Long and short of The Breakfast

BLOG #583: Mayor Joe Fontana delivered his second State of the City Address yesterday. He described London as a great city, a city of opportunity, a city on the move. It went mostly downhill after that.

Thursday, Jan. 12, 2012 – London

There are two versions of Mayor Joe Fontana’s State of the City Address to the Chamber of Commerce breakfast yesterday.

The long version, one hour and six minutes, you’ll find (after poet Penn Kemp and various introductions) here. 

The short version is this: “London is a really great city. It’s the city of opportunity. If you only believe. We are on the move. We need jobs though. And did I mention London is a really great city? Thank you.”

Exactly why it took his worship so long to say so little isn’t clear. Let’s face it though; the guy likes to talk and he loves a crowd, especially when they’re paying an average $50 apiece for bacon and eggs and feel bolted to their seats.

Perhaps the malfunctioning Russian robot – some kind of inside joke apparently mostly lost on the long-suffering audience – ate the original speech. The replacement, if this was it, was as thin and flat as bull – well, thin and flat.

There was none of the quirky techno razzle dazzle of last year’s maiden voyage which marked such a departure from Anne Marie DeCicco-Best’s masterly recitation of things others had done in the previous 12 months.

Instead, what we got was a sort of wistful fairy tale about what might be here, there and everywhere across the city – $1 billion worth of new economic energy just poised on the blades of it collective shovels awaiting the signal to start digging to create, over the next five years, “more than the 10,000 jobs I promised.”

But, then, you knew all that was coming when, in the first minute or so of his address, the mayor referred to his “incredible team on council” – then seemingly had difficulty remembering some of their names.

The annual State of the City Breakfast is described – by chamber officials, it should be acknowledged – as the largest event of its kind in Canada. In the audience of 1,200 were many of London’s elite in the realms of business, education and culture. In theory this is an opportunity for our top elected leader to set out an agenda for the coming year and beyond – marching orders, in effect, for those who command the citizens of this community.

It should be inclusive and interactive. It should make us want to rise from our seats ready and willing to contribute whatever it takes – ideas, energy, money – to make this happen. It should be THE community energizing event of the year.

Unfortunately, the State of the City Address has never achieved that level of distinction. And it didn’t yesterday.

Instead what we got was boiler plate such as this:

“We are not afraid to dream. We have a great vision. . . . We are competitive. We have the talent. We can produce anything the world needs. . . . It’s time to build the new London. . . . We are ready to take on the world.”

No we’re not. And we’re not likely to be ready until our leaders – whether in politics, business, education or culture – stop wasting 66 minutes of our time with platitudes and start dealing full square and in public with the issues London needs to overcome to take full advantage of whatever opportunities come our way.

But then maybe a buffet breakfast at the convention centre is the wrong venue for hard facts and take-it-all-off realism. Perhaps next year’s State of the City address should be over a few beers at Jim Bob Ray’s. The crowd there knows how to handle bull whatever when it hears it.