Council veteran says he won’t let others ‘screw up’ the city he loves

The world is full of once-great cities,” the candidate told editors at Toronto Community News on Friday, Aug. 13.

A half-century ago, Cleveland, Buffalo and Detroit ranked amongst the wealthiest cities in North America. Look at them now, Pantalone said.

“People made wrong decisions and now they’re in the pits.”

Pantalone, after 29 years as a city politician, sees himself as the sole progressive seeking to build Toronto into “a more fantastic city” as mayor, and his opponents – all of them – as “mini-Mike Harrises” seeking to pinch pennies, contract municipal services out and “shrink what we do.”

“Yeah, we’ll save a few bucks in the property taxes,” he said of this less-costly approach, “but we’ll be messing up the city forever more.”

There’s one exception in Pantalone’s theory: his opponents want to build subways, while Pantalone, councillor for Trinity-Spadina and David Miller’s serving right hand as his deputy mayor, is sold on the province’s Transit City plan for light-rail lines.

The light-rail vehicles, he said, are not the “old clunkers” Torontonians see on streetcar tracks downtown; they are sleek “European-style, high-speed trains” that can cure the city’s biggest problem, a transportation system more clogged now than that of Los Angeles.

Subway extensions, several times more expensive to build and to run than a light rail network, are just “beautiful mirages,” Pantalone said.

Coming from Pantalone, a comparison to Mike Harris is serious. The former Ontario premier has been out of office a decade, yet Pantalone still speaks of the damage his Progressive Conservative government did to Toronto in downloaded costs, which if ever removed, would solve the city’s budget problems, he said.

In fact, the central theme of Pantalone’s campaign so far – one he tends to repeat – is that Toronto does not nearly get its fair share of taxes the provincial and federal government collect here.

The problem is not Toronto’s alone, but part of the “nature of the Canadian federation” formed when the country was mainly rural. That relationship with cities must change, Pantalone said, if cities are to succeed without having to beg investments from higher governments.

“The idea that they’re giving us charity for things they should have an obligation (to provide), is a problem in the mind set that they have.”

Pantalone sees it as his job, “my first priority,” to spur Torontonians into demanding more than what he says has been an eight per cent share of revenues flowing to those governments.

“If they don’t know that, and I as a mayoral candidate, possibly mayor, don’t remind them at every opportunity, then they’re never going to know,” he said.

“And if they don’t know, how are they going to argue for the change that we need?”

Pantalone pledged, if elected, to hire two communications workers just to hammer away at this message.

“If the mayor of Toronto fails (to get more money for the city), then I think the whole community fails,” he added.

George Smitherman, one his rivals for the mayoralty, was the deputy Ontario premier for years. If Smitherman was “unable or unwilling from the inside to rectify this problem,” Pantalone asked, why would people believe he could solve it as mayor?

Maybe, he added, the city would be “better off having a different kind of voice which is not afraid to be critical” of higher governments.

Running third in recent polls, Pantalone wouldn’t budge when asked if he would throw his support to Smitherman at the last minute to keep Rob Ford, last week’s apparent front-runner, from becoming mayor on Oct. 25.

“Are you trying to tell me Mr. Smitherman is better than Mr. Ford?” he asked. “I see little difference between the two of them. It’s more veneer, an issue of style, rather than substance. They basically believe the same thing.”

Pantalone said he’s been doing more to differentiate himself from Miller and step up the pace of his campaign.

“I hate to put it in warlike terms; I’m a pacifist, (but) when you’re engaged in a war, you have to know where to wage the battles and how to wage the battles,” he said. “My rise has been steady and history will tell you being third could easily become first. So watch me, as Pierre Trudeau said.”

The Italian-born son of a sharecropper and a seamstress, Pantalone said none of his opponents have anything close to his experience at city hall.

”If I step aside and these guys screw up my city, the city that’s been so good to me as an immigrant, the city where my kids were born. I’d never forgive myself,” he said.

~ Mike Adler

Posted in Mayoral race, News