One Great City
There are so many different ways to be upset with this development that it is hard to know where to begin or what is most important to emphasize.
As a practical political matter, this is discouraging because it sucks the oxygen out of the room and basically shuts down whatever serious discussions we were starting to have as a city, despite the mayor, about important things. It occurred to me tonight that Mayor Ford is kind of like a Kardashian, in the sense that he is very good at getting media coverage but he does not intentionally wield that exposure to the benefit of the public.
And of course, I know it happens in other countries, but no reporter should fear for his or her safety for covering municipal politics. This is not Moscow. It’s not even Chicago. We rightly hold everyone to a higher standard of behaviour. The mayor shouldn’t be acting like a vigilante to protect his family. And in his defence (somewhat undermined by his over-reaction to Mary Walsh’s comedy routine, but nonetheless), he shouldn’t feel like he needs to protect his family by force; the police ought to have a constant presence near chez Ford considering the mayor’s controversial public life and the troubled private life of his extended family.
This is such a mess. Such and unhelpful mess.
I’m worried that no matter how much City Council gets its act together and governs through a vacuum of leadership for the next two years, these kinds of incidents will periodically be ignited by the mayor and derail everything.
EDIT: Now that I’ve had a day to think about it and wait for the smoke to clear, I think this captures the whole mess perfectly: send in the clowns.
Since I’ve already set the precedent of mapping these things, here is a map of how Toronto City Council voted on the Sheppard LRT.
How do you compromise with a mayor who doesn’t see shades of grey?
Here is an interesting take on the immediate state of transit planning in Toronto.
The author suggests the ideal compromise solution, where everybody pretty much wins, is to build Ford’s Sheppard subway extension with mostly public funding, and at the same time introduce whatever new revenue tools are necessary to offset the cost so that worthy projects like the Finch LRT aren’t starved and we can keep building new transit into the future.
The real challenge is that the mayor doesn’t seem to know how to negotiate or compromise. One day he’s conceding that a new tax/fee/levy, albeit a modest one, may be necessary to help fund subway construction. He asks centrist councillors which new revenue tools they might support. He suggests a $100 vehicle registration tax, apparently unaware that this would undo the one major plank of his election platform that he has been able to implement. In the next few day his councillor-brother calls all taxes “evil” (unlike casinos) and the mayor goes on the radio to declare, “There will not be any new taxes administered by my administration.” The door on new revenue tools and, by extension, viable new subways, has been slammed shut.
I feel genuine sympathy for TTC Chair Karen Stintz, who has become the person responsible for negotiating between the mayor and Council’s majority coalition. Or at least trying. It would be hard enough to accommodate the diverse interests on Council without a mayor whose stances change radically every few days.
On Monday, Council will very likely remove Ford’s allies from the transit commission, the arm’s-length body that governs the TTC for the City. The more the mayor is marginalized from this conversation, the better. City Council has already shown that it is willing to rescue the city from the Mayor Ford’s most irresponsible actions. Soon they will have a chance to prove that they can govern.
If the councillors can come to a compromise among themselves that uses new revenue tools to expand the initial funding envelope of $8.7 billion from the federal and provincial governments, that would be the best outcome possible. Not only would we get badly-needed improvements to the TTC, but it would bury the divisive campaign rhetoric and tactics that the mayor has relied on. That’s real city building.
(Before and after images of Eglinton East via west-egg.)
WHAT is going on with Toronto’s transit expansion plans? Everything is changing so quickly!
For more than two weeks after Council overruled Ford’s so-called plan and basically returned us to the funded, studied, and shovel-ready LRT projects, the mayor has been scheduling regular photo-ops at Scarborough malls, telling everyone that Council is irrelevant, the people want subways (not streetcars), and the province is going to listen to the people and give Toronto subways.
The province has not been inclined to cooperate with the mayor. “Council is supreme,” they keep saying. Ford would not budge, and for a while, it looked like he was planning to spend the next two and a half years playing the role of our Civic Monkey Wrench, gumming up the machinery of government in any way he can. Through his proxies on the Transit Commission, one of the last remaining bodies where he can command a majority, he had the TTC’s chief general manager fired. Very literally, the opposite of being constructive.
That was Tuesday. Then a number of things happened very quickly. Premier McGuinty and the Minister of Transportation, in their harshest words yet, rebuked the mayor for being a bad team player. Surprisingly, the Ford administration quietly signalled that it would stop fighting the LRT projects and focus on long-term subway expansion instead. Shortly after, the mayor raised the possibility of using new revenue tools — specifically, a parking levy — to fund subway expansion, which is only shocking for it’s reasonableness and because Ford was elected on a platform of little more than cutting a $60/year car tax. Up until this point, he had been essentially promising to construct money-losing subways for free.
The door has been opened just a crack (but wider than it’s ever been) to getting the tools we need to build transit throughout the city. It’ll take more than a parking levy, which is too small by about one order of magnitude, but it’s a start. And that’s exciting. Let’s ignore how ironic it would be to achieve this under Ford’s mayoralty. It’s enough to remark that Ford has swung from the extreme of populist impossibility to a position more ambitiously progressive than even David Miller dared to take — and all in the space of about two days.
But a public opinion poll was released just a few hours ago that dampens my optimism. Only about a third of Torontonians are open to paying road tolls and other taxes or fees to fund subway construction. And it appears that Mayor Ford’s two weeks of obstruction hurt himself as much as anything else, with fully half of the city reporting “no trust at all” in his ability to handle the transit file, and only a quarter said they trust Ford more than the Premier or City Council. These are not the numbers of a man who can convince sceptical drivers and suburban homeowners that they should pay more to get more.
Revenue tools aren’t dead after just one unfavourable poll; the number are perpetually against them. But even without the mayor campaigning against them, he isn’t looking much like a saviour either. If the mayor doesn’t throw us another curve ball (or six) in the next week, I expect whatever transit we squeeze out of the province’s $8.4 billion gift is nearly all we are going to get for a while.
But at the speed things have been changing, you never know. We might get that municipal sales tax sooner than later, if we are lucky.
Toronto Life brings this to our attention. Not sure who to originally credit.
This meme is actually very effective at communicating a number of complicated perceptions all at once.
+1 for the internet.
OpenFile has posted an interesting interview with City Councillor Shelley Carroll. It ranges from how she got into politics to her Oscar picks, but here is a highlight that gives some insight into the mindset on Council’s “left” or opposition:
The biggest obstacle is the constant onslaught. The Ford administration doesn’t worry too much with the idea of setting the legislative foundation for big change; they just try and bluster their way through. It’s not working particularly well for them, but it still keeps you constantly busy. We are far too often overwhelmed with thinking about how something will go down at the floor of council or organizing special meetings for transit.
People often forget that while all these things are going on and you’re monitoring the Executive Committee and poring over their reports for things hidden in them that we’re not going to get briefed on, there’s also our regular constituency matters. All of us have our community meetings where no one wants to talk about Mayor Ford. They want to fix their park’s water fountain.
So with all of that going on, time management is the biggest struggle we face. But we need to find that time to sit down and map out where our city is going, that’s our challenge.
The Star has assembled a very handy google map of the votes for and against the TTC Chair’s successful motion to (more or less) return to the LRT-based transit plan that Mayor Ford prematurely declared dead last year.
I thought it would be interesting to juxtapose The Star’s map of the transit vote with my own map of the budget vote, below. (Red and yellow represent votes are against the mayor on the budget while green represents councillors who voted with the mayor but spoke out early against his transit plan.)
What an incredible political collapse over just a few weeks. Or maybe it is better to say an incredible political reorganization, because the majority coalition on City Council organized quickly and effectively once the door was opened by the budget vote and some prodding from activists below and the provincial government above.
St. Clair Avenue no disaster, councillor asserts - Globe and Mail
I moved here just after the ‘disaster’ when the new streetcar was finished. If anything, the final project was compromised by the unquestioned need to maintain two lanes of traffic and as much parking as possible, to the exclusion of wider sidewalks and bike lanes. And still, the people who hate it the most are the drivers who are trying to pass quickly through.
But I can depend on this streetcar, removed from the random delays caused by traffic, with greater confidence than any other line in the city. And for the 32,000 people who ride it every day, that’s no small improvement.
With city council’s politics newly destabilized by the 2012 budget vote, it has suddenly become conceivable that the transit plans for Eglinton East (dashed red line, above) might be revisited, freeing up at least $1 billion to invest in another corridor somewhere else in the city.
On the map above, I used Matt Elliott’s council scorecard to overlay the city’s multitude of unfunded transit plans onto council politics.
Wards in red are represented by opposition councillors, likely to oppose the mayor in any event. The councillors in yellow wards voted against the mayor on a very important budget vote (the one that destabilized things), and the councillors in blue wards have voted against the mayor at least once in 2012. These people aren’t necessarily opposed to the mayor’s agenda, but they are aware that their constituents are not 100% aligned with the mayor.
The councillors in the green wards are very important because these are Ford allies who have publicly questioned the status quo on Eglinton East. Councillor Parker, the Deputy Speaker, called the plan “loony.” Councillor Michael Thompson, a member of the mayor’s Executive Committee, has said that surface LRT makes more sense. And Councillor Karen Stintz, the TTC Chair, has also said that it is a waste of money to bury an LRT line.
There are a number of plausible combinations of swing-votes to pass a motion to more effectively distribute transit improvements across the city. (With dotted grey lines, I roughed in some of the possible transit alternatives that have been considered in the past few years. If you want to do some armchair political strategy, figure out which project, if any, could entice the magic 23-vote majority.)
Now more than ever, efforts like CodeRedTO to get people to call their councillors—particularly suburban councillors—are key to success.
Out of curiosity, I mapped the councillors who supported (Edit: in red) a winning amendment to the city budget (motion 1 here) that undid several planned service cuts including some affecting transit, pools, and shelters. It doesn’t sound like much, but the mayor just lost on the most important vote of the year. If council was a parliament, the government would have fallen today.
Importantly, the anti-insanity coalition of 23 (it may not be progressive, but at least it’s not regressive) included 10 councillors from the former suburban municipalities. This map of the city doesn’t look like any I have seen before—not the mayoral election map, not the ‘three cities’ map, and not the transit map. The quality of city services is important to people no matter their income, ethnicity, or mode of transportation.
Update: An alert reader points out that Councillor Moeser (Ward 44) was absent due to illness, so he didn’t vote against the motion. His vote either way would not have changed the outcome.
