Un vent de prudence fiscale à Toronto?

La ville de Toronto a élu un nouveau maire, qui selon sa feuille de route, n'a aucune crainte à sabrer dans les dépenses publiques excessives.

Via Global Economic Analysis:

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Toronto Embraces Fiscal Prudence; Guillotine of Spending Cuts Coming?

A guillotine of spending cuts may be headed Toronto's way after a resounding victory by right-wing candidate Rob Ford. Many Canadians wrote me this evening with the good news.

One of the best of them comes from "Bruno" who writes ...

Hi Mish

I am an avid reader of your blog. I wanted to point out a bit of news that would make you smile. The city of Toronto elected a new mayor last night with a sharp turn to fiscal prudence and rejecting the very very left wing it has been saddled with for most of the past three decades.

Rob Ford who is anything but presentable in the conventional context (very over-weight, loud, sometimes obnoxious) was elected by a landslide garnering more than the second and third place candidates combined. His leading opposition was a man named George Smitherman.

Smitherman is a failed provincial minister of health under whom the ministry blew $1 billion in consulting fees for something called "eHealth" that never resulted to so much as a single shovel turning over in new programs etc. It was a solid rejection of the spending class.

Ford has been a city counsellor for several years and was widely detested by the other counsellors because he never spent any of his allotted budget and actually returned calls from his constituents directly. He kept detailed memos of the waste by the mostly left-leaning counsel such as $12,000 retirement parties, rented bunny suits at local events, taxi bills spent by the transit commissioner, etc. He voiced them every week on a talk radio show and built up a momentum behind him sufficient enough to make the strongest statement yet in Canada in favour of fiscal prudence.

Ford plans to cut city counsel by half, out-source garbage collection, reduce government operating budgets, reduce staff through attrition, cut out all perks for city staff, eliminate many grants to thousands of groups, etc. In short, he wants to do many of the things you write about in your blog.

Will he be successful? Time will tell. Has his "end of the gravy train" message resonated? More than any taxpayer could ever have hoped.

Kind regards,
Bruno K.
Toronto