No matter what we might think of him I have to confess he really is a fiscal conservative.. he just doesn't have any well thought out ideas of his own.

http://www.thestar.com/...nity-grants-program-again

well at least he's putting the small c back in conservative? heh... unusual

funny that people with these kind of views manage to get elected to some sort of office

"The six programs would have sailed through council unanimously on Friday, without a vote, had Ford not placed a “hold” on the items in order to vote against them. He lost the votes 34-1, 34-1, 33-1, 34-1, 35-1, and 35-1.

Ford did not offer an explanation. He was also silent when he voted in June against accepting federal money for a gang prevention project that would not have cost the city anything. He lost that vote 33-1."


lmao.... wasn't going to look till I saw who it was about. Funny stuff in there though.

He stands up for what he believes in I guess... even if apparently everyone else disagrees :P

Funny stuff.

Atleast he seems consistent, I respect that more than a flip-flopper... even if I disagree w/ the guys stance.

we spend too much to begin with and he doesn't want to spend even more.

if you owe sixteen hundred dollars in rent and don't have it, would you consider spending another thousand dollars as a way of getting out of your original sixteen hundred dollar debt?

yea, he's a dumbass, you guys are right

(rob ford is pro gangs, those street youths need to put food on the table and lord knows gainful employment isn't an option. it's just one more social safety net, meant to help the poor man)

The objection to him isn't that he wants to save money. The objection to him generally is that he seems to have no clue what he is doing really and doesn't understand how the system works (ie who is responsible for what). His unrealistic subway proposal is proof of this.

If you owe sixteen hundred dollars in mortgage and don't have it, would you consider burning down your house :) ?

On April 15, 2006, Ford (a sitting councillor at the time) attended a Maple Leafs hockey game at the Air Canada Centre. Visibly intoxicated and belligerent, he began to insult a couple seated behind him, who were visiting from out of town. Two security guards escorted Ford out of the building. When confronted about the episode three days later by a National Post reporter, Ford denied even having been at the game, declaring that he hadn't been to a hockey game since Christmas. "This is unbelievable," he told the Toronto Star. "I wasn't even at the game, so someone's trying to do a real hatchet job on me, let me tell you." [76] The following day, Ford admitted that he had lied to the media about the incident, and finally apologized for his behaviour: “That was just stupidity. I feel terrible about it. My wife and I had a little bit too much to drink . . . I made a mistake that will never happen again.” [77]

wow this guy is pretty amazing

My hometown has a guy like that on its school board. Obviously a school board vote doesn't carry the same weight as a vote from a mayor on all things involved in a municipality, but the guy pretty much votes "no" on everything. I respect the philosophy of voting against things because you generally don't want to spend money if it's not going to good use, but sometimes money HAS to be spent, and saying "no" to everything all of the time isn't governing.

Martian this depends on two factors: what is my fire insurance policy looking like and how competent are the arson investigators?

ill tell you one thing, if i owe the sixtreen hundred i wouldnt start handing out hundred dolla dolla bills, yo. i,d argue that cutting bck spending would be my best choice.

how do we save money? ill answer that when i take a political theory course (from a conservative christian college, of course), otherwise what you claim of the mayor kind of also implies to me, if we,re being honest

Braden, where were you when I was taking on ten people at once in the tax thread? I could have used your help.

nobody wants to hear about how the sixteenth amendment is treason, spear. further more, nobody wants to hear everybody proving me wrong. so avoidance is best i think :P

anything past ten is treason. treason might be heavy handed, but really what is the point of ten anymore in this day and age?

just out right remove it if you're constantly going to ignore it

He doesn't want "a smaller government" and doesn't seem to want to demand the conversation that is the requisite precursor to his position:

He needs to facilitate the debate on the items government should perform with FTE's [and therefore citizens should be taxed to pay for], the tasks that government should pay a private company for [and therefore citizens will have to pay a contract fee for] and the tasks that private companies should do.

If you're just voting against "big gubmint" you're not actually furthering any understanding of anything.

He kind of reminds me of Eric Cartman.

http://www.youtube.com/...n9XhWo&feature=fvwrel

Rob Ford runs into his house retreating from a comedy crew and calls the cops. When they don't get there fast enough he calls back and says this to the dispatchers:

'you fluffes don't you fluffing know i'm rob fluffing king ford the mayor of this city'


hahahah. porky is youtube gold.

he also has successfully united conservatives, liberals, and centrists together on council.. the first Mayor to ever do so successfully... too bad they are united against him:P

Fortunately council > Mayor

Too bad he didn't explain himself. Do you guys have transparency in the spending? Aka, requiring the organizations to note how much of the funding is actually spent on it's intended purpose versus overhead? It was a hugely controversial amendment that folks I worked for once pushed. We based it on looking at a well-known organization's 990s and seeing executive compensation levels approaching 7 figures for a few officers. Still lost the battle on partisan grounds. Sometimes the grantees aren't as benevolent as they seem. There is a fidicuiary duty to manage the people's money so hopefully it's upheld.

Dont get me wrong, the guy is an obvious tool, but most of those grants do in fact appear to be complete wastes of taxpayer dollars that could be better spent filling pot-holes or (shudder) not taken from the taxpayers to begin with.

"a program to improve relations between young people and the police; a program to help female Caribbean immigrants, aged 16 to 18, to develop better conflict resolution skills; a program to reduce violence and substance abuse among young Tamils"

What a load of bullfluff.

You're also investing (based on funding recommendations) $10,000 in table tennis, $7,500 for urban youth farming, $5,000 for teaching the fundamentals of crickett, $9,000 for encouraging ethno-cultural seniors 55 yrs+ to address Human Rights issues, $3,500 for a two-day forum to address the Ontario Policy Complaints System, $3,500 for helping live-in caregivers raise awareness of their human rights issues, and $20,700
to help people of North Etobicoke/Rexdale learn about voting, etc. Sadly youth meditation, Somalian youth organizations and helping violent Tamil men did not make the cut. Moral of the story, I'm moving to Toronto and launching all sorts of human rights advocacy organizations, ethnic soccer groups, and all the while saying I need money to run them.

Yeah, I know it wouldn't put much of a dent in the deficit or in funding SS or Medicare or anything like that, but it'd be nice if someone took on all those ridiculous programs.

There was a debate in my hometown about the public high school spending around half a million dollars to redo their football stadium, including putting turf on the field. This was being discussed in the school board at the same time that RIF slips were being handed out to about 40-50 teachers due to economic shortfalls for the district.

It's hard to blame the district (even though many people did) because the money for the football field came from a government grant and could ONLY be spent on infrastructure improvement and not on teacher salaries.

Not all programs should go away obviously. Without some of these grants, there are certainly things that would never be a priority that are important enough to be done (for instance, the infrastructure improvement grant in theory is a good idea, just unfortunate that it was being used in my hometown at the same time as teachers were being laid off).

The programs being discussed here are even more ridiculous. If my math holds up, the grants trumper just listed come up to $59,200. If that amount of money were spent elsewhere, that could make somewhat of a difference. That's the salary of a veteran teacher, or in some more poor districts, potentially the salary of TWO young teachers.

I agree wholeheartedly. I'm not sure we will get change overnight, but the transparency of the government posting those grants is a good first step because the population can ridicule the necessity of some of the grants. And, shoot, for all I know there is a serious need for urban youth farming--I mean, shoot, if Walking Dead has taught me anything it's that even us urban dwellers must learn the country ways.

And you raise a good point on grants. One thing that always drove me nuts were "open space" grants that a state provides to local governments. When I got into the weeds of it, these dollars came out of property taxes and were even listed on said taxes as going to preserve "open space" lands from encroaching development. Then you get into the actual government spending and the state would lend itself money from these funds. Worse yet, they started buying dilapitated old shipping yards from connected (aka donrs) developers and then promising to build bike paths on them as "open space." And that's without even touching the scandals of accepting paying more than government-sanctioned property value estimates. Ok, that's enough ranting for me.