The appropriate thing to do when someone slaps a pie in your face, I'm told, is to smack your lips, roll your eyes and say, "Boston Cream - my favourite."
So in that spirit, may I say: "Toronto Cheese - my favourite," after the wily David Miller lured me along with the entire Toronto news media into his not-quite-big-enough office with the most oblique of hints that he was contemplating a career move. Of course he was not. What he was contemplating was a newly-discovered budget surplus - something the city sees every year in one shape or another, but this year was uncommonly large: $100 million. But the outgoing mayor had his fun, approving the late-afternoon release of a vague announcement that sounded enough like the one he used to announce his retirement that it made reporters wonder. In the end, he set the media echo-chamber buzzing enough to draw what may be the largest assembly of cameras, tape recorders and reporters that have been in the mayor's office since amalgamation 12 years ago; certainly the largest crowd to witness a mayor boast about a budget surplus. It is a boast-worthy surplus. Toronto had already squirreled away an impressive surplus from 2009 of about $250 million - thanks to wage restraint for both union and non-unionized workers, a six-week municipal workers' strike, lower-than-anticipated welfare rolls as well as wise and lucrative investments. It turned out those investments paid off better than anyone hoped; the restraint yielded more savings than anyone imagined; and new taxpayers came on-line more vigorously and in greater number than anyone had thought possible.So the city's operating budget, which had been moving forward with all the bare functionality of a Soviet-era economy car, got a boost. And the mayor decided to throw a surprise party to tell us all.Well, here's the thing with surprise parties: you never know how they're going to go. And this one didn't go as well as the mayor might have hoped. For one thing, the message he tried to send along with the surplus announcement was so fundamentally political that the moderately good news that Torontonians wouldn't be paying as much more as they thought in taxes this year was drowned out. Miller used the revelation to frame an argument against the embryonic platforms of the most formidable candidates to succeed him. The gift he sent forward - $75 million to help stabilize the city's 2011 books - was accompanied by a prescription for how the 2011 budget ought to be spent: Raise taxes by three per cent; get the province to hand over $250 million; and presto, no TTC fare hike for 2011.It's good long-term planning to do this sort of thing. But it would be better long-term planning if Miller were also planning on being at City Hall in 2011 to see things through - which, as he confirmed Wednesday morning, he is not.In the end, the stunt left little behind but ammunition for candidates George Smitherman, Rocco Rossi and Giorgio Mammoliti to complain about Miller's attempt to reach beyond his mandate, and to hammer at the city's financial credibility - all over what is in the end a fairly routine piece of public bookkeeping. Because the fact is, Toronto almost always comes through with a small surplus from the previous year. And because city accountants are small-c conservative when it comes to projecting surpluses, the surplus often emerges as somewhat larger than early estimates suggest.This surplus happens to be quite a bit larger. But it still represents just one per cent of the city's operating budget. It is still one-time money. Its existence is nobody's fault, and really, to nobody's credit; it is happenstance.The to-ing and fro-ing around it, however, is pure slapstick.