Size doesn’t matter after all, as the example of Canada’s biggest city, Toronto, shows. Once known as “Toronto, the Good”, the city is now a shadow of its former self. While the US bemoans its sad state of the economy, Toronto is actually in much worse shape. Unemployment in the Greater Toronto Area is 9.2% and in the city itself, 10.3%. The ranks of welfare recipients are swelling, and there doesn’t seem to be an end to Toronto’s travails.
How is it possible that a major city with such great potential should have fallen so hard on its face?
Mismanagement is the first underlying cause that comes to mind. For the past ten to fifteen years, in particular, the city has been subjected to one lousy mayor and shortsighted city council after another. City politicians always tend to look no further than their current term of office. But complex cities require policies and solutions for the long term. Public transit policies, for example, must be mapped out for the next few decades, rather than two or three or even five years. Unfortunately, such projects take a long time transitioning from plan to reality. If you want an efficient subway system in 2025, you’d better have your ducks in a row by 2005, or it’s not going to happen.
Public sector unions are another big problem for Toronto. Their members receive regular wage increases that go far beyond “adjustment for inflation”, nor are their platinum-plated pension plans and other perks in any way proportional to their job performance or to what the market can digest. Those wage concessions to public sector unions actually shouldn’t be called “wage increases”; what they really are is ransom money, extorted through the usual and typical ways that all unions employ (the same methods that you and I would go to jail for if we attempted that). If Toronto is serious about digging itself out of the hole it is in, it should start by normalizing unionized city employees’ wages and salaries as well as putting an end to their overly generous and unsustainable pension plans and fringe benefits.
The other problem dragging the city down is the huge number of people who will not or cannot do their share. Too many people there have made living off welfare their personal philosophy (the typical crowd of NDP voters). Toronto also suffers under the weight and burden created by immigration, as the city receives the bulk of non-productive immigrants, which make up 77% of all immigrants currently in the country. Not all of them choose this lifestyle, though. A large percentage of them can’t be as productive as they’d like to be, because their foreign credentials aren’t recognized and/or they can’t find jobs due to lack of “Canadian work experience” or outright racism. (Of course, telling an applicant he or she can’t be hired because he or she doesn’t have any “Canadian work experience” is also racism and has no grounding in reality, as the “work experience” gained in most other countries is often more valuable than what constitutes “Canadian work experience”.)
With Torontonians electing a new city government and mayor on Monday, the candidates on offer make it difficult to choose. Should the next mayor be Rob Ford or George Smitherman? One newspaper has endorsed the latter, but its support comes across as more than ambiguous, vague and even hesitant. In essence, the paper is saying, “Look, we don’t like any of the candidates, but we’ll support the lesser of the many evils out there.” How encouraging for voters who are going to spend this weekend trying to make a decision.
However, the newspaper is right. Ford is a populist who knows how to attract attention by speaking from the gut. Smitherman, if elected, would become an extension of the province’s Liberal premier, Dalton McGuinty – or, put more bluntly, Smitherman would be McGuinty’s clone. Neither one is really suited to manage the city during these difficult times.
Is it any wonder, therefore, that Margaret Wente is experiencing Calgary envy? Toronto should be so lucky as to have someone of Naheed Nenshi’s calibre running the city. Sorry, folks: Nenshi’s already taken.
"extorted through the usual and typical ways that all unions employ (the same methods that you and I would go to jail for if we attempted that)."
Isn't the non-union equivalent saying you'll stop working if you don't get the raise you are asking for? What's illegal about that?
What you describe is a simple case of resigning and quitting. Nothing illegal about that – but that's not what unions do, because they don't quite and go somewhere else.
No, the equivalent is this:
You go into someone's company, home, property, etc. and threaten them with the destruction of their property, livelihood, even physical well-being, unless they do exactly as you say.
Yes, that's known among reasonable and normal people as extortion, and that's a criminal offence.
P.S. You really must read up on the Criminal Code, as your knowledge of what is a crime and what isn't has been shown to be extremely deficient of late.
Unions don't legally threaten people with the destruction of their property or physical well-being. The example you gave before where from a few years ago of a couple irresponsible employees acting on their own.
Unions can threaten a employer's livelihood which isn't illegal. If fact threatening the employees livelihood is the foundation of the employer-employee relationship. That's why unions are needed. To balance out the disproportionate power that an employer has over an employee.
"You really must read up on the Criminal Code"
I'm wasn't the one saying mischief wasn't the crime of damaging property.
They don't, eh? What about some paper mill workers in the Maritimes somewhere several years ago, when union members/mobster beat a "scab" half dead? What about their colleagues who, in a separate incident, actually did kill innocent people who had been hired as replacement? What about Videotron workers in Quebec who years ago cut vital telephone lines, preventing tens of thousands of people from making 911 and other (life-saving) phone calls? What about the "boss-napping" we saw in France not too long ago?
Get real! Unions are for the most part organized crime operations, and everyone I've ever talked to who's been forced to join the union at their workplace has confirmed as much. When a member really does need help, the union guys are nowhere to be found (despite having pocketed their members' (protection) money).
Those union mobsters would rather spend their members' money (without the latter's permission) on anti-Semitic campaigns and things that are completely unrelated to their job of providing workplace representation.
Toronto's unemployment rate has been higher then the countries average for years.
so if immigration brings wealth that wealth is cleverly hidden by
It doesn't bring wealth, because we play the "immigration game" all wrong.
Liberalism is a disease. It has not moral underpinnings, and is at the mercy of political correctness and special interest groups. Conservatism and it's paternal philosophies is what shaped western civilization, and has provided us with the sweet sleep of freedom, innovation and success. It's time we take our cities back, and it's time we keep those that would seek to undermine the political process for their own welfare subsistence, out of office……for good.