There is nothing more boring than brochures that tell you what a great representative someone will be if you just put all your faith in them and elect them to a job for which taxpayers will pay them a disgusting amount of money. These brochures can be cheap first efforts or glossy magazines prepared by professional writers. No matter which, they often tell you far more about the candidate than the candidate wants you to know.
It is not so much what the brochure says but what it doesn’t say that tells the story. One of the most obvious is in the biography that is supposed to tell you how well educated and trained the person is to represent the voters. What you need to look for is statements such as the candidate took a particular course at this or that university. If it fails to say the candidate earned a degree, the candidate probably flunked out.
Our problem as voters is that as untrained as we might be in human resources, we are making a serious decision about hiring the person. There is no recall for municipal or provincial politicians in Ontario so you can have many years to regret your choice. If it is a mayor of Babel, for example, you are making a commitment to pay the person over $400,000 over the next four years. This is not something you want to do on a whim.
One of the classic promises politicians make in their brochures is that they are going to lower taxes. It always pays to check on how they intend to do that. An interesting example of this is the recent literature from Babel’s own Joe Tascona who is running for mayor. Joe served an apprenticeship under that famous Mike Harris at Queens’ Park. As Premier, Mike Harris cut costs for the province by dumping welfare, regional highways and other costs onto Ontario’s municipalities. Mr. Tascona complains that Babel’s municipal taxes went up 24 per cent while he was at Queens’ Park. Mr. Tascona seems to have a convenient memory. He helped Mr. Harris do that.
He is even more foolish when he tells the reader how he will reduce taxes. He says he is going to introduce ‘zero-based budgeting’ to city hall. It would have been smart to check what zero-based budgeting meant before making that promise. His literature says departments would base their budget requests on the prior year’s actual expenditure—which is basically what they do now. Zero-based budgeting is a much more demanding budgeting technique that starts from nothing and the department has to justify every item and dollar of expense. Zero-based budgeting is not as popular as it was once because of the serious amount of employee time required for the exercise.
Mr. Tascona’s literature also shouts at you in print that he will be cutting out `WASTEFUL SPENDING` on expensive consultants. This is treating the reader as ignorant. Or maybe Mr. Tascona appears ignorant in his literature in that he does not know why the city sometimes uses consultants.
Just once it needs to be said: consultants can bring a special expertise to a task so that the city does not have to hire someone with that special skill. Would you rather hire someone at $100,000 per year for their special skill and knowledge or borrow them for a couple weeks at a time, when needed, for a few thousand dollars. Your choice!
Joe Tascona’s literature uses the slogan at the end: We Can Do Better.
Yes Joe, we can.
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