at the end of the day Tory did what most people wanted and did not go for the Olympics. Im sure there are many cases where advisors advocate for something but the person at top has to make the final decision. Animatronic should just be happy Tory made the "right" decision. Personally I like Tory want the Olympics, so I can see how it would not be hard if I had advisors pushing me to do it to want to commit. What I thought Tory did well was not rush into it and was able to back off even when perhaps some thought it was too late to turn back. I look at that positively and think to myself maybe that same logic will apply to smarttrack Eglinton west portion or the SRT to subway conversion. When the new prices come in, there is a precedent that Tory may say no we just cant do that. That should be good news.
Fair enough but I actually think this sort of thing is quite informative. This forum is pretty inside baseball and we should be able to get into the details of why decisions are made. Tory has gotten a few lucky breaks but generally his handling of marquee files had been pretty shaky. Olympics, Gardiner, Scarborough subway and Smart Track are all potential wedge issues for the next election and his performance to date has been mixed at best.
The narrative we've been given publicly is that Tory was truly undecided on the bid and spent his time consulting everyone and their mother to determine if it was in everyone's best interests. He finally concluded that it wasn't a good deal and shut things down. That's not what happened. The bid was a go until the last minute, when Tory got cold feed over lack of private support and pulled out. Now we learn that he brought in a new advisor to help with the messaging. From this we can ask a few questions:
- How pissed off are his pro-Olympics backers (Richardson, Pritchard, Peterson et. al.)? Will they still support Tory in 2018 if he keeps misbehaving?
- What else did Tory need to agree to in exchange for getting elected? Are those things in Toronto's best interest?
- His advisors (Eby, Gupta, Galbraith et. al.) clearly didn't do their job of protecting Tory from a bad idea. is Siri's hiring the start of a wholesale staff replacement less than a year into his term?
- Tory made the same mistake as Ford by thinking the private sector was some sort of Scrooge McDuckian gold vault. Can he keep his tax hike promises and deliver his service improvement promises without private support?
- Tory's m.o. is to keep council away from decisions as much as possible. Yet his staff apparently didn't try to whip council on the bid. They also barely got the hybrid Gardiner option through council. If he wants to run a strong mayor model does he have the personal ability and team to pull it off?
Tory got a break on the bid decision because there wasn't a lot of deep public support and most voters didn't even realize what was happening. Tory has a habit of getting himself into these corners and next time he may not be so lucky. If you are a Tory supporter this sort of thing will tell you what's going to happen over the next three years.