered no new textbooks in 21 years. Schoolchildren reportedly have had to bring their own toilet paper. 47% of the population is functionally illiterate.
And now, city elders are planning the forced relocation of thousands of residents, to “save” the few neighbourhoods deemed viable.
Welcome to Detroit, Michigan.
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Detroit and Toronto are not comparable.
Detroit was a one industry town and built by entrepreneurs like Henry Ford. Gradually Detroit was overcome by a series of Faustian patronage deals among bureaucratic auto industry caretakers, politicians and unions. With the movement of the auto industry south, away from unions, Detroit has shrunk in half.
Toronto on the other hand is a dynamic multi-industry town with a rapidly growing population. Our problem is abdication by McGuinty letting Torontonians blame its problems like transit on Miller. This is reckless politics. Because about a 1/3rd of the Canadian population lives within a 100K of Toronto, this area is the engine of Canada, issues are more far-reaching than a Toronto Mayor can handle.
Miller was actually right, Toronto needs more tax funds. But we couldn’t give money more money to Miller because he’d just give it to his bureaucracy of unions. Now we need to figure out how the Toronto taxpayers can both fund our City and send money to Ottawa to fund via equalization some stagnant and shrinking Detroit-like regions of Canada. The article should be about what to do about those stagnant regions because Toronto taxpayers can’t keep funding them.
Perhaps Toronto could download some of its responsibilities like the federal lieberals & Mikey did to save money. Wait, theres no government lower to download to.
Perhaps, Toronto should become a province if this would help them financially having a population larger than some provinces.
I wonder if Toronto ever sold any of the surplus city halls, education centres and maintenance yards & other buildings when Mikey amalgamated the seven cities into one.
” wonder if Toronto ever sold any of the surplus city halls, education centres and maintenance yards & other buildings when Mikey amalgamated the seven cities into one.”
Sure, it’s Mikey’s fault., never the current leadership for not following through, why not blame it all on Sir John A?
But to answer your question …no, they have not been sold and the CUPE unions didn’t shrink with amalgamation either, in fact they ballooned from 40,000 to 52,000. Lots of opportunity assets there to get rid of and help fix things.
No its not all Mikeys fault as Dalton McTaxeverything is much worse but he did keep many of Mikeys policies in place in that he didnt upload any of the downloads and hospitals continued to be closed or cut back.
The big difference between these two right leaning leaders, is that Mikey actually lowered taxes while Dalton raised them after saying he wouldnt and plans to raise them again by bring in the Harper Sales Tax on July 1st.
Butt Mikey like Pauly Martini both took the easy way out of their financial problems by passing some of their responsibilities down to the municipal level and we all know, theres only one tax payer;
“Butt Mikey like Pauly Martini both took the easy way”. Not so, not the same at all UV.
Paul Martin downloaded the single largest expenditure of any file in Canada…Health.
He dropped it from 50% Ottawa funding to 13%, now it’s about 18%. Yet even with that cutback “Mikey” spent more on Health than any previous Premier, both in terms of GDP and absolute $$$. Sure hospitals got closed, something had to give because the Liberals had cut off massive spending on Health and the MSM lapdogs never mentioned it, like you, many still blame it all on Mikey.
All of which points out why devolving responsibility for Health entirely out of Ottawa would be a good idea , because nobody can keep track of who’s responsible for what and polticians blame it on the other level of government. Obama is going the other way, pulling all of Health for 300 million people into Washington .. absolute insanity.
Cutting back on healthcare was the one thing which Big Paulie Martin did right.
The federal government has no jurisdiction whatsoever in matters of health. Even in Trudeau’s flawed Constitution, the provinces have exclusive jurisdiction to health. The problem is the provinces prefer to let the feds be the “bad guy” and collect the taxes then dole them back in the form of transfer payments as per Tommy Douglas’ legacy.
‘Activists’, the usual left-leaning, progressive, social-justice seekers have achieved victory in Detroit, someone should congratulate them.
Re #7: ACTIVISTS, they have a plan, the plan is ” GOOD “, opposing the plan is ” BAD ” and proven good beyond any discussion. Someone not convinced about the plan, in disagreement with the plan is opposing ” GOOD ” so he is not just expressing his freedom to disagree but is an enemy of the State or The official Religion or any plan that the activists have decided is some ultimate truth !
Activists with power, and even more absolute power, and we get concentration/death camps. Gulags, famine in the name of collective farming, 5 year plans and hundreds of millions of dead in the twentieth century in the name of good for all.
Like they say the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Oh, and the problem with humans is that we rarely all agree on what the problems are or what the solutions should be but when some group tries to impose a point of view on all, some end up dead or at the least lose their freedom.
Anyway, just a general ” rant “( more or less on-topic ) about fanaticism, group think and the dangers of concentrated power without checks and balances !
Freedom is good but freedom is also risky and unpredictable and can be messy: Some people prefer the security of order and this order is often defined by they being the deciders of what the order should be.