New Math

I love politicians. Especially when the make “promises.” Even more when they make statements with little wiggle room as promises. For instance, when Larry O’Brien said Zero Means Zero you’d think that the statement wasn’t really open for interpretation. Then after cutting everything in sight and spending the city’s college fund Mr. O’Brien is saying that zero may not actually mean precisely zero but a relatively low number somewhere in the region of zero, unless of course you come back in few weeks and the province hasn’t given us anything at all at which point zero means a number much higher than anything remotely close to zero.

Yes, I agree it’s unfair for the city to be paying for provincially mandated priorities without help from the province, but c’mon! I know Mr. O’Brien said he’d run the city more like a business but I didn’t realize he meant a Dilbert-like business parody. Stop trying to pass the buck and deal with what’s in front of you. Don’t blame the province, work with them to remedy the situation – govern, don’t blame. That’s the big difference we need to see – city council needs to govern, not try to blame someone else for not doing their job.

It doesn’t take a genius to see that running the city like a business means we can expect more higher ups to pass the buck onto someone else and claim that lower person not doing their job is the reason the higher up needed a 500% raise and to leave the country with a briefcase full of stock options just before the company was sold to foreign investors. Don’t run the city like a business, please just run it like a responsible group of elected officials. We’ve seen enough execs going to jail because of their use of “new math” where “zero means zero (when convenient).”

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