As the Rob Ford regime likes to boast, this time around, everything is up for grabs.

Heading into next year’s budget season (with its $774 million shortfall), no city service, no matter how “core,” should be taken for granted.

To that end, consultants have been hired — no one need worry about the gravy train just yet — internal reviews launched and staff buyouts initiated.

The first results, released Monday at a city hall “technical briefing” presided over by city manager Joe Pennachetti and budget chief Mike Del Grande, were not only underwhelming, but strangely familiar. (How many times have we gone through all this already?)

Nobody was prepared to get down to the nitty-gritty about what will be chopped and by now much. What was clear, however, is that cuts loom. That surely was the point, subliminal or otherwise, of the session.

The consultant, KPMG, undoubtedly did a thorough job; but its issue is methodology, not politics. In other words, the hard decisions won’t be made for some time yet, most likely this fall.

In the meantime, much like the old boss, the new boss has taken advantage of every opportunity to make the process seem scientific, somehow inevitable. Throw in enough charts, footnotes, acronyms and, best of all, “a core continuum,” and the whole thing starts to feel more like a formal economic exercise than an ideological intervention, pure and simple.

Monday’s briefing, the first of many, was limited to the city’s public works portfolio. Though numbers were extremely difficult to come by, it emerged that at their deepest, the cuts would add up to savings of $10 million to $15 million, not exactly enough to balance the city’s much perused books.

“We are spending more than we are raising,” Del Grande noted. “A lot of governments are having the same problem. I want the process to continue in an honest manner.”

Thus, he explained, we can expect staff and program cuts.

Among the genuinely interesting things to emerge from the KMPG report was that fully 60 percent of the 13,000 respondents to a city core review online survey said they’d be willing to pay a 5 percent increase in property tax to maintain current service levels.

That clearly didn’t resonate with either Del Grande or public works chair Denzil Minnan-Wong, who quickly pointed out that because the 13,000 were “self-selected,” the survey was “not statistically valid.”

Of course, tax increases of any sort are a no-go with Ford, whose agenda — if that’s the right word — is to reduce government, which he views as an obstacle to suburban happiness.

If, as Del Grande points out, the city spends more than it raises, why wouldn’t he and his boss consider raising taxes? Given the stated willingness of so many Torontonians to pay more, Ford’s refusal at least to consider such a move seems irrational. Indeed, the only basis on which the refusal makes sense is ideology.

As Del Grande also points out, Toronto enjoys the lowest property tax rates in the GTA and some of the lowest user fees.

So why bother with a process that Del Grande himself referred to as “a song and dance”?

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The more things change the more they stay the same. The message Monday was that cuts are coming, and they’re going to be deep. But by the time the spit hits the fan, we will have had plenty of warning. The city administration will be the first to let us know: It had no choice. Even the consultants said so.

Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca