How quickly can you pull daggers out of your back Mayor David Miller? The prospective candidates for his job are quickly lining up to take shots at him after his handling of Toronto’s garbage strike. All are in agreement that it took way too long to settle and all are saying the mayor failed miserably. Let’s take a look at the whole sick bank issue.

Has it been “eliminated”? No. It’s going to be phased out. Basically current workers get to keep their sick days. The union refused to budge on this issue. If someone was planning on taking away your pension contributions, I don’t think you’d agree to that.

The city tried to out-wait the union on the issue, hoping they would relent, however that did not happen. So on to plan B: give them the deal you were originally willing to offer them. Yeah, it’s not a great deal for taxpayers now, but going forward this deal will cost less.

Like it or not garbage pickup is an essential service. Despite everybody bitching about how they don’t deserve the money, the point is they do the work nobody else is willing to do. The dirty work. You don’t like doing it so you pay someone else to do it. And the cost of that is $40k/year.

Unfortunately Miller is going to be forced out because these last 36 days. The public, council, and media have turned against him. Perhaps he didn’t know exactly what he was getting into after defeating John Tory. He inherited a dysfunctional city council, out-of-control spending spree by workers, a mountain of red tape, and most importantly, an overprivileged nitpicking bunch of whining city folk. No, Mr. Miller, not your ideal job, but somebody had to do it. Despite being paid less than neighboring municipal workers, you did the dirty work. This past year has simply been overwhelming and there was no support from the bickering city council. Move to the private sector, at least you will be paid decently for the work you do.