The East York-Riverdale Mirror

That quote immediately came to my mind last week when it was reported that former Ontario premier Mike Harris is concerned about the state of Toronto.

In a paper called Is Toronto in Decline?, recently published by the right-wing think-tank Fraser Institute, Harris promotes the idea that it is.

Along with former Reform Party leader Preston Manning, Harris uses census statistics and public opinion poll results to paint a not-very-pretty picture of the city's current state.

Not surprisingly, this conclusion about the state of Toronto put forward by Harris is neither new nor original.

When Harris was premier he presented essentially the same conclusions during a speech to the Fraser Institute one year after gaining power.

It was only four years earlier that Harris was making the same argument when he was head of the opposition at Queen's Park.

In 1995, he had set up The Mike Harris Task Force on Bringing Common Sense to Metro, which he claimed showed that Metro Toronto was in a serious decline.

Yet, as we now know, rather than being a true task force, its real purpose was to create an image of Toronto as being in a crisis and to offer the Common Sense Revolution as the solution.

Former Scarborough mayor Joyce Trimmer, who chaired the task force, was later shocked to find Harris had never read her report, but insisted that it backed up his claims.

Indeed, when the forced amalgamation of Metro Toronto was announced it came as a complete surprise to Trimmer as she had never suggested it in her conclusions.

For the past 10 years I have documented in this newspaper column the negative impact that amalgamation and other policies from the Harris era have had on the East York community.

Yes, Toronto noticeably declined over 10 years, exactly as was predicted by hundreds of people a decade ago and documented in numerous reports since 1997.

Great efforts have been made over the past decade by politicians, civil servants, community groups and citizens to fix the damage and make the city work once again.

So now we have Mike Harris telling us through an official sounding report that Toronto is in a serious crisis.

Again, the report states that only he, and his colleges at the Fraser Institute, have a solution for the problems, which is essentially The Common Sense Revolution - Part II.

This goes completely against a universally accepted understanding that the city's decline was manufactured by the Harris government due to amalgamation, downloading and other bad policy decisions.

It is going to take decades to repair the damage done, but the now-discredited political philosophy of tax cuts and smaller government suggested by Harris truly defies real common sense.