The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as
well as the poor, to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal
bred. – Anatole France "WHEN
THE BUREAUCRACY INCREASES THEIR SALARIES WITH PUBLIC FUNDS" INCREASES THE
RATES OF THE PUBLIC TRANSPORT FOR THE POOR? As is customary in corrupt politicians,
the actual mayor of the city of Toronto has broken his promises made in his
political crusade, proving him to be an opportunist, without leadership, and
credibility to protect the cost of public transportation. If this bureaucrat
wants to start living in a real world, should have known the nature of the poverty, how people
lives in poor neighborhoods and in the immigrant communities that never were
visited by him his political career, or the racial injustice that him knows
very well but ignores. In addition the brand new mayor of this city knows that
seniors and students that belong to poor families simply cannot afford to pay
the increases rates of the TTC, because of the ridiculous pensions that receive
from the federal government and the unworthy minimum wages.
Mayor Tory’s reversal of TTC fare freeze promise sows seeds of doubt
How many times have we seen this movie
before? A politician running for office makes a promise not to do
something unpalatable – raise taxes, say, or cut services or run a
budget deficit. After taking office, the politician claims that, to his
horror, the previous government has left things in far worse shape than
he ever imagined, requiring him, with great regret, to abandon his
promise.
This is the tired script that Mayor John
Tory followed on Monday when he broke a campaign promise not to raise
Toronto Transit Commission fares. Mr. Tory said that when he made that
the pledge, he was merely an uninformed candidate on the campaign trail.
So, “I’m not going be much of an expert on the transit system.”
Now
that he has taken office, talked to the TTC and viewed up close the
devastation wrought on our transit system by that bad, bad man Rob Ford,
he can see that he was wrong.
To help
cover the cost of various improvements to transit service – more buses,
better off-peak service, more express and nighttime bus service – he
proposes to raise non-cash fares by 10 cents. It was only a foolish
promise, after all. It is not as if anyone actually expected him to keep
it.
To distract voters from this
reversal, which comes less than two months after he took his oath of
office, he offered one of the more blatant sweeteners proposed in recent
Toronto politics: free rides for children. The mayor’s people summoned
reporters to a school library to make the happy announcement. The kids
cheered. How much will your ride cost, asked TTC chair Josh Colle.
“Free,” they roared. Louder, he told them. “Free!”
It
was clever politics, for who could ever object to letting our precious
little ones ride the streetcar without a ticket? But the cost of this
shiny little bauble was $7-million in forgone revenue for an underfunded
transit system. That is a pretty steep price to drown out any clamour
over that broken promise. The kids-for-free measure seemed to come out
of nowhere.
Asking adult riders to pay
10 cents more per trip, on the other hand, is defensible policy.
Everyone wants better transit service and the money has to come from
somewhere. It would even make sense to institutionalize a modest annual
increase, avoiding all the political wrangling.
What is harder to defend is Mr. Tory’s claim that he didn’t know the true state of the TTC when he made his promise not
to raise fares. Mr. Tory has been around a long time. As a former radio
talk-show host, a two-time mayoral candidate and a civic leader who
campaigned for better transit, he is hardly a babe in the woods.
Transit
was the centrepiece of his election campaign. He criticized Mr. Ford’s
transit record and held forth on a multimillion-dollar
transit-improvement plan that the TTC put out last summer. Where, he
demanded then, was all the money going to come from? This avowed
non-expert considered himself expert enough to propose an elaborate
$8-billion transit plan, SmartTrack.
It
is unfair to hold politicians to every one of their promises. If the
facts change, they have a right, even a responsibility, to change tack.
But when he made his promise, Mr. Tory knew that the TTC was struggling
to restore service. He must have known, as well, that finding the money
to get the service back would be tough without asking commuters to pay
more at the fare box.
He made the
promise regardless. Now he has broken it, and that is never a small
thing. Mr. Ford, making sense for once, put it simply. “John said he
wasn’t going to increase fares. We all heard it during the mayor’s
debate. And he has.”
If we accept that
politicians are always going to go back on what they promise, it makes
evaluating their competing platforms impossible. Worse, it makes voters
doubt everything they say. If Mr. Tory reverses himself on a fare
increase, will he do the same on his pledge that SmartTrack will cost
local property taxpayers nothing?
Sowing that kind of doubt so soon in his term was a mistake that even free streetcar rides for tots should not obscure.
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