Sunday, August 19, 2007

Mel's lament

The Toronto Sun features a column (Joe Warmington - Sun, August 19, 2007) covering commentary by former mayor Mel Lastman on the city's current budget mess. Now Mel has too much personality for many Torontonians - or is this just an excuse on the part of the downtown elite to dislike someone who is not one of there own. However, there's no doubt as to his leadership capabilities.

Lastman is quoted:

His advice to the socialist-majority council is to start listening to those who are not like-minded. "That's what I did," he said. "I made them part of the decision-making. That's how you get ideas."

Sage advice. The only problem is that the hard-left in council don't believe in finding solutions. They deem the concept of finding slolutions - be they via efficiencies, new ideas, and/or making trade-offs - as capitalist and bourgeois. It's no so much a that they lack understanding, but rather a hard-wired scrambling of their brains.

Friday, August 17, 2007

All things upside down

OK - nothing like a good vacation to rejuvenate oneself. Aha - but things don't change much in Hogtown - not over a few weeks (months, years, decades..) We should have junked the streetcars decades ago - instead we still have people trying to prove they were right for forcing us to keep them.

In the latest news, a number of panhandlers have been involved in a murder (ok al-edge-ed-ly - lol) of a visitor to our fair city. The incident was witnessed by many from a stopped Queen streetcar (no news in the streetcar being stopped). One women has been charged and a number of American panhandlers are now under investigations.

Now why would American hobo's head up to Hogtown. The simple answer is that the left-wing wing-nuts who run this city WANT them here to keep up the pressure for oodles of money to be spent on socialist housing. The hobos actually aren't in line for public housing - they are just being used for PR purposes. Now an astounding 10% of domiciles in Toronto are public housing units. However, one needs to realise that the goal of people like Paula Fletcher and David Miller is to have 100% public housing. (Top party officials would still be allowed to 'own' there own dachas. )

Given this, it's not surprising that the City does nothing about panhandlers - other that to invite more. I'm surprised they are advertising.

Of course, if you are a home or business owner in Queen W - you're out of luck. This is the city where a councilor (Adam Vaughan) has actually proposed taxing people who are lawfully lining up to get into a club or restaurant - while inviting hobos from around the world to invade the city and suck up out tax $$$.