Silly Little Country

Toronto a Monty Python Skit?

The man who was elected to hold tax increases in Toronto to the cost of living increase and has broken that promise with every single one of his many budgets sure finds some interesting things to do with the money he extracts from us property owners.

The Canadian Arab Federation may be too biased for the federal government -- which moved to cut off funding after CAF president Khaled Mouammar called the Immigration Minister a “professional whore” for supporting Israel -- but it can still count on the City of Toronto, which is ponying up $25,000 in support.
...
The main criteria for grants, it seems, is an ability to learn and regurgitate an inscrutable pseudo-script, which assembles legitimate words in apparent sentences, which in turn purport to contain a legitimate message but might as well be written in a regional variation of ancient Sanscrit.

Here, for example, is the description of activities carried out by the Stop Community Food Centre (whose name alone doesn’t make sense. They want to stop community food? Why? And just what is community food -- do they sell it at Loblaws?)


The Stop Community Food Centre
This civic engagement and community capacity building project focuses on advocacy skills of the community around issues of access to services, particularly as it relates to poverty and food security. The establishment of a peer advocacy office will provide peer advocates an opportunity to provide advocacy services to their community and build linkages and networks for collective action.
$5,000.00

You can tell from this that “advocacy” sells well around City Hall. If you advocate something, you’re pretty much in. Advocacy means you support a position or organization and argue on its behalf. So Toronto gives money to organizations that support their own activites {SIC: perhaps the National Post could ask the city for a proofreading grant :-) ] and argue in their own support. What do they argue for? Why, themselves of course. And to whom do they argue: well, to people who can do them some good, like the people at City Hall who hand out money. So Toronto pays organizations to hire people to turn up at City Hall to ask it for more money, so it can afford to come back again later and ask for more money again.

This is the sort of thing that undermines the Millerbabble that perpetually asks some other level of government to spare him the need to actually say 'No' to one of his cronies.
h/t Damian Penny

Labels: Millerbabble, ridiculosity, waste

posted by Alan Adamson @ 11:23 AM