City of Toronto Strike Strategy

Wait it out. In due time, enough money will be saved to pay for the benefits.

It may sound cynical but there really is no other logical explanation for what is happening in Toronto with the municipal workers' strike. Don't think for a minute that Mayor David Miller is standing on principle against a benefit that has become the target of widespread public derision. While those on the left would quickly argue that this is a symbol of 'a race to the bottom', I'd argue the City's position reflects a new global paradigm that has caught North American Unions stuck in their own concrete boots.

There really is no logical explanation for a 3-week strike against a left-wing led City Hall or for the City to take such a principled, centrist stand against the continuance of a policy that enables workers to collect up to 130 sick days for cash out upon retirement, the equivalent of a half-year's salary. Mayor David Miller is a Union boy. The Mayor has repeatedly said outrageous things like 'open shops kill workers.' So there is no real concerted effort to break the Union's will on this issue but merely a game being played to portray a Mayor hell-bent on doing the right, or 'right' thing, damned be the political consequence!

The City imposed a 4 percent tax increase on Toronto homeowners this year, around 2 percent higher than last year's rate of inflation and one percent higher than the Mayor's promise of 3 percent increases. This is at a time when the City is getting some long overdue uploading from the Province of Ontario for social programs and ancillary Health Care costs such as land ambulance services. When one adds the cost of an increased Welfare caseload due to the economic downturn, on top of the other impacts (less growth in assessments, less building permits) of a slowdown, the City must be hurting. Why is City Hall keeping so quiet in the face of what appears to be damaging negative reaction to this strike?

What is Mayor Miller hiding? An old colleague from the City of Toronto and I had a discussion earlier this year that there was something missing from the Budget puzzle this last year. The numbers simply didn't make sense to this former top bureaucrat. Given the upcoming cost, she speculated that we might be headed for high single-digit property tax increases in 2010, the year of the next election. Imagine a double-digit increase?

Another former colleague is baffled. The blood is in the water and the sharks are circling. To their credit, the Mayor's right-center opposition has allowed this strike to just be; nothing they could say would top the ugly drama of mounting, smelly garbage. The Mayor has been graced by luck that the hot summer that meteorologists were predicting has yet to arrive! There really is nothing that can be said either as the Mayor seems to have cooked his own goose, or had it cooked for him by Collective Agreements of the past and with other Unions.

David Miller and his team have learned the lessons of the 1991 recession and the way Unions repaid Bob Rae for his rational, sensible approach he took to reducing government spending in a downturn. The Unions deserted Bob Rae, stayed home in the next election and we got Mike Harris' big blue machine. So Miller is not about to drastically slash City work-forces or to take away benefits to avoid massive tax increases. It's much less painful to endure a strike, even a long one, than to face such a massive tax increase in an election year!

There can be no other explanation than that the Mayor is truly struggling to avoid what most certainly could be his undoing. The public demonstration that the Mayor is truly a tax-and-spender with former Mayoral Candidate, conservative business uber-god and all-around nice guy John Tory waiting in the wings could be Mayor Miller's fatal error.

But strike or settlement, it's a bleak time for the Mayor. The choice is to hold out today and by election time, people will have largely forgotten and perhaps a tax increase can be minimized to 6 percent or allow the benefit and keep business as usual and face a double-digit tax increase in 2010, where Miller will already most certainly face some tough opposition? If you were Don Wanagas, what would you do?