Budget 2012: The Votes

The bloc of councillors who blocked the cuts.

By Hamutal Dotan • Photo by Christopher Drost

Doug Ford working the floor of council during the budget debate yesterday (here shaking hands with Peter Milczyn).

Yesterday council considered many changes to Rob Ford’s draft budget. In a series of votes, an unexpectedly strong bloc of anti-cut councillors emerged that was determined to reverse many of Ford’s proposals. And they had coalesced in a striking way: votes for and against several of the motions were identical. That bloc included all the councillors generally identified as progressive or on the left, almost all councillors who tend to be identified or self-describe as centrists, and two—Gloria Lindsay Luby and James Pasternak—who vote with Ford a majority of the time.

Here’s what the voting pattern looked like:

Three major reversals to proposed cuts

• Omnibus motion to save shelters, daycare facilities, community grant funding, $5 million in TTC funding, and more—
• Reverse a decision to increase user fees at indoor pools for children and seniors, and to introduce a user fee for everyone at outdoor pools—
• Restore $3.9 million in funding to the Toronto Public Library to prevent additional service reductions—

Notes

• *James Pasternak abstained from the vote about libraries, due to a conflict of interest (his wife is a library employee).
• Paul Ainslie, Cesar Palacio, and Jaye Robinson are all members of the Library Board who voted against restoring funds to the library. Janet Davis and Sarah Doucette are Library Board members who voted in favour of restoring funds to the library.
• Ron Moeser was absent from all votes; he is currently in hospital.

One vote that fell along slightly more traditional lines concerned a failed proposal, moved by Joe Mihevc, to delay any decision about outsourcing custodial jobs until the final number on the 2011 surplus was available. Here’s how that went:

Overall Budget Vote
Finally, here is how the votes broke down for the last vote, on the budget as a whole. The five votes against were protest votes, cast by left-leaning councillors who were glad that some cuts were reversed (all five voted for all the reversals) but felt that the package overall still contained other cuts that could and should have been avoided—that it was a better budget, but not a good one.

Complete results for the voting on all of yesterday’s motions are available from the City.