Doug Ford's plan to streamline Toronto City Council is… “racist”？
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Summary
In light of Doug Ford cutting the size of Toronto City Council by almost half, the outcry from soon-to-be unemployed career politicians and their useful idiots in the media came fast and curious. The over-the-top pronouncements included accusations that Ford s move was undemocratic, that it was a thinly-veiled personal vendetta against Mayor John Tory, that there was no consultation, that the changes were being done way, way too fast. Meanwhile, the NDP leader Andrea Horwath played the backroom deals and hidden agenda cards which she almost always does these days.
Transcript
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Tonight, Doug Ford's plan to streamline Toronto City Council is finally being called racist.
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It's August 2nd, I'm David Menzies and this is the Ezra Levent Show.
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Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
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There's 8,500 customers here and you won't give them an answer.
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You come here once a year with a sign and you feel morally superior.
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The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
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In light of the Doug Ford PCs cutting the size of Toronto City Council by almost half,
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the outcry from soon-to-be unemployed career politicians and their useful idiots in the media came fast and curious.
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The over-the-top pronouncements included accusations that Ford's move was undemocratic,
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that it was a thinly-veiled personal vendetta against Mayor John Tory,
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that there was no consultation, that the changes were being done way, way too fast.
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Meanwhile, NDP leader Andrea Horwath played the backroom deals and hidden agenda cards,
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And hey, it's getting really, really old, Andrea.
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But when I initially addressed the council-cutting issue in this space a few days ago,
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I joked that at least Ford wasn't being labeled a racist by this move,
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because when it comes to things the loony left doesn't like,
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well, the race card is their trump card, and they usually play that card from the get-go.
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But folks, me thinks I joked too soon, because yesterday in that periodical paragon of progressiveness,
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Ford's attack on Toronto is an attack on urban diversity.
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This wondrous piece of fish wrap is penned by Mariana Valverde,
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who is, of course, a professor at the University of Toronto specializing in urban governance and law.
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And as the saying goes, that column would have been twice as good if only it had been half as long.
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Valverde suggests that because there's fewer council seats up for grabs,
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that means there are, of course, fewer opportunities for persons of colour to get elected.
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Therefore, I guess smaller government is racist government?
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One particular excerpt stands out regarding the protests that took place at City Hall last Friday
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who in a streetcar would be just another Torontonian,
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but who would stand out on council because she wears a hijab.
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Several black Torontonians with experience addressing violence and poverty
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are also running for council, such as Waleed Kogali.
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Valverde seems to be suggesting that in the case of Osma Malik,
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she should be embraced by diversity-loving Torontonians,
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Wow, I can just imagine what an election sign for this candidate might state,
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vote for Malik, or at least vote for her diverse Islamic headgear.
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And hey, surely this is not the same Osma Malik who has a very checkered past, is it?
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Such as her being involved in the rigging of a student council election
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and how she spearheaded a fundraising drive for the families of the Toronto 18 terrorists,
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and how in 2006 she labeled Israel's actions against the terrorist group Hezbollah
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Oh, but come on, folks, pay no attention to that Sharia suffragette behind the curtain
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And if y'all got a problem with that, then you're obviously a racist.
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And if the name of the second individual Valverde mentions rings a bell,
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Waleed Kogali, that's because he's one of the founders of that racist collection of agitators
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He's also the brother of another Black Lives Matter Toronto head honcho,
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You might remember Usra's infamous tweet from a while back when she stated the following,
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quote, please, Allah, give me strength not to cuss, kill these men and white folks out here today.
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Usra never apologized for this racist rant, and instead of condemning her,
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Black Lives Matter shamefully rushed to her defense.
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But in addition to hating white folk, Black Lives Matter Toronto hates the police,
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In fact, BLM was instrumental in getting the police punted from the gay pride parade
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and getting the cops kicked out of Toronto schools at risk.
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They also had a hand in ending carting by police,
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which might be one of the reasons why Toronto is experiencing another awful summer of the gun right now.
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But as I said, I'm not surprised the left called Doug Ford's changes to Toronto Council
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and attack on urban diversity to show how insane the left are when it comes to race.
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Do you recall the story last month about Michael Tobolo?
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Tobolo is the newly minted community safety and correctional services minister,
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and he went for a late night ride along with police in the tough neighborhood of Jane and Finch.
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and he mentioned this anecdote at Queen's Park.
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The comments he made in this house are nothing but racist.
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They stigmatize the Jane Finch community, end quote.
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Yeah, so in the eyes of the official leader of the opposition,
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And now we are led to believe that trimming city council is really an attack on diversity?
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that the race of a candidate is more important than the substance of a candidate?
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In the final analysis, hopefully the progressives will come to understand
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that the vast majority of normal people are currently suffering from outrage fatigue,
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meaning that the left's constant accusations of racism
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is now becoming so much ambient noise that people are simply tuning out.
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Because at the end of the day, if everything is racist,
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that merely stating this truism makes me a racist.
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Well, these are very interesting times indeed at Toronto City Hall.
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Just last week, Ontario Premier Doug Ford decided to cut the size of city council
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And oh, the cries of outrage from the usual suspects.
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They reverberated throughout the mean streets of Hogtown.
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And it's going to be Ward 7 and Ward 8 after this election.
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Oh, that's right, because they're amalgamating it.
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Now, Giorgio, I think it would be, to a lot of viewers out there,
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somewhat counterintuitive that anyone on council, including yourself,
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would support a reduction of almost 50% of council seats.
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But you actually do support Premier Ford's move.
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I mean, if you were here right now, I'd give him a big hug.
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Because at the end of the day, he's doing the right thing.
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It's saving taxpayers' dollars, not only on the council floor,
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We drive the bureaucrats nuts with reports and that sort of thing.
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It's going to save a ton of money in the end, in the long run.
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And we get to make decisions faster and better.
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And you know what I like about this move the best, David?
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And I've been harping on this, and people have been laughing at me for so long.
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And those long-awaited transfer payments for little things like getting our parks cleaned
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and grass cut and that sort of thing are finally going to make their way up to the suburbs.
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Now, Giorgio, what do you make of the outcry by the usual suspects on the left,
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that this was undemocratic, there was no consultation,
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this was never talked about during Doug Ford's election campaign,
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Oh, yes, of course, a personal vendetta against Mayor Tory,
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First of all, Doug, his brother, myself, a whole slew of us have been talking about this for years.
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And even before they came onto the picture, guys like me after amalgamation were saying the same thing.
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We need to cut ourselves in half because it's unmanageable.
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And so it got heard with the Fords, for sure, well before this.
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And it's been an ongoing conversation in elections.
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It's been an ongoing conversation outside of elections.
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The people that are complaining are the same people, and I might add,
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a bunch of lefty New Democrats, socialists, communists, whatever you want to call them.
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They're the ones that didn't have a problem cutting the police budget,
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and police, the police by 800 officers, did they?
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They didn't have that problem when they voted in cutting out those jobs
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or cutting out some of those manufacturing jobs
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because they didn't like what people manufacture, right?
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They didn't hear the plight of all those families when they came to council.
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All of a sudden, their jobs are in jeopardy, and now we're hearing a cry from them.
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So this is really about the NDP power base of downtown Toronto being eroded.
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And one of the latest developments at the 11th hour, you had the former city planner,
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Jennifer Kiesmat, a darling of the left, throw her hat into the ring.
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I heard they courted Mike Layton and even David Miller to be a challenge.
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What do you think of her arrival into the mayoralty race, Georgiou?
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And do you think, I'm thinking Mayor Tory must be feeling backstabbed right now
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because he has caved to almost every left-wing demand on council these last four years,
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Well, he didn't listen to me to a large degree because I told him right from the start,
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you're conservative, don't cater to a lot of things.
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And he did it, I think, for primarily political reasons.
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I think we can all read through that, that kind of thing.
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And now he's stuck because he has catered to them,
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anticipating that there's going to be another 47 councillors on the council floor.
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And I think this is going to benefit him because now he might be able to become his real self,
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that right-leaning guy, that center right-leaning guy that he always has been.
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I told him the other day, I think this is actually good for him.
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He'll be able to perhaps talk a little more about what he wants to do in the next term.
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And if he plays his cards right, he needs just a few people to support him.
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And I know we're an eternity away in political timelines,
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But what do you see shaking down in terms of the mayoralty race?
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I mean, we have Keyes, Matt, who is, you know, admittedly a serious contender.
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I'm not sure what his political CV is all about.
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And Torrey's got to come out with his real self, I think, in this election.
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And there is no red carpet for Keyes, Matt, in the suburbs.
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And so I need to make that really clear, that a guy like me is not going to be supporting a very left-leaning individual,
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who, by the way, was very instrumental in bringing this whole city through this congestion that we've been with the bicycle lanes
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and that whole array of mismanagement on bike lanes and how we're putting them everywhere, right?
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And the King Street Pilot Project and banning cars, right?
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Even the shift on subways and LRTs, you know, it has a lot to do with her when she was at the helm.
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But at the end of the day, we're not going to vote for people that are good-looking, are we?
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I'm glad in the Me Too era you're not playing any favorites, Giorgio.
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At the end of the day, look at their platform and look what they stand for.
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At least she's not going to be good for the suburbs, in my opinion.
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And now, speaking of the suburbs, if we can call Jane Finch suburbs, you know, as I said in the beginning,
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I mean, my heart breaks when I think of Jane Finch.
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There's a disproportionate amount of crime there.
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You had Minister Tabolo two weeks ago do a ride-along in a police cruiser in the wee hours of the night.
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He was actually condemned as a racist by Andrea Horwath, the leader of the provincial NDP,
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And yet this is a guy at 1 in the morning that was visiting a known crack house.
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I know you have a plan you want to talk to about Jane Finch,
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but what do you make, Giorgio, of this tone that everything is through a lens of racism,
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even a minister wearing a bulletproof vest for a ride-along, for goodness sake?
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which is one of the largest issues we've had in the city for a long time.
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And those are the gangbangers in the city that aren't afraid of anybody
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and are going to kill people on the streets and anybody else around them.
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And the policy, take it from a guy who's gone on those rides for 28 years,
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they will not let you go on these midnight runs,
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these two o'clock runs to see the worst parts of the city unless you wear that vest.
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So, well, you know, even Mayor Tory said, well, I never wore a vest.
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Well, yeah, but you don't need to wear a vest if you're going to go with some traffic cops, right?
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Like, you know, to look at the congestion or the problems with traffic.
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You are going to need a vest if you're going to go to 2 o'clock in the morning
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and look at some of the crack houses and how they're the part of the problem in TCHC.
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And TCHC, for those outside of Toronto, that's Toronto Community Housing Corporation.
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And, of course, this is taxpayer-subsidized social housing that, in addition to people that need this assistance,
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Giorgio, and I don't think anyone is begrudging that, it is factual that there are thugs,
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there are drug dealers, gangbangers living here, and they're shaking down residents there,
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And yet, why can't we kick these thugs out of taxpayer-funded subsidized housing?
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We attempted, through the mayor, Mayor Tory, just a couple of years ago, actually,
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to try and get to the Wynn government to change the legislation to allow TCHC to be able to evict
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And what was the ostensible policy reason on that?
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I'm going to get to that, because 1%, now, first of all, let me say it this way.
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4% of TCHC tenants make up the population of Toronto.
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They're in every part of the city of Toronto, these units.
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1% of their population are a big problem to not only the residents in TCHC, but the much
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What I say by that is they're harboring, literally, all of these killers.
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They know they are, and they can't do anything about it, because the courts won't let them
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They call it the last place for these people to go.
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So if they evict, there's nowhere else for these people to go.
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I see it like spraying down a building full of cockroaches.
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The cockroaches are just going to scatter, right?
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Let them scatter, because their particular strength is when they're all together in a
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So my approach is going to be scatter them, evict them, get them out of Jane and Finch
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I think we need to knock the buildings down completely and build into a mix.
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It's not fair to those residents to be segregated.
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It's no wonder our little kids in those communities are growing up angry and killing people.
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We need them to mingle with the rest of society.
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So I want to knock down all of the social housing in Jane and Finch, put a plan in place.
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I'm the guy who came up with the affordable housing plan at City Toronto that started the
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Right, which is considered a great success, where it was a similar, you know, maybe you
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But it was raised, and now it's a mixed housing development.
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TCHC became a developer, but it was a good mix, changing the community.
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We've already knocked down half of the units of Furgrove.
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Okay, and the residents in the back, those rate payers that have always had concerns about
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the crime that comes out of the social problems, are saying, you've gotten rid of a lot of
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I want to do it on the Islington Corps, where we just got a number of shootings lately.
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You know, Duncan Woods, Satterley, all those little pockets.
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I want to knock them down, rebuild them as a mix, and get rid of the problem once and for
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You've got an election slogan, I understand, that you're going to be using.
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And that's gotten me into trouble, because sometimes when you keep things real, people
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This election is going to be about keeping it real.
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Well, Giorgio, thank you so much for dropping by the Ezra Levent show.
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Maybe in October, the city of Toronto is going to take a right-hand turn.
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More of the Ezra Levent show to come right after this.
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Earlier today, Ontario Attorney General Carolyn Marooney and Environment Minister Rod Phillips
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They have urged the Trudeau Liberals to completely back off on implementing any sort of carbon tax.
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And if Ottawa doesn't reverse course, they vow that the province of Ontario will fight
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Now, yesterday, I spoke with Ian Lee, a professor at the Sprott School of Business at Carleton
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University in Ottawa, regarding those supposedly new and improved changes to the federal carbon
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tax, changes that are clearly not winning over any of the detractors.
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Now, Professor Lee, for starters, can you tell us what's so radically different about this
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new carbon tax scheme and whether or not it is likely to win over any of the detractors
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I mean, what they're doing today is, in one sense, it's very momentous.
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It's very important because it represents, I wouldn't say a full-fledged repudiation of
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their signature issue, the environment that they campaigned on.
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But it certainly is a major rollback in terms of the commitments that they made.
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I'll get to whether this is good or not to preempt myself if this is a good thing, I'm going
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to argue, but I'm just dealing with what they did today.
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They are walking back on the issue on which they backed the farm.
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The issue that they said was the defining issue of this government when they are this party,
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when they ran to form the next government in 2015.
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And why it was so critical then and now was that this government and Mr. Trudeau and the
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other leaders, his supporters, many of whom became, or a number of them became cabinet ministers,
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said that they were evidence-based and that they were going to, you know, not rule by emotion
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And yet, they didn't subject it, in my view, to serious empirical econometric scrutiny.
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And, in fact, just to point this out and get this out there, the Minister of the Environment
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repeatedly said for the past two years, not only was a carbon tax not going to hurt the
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economy, it was going to be good for the economy.
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It was going to be good, not just for the environment, she said.
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It was going to help firms and help them be even more competitive.
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Over the last two years, as more and more people studied it, as companies came forward
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with their own analysis showing the negative impact of this on their own company's balance
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And I would suggest to you, after Finance Canada, the bureaucrats crunched the numbers,
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it became increasingly clear that Catherine McKenna, the Minister of the Environment, was
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simply wrong, that it was going to be deleterious.
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It was going to be damaging to the environment, principally because our major competitor, the
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United States of America, has categorically said repeatedly they are not going to do a carbon
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So, just to quickly summarize, this is a huge walk back on their, I think, their most important
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issue, their signature issue of the environment.
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And it's good for us because it has had such a negative impact.
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But you are right, because they didn't roll it back to zero, because they're not shutting
00:23:37.740
They're making it less aggressive so that the impact on big emitters is not as significant.
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But as I said, they're not cancelling the carbon tax.
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And Professor Lee, I mean, that begs the question, why not just put this dog out of its misery?
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I mean, especially when you have Saskatchewan, they're going to challenge us in court.
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That was one of the things, first and foremost, we will go to court against the federal government
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in terms of a carbon tax because Ontario is, or at least was, a manufacturing province.
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And to have something uncompetitive as a carbon tax placed on manufacturers that are still
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So wouldn't there be, I don't know, wouldn't there be more, I guess, sympathy or understanding
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if the liberals just came clean and said, you know what, we've crunched the numbers.
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I agree with you completely that that would be the optimal solution.
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The first is, is I think that because they committed so deeply, it became existential for
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We're going to be different from everybody else.
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And I think that they invested so deeply in terms of their own interior values and their
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own commitment, not to mention the political commitment that they have decided that either
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they're not willing to do it from a value, you know, their own values point of view, or
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more likely they think that the damage would be too great politically.
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But, you know, David, the thing I want to bring out, because I realize there's not a lot of
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And not because I don't understand the logic of carbon tax.
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Of course, Jack Mintz does make something more expensive.
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But what they don't tell you in this ongoing debate is that there's a couple of hidden
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And one of them is this is that there is an alternative or a substitute source that is
00:26:01.840
cheaper than the fossil fuel source called natural gas or oil.
00:26:05.960
And the dark and dirty secret that they will not disclose is that natural gas is the cheapest
00:26:11.360
source of energy in North America per kilowatt hour.
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The Department of Energy in the United States produces a chart once a year pricing all the
00:26:24.160
energy sources and they factor in and crunch all the numbers in terms of the cost of each
00:26:29.280
energy source, nuclear, geothermal, wind, solar, coal, natural gas, and they convert it into
00:26:37.140
Solar and wind are still not close to natural gas.
00:26:42.100
And so as a consequence, we are not switching en masse in Canada or the States to alternative
00:26:52.520
And that's why oil and natural gas still dominate.
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In fact, the world at about 80 percent, they provide about 80 percent of all the energy.
00:27:04.720
What I'm trying to say is that what they were saying is we're going to change Canada.
00:27:08.640
We're going to get us all off of natural gas and oil was not credible in an evidence based
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world because the substitutes, meaning alternative energies using wind and solar, are still not
00:27:22.660
economically competitive with natural gas and oil.
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And the second final point I want to make, David, is they never they always bring up European
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Canada is the second largest country on the planet Earth, and we are the second coldest country
00:27:40.860
in the world, we consume more energy and produce more GHG because not because we squander or
00:27:49.660
are wasteful, but because we're the second largest country with the lowest density in the world,
00:27:55.640
four people per square kilometer versus Europe with 250 to 500 people per square kilometer.
00:28:01.640
So my point is their whole vision was based on, call it green ideology, almost a green religion.
00:28:09.320
It wasn't evidence based in the sense that we could cause large numbers of Canadians to switch
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almost all of their energy and used in Canada from natural gas and oil to two alternatives.
00:28:23.240
So it was a pipe dream from the from the very beginning.
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And from what you're saying, Professor Lee, like two things come to mind.
00:28:29.460
First, I I'm with the camp that looks upon this as just really so much virtue signaling
00:28:36.720
at the expense of the facts and the reality on the ground.
00:28:42.280
And secondly, Professor Lee, tell me if I've got this straight, if Canada in a utopian world,
00:28:48.840
I don't know, maybe we invented dilithium crystals and made our carbon footprint zero and the rest
00:28:55.680
of the world went on business as usual, that wouldn't make a lick of difference in terms
00:29:00.920
of, you know, the total, the overall total carbon output that the world produces.
00:29:10.200
I'll use slightly different language to say the same thing, because it's language I'm
00:29:13.680
familiar with that I'm comfortable with being in a business school.
00:29:22.120
Three, there's a couple of countries in the world that are market makers.
00:29:30.620
One is the United States of America, and the second is the People's Republic of China.
00:29:36.360
Because they're the first and second largest economies in the world.
00:29:43.140
The U.S., a third of a of a of a billion people.
00:29:46.780
And of course, China with one point three billion.
00:29:58.840
The idea that a country that is smaller than one of 50 states in the U.S., Canada is smaller
00:30:07.700
The totality of all of Canada is smaller than the state of California in terms of population
00:30:13.000
The idea that one country with 37 million people could cause the world to change its behavior
00:30:20.840
or change the footprint of GHG around the world is just preposterous to anybody who has
00:30:26.800
any understanding of basic arithmetic and the numbers involved.
00:30:31.440
We are two percent of the world's emissions of GHG.
00:30:35.100
So the idea, even if we eliminated every last molecule of GHG in Canada, it would make no
00:30:42.360
difference on the world because over the next 35 years, the IEA, the International Energy
00:30:47.560
Authority, is forecasting the equivalent of two more Chinas coming on stream in terms of
00:30:54.460
In other words, the consumption today of China is going to be it's going to go up again over
00:31:00.000
the next 30 years, 35 years by the equivalent of two Chinas.
00:31:03.620
And so two percent Canada's contribution is literally irrelevant to the to the global
00:31:11.860
Well, Professor, I got to tell you, the way you frame it, it just makes this whole issue
00:31:19.920
But again, we are dealing with a government whose prime minister once infamously said the
00:31:27.620
So maybe the carbon will balance itself to environmental stewardship.
00:31:32.880
But Professor Lee, I want to thank you kindly for weighing in on this very important matter.
00:31:42.160
More of the Ezra Levin show to come right after this.
00:31:44.500
On my monologue yesterday about Doug Ford's free market marijuana plan, giving public sector unions a
00:32:04.100
Paul writes, although I do not approve of illegal drugs being sold to the masses, I do support
00:32:09.940
Doug Ford in his efforts to break the government's monopoly on selling dope and booze.
00:32:15.740
Well, Paul, as I'm no fan of the wacky tobacco either, and I've never actually imbibed.
00:32:21.640
But since this is going to be a legal commodity, government needs to know its role, which is
00:32:27.700
to regulate and tax this stuff, not warehouse and retail it.
00:32:32.960
Liza writes, the control of booze sales and gambling is something these guys want to keep
00:32:39.760
Suggesting a free market for pot sales threatens that grasp.
00:32:43.740
The phrase from my or their dead cold hands comes to mind.
00:32:50.380
Well, you know something, just about everyone I've ever met wants the government out of the
00:32:57.960
I say just about everyone because the only people I've ever heard trumpeting the merits
00:33:02.660
of the bloated Liquor Control Board of Ontario and the scandal-plagued Ontario Lottery and
00:33:08.240
Gaming Corporation are the bureaucrats who work there and, of course, the unionized staff.
00:33:14.600
These fat cats have a lucrative racket going and they don't want to give it up, even though
00:33:19.540
we all know the private sector would run things so much better.
00:33:24.680
And Shannon writes, keep those lefties crying, Doug.
00:33:28.000
You know for every embittered lefty, there are a hundred happier taxpayers being treated fairly.
00:33:35.780
They say you're supposed to give the squeaky wheel the grease.
00:33:38.960
My advice to Premier Ford would be to ignore the whiners in the public sector who see their
00:33:46.020
Sure, public sector unions are really good at raising a ruckus, but all that should really
00:33:51.380
matter is the will of the people and the silent majority wants less government involvement in
00:33:58.760
Well, that's it for tonight's edition of the Ezra Levent Show.
00:34:01.820
It's been a pleasure guest hosting this past week.
00:34:04.740
The big boss man, he's back tomorrow, and I'm sure he'll have plenty to say about the
00:34:09.740
Tommy Robinson case that Ezra was covering in the UK these past few days.
00:34:15.800
And hey, folks, never forget, without risk, there can be no glory.