In municipal politics, long high handed and out of touch, courtesy of voter apathy, nothing changes much.
Twenty-five years ago, I was covering the Toronto Board of Education for the diligent, taxpayer conscious Toronto Sun. Back in those days a guy by the name of Robert Spencer was board chairman. Incredibly, he attended school board meetings in cut-off denims with his Dalmatian dogs in tow.
The words `pupil’ and `pencil’ were rarely if ever mentioned at school board meetings, but Marxist loving trustees gave long winded speeches about the virtues of socialism, and had coffee breaks with taxpayer-paid repasts straight out of
Gourmet Magazine.
It had been some years since the
Sun had checked out the goings on of the New Democrat Party (NDP) controlled school board where Karl Marx got more respect than any parent.
For coffee breaks, board trustees dined on scampi, and imported cheeses washed down with wines from their private stock making me ponder in one of my columns, “If that’s for coffee break, wonder what they have for dinner.”
The cutoffs-sporting board chairman, landlord of a spectacular property, located at 150 St. Clair Avenue West in the City of Toronto where he was seeking a rent increase of 99%, was the center of a scandal of the day;.
It was on Sunday, April 29, 1984 that the scandal of Bob Spencer’s rent increase hit the front page of the Sunday Sun. Time would prove that the scandal was even worse than a member of the NDP, which both then and now take credit for the lot of tenants falling into the hands of gouging landlords. For as it turned out, 150 St. Clair Avenue West had been purchased with Toronto Board of Education Credit Union funds!
Well, good old Bob Spencer is baaack, running for a City Council seat.
Spencer is not only running for Councillor Brian Ashton’s seat in Ward 36, Scarborough Southwest, he’s running with the printed endorsement of the
Toronto Star, Canada’s largest newspaper.
States the left leaning
Star in last week’s endorsement editorial:”...We like Robert Spencer. He’s an articulate environmental consultant with school board experience and one of the few credible candidates in this part of the city who isn’t blindly opposed to wind turbines.”
This is what the uber left
Now Magazine had to say about Spencer: “Spencer, a former Board of Education chair and environmental consultant, has the stuff. The sophisticated former '60s radical is pushing co-op housing programs, local food development, a green jobs policy and turning schools into community hubs. And’s he’s a rare Scarberian with the courage to back wind farms off the Bluffs. Talk about a dream candidate.”
It should be more like talk about a nightmare candidate.
In the race for the same east-end council seat are nine others, including a former and more recent Toronto board vice chairman and the never mentioned by the
Star or
Now, hard working, straightforward business man Sean Gladney. Gladney is a detective with the Investigator’s Group, and perhaps can put some of his investigative skills to work to find out why the city of Toronto has a $503-million budget shortfall and why the “Gappers” program, which actually pays employees no longer working for the City of Toronto are still on the payroll.
Over in Ward 14, where environmentalist Gord Perks has been incumbent so long he’s covered in spider webs, is another businessman who can boast being the leader of the hard fought 2000 plebiscite to end the booze ban in the Junction as the only area in the GTA that was still dry. Gus Koutoumanos, not only survived city councillors some of whom wanted to close his popular Shoxx Sports Saloon at Keele and Dundas Street, but went on to end a 100-year ban on alcohol in November 2000 with the overwhelming support of neighbouring residents and businesses. We like best his goal (which should be the goal of everyone in local politics) “to increase voter turnout--currently at 25 per cent at the municipal level. I will increase it to 75 per cent over 25 years.”
Toronto City councillors are among the best paid in North America. They make about $100,000 a year--plus benefits and perks.
CFP says go, Gus Koutoumanos, go. If there were more people casting their votes in municipal elections, the Bob Spencers of this world would stay in the environment consultancy business.
