Let's end Rob Ford's war on math

At Toronto City Hall last week, Deputy Mayor Norm Kelly argued that the city’s budget process isn’t the “appropriate place for sloganeering.” Instead, he said, let’s try for “rational and reasonable debate.”

It’s a nice thought, but probably not a realistic one. People like slogans — who doesn’t remember “stop the gravy train”? — and Mayor Rob Ford has a truckload of ’em.

What might be more plausible is for opponents to counter Ford’s slogans with slogans all their own.

I’ve come up with one. It’s important and timely. It even cribs from a slogan Ford came up with during the last election.

It goes like this: Let’s end the war on math.

Because, seriously, something has got to give. Last week, Ford approached the city’s $10-billion operating budget with comments that were a million miles away from basic arithmetic. He offered no specifics, and nothing resembling a plan. At times, the mayor seemed actively hostile to real-world numbers and data.

The problem isn’t that Ford wants low taxes. The problem is that he has no idea how to deliver them. By virtue of mathematics and Toronto’s legal requirement to deliver a balanced budget, any tax reductions need to be offset by cuts to spending.

There’s no magic there. There’s just math.

For Toronto’s 2014 budget, setting the residential property tax increase at 1.75 per cent instead of 2.5 per cent, as Ford wants to do, creates a $19-million hole.  Cutting the land transfer tax by 10 per cent would mean another $35-million or so in cuts. Freezing TTC fares adds another $23-million in costs that need to be balanced.

All told, the budget Ford is pushing for would create a gap between expenses and revenues of up to $77-million. The mayor isn’t proposing lower taxes — he’s proposing a deficit.

The numbers are the numbers. They’re not matters of opinion. Any politician who says that they can deliver lower taxes or new investment without specifically addressing how they’ll make the numbers work is waging a war on math.

Ford isn’t alone in this. In the transit debate led by Metrolinx earlier this year, elected officials across Ontario seemed to struggle with the notion that spending $50-billion on public transit requires $50-billion in revenue. They even hired an advisory panel to see if there’s a way to make that fact less true.

And stay tuned for next year’s Toronto mayoral election, where candidates of all stripes will promise lower taxes and major infrastructure like subways with only the vaguest of numbers behind their proposals. The actual budget math, of course, will come later — or maybe never. The war on math will continue.

Or maybe we could just finally tell politicians that we’ve got no time left for numbers that don’t add up.