Fund to help create at least 7,500 jobs a year for ‘at-risk’ youth

George Smitherman’s plan to have business owners pay $10 million a year to subsidize jobs for “at-risk” youth played well in a Cabbagetown gym but might not be so welcome on Main Street.

The Get Youth Working Fund was among policies Smitherman released Thursday, Sept. 2, he said will create at least 7,500 jobs a year for young people when he’s mayor.“People need jobs and youth especially are struggling” to get a first job, the former MPP said after speaking with several young men and teens at the Cabbagetown Youth Centre.

The fund, he said, would cause commercial and industrial taxes to rise a “miniscule amount,” perhaps $70 on a $10,000 tax bill and “nowhere near” a percentage point, In return, it will cover training and up to 20 per cent of wages for employees under 25 and “at risk of long-term unemployment.”

A camera store owner before he was first elected, Smitherman suggested many retailers would respond to the incentive, “but those that don’t would subsidize those that do.”

TABIA, an association representing the city’s 68 Businesses Improvement Areas, disagrees with the plan.

John Kiru, its executive director, said any tax increase on commercial property, no matter how small it seems, “is a step backward.”

Small businesses are predominate employers of the city’s young people, but still don’t have a property tax rate competitive with Toronto’s neighbours, said Kiru, who argued keeping taxes low is the best way to encourage hiring.

“We are hiring what we can and how we can and will continue to do so.”

Smitherman also announced he would expand TTC, Toronto police and other city summer programs for youth employment and training. They are good but too small, he said.

The candidate would also arrange for youth jobs and apprenticeships whenever the city deals with contractors, and previously released a pledge to add $15 million to the city’s parks and recreation budget prior to the 2015 Pan-American Games.

A developer and carpenters union created as many as 50 youth apprenticeships for the re-development of Regent Park, and Smitherman said there is strong support in the local Building Trades Council for more such programs.

Around a table at the youth centre, less than a block from where he once lived, Smitherman heard from Michael Danchuk finding a job seems harder this summer.

A cook’s apprentice and mover in the past, Danchuk has lately been telemarketing, He has a son to support and dreams of an apprenticing in a trade so he can get a job paying more than minimum wage.

“Finding a day job is top priority right now,” he said.

Kaushik Jamadagni of St. Jamestown hopes to afford tuition for the University of Waterloo and also found searching for a summer job hard. “I tried at Tims and McDonalds and never got one,” he told Smitherman.

His brother, Kautilya admitted being a bit discouraged after applying for a job to a Toronto Police summer program. “People keep saying, ‘You apply for two or three years, then you get one,” said Jamadagni who volunteered instead as a videographer and librarian.

- Mike Adler

“Today I am announcing a green policy that will lead toward a cluster of green companies in Toronto, that will lead to a cluster of green collar jobs,” said Smitherman, atop the York School’s Yonge Street campus, where for the past months the school has been experimenting using solar power to run their air conditioning.The school is working with Helios Energy, a Toronto company that installs solar power, to study on a panel-by-panel basis, exactly how much power a large rooftop array of solar panels will generate. Data so far indicates that the panels cover about five per cent of the air conditioning power needs for the four-storey school.

Smitherman said the small company, which employs seven people and is based in Toronto, is a beneficiary of provincial incentives from the province’s Green Energy Act that he instituted as the provincial Minister of Energy and Infrastructure.

And he said that pushing green technology harder in Toronto will mean more of those jobs in the city.

“The race is on around the world and indeed in the world for leading jurisdictions to step forward,” he said. “Toronto has all of the potential to be one of those jurisdictions.”

Smitherman highlighted three elements of his plan.

He said he would “refocus” Toronto Hydro on its plan to create new, renewable power generation to the tune of 500 megawatts, and conserve another 500 megawatts.

Smitherman acknowledged that Hydro is already engaged in this plan, but he said he would push it to the top of the agency’s priority list.

“The city has already done the paperwork – they’ve laid out an ambitious plan to achieve 500 megawatts of energy and 500 megawatts of conservation. That’s an extraordinarily ambitious plan,” he said. “It’s going to take a lot of effort to translate that into action.”

Smitherman said he wanted to position Toronto Hydro as a “one stop shopping” place for green energy initiatives.

“Right now it’s more complicated than it needs to be – I want to reposition that as a one stop shopping organization to allow you as a homeowner to turn that into a revenue generator,” he said.

Smitherman said he also plans to encourage homeowners and businesses to install their own clean energy generation by way of what is known as a feed-in tariff that allows small generators to feed into the power grid and be compensated for doing so.

All of that, he said, would feed into growing Toronto’s green manufacturing sector.

“I’m a mayor that would be building on the experiences I had as Ontario’s minister of infrastructure, to make sure that Toronto gets more than its fair share of the economic pie,” he said. “Fifty thousand jobs have been created and so far not enough have been created in the City of Toronto. I’m talking about a policy motivated by our desire for a cleaner environment, and at the heart of it motivated by the desire to get jobs for people of Toronto.”

- David Nickle

The museum, with former mayor David Crombie’s assistance, is being planned for Old City Hall after 2016, when the building may no longer be needed for courts.“We cannot afford it, period,” Rob Ford told an overflowing crowd of heritage advocates Monday, Aug. 30, at St. Lawrence Hall.

It’s a good concept, but not practical when the city’s “grinding to a halt” for lack of funds, said George Smitherman, who also criticized plans for a smaller TTC museum in York Mills.

Sarah Thomson, another mayoral contender who spoke in the historic gas-lit room, said it would be better to spread money for the museum out in grants to heritage building owners.

Rocco Rossi didn’t answer the question, and Rocco Achampong, another candidate for mayor, supported the museum but also others in places such as North York, so that, he said, everybody does not have to go downtown to learn their history.

But Joe Pantalone offered unqualified support, saying the museum project is not a waste of money but an investment that will bring tourists to hear Toronto’s “amazing story.”

The city agency, Heritage Toronto, and the Toronto Historical Association, which support building a city museum, hosted the debate to draw attention to heritage as an “under-resourced” part of Toronto and to the fact heritage properties are being lost.

“If you don’t understand the history of your city, it’s kind of hard to figure out where to take it,” said moderator Paul Bedford, a former Toronto chief planner.

Ford pledged to “to do everything in our power” to preserve the city’s heritage buildings and suggested Heritage Toronto should get more money and staff, both reassigned from elsewhere at city hall.

“You’re not going to get more money if we bring another million people into this city,” warned the Etobicoke councillor, who has said the city cannot afford to handle any population increase.

Smitherman, a former MPP, released a heritage policy platform Monday with tax breaks to encourage heritage shopping districts, a wider definition of heritage to include the city’s natural features and an “early-warning system” to crack down on those who own but neglect heritage properties.

He added both community engagement and detailed secondary planning is needed to complete the city’s heritage inventory and protect it.

Rossi said preserving heritage is not just “do-goodism” but good economics, because it gives character to a city.

“We’ve basically been starving it,” he said, promising to “de-couple” heritage from other concerns at city hall.

It makes no sense that heritage tax rebates don’t require owners to re-invest in their buildings, Rossi said, arguing they should “earn” a rebate or not get it.

Thomson, a publisher who said her hobby is restoring old homes, promised heritage concerns would not lack funding under her administration. She said she wants homes and other buildings constructed before 1920 “put in zoning that really protects them.”

Achampong, a lawyer who noted the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass was one of the first to speak in the room when the hall was finished in 1851, blamed Ford and Pantalone – a councillor for almost three decades – for awarding Heritage Toronto only $330,000 a year.

“That’s why they need to go,” he said. “You are not a priority (at city hall).”

Pantalone admitted Toronto has a “checkered” record on heritage. The Guild Inn park in Scarborough, scattered with architectural relics from demolished downtown edifices, is like a “cemetery of remembrance of buildings that used to be,” he said.

“Demolition by neglect” occurs because the province hasn’t given the city power to enforce standards on vacant buildings, added Pantalone, who said he fought as a Canadian National Exhibition board member to restore the Music Building and other structures there.

Some came to the event with particular heritage concerns, including the Church and Welleslley Residents’ Association, newly formed to protect listed heritage houses at Church and Gloucester streets members say are threatened by a proposed condominium project.

A founder of the group, Brian Elder, said residents fear being “left in the dark” about the condo plans until after this fall’s municipal election.

- Mike Adler

The veteran councillor from Ward 15 (Eglinton Lawrence) will be informing his constituents via newsletter that he won’t be seeking re-election for the first time since the 1970s.In an interview, he said he hung on as long as he did as a registered candidate so that he wouldn’t be a “lame duck” councillor at the last meeting of council last week.

Now, he’s looking forward to the future.

“I’ve got the same interest and enthusiasm for the job that I’ve always had but I’ve had a couple of interesting offers, want to do some travelling,” he said. “I’m 70 years old – running again would put me at 74 at the last election.”

- David Nickle

Hours before a debate Monday, Aug. 30, on the city’s heritage issues at St. Lawrence Hall, Smitherman stood near a partially-ruined Gould Street building dating from 1888 and said he would promote heritage shopping districts with tax cuts and “residential development guidelines” to preserve neighbourhood character.“We can’t replace these buildings. It’s our obligation therefore to protect them,” the former MPP told reporters on the street, which remained closed behind him months after part of the William Reynolds Block crumbled.

Smitherman said he remembers the “extraordinary row” of mid-19th Century Georgian townhouses on Shuter Street – Walnut Hall – that collapsed in 2007 in what the Heritage Canada Foundation termed “a classic case of demolition by neglect.”

“They just lay dormant and vacant for a long, long time and eventually they met their demise. This was a preventable incident,” said Smitherman, who argues the city needs “real tools that will fight neglect” including an “early warning system” to catch landlords neglecting heritage buildings in time.

Though he pledged as mayor to send the message “heritage matters,” Smitherman said he’d spend “relatively modest dollars” to do it.

The city already has a heritage grant program offering owners matching funds for conservation work on structures.

The Foundation, a national non-profit group, put Walnut Hall on its 2008 Worst Losses List and has also placed on its annual Most Endangered Places lists the former Bata Shoe Headquarters, demolished for a museum in 2007, and the Riverdale Hospital, endangered but still standing. It described both buildings as modernist landmarks.

The group’s current Endangered Places list includes what it calls historic views of the Ontario legislature at Queen’s Park which “will be permanently disfigured” by condominium towers the Ontario Municipal Board approved in May.

Smitherman said he supports a broader definition of what the city includes in heritage programs, and promised “greater consideration” of Toronto’s ravines and other natural features. He said he’d join others, including the current city council, in calling for Rouge Park to be made a national park.

He added he was “pretty sure” he could convince the province, which technically owns the park’s vast lands, to take necessary steps if the federal government accepts the Rouge proposal.

- Mike Adler

“When you make a can of tomatoes, you choose the best ingredients. But when you open up that can and it’s rotten – you don’t put up with it,” said Rossi, as he announced he’d support a recall system for municipal politicians that would allow voters to remove mayors and councillors from office if they felt they were doing a bad job.“The same thing would be true of politicians when I’m mayor.”

Rossi said he’ll ask the provincial government to institute a process that will allow voters to recall a mayor or councillor who goes dramatically against their wishes – triggering a byelection.

The system is rare in Canada, although it has been attempted in some jurisdictions in British Columbia and also the United States.

“How we do it – what it looks like – and how well it works will all be developed by the citizens of Toronto in town halls and panels across the city,” he said. “Voter recall is a tool to channel our disappointment into action – because action is what is needed at city hall.”

The proposal would require Queen’s Park’s help. Rossi said he’d start community hearings three months after taking office, and have a resolution asking for that help in the mail six months after the election.

It would be, he said, “a classic Toronto compromise,” having a threshold that would prevent councillors and interest groups from using it as a weapon, and also not protect politicians from ever having to face it.

“With voter recall, Torontonians will hold the keys to city hall not just one day every four years – but every day of the year,” he said.

Rossi made the announcement just a week before nominations close in the municipal election and the campaign begins in earnest, and as he confirmed that prominent federal federal Liberal operative Warren Kinsella had joined his campaign, along with Sussex Strategy Group Vice President Bernie Morton.

- David Nickle

Candidates will have four less days to post signs

Toronto councillors have cut by four days the period people can display municipal candidates’ signs out of consideration to the city’s Jewish community.

Except at candidate’s offices, the signs were not to be posted before Sept. 30. Jewish organizations, and at least one candidate for council, however, complained this would give candidates a disadvantage if they observed Jewish religious law, since Sept. 30 and three days following it this year are holidays in which Jews are told to “do no work.”

In a motion they brought Thursday to Toronto Council, Case Ootes and Mike Feldman said this religious observance may mean Jewish candidates are “unable to engage” in erecting or displaying campaign signs, so the date should be changed to Oct. 4 to put all contenders “on equal ground.”

The motion passed, 31-4, leaving candidates three weeks for signs on lawns, billboards and shop windows before the Oct. 25 voting day.

Feldman, a longtime North York councillor who isn’t seeking re-election, later said he wants a level playing field for candidates vying to replace him.

In his ward, he added, “there are nine candidates who are Jewish, one who is not. I’m supporting the one who is not,” Feldman said, referring to his former senior executive assistant, Nancy Oomen.

Feldman said Len Rudner, regional director of the Canadian Jewish Congress, was the first to call him and say that starting the display period for signs on the festivals of Shemini Atzeret, Simchat Torah, and then the Jewish Sabbath, gave non-Jewish candidates an “unfair advantage.”

Feldman had wanted to start the display period a day earlier, but a law setting election dates makes that impossible without the province’s agreement.

On Friday, James Pasternak, a candidate running in Feldman’s York Centre ward, welcomed council’s decision as part of “what fair elections are about”.

In an online posting before the vote, he thanked Feldman and Ootes “for responding to the issue. Mike Feldman, in particular, has been very supportive,” said Pasternak, who raised the issue in a newspaper article this month.

He too said he would have preferred a “wider window” for posting signs instead of a shorter one.

“For the general public, the date of affixing signs is not uppermost in their minds,” Pasternak added, but having it on a date that is fair for all “is pretty crucial.”

Ootes, an East York councillor also stepping aside this year, said he didn’t think the change is “a big inconvenience” to anyone.

The city has a large Jewish population, whose religious days should be respected whenever possible, he said.

Feldman said if the conflict had been with a Muslim or Christian holiday he would have acted the same way. “We’re a multicultural city and we have to respect the rights of others,” he said, pointing to the council chamber as a reminder members stop city business there during the Jewish Sabbath.

“We close here every Friday night at sundown.”

The moon-based Jewish calendar shifts the dates of its festivals, so the incoming council may have to examine the issue again in 2014.

- Mike Adler

Now running for council, Mammoliti says he will make his decision on choice for mayor in September

When city councillor Giorgio Mammoliti dropped out of the mayor’s race last month, he said he’d take a vacation with his family, and decide where to send the six percent of voters who supported him on election day.

Back at work this week, the York West councillor said he hasn’t made his mind up who he’ll support among the five front-running candidates. But he’s crossed one off the list: Women’s Post
Magazine publisher Sarah Thomson.

“I’ll tell you this. I will not be supporting Sarah Thomspon. She has no experience, she brings nothing to the table and she hasn’t got an absolute clue on how the city’s run,” he said. “We can’t afford to be training somebody for the next eight years at city hall. We’ve all been down here and we know it’s going to take that long for someone to feel comfortable in moving around city hall.”

Thomson responded by email to the comments.

“Mr. Mammoliti has no understanding of the vast amount of experience I will bring to city hall,” she wrote, referring to her success as an entrepreneur and the consensus building and leadership skills that she’s gained in that way.

“Most of Toronto’s problems are caused by poor leadership and a top down style of management that isn’t very effective. I have experience doing exactly what Toronto must do to stop the wasteful spending, turn around the planning process and get our city back on track.”

She added: “Right now people are angry with the fact that career politicians keep trying to pitch their “experience” yet that experience has led to wasteful spending, the decline of service levels and the refusal to give Torontonians the subway system we want.”

Mammoliti’s decision means that Thomson will be denied six per cent of the seven per cent support that he received in the last poll before he withdrew from the race in the summer. The outspoken councillor had put forward an energetic platform, that included a floating casino, a causeway linking the Toronto islands to the mainland and a get-tough-on-crime agenda.

Now, Mammoliti is running for re-election in his old ward and looking to send those who supported that agenda to another candidate.

He said he’s interviewed each candidate, and will be holding an event in the second week of September to bestow his support on one of the following: Rocco Rossi, Joe Pantalone, George Smitherman or Rob Ford, the current frontrunner.

- David Nickle

Federal NDP leader sees candidate as “pragmatic”

Jack Layton says the exciting horse races are the ones that change and shift, and a race for Toronto’s mayor is no different.

“I have no doubt that I’m backing the right horse,” the federal New Democratic leader said Wednesday as he put his support in the mayoral campaign behind Joe Pantalone.Standing in Nathan Phillips Square beside Pantalone – a former Toronto Council colleague – Layton acknowledged “challenging turns” in the race so far, but said it’s “in the very early days” and opinion polls, which have not been kind to Pantalone, come and go.

He suggested, Pantalone, the city’s deputy mayor, can still win on Oct. 25 through “a steady building process.”

The Toronto-Danforth MP said as a councillor he saw Pantalone, a man with a “pragmatic set of principles,” take on tough projects, persevere and bring them in on schedule and on budget.

As the city’s tree advocate, Layton said, Pantalone increased the city’s tree planting goal from 9,000 trees a year – less than the number dying of old age – to the current 100,000. He also lauded the veteran councillor’s efforts on the Canadian National Exhibition board, saying Canada’s first urban wind turbine on the CNE grounds “never would have happened without Joe Pantalone.”

For his part, Pantalone said he will endorse candidates for councillor from across the political spectrum, but he warned voters the election is a choice between his progressive views and what he called the divisive, negative politics of former Ontario Premier Mike Harris and current mayoral frontrunner Rob Ford.

“Toronto has its challenges. Tell me who doesn’t have a challenge,” Pantalone said. “I know Torontonians want the positive choice, not the negative choice.”

He also said Layton’s endorsement of his mayoral bid removes any illusions of there being another progressive candidate in the race.

Layton’s son Mike Layton is among the candidates running in Pantalone’s ward for his longtime Trinity-Spadina council seat.

“He’s prepared himself well, and he’s the same age I was when I was (first) elected,” the MP said of his son.

-Mike Adler

New campaign manager acknowledges uphill battle

He may be in fifth place now, but Rocco Rossi is running to win and won’t ever quit Toronto’s race for mayor, his new campaign manager says.

“Under no circumstances,” Bernie Morton said Tuesday, Aug. 24, can he or Rossi imagine a point at which Rossi would bow out, possibly throwing his support to another candidate.“If that was the case, I would never have signed on to this campaign,” Morton added.

“He’s got money. He’s got a strong campaign team. He’s still in the race.”

But while Morton said he has a plan for a Rossi victory, he acknowledged his candidate has a big hill to climb.

An Ipsos-Reid poll on the weekend put Rossi fifth among decided voters, in single-digit territory behind front-runner Rob Ford, George Smitherman, Sarah Thomson and Joe Pantalone.

Morton, however, said poll numbers before Labour Day “are simply about name recognition.”

When the public starts paying real attention to candidates and their policies, he said, “then we’re going to see Rocco Rossi soar.”

An organizer for the 2006 and 2008 federal Conservative campaigns, Morton also served as executive assistant to former Toronto Councillor John Adams. Early in the campaign, he said, he met Rossi to offer advice, but was too busy running a public affairs firm and preparing to launch the Canadian edition of a U.S. political magazine to accept any mayoral campaign’s offer to join.

But when John Tory, considering a run for mayor, “came knocking” it “re-invigorated my passion” for getting involved in the race, Morton said. “It’s no secret I was tagged to run John Tory’s campaign if he was to run.”

Tory didn’t run, and now Morton has the challenge, he said, of asking Torontonians “to have the courage to elect someone who is like them,” an outsider at city council.

Rossi’s campaign announced the change Monday. His former manager Sachin Aggarwal will stay on as policy director.

- Mike Adler