It says something about the slow decline of political discourse in this town that when I watched the tape of Paula Fletcher shrieking a call-out to boisterous constituents at Monday night's budget meeting, my first reaction was to wonder what the fuss was about.
I've been watching city councillors wrestle policy, the public and each other for many, many years now. While Fletcher's admonition to "come on down, baby!" and run against her in the fall election was certainly a spectacle, it didn't hold a candle to the ethnic slurs, sexual innuendo and death-threats that have tripped off the tongues of councillors and mayors over the early years of amalgamated Toronto.It was only watching the dropping jaws of colleagues who've been on the municipal beat just a few months, that it occurred to me: Yes, we do deserve better treatment than this in the public arena. Most people, at least in polite company, don't carry on like that. And yes, it is disgraceful when a city councillor does. Yes, perhaps I should check myself into a ward for political Stockholm Syndrome among city hall reporters.Because really, things are bad all over.Before Fletcher got into the shouting match with constituents angry about the city's budget, her colleague Gord Perks got into it with Toronto Board of Trade President Carol Wilding, who was presenting a study the board had done of the city's finances with the discouraging title The Growing Chasm. You'll never see a more vitriolic discussion about the difference between gross and net and other niceties of public accounting.On Thursday, Mayor David Miller himself weighed in with an op-ed piece in an alternative weekly, calling his opponents on council and the Board of Trade liars - literally - when they say the city's $9.2 billion budget is anything other than a well-tuned machine.And the other side of the table is not blameless. There is something to the city's side of that gross/net argument. The Toronto Board of Trade is arguing the city's finances are getting worse because gross expenditures are going up at a rate of almost six per cent a year. But that percentage includes spending where the city either recovers costs entirely, and where another level of government funds a premium service. The budget is increasing on a net basis - but the increase is lower, between three and four per cent a year. And it reflects the budget city council can cut, without actually saying 'no thanks' to fees-for-service and intergovernmental largesse.By focusing on the 'gross' budget increases, there's no doubt the Board of Trade is over-stating the financial chasm - and helping widen the political chasm in this city.It's not only a political chasm, but a cultural one that's been growing in Toronto through this term of council. On the one side: Miller and his left-of-centre team have attracted bike-lane-loving, streetcar-hugging, social-equity-fancying environmentalists who don't fret about big government, bike lanes, garbage fees and five-cent bag charges. On the other side: everybody else, it seems.That chasm was as wide as it ever was Monday night when NDP councillor Fletcher took on the assembly of angry residents and radio host John Tory at the budget meeting. It all started when Fletcher sparred with John Smith, a father of six who came to tell the committee it needed to cut more from the budget to spare his children endless property tax hikes. Fletcher was never particularly sympathetic to his concerns. But it got worse as members of the audience began to heckle her, suggesting she should resign, or go down in the next election.Fletcher, whose south-Riverdale ward is arguably the most impregnable NDP stronghold on the planet, took them on. "Come on down and run against me! Come on down, baby!"No doubt she felt she had to shout to make herself heard across that great big chasm.