Things They Are A-Changing Back

June 12, 2013

During yesterday’s council session, while debating the mayor’s first key item, Traffic Congestion Management and Traffic Signal Coordination ghosttown(aka Cars Go Fast!), both councillors Gord Perks and Adam Vaughan talked about the positive aspects of a congested city. “I don’t want to live in a ghost town,” Perks said. “I want to live in a vibrant exciting place where I’m meeting people on the street and saying hi.”

Naturally this brought howls of derision from the likes of the Ford Bros. and Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti. “Congestion is not good,” Mammoliti declared, “and if you suggest that it is, blow your nose because it isn’t. Clear yourself.”

The councillor then went on to introduce a mocking item that would revert everywhere south of Davenport back to the 19th-century, complete with dirt roads and period customs. Funny, for sure. Giorgio can be a funny guy at times. carcommercialBut it also revealed a couple other telling aspects about him and the car-centric crowd on council he runs with.

They cannot envision a city that doesn’t prioritize the use of the private automobile. It’s completely alien to them. Without our cars, without giving them easy and unobstructed access to go wherever they want, whenever they want, as quickly as possible with the least amount of hassle, we might as well be living in the pioneer days. Before cars, there were only horses.

Their reaction to the congestion statements by councillors Perks and Vaughan also displayed a fundamental incuriosity to what is a fairly counterintuitive idea. Instead of standing to ask for some sort of clarification – Congestion is good?! What the hell do you mean by that, councillor? How could congestion be good? – they just rolled their eyes and laughed in disbelief. crazytalkCouncillor Mammoliti even suggested that statement would come back to haunt Councillor Perks.

Congestion is good? How stupid is that?

But stop to think about it for a moment.

Councillor Vaughan brought up the image of downtown Detroit. No congestion there, apparently. Drive from one side of the city to the other, free of bumper-to-bumper traffic. The wind in your hair. The wide open road.

Perfect for quickly getting from point A to point B but you wouldn’t want to really live or visit where there’s nobody or nothing going on, right? A ghost town versus human congestion, let’s call it.

Think Manhattan, for example. There’s congestion caused by intense activity of all kinds. Pedestrians, cars, bikes, buses. Working, shopping, playing. Bustling, in other words.

That’s far different than the spectre of congestion Councillor Mammoliti is trying to evoke. busystreetNo one believes the gridlock that has bogged down commuters and the movement of goods throughout the GTAs as something that’s good. To pretend that’s what councillors Perks and Vaughan were suggesting is either deliberately obtuse or pure political calculation.

Or it’s just status quo hugging laziness.

Like Mayor Ford’s reaction yesterday to council giving the go ahead to ask the province to allow permanent residents to vote in municipal elections. “I think we have a good system,” the mayor responded. “It doesn’t make sense. How can someone that’s not a Canadian citizen vote?”

How can someone that’s not a Canadian citizen vote? How can congestion be good? How can anything that isn’t exactly how it is now or is exactly how I think it should be good or an improvement or in any way a positive sort of change?

The mayor, his brother, the likes of councillors Mammoliti, Minnan-Wong, Del Grande, Holyday et al notlistening2cannot understand anything that deviates from their point of view, anything that challenges their perception of how the world works and how it might be made to work better. It’s rigid, ideologically hidebound and fundamentally incapable of arriving at any sort of compromise.

Unsurprising then that this gaggle of reactionaries finds itself occupying a smaller and smaller circle at city council. The backward brotherhood, united in a dislike of and disbelief in anything that smacks of them having to lead their lives in any way different than they always have.

– bob robertsly submitted by Cityslikr

5 Comments | Better Ballots, City Building, City Council, Electoral Reform, Municipal Politics, Newspapers, Press coverage, The Toronto Sun | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
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Electoral Reform Gets All Tied Up at Government Management Committee

May 14, 2013

In the end, Government Management Committee item 22.15, Proposed Electoral Reforms, limped forward without recommendation for wider city council consideration deadlocked in a 3-3 tie. alltiedupThose voting against reforming the way we go about casting our ballots municipally? Team Ford. Councillors Vincent Cristanti, Doug Ford and Giorgio Mammoliti, stood firmly in opposition to any change in the status quo, even going as far as putting up a motion to defer the item indefinitely. That salvo was fended off by the rest of the committee, consisting of Chair Paul Ainslie and councillors Mary Fragedakis and Pam McConnell.

At issue was a staff report that proposed four reforms of how we can and who can vote municipally. Any possible changes that might be enacted wouldn’t occur until the 2018 campaign at the mayoral level, 2022 council wide. Nothing too radical or too quickly. Plenty of time to ruminate and consider, and all for a good cause. The promotion of wider civic participation and engagement.

Much of the conversation and most of the deputations revolved around only one of the measures, to rank ballots or not. An alternate way to vote by ranking candidates in order of preference to ensure that the winning candidate gets at least 50%+1 of all votes cast. rankedballotIt’s a pitched battle that has been going on for some time now, not only pitting those in favour of keeping our current First Past the Post system against those proposing the basic 1-2-3 alternate ballot but reformers at odds with each other, arguing the merits of the ranked ballot versus pure proportional representation. That fight is for another post altogether.

But I will say that those speaking under the banner (if not official endorsement) of Fair Vote Canada – the side of proportional representation and against ranked ballots – did themselves no favours. It’s one thing to speak out against a proposal and another thing entirely to positively offer up something in its place. They told the committee members a ranked ballot was not truly proportional and wouldn’t affect the election results all that much. What they didn’t tell us was how their Single Transferable Vote would work at the municipal level.

None seemed really all that familiar with the structure and workings of the local government in fact, intent to graft on an approach to voting much more conducive to a situation with a party system in place and multi-member representation. Not to say that PR and STV couldn’t work in Toronto. singletransferablevoteWe just needed to be shown how.

We weren’t and in reality, the PR deputations seemed to scare off potential committee support from the likes of Councillor Ford to the idea of any sort of electoral reform whatsoever. Which, unfortunately, also threatened other equally important ideas in the item for ways to increase not only voter turnout but civic engagement overall. How our ballots were counted was only part of the solution put forward.

City staff proposed holding elections on one of the weekend days in order to free voters from having to sneak away from work to vote. Staff also suggested extending the right to vote over the internet for those with disabilities. Thirdly (and most importantly to my way of thinking) the report put forward the idea of allowing permanent residents living in Toronto the right to vote in municipal elections.

The chair of the Government Management Committee, Councillor Paul Ainslie, who has been indefatigable in his support of electoral reform, talked about how when he campaigns a solid majority of the residents in single-family dwellings are eligible to vote. The opposite is true when he knocks on doors in apartment buildings. outsidelookinginYou want better election day turnout and more civic engagement? There’s no better place to start than extending the municipal franchise to those living in Toronto, paying taxes and using the city’s services.

As someone native born to this country, and with my Canadianness dating back a whole two generations now, I don’t feel particularly possessive of my right to vote here. It’s one aspect of citizenship, the cornerstone of it even. But I believe the exclusivity to it decreases as we move down the levels of government, from federal to provincial to municipal.

What I find especially egregious in the anti-permanent resident vote at the local level is that it’s perfectly fine for citizens to vote municipally in Toronto even if they don’t live here as long as they own or rent a property in the city. velevetropeI get the reasoning. If you have some pecuniary interest in city business, you should have a say in how the city is run.

Why give that right to just citizens? All permanent residents have financial as well as social interests in Toronto. Giving them the right to vote acknowledges their contributions to this city, the sacrifices they make to live here and the benefits they receive for doing so. It’s like a democracy starter kit. A welcome mat to anyone wanting to put down stakes in Toronto.

Fortunately, all this will be debated again at council despite Team Ford’s best efforts to smother it at committee. Like the representatives of the proportional representation camp, councillors Cristanti, Ford and Mammoliti were content to emphasize the negative without making any sort of positive contribution. Councillor Mammoliti bemoaned how much harder voting is in the suburbs than it is downtown without offering up any motions to address that claim. He chose instead to try and stop any talk of reforms in its tracks. Councillor Ford was all for strengthening the office of the mayor – putting forth a motion to ask the City Manager what kind of legislative amendments were necessary to do so — while merely providing lip-service to giving more power to community councils.

Trying to bolster our democratic process and extend its reach to promote wider and deeper engagement shouldn’t be a partisan issue. nonpartisanOn a lot of fronts, it isn’t. The proportional representation-ranked ballot dust up is largely being fought between the left. City council’s champion of electoral reform is Councillor Paul Ainslie who usually sits centre-right. At Government Management Committee he was backed by two of the more left of centre councillors.

But we heard loud and clear yesterday from those wanting nothing to do with electoral reform. The self-described Looking-Out-For-The-Little-Guys guys. The hardest of the hardcore supporters of Mayor Ford. They came down firmly against change without really saying why. The mark of true reactionaries.

– frustratingly submitted by Cityslikr

6 Comments | Better Ballots, City Building, City Council, Electoral Reform, Municipal Politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
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Strictly For Wonks

April 9, 2013

Government Management Committee.

Yes, it is as dry as all those words on their own might suggest. bonedryPut together? Well, the Sahara fucking desert.

Yet, this committee deals with the nuts and bolts of how City Hall functions both inside its curved walls and outside. Why, just yesterday the agenda was full of such diverse items as property tax shirkers and parking ticket miscreants to building a bike station at City Hall and TTC pension plan mergers. Most of it isn’t headline grabbing stuff but it’s all got to get done for the place and the institution to function properly.

Or, in short, from the city website: This committee has a focus of government assets and resources, with a mandate to monitor, and make recommendations on the administrative operations of the City.

From a City Hall watcher’s perspective, this Government Management Committee got council chambers and committee rooms wi-fied up and there’s talk of installing more electrical outlets for ease of keeping computing devices charged. nutsandboltsIt just pushed for extending live streaming of all committee and community council meetings before 2014. And word is, they’re pondering granting media accreditation to council social media types which, from our very subjective viewpoint would render the process meaningless. I mean, come on. It’s bloggers we’re talking about. Those people are hacks.

As committee chair, Councillor Paul Ainslie was quick off the mark to embrace many of the electoral and civic reforms that came out of Dave Meslin’s The 4th Wall project including looking at using ranked ballots in municipal elections. Clicking through the committee’s agenda over the last little while, it’s hard to tell exactly where those items are sitting right now and it’d be nice to know that they haven’t simply been buried. But I’ll give Councillor Ainslie the benefit of the doubt because, well, he seems like a sensible guy who knows better than to get on Meslin’s bad side.

Councillor Ainslie also seems to run an affable meeting. He doesn’t huff and puff, is courteous with staff, fellow committee members and deputants. If I were writing copy I’d say something like Committee Chair Ainslie makes boring Government Management stuff fun! fineprintMaybe even with two exclamation marks.

He does get some help from Councillor Doug Ford in the fun department, although the mayor’s brother does provide a different sort of fun. More of the laughing at than laughing with kind of fun. In many ways, the Government Management Committee is the reason the councillor came to City Hall. To Lean Six Sigma his ass all over procurement practices and squeeze out every ounce of gravy he can find.

The committee also offers up Councillor Ford the opportunity to rail about out of control spending like the budget of the Nathan Phillips Square revitalization. Or the construction of a bike station at City Hall in place of perfectly unused parking spots, complete with, and get this…”Vince! You gotta come here, they’re building showers!” Showers! For bikers! Can you get any gravier than that?

But with the chair siding with the lefties on the committee, councillors Mary Fragedakis and Pam McConnell, Councillor Ford and his buddy Vince (Crisanti) did not win the day. That may have to wait until the one missing committee member, Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti, returns from the DL. boringmeetingHis presence at the meetings must change the dynamics somewhat.

Would I recommend a visit to the Government Management Committee to take in the proceedings?

I don’t know. Did I mention it covers a lot of dry terrain? You have to really love watching people cross their t’s and dot their i’s to get caught up in the action of a Government Management Committee meeting.

Theirs are many of the thankless tasks that must get done, and very much subject to the whims of the much higher profile Budget Committee. (Given the overlap of many of the items, it would’ve made perfect sense for Councillor Ainslie to seamlessly transition into the role of budget chief. Alas.) Government Management Committee might not be the place to start your journey through the committee meetings but be secure in the knowledge that six councillors are dedicating their time to getting `er done.

– appreciatively submitted by Cityslikr

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Payback’s Rarely Pretty

February 17, 2013

Say what you will about Toronto lacking things like an adequate transit system or good governance, cautionarytaleswhat it does have in droves is cautionary tales. Hardly a day or two goes by when some new news flashes across our screens that leaves us shaking our heads and muttering. Well, who didn’t see that coming?

Just this past week, Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti was in the thick of it again over loans he received from some business interests whose requests he championed at community council meetings in regards to billboards in his ward. At this point it doesn’t appear as if the councillor did anything wrong aside from look a little greasy. It’s just, coming on the heels of the compliance audit committee report that alleges some gross campaign over-expenditures during his 2010 mayoral/councillor race, bad optics abound.

The cautionary tale bit?cautionarytales1

If you insist on being an unrepentant jag off, an epic asshole, drunk with power from sitting beside the mayor and flashing your thumb up or down to help forward his agenda on the council floor and signal you’re part of the in-crowd, expect a little pushback. Keep your nose clean, all your ‘i’s dotted and ‘t’s crossed if you’re intent on going out of your way to draw unwanted attention to yourself and openly bait those you disagree with. People are bound to start looking for dirt. And if they find even a speck of grime… Well, who didn’t see that coming?

Blatant opportunism doesn’t win you many friends either. Councillor Mammoliti’s about face from Rob Ford’s mortal council enemy to best friend forever as Ford’s popularity rose on the 2010 campaign trail didn’t go unnoticed. His dying fidelity when the mayor got into a little legal trouble manifested itself with Council Mammoliti bolting from the Executive Committee, and then awkwardly trying to shrug the move off with a bizarre conspiracy tale of covert left wing operations being conducted against him.

Now, in a tight spot himself, he’s left to dangle. Yeah, love to have your back, Giorgio, but, you know, you kind of abandoned me in my hour of need. With friends like that… Well, who didn’t see that coming?

Grace in victory goes a long way in smoothing ruffled feathers and soothing bitter feelings. cautionarytales2Being amenable to people when you’re on top because you never know who you might encounter on the way back down, and all that. While Councillor Mammoliti may’ve been the most egregious offender, Team Ford, pretty much to a player, couldn’t contain frequent noisy chest beatings and score settling, soured by their perception of being kept in the wilderness during the Miller years. In taking that low road, power must be maintained because, once lost, the crowd’s a little less forgiving, more inclined to help pull the rug out from under your feet rather than reaching out to keep you upright. That Kick Me sign on your back is a little hard to resist. And who didn’t see that coming?

Of course, a cautionary tale only really serves a purpose if its lesson is learned. There’s very little evidence the intended audience has been following along, taking notes, modifying behaviour. Any problems or missteps are not of their doing. It’s all the work of sore loser left wingers still unable to accept the outcome of the 2010 municipal election, yaddie, yaddie, yaddie.

cautionarytales3

And so, the beat goes on. An endless loop of new allegations, denials and rebuttals that begin to sound the same after a while. Didn’t we hear this song-and-dance before? Our cautionary tales grow into epic sagas.

– told-you-soly submitted by Cityslikr

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The Kids Are Alright

January 22, 2013

Next time you get all hot under the collar at what you perceive to be shenanigans, childish antics or just a general sense of out-of-control behaviour by our municipal politicians, you really need to take a deep breath and a long look at André Côté’s Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance report, kidsarealrightThe Fault Lines at City Hall: Reflection on Toronto’s Local Government. Given the constraints and competing interests at work, it’s really remarkable anything gets done at all. And despite what you might be hearing around Toronto these days, quite a bit gets done, starting with ten billion dollars or so worth of operating and capital budgets just approved last week.

Could things run more smoothly? Of course they could. That’s true at both Queen’s Park and Parliament Hill as well. Probably every place of government the world over.

Two points in Mr. Côté’s report jumped out at me as legitimate causes of both the institutional as well as current struggles politicians face at City Hall. One is entirely external and, as it stands now, almost entirely out of our local politicians’ hands. The second is very specific to our present situation.

“Another factor that clouds political accountability at City Hall is the degree of provincial control over municipal affairs. The Province sets election dates and service standards, limits the use of taxes, requires approval for certain asset sales, and uses conditional funding arrangements to force compliance in important policy areas. The result is that the City’s field of action is constrained. The reliance on fiscal transfers also breaches a basic principle of public finance: accountability is blurred when the level of government making the spending decisions is different from the one that raises the revenues.” [page 5]

Everything municipal governments do in this province can be undone or undermined by their provincial overlords. We are their ‘creatures’, according to a 19th-century document written when this was an agrarian country and not properly challenged in nearly 150 years. eviloverlordUltimate accountability lies almost exclusively in the hands of politicians not necessarily elected to mind municipal level issues. In most cases, we should refer to them as absentee landlords.

Take Toronto, for example. (Please, the rest of the province chimes in.)

Against our collective will, we six municipalities, were messily forced into one by an antagonistic Queen’s Park government. ‘Efficientized’ to use Lucas Costello’s term; a lean, mean level of government meant to shed its fat and reap a certain windfall of streamlined bounty. Never mind that none of that happened because it was never intended to in the first place. It was all part of a downloading scheme almost entirely for the purpose of lightening the fiscal load on the provincial coffers.

Toronto was never given the appropriate powers commensurate with the much larger entity it had become. In fact, it was stripped of a level of governing that oversaw some of the more contentious, citywide services like policing and transit. Gone was Metro council, leaving only one politician at City Hall representing the interests of the city as a whole. The mayor.

Now figures as disparate as academic Richard Florida and councillor-brother Doug Ford have publicly mused about countering this problem by instituting a stronger mayoral system like they have in the U.S. Frankly, I find that notion to be a fucking nightmare scenario. strongmayorAll well and good if you like the policies and directions of a Mayors Bloomberg or Miller or Ford but what if you don’t?

Let me run a hypothetical by you that we can all be appalled at.

A Mayor Giorgio Mammoliti in a strong mayor system?

One might argue if we had such a thing, we’d be more careful with who we elect mayor. And if we aren’t?

My suggestion is rather than seek to beef up our municipal governance by bestowing more power upon one person, we look to increase it for the 2.6 million residents who live here. How? Well, that’s another post entirely and probably by someone with much stronger public policy credentials than I possess. (Paging John McGrath. Call me!)

This does take us the second important point brought up by Andre Côté in his report.

“Reformers should also bear in mind that, under the existing system, Mayors Rob Ford and David Miller have had notable successes in advancing their policy agendas. Both academic literature and recent history suggest that a combination of public profile, political acuity, and a willingness to use the softer skills of persuasion and consensus-building can result in successful and effective lead­ership at City Hall, even without a strong mayor system.” [page 7]

Pre-amalgamation, mayors in their respective cities had fewer councillor cats to herd and the issues were largely more specifically localized. liontaming(Many that weren’t were dealt with at the Metro level.) So they didn’t need more powers to push their agenda or items forward.

Such is not the case in post-amalgamation Toronto. Yet both Mel Lastman and David Miller managed for most of their terms in office to get `er done. Rob Ford too in his first year or so as mayor. Then he didn’t. Ultimately, he has no one else to blame but himself for that.

That’s not quite right.

We the voters are to blame as well because a plurality of us voted for a candidate who possessed few of the traits necessary to be an effective mayor in Toronto. ‘Political acuity’? As a campaigner perhaps but certainly not as mayor. ‘…a willingness to use the softer skills of persuasion and consensus-building…’. Never ever during his time at City Hall did Rob Ford display that particular trait. In fact, he revelled in being the exact opposite, the outsider, the lone wolf.

We elected him mayor despite all that and somehow seemed surprised how badly it’s all worked out.

A perfect mayor (if such a thing existed) will in no way paper over all the problematic governance realities this city faces. hogtheballIt would be foolhardy to think otherwise. But we shoot ourselves in the foot, and vote against our best interests when we throw our support behind a candidate based on a platform of sticking it to others at City Hall. Such an us-versus-them approach is destined to failure, not only for the candidate in question but the entire city as everything becomes a grind not a collaborative effort.

The city doesn’t have the power it needs but it has to stop squandering the power it does have. That starts with electing a mayor who is able to see past their own narrow focus and reach out to interests that are not their own.

– co-operatively submitted by Cityslikr

2 Comments | City Building, City Council, City of Toronto Act, Municipal Politics, Province of Toronto, Provincial Politics, Race 4 Mayor, Toronto Police Services, TTC | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
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