toronto board of trade ford bros crisis creation

Wildly irritating debate on cbc radio this morning. While pitting CUPE versus the Toronto Board of Trade representative on the surface, it was really Ford Bros and their advisors versus answering for any of their bullshit, the false crisis they’ve created, and their refusal to answer for endless haphazard cuts and new fees. It strains ever more twistedly. For instance, ending the vehicle registration tax and replacing it with endless user fees chipping away at the poorest and neediest is simply abusive, but when Matt Galloway asks the TBT spokesperson if it was the wrong idea to cut the one time payment – a fine recompense for all the people cars kill and all the pollution and endless jamming of the streets – TBT initially tries to just flat out change the topic, then when called back to the topic, trails blazingly off on a tautology about the new baseline of city finances as exists after its removal. That people have to lose their jobs by the thousands and the poor be shoved to the ditch by this administration so as to avoid such a surcharge on car purchase is pathetic.

It all seems too tritely simple a version of the shock therapy approach – create financial crisis then come in as if by necessity pressuring people for money and stirring up shit. Federally the ludicrous spending of billions upon billions on security, weaponry, f35’s, prisons, and then turn around and shrill about the need to cut spending is just the pulp of the bill of goods being sold the public, already with historic levels of discrepancy between rich and poor, forcing it ever further into paralytic squalling.

End of the day it seems pretty plain that the Toronto Board of Trade has no role to play in public affairs and no sense of the meaning of government. It amounts to an appropriation of democracy to no good purpose.

so here it is, the path to the city dump for TBT Ford Bros bad ideas