The leftist appetite to bolster their control over Toronto Council couldn’t have been more obvious than earlier this past week.
The doors had barely opened to Nomination Central at City Hall May 1 when we saw NDP Den Mothers — Joe Cressy and former Toronto mayor Barbara Hall — fluttering over the newest recruits to the City Hall Red Army, current leftist Toronto school trustees Ausma Malik and Chris Moise.
Malik and Moise, part of a movement called Progress Toronto, have set their sights on two new downtown wards created as a result of the 2016 highly skewed $819,000 consultant study called a Ward Boundary Review.
That study — which took 2 1/2 years to produce — and the subsequent city report, proposed adding three wards in downtown Toronto, another north of Hwy 401 and losing one west of downtown. That would reduce the number of constituents in each ward from an average of 70,000 to 61,000.
The costs, in addition to the skewed study, have been calculated at more than $1 million to start up the three new offices and keep them operating yearly. That doesn’t include the amount spent to fight appeals at the OMB last summer (which was not surprisingly lost).
The three new downtown wards are like a siren call for council’s leftists.
Radical NDPer Kristyn Wong-Tam would become boss of the newly drawn Ward 22 (which encompasses the Toronto Islands) and she’d magnanimously leave oversight of the Gay Village in Ward 25 (that Pride stuff is so bothersome) to her little sycophant Moise.
Ditto for Joe Cressy who has declared his fiefdom to be Ward 24 but will keep a close eye on his budding progressive — Malik — who will run just below his area south of Queen St.
Back in November of 2016 when the report to increase council by a net amount of three seats came up for approval, the self-entitled porkers on council claimed this was all about improving democracy for a population that will grow at some stage — and lessening their burden amid claims they are overworked.
But make no mistake. This has been well-planned. This council expansion exercise is completely about empire-building. The leftists are just champing at the bit to build up their control over downtown Toronto– and over council.
If you think Toronto City Hall is Social Justice Central now — with anti-black racism departments, Indigenous Affairs offices, days in honour of stamping out Islamophobia, mentions at every meeting of the sacred land of some aboriginal tribe — just wait.
If you think Mayor John Tory has moved left of centre to appease the likes of Cressy and to pander to political correctness, just wait until there are at least 18 social justice warriors on council instead of the current 15 to intimidate those with common sense into submission amid claims of racism, heartlessness and all the usual leftist tropes.
If you think Tory has allowed spending to get out of control on the homeless and other social justice files and has quite happily messed up Bloor St., King St., Woodbine Ave. and created more gridlock, just wait. I can predict bike lanes on Danforth Ave. will be next and the King St. pilot will be quickly made permanent.
Councillor Justin Di Ciano, who appealed the ward boundary realignment to the OMB along with colleague Giorgio Mammoliti, predicts the 47-member council — the largest non-partisan body (based on population) in North America — will be “mayhem.”
Mammoliti sees a “socialist takeover.”
“The mayor already caters to them (the left),” he says.
“The new seats will tip council further to the left,” he adds, noting they know how to manipulate the system to get what they want.
Di Ciano would have preferred a 25-member council representing the federal boundaries plus a 10-member executive committee of councillors elected at large citywide to ensure real democracy and real debate at executive committee.
“This does not serve the public one bit … it’s self-serving and sad,” he says.
“The system gets more bloated which means less value for you,” Di Ciano added. “The more councillors the less power it is for the electorate.”
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