On Thursday, Toronto’s city manager, Peter Wallace, delivered his annual speech on the state of the city’s government at the University of Toronto. He introduced it as a “policy nerdfest.”

It is sort of that, I guess, but those of us in the press had recently come to think of a bit differently, as the Manager’s Marathon of Metaphors: every year, more or less, Wallace and his predecessor Joe Pennachetti have appeared before the crowd at U of T’s Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance and delivered more or less the same message: you have to pay for the city you want to be, and Toronto has been refusing to do that. You keep saying the same thing, maybe it starts to sound like nagging. Maybe people get bored.

So last year, as I reported at the time, Wallace employed an imaginative array of analogies and imagery to bring the point home: the city’s finances were like an iceberg; our politicans were like a pack-a-day-smoker; our budgeting was like driving at night without headlights. There was a can being kicked and we were running out of road along which to continue the footwork. And so on.

This year, the message was again the same. But this year, Wallace seemed to have given up on metaphors. Maybe the audience most in need of receiving the message — our city councillors and other political leadership — are somehow incapable of understanding figurative speech. Maybe they need it in plain language.

So here it was, the policy nerd version of laying it out straight: despite the city’s considerable success, it also faces, Wallace said, “areas of really big failure” in congestion and transit, housing, and child poverty.

Really big failure. Blunt talk in any line of work.

Our budget process has been a “relentless reinforcement of the status quo,” he said. An untenable one. He said “civic legitimacy” is now at stake.

He showed a bunch of slides showing that the city’s per-capita revenue, adjusted for inflation, has been dropping since 2010. Over the same time, the city’s costs have been rising, because of inflation, yes, but also because of the ambitions of the very same group of politicians who kept voting to shrink those revenues.

Council keeps approving plans: for a grand transit network expansion; for carbon emission cuts through TransformTO; for fighting poverty through TO Prosperity, and so on. Good plans, Wallace said. Really good plans, he is proud of those plans. But he said, a few times, that they are “aspirational.”

Aspirational is one of those words usually associated with fancy fashion and home décor magazines: readers like looking at the pictures of $78,000 handbags and whatnot, even though they cannot expect to ever afford them. They like to imagine being the kind of person who might dress like that or live in a home like that. One day, maybe, if the Lotto numbers come up.

The everyday synonym for council’s slew of “aspirational plans,” as I understand it, might be “daydreams.”

In this specific case, as Wallace was using it, it means: the council who approved these good plans have no money set aside to pay for them. And no plan to raise money to pay for them.

Wallace gave an example: Seaton House, the largest homeless shelter in the city, dealing with the hardest cases of street-level poverty. The conditions there, Wallace said, are “wildly unsuitable … close to inhumane.” The city has developed an excellent plan to rebuild it entirely, “make it safer, and actually put humanity, resolve and capacity into that system.” The city council has approved the plan, he said. But it hasn’t approved any plan to pay for it. He used that word again, “aspirational.”

He outlined the decade of squeezing the city’s budgets dry that has taken place. He said it can’t produce much more in the way of efficiencies, in the short term. “I can tell you there is absolutely no justification for saying there’s easy waste to find, because we’ve been looking for it for 10 years, and we have not found it.”

And then he put up a slide showing the obvious thing: the city could decide to just stick to bare bones municipal services: garbage, sewers, roads, policing. It could do that — Wallace called it option A. And the amount of revenue it brings in today would pay for that. Or the city could keep services where they are today — not just providing the bare bones, but also delivering what might be thought of as some regional services — the status quo is option B, which would require some more money than we take in now. And then option C is “broader city building,” which includes the big plans city council has already approved. This requires a lot more money.

“Council has consistently leaned towards broader city building,” Wallace said. It’s not just that they reject any cut to any existing service. It’s that they consistently approve new ambitious service and infrastructure plans.

“Council cannot rationally expect me as a public servant to deliver the expense on number C with the revenue box on number A,” he said. “This is something we are frankly going to have to address. From the perspective of responsible government… from the perspective of actual civic legitimacy.”

No fancy metaphors. Just plain as day: you keep voting to build the city. You have to pay for that. Or else decide you don’t want to build the city. It’s only rational.

If he’s given up on employing literary devices, he also seems to have given up on having this city council take his message to heart. That council’s budget committee is meeting right now, over the next few months, to determine another year of spending and revenue plans, went unmentioned in Wallace’s speech. Almost pointedly ignored.

More than once throughout his hour and a half at the podium, he stressed that he was aiming his message to greet the “new council” that would be elected a year from now. “It’s an explicit recognition that we are going to have to deal with some of these things in the light of a new council, to make some progress. I’m trying to set the stage.”

And perhaps — he did not say, and I don’t think even necessarily implied — to set the stage for the election that would bring in the new council and the mayor who will lead it.

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Elections, famously, are not policy nerdfests. But I feel like we could do worse than to have the election — every race in the election — focus on the question “Are we going to pay to build the city we all claim to want, or are we going to stop trying?”

Then, at least, the city manager would have to come up with some new material for his speeches.

Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwire