I know it's difficult for you to handle so many truth bombs.
1) Rob Ford won’t raise taxes.
Last month, Ford voted to raise property tax by 1.6 per cent (to be phased in over three years) to pay Toronto’s share of the Scarborough subway, estimated to cost between $2.5 billion and $3 billion.
He has championed subways since his 2010 campaign, though he said at the time they could be built without raising taxes by leveraging private funding.
2) Rob Ford is the only one who can balance the city’s budget.
The City of Toronto is required by law to operate with a balanced budget each year. This law has been on the books since at least 1922, says municipal law expert John Mascarin, who’s not sure if any mayor has ever run a deficit.
On the other hand, Toronto had been operating with an annual funding shortfall ever since Premier Mike Harris downloaded several provincial responsibilities onto the municipalities in the 1990s.
The province has been topping-up the city each year through a mishmash of loans and transfers.
Successive mayors have attempted to address this structural deficit, to ensure the city won’t need to go to the province each year for money.
Current budget chief Frank Di Giorgio says much of it has been made up for with the land transfer tax, so now Queen’s Park wants to wean the city off its transfers.
Earlier this year, Finance Minister Charles Sousa announced the elimination one of the provincial programs that provides money to the city.
Ford cried foul, saying it would deprive the city of $50 million.
3) Rob Ford is a political outsider, an everyman who takes on the political elites.
Ford was raised in a privileged family. His father, Doug Ford Sr. founded Deco Labels & Tags, which has since grown into “one of North America’s leading label and tag manufacturing and sales companies in the industry,” according to its website.
According to the mayor’s official city biography, the company employs more than 200 people at plants in Etobicoke, Chicago and New Jersey.
When Ford’s father died in 2006, Ford’s family took ownership of the company, which has annual sales estimated at $100 million.
In addition to being wealthy, Ford is not a stranger to politics. Ford’s father was elected to the provincial legislature as part of Mike Harris’s Progressive Conservative common sense revolution. Five years later, Ford was elected to city council at age 31 and served for 10 years.
His brother, Doug Jr., is also a politician. He was elected to city council at the same time as Ford was elected mayor in 2010.
4) Rob Ford is the only person capable of advancing a conservative fiscal agenda at City Hall.
John Parker and several other right-wing members of council have contradicted this claim, saying that there are many standard-bearers for the fiscally-conservative cause and that they’ve been forging ahead without Ford for some time.
“Truth be told, the effectiveness of Rob Ford really hasn’t changed a whole lot as a result of any of this,” Parker said on CTV Wednesday. “Rob has not been the main activator of work at city hall over the past few years.”
The city has passed two nearly-flat budgets, largely in spite of Ford, who has supported big ticket items like the Scarborough subway, and voted for last-minute budget hikes, like the $12 million added to the 2013 budget for firefighters last January.
That hike helped push former city budget chief Mike Del Grande to quit after having threatened to do so if any more money was added to the city’s budget.
Karen Stintz, who has declared that she’s running against Ford in the mayoral race next year, says she believes in his fiscal agenda, but doesn’t think he’s the one to move it forward.
Also likely to be in next year’s race is fiscal conservative John Tory. While he has not yet declared he’s running, he is widely considered to be a leading conservative candidate.
Rob Ford: Fact checking mayor’s political claims | Toronto Star
