That is, unless you are a certain lame duck mayor of a certain giant metropolis in Canada who has absolutely no other "cause" that he is capable of "winning". Then it becomes the Biggest. Issue. Ever.
For weeks now, Rob Ford has had the five cent bag fee squarely in his sights. Somehow it has annoyed him so much that he has actually changed where he buys groceries rather than actually stop using plastic bags altogether. His math-challenged brother, Doug, opined on their hilarious radio show a few weeks back that retailers were raking in "hundreds of millions of dollars" each year on these bag fees. (Quick calculation: if you bought groceries every single week and used 20 bags to bring them home every time you shopped that would amount to 1,040 bags per year. At a nickle each you would be out of pocket a whopping $52 per year. It would require nearly 20,000 people to shop in exactly this way for that store to even pocket $1 million in a single year. 2 million people would have to shop in this manner for it to reach $100 million. I don't know a single person who shops this way, at least not any more. Likely this is because of the bag fee.)
In any event, nothing else was working for Ford the mayor so he decided to make abolishing the five cent bag fee a cause he would champion full tilt. He talked about it every week on his radio show. He spoke of it any time there was a microphone near him, although that became considerably more rare after his "I'm giving up on my diet...no, you misquoted me...ok, I'm just doing one more weigh-in in June" dance of a week or so ago. So on May 14, Ford got his hand-picked executive committee to agree to send the issue of abolishing the fee to council. On Wednesday of this week, Toronto City Council discussed this motion for nearly four hours, which to my mind is an absolutely egregious waste of time. They even watched a video on the subject. They debated whether to keep the fees and change who collected the money. They wasted a ridiculous amount of time on this, time that most certainly could be considered "gravy" by Ford's own standards.
And then they did an absolutely amazing thing. They voted to go along with Ford's plan to scrap the bag fee by July 1, but also they voted to ban plastic bags outright by January of next year. Right out of the blue. Cllr. David Shiner basically just said, "Let's make a real difference and just get rid of the damn things altogether." And they did.
And piss him off it surely did, to the extent that he went on talk radio in Toronto today and said, "it's the people's fault". Those are shocking words indeed from this particular mayor; to now turn on "taxpayers" live on the air tells me that he is surely very near the end of his rope. When a lame-duck, irrelevant mayor like RoFo starts to blame "the people" for him not being able to do his job, isn't he eroding the last bastion of hope he has for any sort of re-election campaign? Doesn't he claim to be a mayor "for the people"? Is insulting "the people" a good move, do you think?
In that interview, Ford also said that "the people....don't go down to City Hall." So I ask you: is that an indication that he is suffering from memory loss (perhaps due to his apparently heavy alcohol consumption)? Haven't "the people" beaten a rather consistent path down to City Hall for past big-ticket motions? Or does he mean "the people who think like I do"? Are those people even capable of finding City Hall on a map?
After Ford was elected but before he actually took office I read a calming article (I think it was written by Edward Keenan) that explained how little damage Ford could actually do as mayor because there were so many checks and balances in our municipal system of government (unlike, say, what's been happening in Ottawa). For most of the past year this has proven to be true as council has more and more often just ignored Ford's lunacy and worked around him to keep the city running. In fact, ironically, this council has worked together better than many of its predecessors precisely because it was the only way to get any work done.
But now I am worried that we may be coming out the other side of this. Now Ford may be even more dangerous than ever, because council has started to make knee-jerk decisions just to keep him suppressed. This has some bad implications for the future, in my opinion. I hope that most of the municipal policies of the next three years are not formed on the fly as a giant "screw you" to Rob Ford, who has plainly given up on this term and has said many times in the past couple of months that his 2014 campaign is already under way.
Rob Ford may yet prove to be extremely dangerous to Toronto, but not for any reason we may previously have guessed.
It also bothers me that this stuff is being taken so seriously by many of the public making comments on online news outlets. Some people are practically in hysterics - "how will I pick up after my dog?" "how will I throw away my garbage"? It's ridiculous. Plastic bags have only been used consistently for about 25-30 years. We certainly survived without them before.
ReplyDeleteI saw a documentary about plastic bags about 2 years ago that absolutely convinced me that they are not a good invention. My brother was very upset learning about the North Pacific Gyre, a giant plastic vortex in the ocean of mind-boggling proportions, and told me about it. This too, makes me feel that plastics are something we need to be careful about overusing.
As for our mayor, I am now frightened by reports that he is seeking to change the rules so that the mayor has more power in council, including vetoing council decisions. Hopefully, this will be blocked from happening as well.
It's important to remember that many of those same people that are now in hysterics over the ban were previously in hysterics over the nickel bag fee. I get the feeling they would be in hysterics if it snowed three days in a row next winter. They're the very people Ford counts on for his "support", all the while complaining about the fierce advocacy of the "hysterical" activists that show up at City Hall on a regular basis to take him on on the issues that actually matter. The irony isn't lost on me, let me tell you.
DeleteI remember you telling me about that documentary, though I've yet to see it myself. Like I said, this is likely the right thing to do, to ban plastic bags at the checkouts. For one thing, both Ford brothers were adamant that the fee "did its job"; if that is really true and not just more babbling meant to distract, then the ban really shouldn't pose any kind of a hardship whatsoever. For another, they are an environmental disaster, as you have pointed out. I hope this ban is not overturned.
But even if it is the right thing to do, the reasoning is wrong and it scares me. I'm not, however, all that worried just yet about Ford trying to change those rules, because he can't even buy a piece of parkland without having a committee recommend that he take a flying leap. I just don't see this man changing anything about the way municipal politics works in Toronto unless it's to make it tougher for future mayors to get an agenda through. He has nobody of any consequence on his side any more. His brother and the twin psychos Mammoliti and Nunziata along with the insufferable Minnan-Wong. That's really all that's left for him. And I don't see that changing much in the next three years, not really.
But I've been unpleasantly surprised many times before.