The Canadian National Newspaper: Toronto Mayor David Miller is much like Prime Minister Stephen Harper

They may be from nearly opposite sides of the political spectrum, but Mayor David Miller and P.M. Steve Harper share a lot of troublingly similar characteristics and tactics. Both pledge one thing and do another. They both pretended they would bring more honour and transparency to their respective governments and yet neither has done so. Quite the contrary. Remember Steve’s promise to open the federal government to greater scrutiny? The Federal Accountability Act? All its teeth went down the crapper the instant he realized it meant he, too, would be scrutinized. Or, considering how smart a character he is, he probably knew he was hedging from the get-go.

If anything, information from the Conservative Party government in Ottawa got scarcer. And who can forget David’s broomwielding campaign that swept him into office at the same time it was sweeping freedom of information (FOI) under the carpet? Having lamented the unconscionable firing of the city’s FOI Director, Rita Reynolds, for doing her job and releasing information that embarrassed top civil servants, Miller failed to order the city manager, Shirley Hoy, to hire her back. Now it’s like pulling teeth to get information the public has a right to know from city hall. The provincial FOI officer has chastised Toronto on several occasions for its opaqueness in Miller’s neo-fascist information regime. After city hall’s Top Banana Mel Lastman took his final bow we thought David Miller was the solution. He looked good, sounded good… everything he isn’t insofar as a suffering Toronto citizenry is concerned.

And now we’re inundated with publicly funded PR flaks touting that Miller will be here, be there, cut this ribbon, open this venue, award this trinket, call for an end to violence, support motherhood, oppose teen pregnancy and… oh, yes… call for a ban on handguns and put up a website to promote that fruitless nutbar waste of time and money. (As if outlaws are going to quit shooting because there’s an impossible-to-enforce ban on their weapons of choice.)

Both David and Steve want more power. Steve, the reactionary, because he’s got real plans to turn the country over to do the will of the corporations that are responsible for so many of our woes, and to break government down to a minimalist role. And David, the inactionary, because it reinforces the spin that he’s been such a failure because his hands were tied. He’s been such a failure because he knows no better. He’s had the power all along but lets staff lead him around like a cocker spaniel. The last thing Toronto needs is for this guy to sequester himself in a room with some council lackeys, in secret, and have staff sell them on more ways to torment Torontonians while picking our pockets with new, unique and blue-box intrusive “revenue tools.”

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