Got another for you:
As far as I know, most of Council spent all of their time trying to sabotage and get rid of him, they did managed to take away his powers. In the meantime the city went to ..... So how exactly was it his fault, and not theirs?
I can't speak for DJM, but we know that Rob's purported to save a billion dollars in one of his famous lies. He actually cost the city at least that much in only one project - his vanity subway line. We'll be paying his subway levy for decades. That doesn't include the extra hundreds of millions tossed in by Harper, nor the extra that will be needed down the road when the final estimate is known. And all for an inferior solution, but one that gets easy votes (yes I know, the Libs play that game too). None of that made it into the Sun network, so your "as far as I know" disclaimer is understandable.
But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Switching from to a subway also shifted the operating costs onto the city, whereas the province had agreed to pay operating costs for the LRT. Operating costs over time are (very roughly) about 6x the cost of infrustructure itself. So this is gonna hurt for a long time
Speaking of time, without Rob the LRT would have been completed in 2019. That's next year. Instead, we'll be lucky if anything gets
started next year.
That fiasco is a perfect example of the legacy he's left us by refusing to invest intelligently in the city, favouring flashy impractical projects (ferris wheel, casino, subways everywhere...) over sensible functional ones (downtown relief line, TCHC, Gardiner...). We'll be paying for his folly for a generaqtion, at least.
But wait, it gets worse.
While he was mayor, instead of raising property taxes so that Toronto wasn't the very cheapest place to own property in the GTHA, he kept homeowners happy and balanced the city's budget off the back of the (much scorned) Land Transfer Tax, which is not a reliable source of revenue as property values can crash any time. Like, now. So with LTT revenue being unreliable this year, the 2018 budget either had to increase property taxes by a lot, or cut spending where it's already insufficient. Now, you likely don't think that city council is conservative, but since this year's budget doesn't raise spending as fast as inflation and raised taxes at the same rate as inflation, this should tell you that they are conservative, and that you're a political extremist. Don't believe me, believe your favourite (sole?) source of information:
http://torontosun.com/opinion/editorials/editorial-the-monsters-in-torontos-fairy-tale-budget
We're actually fortunate we were saved from the worst of Ford's machinations, though to his credit mostly that was due to his own imbecility and general ignorance. But we're still left with the stuff he did achieve, plus his toxic legacy of rationality-distorting election anthems that carry forward to today, like pretending that efficient use of road space is inefficient, and the lowest tax region is the highest, and that world-class cities become world-class by doing the same things over and over again for generation, but doing them cheaper.
It takes a 'special' kind of ignorance to claim membership to Ford Nation and be proud of it.