Well, not a very good one. It doesn’t take any skill, there are no prizes and in fact no one has been able to successfully do this sort of thing in the history of the megacity. But it’s my contest, and I challenge you try your luck at it all the same, blog readers.

Here’s the setup.

Toronto is having a fiscal crisis. The mayor and the city manager are dealing with it by closing community centers on Mondays, going easy on the pothole-filling and clearing snow less frequently and comprehensively. Many suspect that there are other ways to find the $575 million that don’t trouble residents. Others resent the fact that the politicians and senior bureaucrats aren’t feeling the same pain as the constituents they serve, and suspect that there are ways to balance that pain without troubling residents.

So here’s the contest. Send in your ideas for balancing the budget that don’t involve raising taxes or cutting front-line services or making another level of government give the city money that we all agree that government owes.

Also, send in your ideas for things that your councillors and mayor should do without because it would make them feel as badly as you do. Special bonus points go to ideas that Ward 2 (Etobicoke North) Councillor Rob Ford has not already come up with.

For more special bonus points, come up with new taxes and fees other than land transfer taxes and vehicle registration fees. This one is for all you “teacher-you-forgot-to-give-us-homework” kids out there, who are clinging to the unfashionable-yet-some-would-say-numerically-correct premise that Toronto is suffering from chronic underfunding and an over-reliance on the property tax base.

Like I said: no prizes, but I’ll take the most practical/amusing/completely unfeasible schemes to budget chief Shelley Carroll and see what I can do.

I had a great vacation, thanks for asking. Which is a round-about way for apologizing for / explaining away the lack of blogging during the past two weeks of very blog-able events down here. Brian Ashton got kicked off the Executive Committee, and Adrian Heaps, the left-leaning fellow who represents the ward north of Ashton’s, turned down the mayor’s invitation to replace him.  Adam Vaughan and Denzil Minnan-Wong had a fight. Giorgio Mammoliti and Rob Ford also had a fight. Shirley Hoy announced all kinds of cuts and service reductions to help the city deal with council’s unwillingness to swiftly pass two new taxes this past summer - including ending the age-old practice of clearing windrows from North York driveways after snow storms.

This last indignity, no doubt, had a lot to do with the single most riveting event of the past fortnight (and therefore the subject of this blog entry):

The re-emergence of Mel Lastman, the megacity’s first mayor, as the guy to beat (if you’re David Miller) in 2010.

Okay, I exaggerate. The very large amount of ink spilled on Mel’s musings in various newspapers  took care to spell out the former furniture salesman turned mayor turned furniture salesman’s explicit disinterest in the job. “I’m glad as hell I’m not in there now,” he told Susan O’Neill in an interview last week. 

And yet - the idea of Mel Lastman back at the help of the City of Toronto has captured the imagination, if not the long-term memory, of a whole lot of Torontonians. Lastman himself confided to a reporter at another newspaper that people are stopping him on the street, urging him to take back the city from that Miller character. So if he’s not interested - it appears we are.

It’s good of Mel to save us from ourselves.   Because really, Mel Lastman is not the one to lead a city through tough financial times like this. His administration’s two terms were managed well largely through deferral of expenditures and ultimately stained by the effluent of one of the most odious deferrals: the MFP computer crisis. It would be wrong to say that Toronto’s financial crisis is entirely or even largely the result of Lastman-era fiscal policy - the provincial downloading is really the main culprit - but it certainly wasn’t aided by the false economy of three consecutive tax freezes.

With that said, Lastman offered up some interesting advice on a purely political level. Because that is where Lastman’s true genius lay: his instinct for finding the juicy core of popular sentiment, and inhabiting it. So when he told Susan O’Neill that the cuts were “absolutely silly” - particularly those snow removal reductions, his own baby from the North York days - and that councillors should start thinking about salary rollbacks, office budget cuts, a postponement of the renovation of Nathan Phillips Square and turning the rest of City Hall into a perq-free zone - his successor David Miller might want to pay attention.

Because Lastman is laying out a strategy for selling these new taxes that are garnering such an unenthusiastic response right now.  And whether those office budgets, salaries and square renovations are a significant barrier to a balanced budget or not, they’re certainly a major impediment to convincing Torontonians to pay more taxes.

Miller has understood this to an extent - it was good to see him putting kibosh on the renovations to his office. But there will have to be more before the case for new taxes can be made credible on the from-the-gut, on-the-street level that Lastman was able to ride into office, again and again.

It had to happen sometime, and in politics, the best time is often the Friday before a long weekend in August. Brian Ashton, the Ward 36 (Scarborough Southwest) Councillor who defied Mayor David Miller on the tax vote is off the mayor’s executive committee.

This is the closest thing to a cabinet shuffle as one can see at the municipal level. Ashton was a Miller appointee to the powerful executive, which operates similar to a cabinet in the parliamentary system. The mayor appoints committee chairs, and Ashton was chairing Planning and Growth Management.

However, it was clear to everyone that his days were numbered when he cast the deciding vote to defer Miller’s plan to impose new taxes on land transfers and vehicle registration last month. The only question was, how long.

And now we have the answer: This long.

And so long.

If you think Toronto Council is a little balkanized in the wake of the great deferral vote of July, you’re not alone. Councillors are lined up along the left and the right spitting acid invective at one another at really distressing levels.

Ward 38 (Scarborough Centre) Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker, a Miller loyalist, believes that the councillors who opposed the tax increase are so heartless as to guide the city into bankruptcy next year, eventually voting against the new taxes when they come up again in October, then voting against the service cuts to fill the $356 million hole, and finally, voting against the very hefty property tax increase that will be necessary to balance the budget.

“We’re the ones to make decisions and some people are too afraid to do it,” he told me Monday. “My sense is that people, to save their own political behinds will vote against it. The easiest way to get reelected is to oppose these new taxes.”

Gloria Lindsay Luby, the councillor from Ward 4 (Etobicoke Centre), is one of those trying to broker a compromise on Toronto’s new taxes - and here’s what she had to say of the opposition, and the possible paralysis of the city:

“It’s the councillors that refused to vote for anything that are the ones not being responsible. Those are the ones who pretend to the public that we can solve things through managing better - well that’s not the solution. Yes, we need to manage better. But we need to stop pulling the public’s leg, because that’s what they’re doing. If they can’t figure that out and come up with a better solution then shame on them.”

Ouch. And what if Toronto does hit a bankruptcy wall in 2008?

“Those few councillors will love it. They don’t care. I never felt they had a big improvement to improving this city other than nickel and diming their way: to what? I haven’t seen anything to show me the sincerity that’s needed to be responsible as a councillor.”

Ych.

You listen to enough of that talk, it’s enough to ruin your summer. So you’ll understand how absolutely desperate was my hope this morning, when a group of labour, environmental and community activists got together at City Hall to announce their plans to lean on all three provincial parties to reverse the $700-plus-million download as fast as they can this election. This, of course, is exactly the strategy that the right-wing opposition is urging the mayor take.

Surely, you’d think, this would mean that some tiny, really molecular particle of co-operation and commonality might flourish and grow between these two otherwise divided camps. To see if this were so, I asked Denzil Minnan-Wong (the Ward 34 (Don Valley East) Councillor who has made it his quest to show Mayor David Miller for the boob that Denzil thinks he is, then pare down and realign city services) and Katrina Miller (the Toronto Environmental Alliance member who has made it her quest to halt global warming) if they just might be able to get along on this issue.

Here’s a transcript of my recording, beginning after I ask Minnan-Wong how it feels to suddenly have something in common with the Toronto Environmental Alliance, the Toronto and York Region Labour Council and the Canadian Union of Public Employees:

MINNAN-WONG:  “Well they’re following our lead. I’m happy to know that following our lead. What this actually shows the council and members of council fighting for this deferral and they’re quite ocrrect. We have to add to the momentu8m. I’m glad to have them involved.”

ME: “Will you sit on their board?”

MW: “If they asked me to participate I’d be happy to do that.”

ME (motioning Miller over, after observing her roll her eyes expressively through the interview with Minnan-Wong thus far): “Katrina, would you like Denzil to participate on the board?”

MILLER: “If  you’re willing to focus on fair funding and not on cutting the city further to the bone in order to provide services that don’t meet the needs of Torontonians I’d be happy to have you.”

MW: “I think we can find a common agreement that downloading needs to be an issue but I think that she and I will disagree on the fact that I believe we can find greater efficiencies and structural efficiencies in the organization. The proposition in an eight billion dollar budget you can find some savings, I don’t buy that proposition.”

M: “Wait - wait…”

“MW: “I think that we should focus on the things that we can agree on and move forward together and I’m willing to do that.”

M: “We inherently disagree.  You can’t focus on one and the other at the same time. It’s either that the city is efficient and needs fair funding , or it’s your message that the city can be cut to the most skeletal level so that people are provided with just the base services with nothing that helps them become a vibrant community that grows and is healthy and has healthy young children. That’s very very clear. And your messaging is contradictory. And that’s why we can’t have this discussion.”

MW: “Anyway, I’m happy to work together with her on the issues we can agree on. We should all work together because right now is our time to take on the provincial government. That’s what we should be doing together. I’m prepared to set those  differences aside which I think we could do.”

So you see what I have to work with here?

Just back from Toronto Council chambers, where the slimmest of majorities voted to defer the city’s plans to impose two new taxes - on real estate transactions and vehicle license plates - until October. Listening to Mayor Miller in his speech, the deferral is just about lethal. Look forward to big property tax increases next year (it takes hikes of 18 per cent residential, six per cent business, just to find the $356 million the new taxes would have gained the city); cuts in services like sidewalk snow clearing and leaf collection; or, a startlingly successful campaign to force the provincial government to reverse hundreds of millions in downloading that everyone agrees is the true culprit in Toronto’s fiscal crisis.

In the interim, look for a whole bunch of very dirty looks shooting back and forth across the floor of council. Rookie Ward 8 (York West) Councillor Anthony Perruzza, based on all of those looks, appears to have been the swing vote in the 23-22 vote to defer the taxes to October.  There’s not much anyone can do to him. Ward 36 (Scarborough Southwest) Councillor Brian Ashton is another matter. A member of Miller’s Executive Committee - for now - Ashton’s really not supposed to vote like that.  It will be interesting to see who replaces him - or, if the same lightning strikes that makes the province reverse its downloading in 2008, if he perhaps manages to keep his spot in the tent.

And it will be very interesting to see how the rest of this council meeting goes, after the mayor was delivered what is clearly the first major defeat of his mayoral career.