Fuzzy Civic math at the Globe and Mail

You can put out press releases. You can whisper in an ear. You can even blog about it (see prior post “‘Public Service’ — easier said than done part 2” September 15-08). But there appears to be no surefire way of getting the Globe and Mail’s Toronto City Hall Bureau Chief to admit to herself, let alone her readers, that the Toronto Port Authority is no longer a financial basket case.

This from today’s DTM:

“There should be a great deal more city control, oversight and ownership of these functions,” says David Gurin, a former top planner in Toronto and New York City who cites a public-policy principle that the central government should have a role only when matters cannot be handled locally or provincially.

“I believe this is a municipal function,” he said.

But Mr. Gurin, named by council this week to fill the city’s long-vacant seat on the seven-member board, concedes his view does not square with the reality that the money-losing agency is in federal hands.

As Bureau Chief Jennifer Lewington well knows, it was just a few weeks ago that the TPA publicly announced that it was now a profitable business:

On an operating basis, early unaudited indications are that for the first eight months of the 2008 fiscal year, the TPA turned a profit, a meaningful improvement over the $1.877 million operating loss experienced in 2007.

As a longtime media watcher, I understand that the frame of her story isn’t as punchy if she was to correctly state that the TPA was profitable, rather than a “money-losing agency”.

Where’s the scandal in profit? “Money-losing” just sounds so much more irresponsible, I guess, and all the more justification to support the City of Toronto’s desire to take over the TPA so that it can shut down the Toronto City Centre Airport. And Porter Airlines along with it.

With more 55,000 people using the TCCA each month, and 60% of the ~642 noise complaints about the TCCA coming from the same 8 people (YTD as of August), it isn’t entirely clear if the City is listening to the vast majority of voters (the 55,000 passengers per month) , or just the ones who are good at stirring up interest (the active 8).

But ignoring publicly-available facts makes this “money-losing” reference erroneous, casts doubt on the journalist’s objectivity, and isn’t worthy of Canada’s National Newspaper.

MRM
(disclosure – I’m a director of the TPA)