🔭 PLATFORM VIEW: Anthony Furey’s “Making Our Streets Safe Again” plan

🔗 LINK: furey.ca/2023/05/16/mak…

🔧 DOABLE? Theoretically.

💰 COSTED? Not even a little bit.

✨ OVERALL: ⚫️ (Zero out of five)

Former Toronto Sun columnist and advocate for EMP bomb preparedness Anthony Furey has been gaining in some polls lately, so let’s give him the due consideration of a PLATFORM VIEW.

Furey is running on a “law and order” platform which means he’s advocating for a lot more police officers.

Specifically, he wants Toronto to hire 500 officers. And he’s made it clear that this hiring spree would come on top of any hiring necessary to replace cops who are retiring or leaving the force. So this is 500 net new police officers.

This works out to be a 10% increase in the number of officers, raising TPS’s “Uniform Strength” from 5,127 to 5,627.

This would be enormously expensive. A budget briefing note from earlier this year pegged the cost of a cop at about $147,000 per year on average, so hiring 500 more would represent a $73.9 million increase to Toronto’s operating budget.

This is one of the priciest promises made by any candidate, and it’s coming from one who proports to be a consevative. On a net budget basis, Furey’s proposed increase is bigger than the entire amount the city spends on whole departments, like economic development, senior services, and childcare.

Does Furey provide a funding source or an offsetting amount for this? You will not be suprised to learn the answer is no, not even a little bit.

In a separate policy proposal, Furey promises “a top-to-bottom audit of City Hall’s books” to find savings, but this has been tried before to little effect. He cites “frivolous spending like re-naming Dundas Street (minimum $4 million) and disruptive bike lanes (est. $20 million annually)” but both of these are capital budget items. Even cut to zero, they don’t approach the kind of permanent spending offset (or revenue gain) you’d need to carry a nearly $74 million annual commitment.

This isn’t serious policy. It’s picking a number and then pretending like that number is a serious policy.

Furey’s safe streets plan includes some ancillary elements, like “working with the Police Services Board and Chief to enhance ‘beat cops’ on the streets” (At least this suggests an understtanding of the fact that, as mayor, he would not be legally allowed to direct the police chief on operations) and “appointing no councillor who has called to defund the police to the Executive Committee.”

Some good news on the latter: no councillor voted to “defund the police.” Some councillors voted to request the police present a draft budget 10% lower than previous year for consideration. That kind of approach to cost containment used to be standard conservative governance strategy. It’s been replaced, I guess, by calling for oodles of police spending with no thought to how to pay for it.

PLATFORM VIEW is a daily(ish) feature by City Hall Watcher on Substack Notes. Got a request for a candidate policy proposal I should review? Let me know.