City Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti is looking to engage the public as the City of Toronto negotiates the difficult task of overcoming the roughly $500-million shortfall facing the 2012 budget. And what better place to accomplish such a task than Facebook. According to Mammoliti, "the wrong people have been sending the wrong message out," so presumably this new group will engage the "right" people.

You know, non-communists.

"I'm really sick and tired of hearing from the communists in this city," he told the Star. "I don't want anything to do with them. I don't want to listen to them. I don't want to listen to their griping and their whining. I want to listen to people who are clearly working for a living, and wanting their tax dollars to be used in a particular way. I'm clearly trying to wean out the typical communist thinker who will be doing nothing but whining."

This is a shame for a number of reasons — not the least of which being that the idea of starting a group that solicits citizen feedback is a solid enough idea in and of itself. The problem, of course, is that if such a group remains open, you may find that the response isn't exactly what you envisioned in the first place.

So far there have been accusations of post-deletions and some pretty offensive commentary. On the flip-side, there have also been a few (mostly) constructive threads. For his part, Mammoliti has been an active and polite commenter and says that thus far he's accepted all members and only deleted one post on account of the fact that it was off-topic (a Beastie Boys video, which is back up now anyway).

So the ball is in his court. Let's wait and see if he stays in the game.