When voters backed Rob Ford's vow to Stop the Gravy Train, few suspected he would be so literal. His first victory at city council this week was a decision to stop supplying free snacks to councillors when they gather for meetings, a miserly measure that could work against the very efficiency he seeks from city hall.
The mayor has been fulminating for a solid decade about the scandalous waste of taxpayers' hard-earned money when councillors order in fruit plates, raw vegetables, sandwiches and other delights. During the election campaign, he tried to expose the cheese-and-cracker scandal by smuggling in a tabloid photographer to capture the feast. "When I'm mayor that food is going," said Mr. Ford at the time, comparing councillors to "pigs at a trough."
Now that council "finally got rid of it," he crowed on Wednesday, "I'm very, very happy." Voters should not be.
City hall didn't bring in snacks for councillors so they could lounge around in togas eating grapes. It brought them in so councillors could get their work done.
Council and committee meetings often run into the evening as councillors and their support staff wrestle with the issues before them. They used to break for dinner, but the thrust of the meeting would be lost and vital decisions would be delayed.
A few years ago, councillors decided to meet from 9:30 a.m. to 8 p.m., doing away with the supper break and instead bringing in a late-afternoon snack to tide them over while they worked. Only Mr. Ford found that outrageous. Banks order supper when staff work late on compiling quarterly results. Magazines buy pizza for editors on press night. If you ask people to work overtime and miss their meal break, it's only fair to feed them.
Now councillors will have to brown bag it, duck out on council business for a bite or ask their assistants to fetch them something when meetings grind on into the evening. Not even a pot of coffee will be on offer.
That's no great hardship. Few councillors are crying over their lost tuna wraps. It's the sheer silliness of the cutback that grates. Even deputy mayor Doug Holyday, a tight-fisted conservative, thought it was self-defeating to get rid of the snack table. The annual cost of the food was $48,000, a grain of sand in a $9.2-billion city budget.
But that is the Ford way. He made his name as a gadfly councillor, then star candidate for mayor, by harping to the point of obsession on the perks enjoyed by city councillors, from zoo and transit passes to free City Hall parking.
Listen to Mr. Ford, and you would think that luxury-loving councillors and their lavish expenses were the root of the city's problems. They are not. Up against challenges like a ballooning police budget or the relentless demands of running the TTC, cheese-paring measures like reducing councillors' office-expense budgets to $30,000 from $50,000 or cutting the size of the mayor's staff don't amount to much.
In fact, some of these measures work directly against Mr. Ford's goal of improving customer service. Many councillors use their office-expense money to run their ward offices or pay for staff to answer complaint calls. What happens when they have to cut those budgets nearly in half? Mr. Ford says he wants to be an accessible, hands-on mayor who answers his own calls, just as he did as councillor. How can he do that if he has fewer helpers to handle the crushing workload of a mayor?
"To lead by example," he said at his inauguration this week, "we must be willing to give up some of our perks, privileges and 'nice to haves.' " That is a fine principle, but is it really a perk to get a soggy, catered sandwich during a late-night session on the 10-year plan for sewer expansion?
Most councillors acknowledge that, in the age of Ford, they must be extra careful with public money. Most also know that real frugality goes beyond empty symbolic gestures.
Marcus Gee