Yule Heibel on 2008-09-17
Bang on!
This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 17 Sep 2008, by Yule Heibel.
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17 Sep 08
Yule HeibelHume includes that classic bozo line by federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty: "We're not in the pothole business in the Government of Canada." Incredible... The finance minister needs to do a rethink. Infrastructure isn't just about fixing "potholes"...
thestar christopher_hume canada cities infrastructure_funding
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F rom an urban perspective, the most remarkable thing about the current federal election is the sheer irrelevance of it all.The issues that city-dwellers care about – jobs, housing, safety, transit – have yet to cause a ripple among candidates, let alone leaders.
This election, it turns out, is about politicians, not politics, and certainly not policy. They call it "leadership," for lack of a better word.
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Even Stephen Harper's much vaunted if modest 2-cent reduction in the GST means little or nothing to the average Canadian. Besides, if tax cuts were the answer to the nation's woes, we'd be well along the road to Nirvana. And after eight years of George Bush, our neighbours to the south would be living in the New Jerusalem. Nothing could be further from the truth.
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federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty very publicly washed his hands of Canadian cities. "We're not in the pothole business in the Government of Canada," he declared famously last year.
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the minister had tipped his hand and that of the government. What he signalled goes beyond indifference, or even ignorance. The fact is neither Flaherty nor his Conservative colleagues recognize they have any responsibilities for Canadian cities per se.
The cities' task is to stop "whining," do their jobs and take care of the infrastructure, including potholes. Hiding behind some fundamentalist interpretation of the British North America Act and which level of government does what hardly constitutes leadership.
The Canada the federal government sees is not the one in which the rest of us live. It is an abstract construction, an approximation not to be confused with the truth.
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Though there was a time when Ottawa played a major role in the provision of housing, it has now largely withdrawn from the field. And where federal funding is available it comes wrapped tightly in red tape.
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And let's not forget Flaherty's predecessor, Paul Martin, who balanced the federal budget on the backs of the provinces. They simply passed it along to the cities. Torontonians know all about this; it's called downloading and it casts a shadow to this day.
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Yule Heibel on 2008-09-17
...exactly.
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