Tag Archives: Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam

Friend And Foe

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When Rob Ford was elected mayor of Toronto his council critics, opponents, arch nemeses were easy to spot. Hello Councillor Adam Vaughan! The whiny, scheming two steps left of Stalin led by the likes of councillors Janet Davis and Gord Perks. As former mayor David Miller’s 2nd budget chief, Councillor Shelley Carroll was made the symbol of everything tax-and-spendy.

This was the division Ford exploited on the campaign trail and what he pursued during his first year as mayor. Taxpayers versus trough feeders. The reasonable right wing versus the loony left. Etc., etc. etc.

But 16 months into things and the mayor’s aim has become scattershot, a growing number of fellow conservatives taking on friendly fire. His decade long feud with Councillor Gloria Lindsay Luby got openly nasty during last week’s Sheppard subway/LRT vote with both brother councillor Doug and Speaker/ toady Frances Nunziata piling onto the fray. Chin Lee, a moderate right of centre councillor from the mayor’s beloved Scarborough has openly drifted from the Ford camp in a manner that suggests it would be very, very difficult for them to lure him back any time soon.

And of course there’s the case of TTC Chair Karen Stintz. A very well established anti-Millerite and solid Team Ford player until just recently, the councillor did Mayor Ford’s bidding by dutifully cutting 10% from this year’s TTC budget and axing service correspondingly. She stood tall for the mayor in the face of the moderate pushback to claim $19 million back in 2012 the budget. In no way could she be considered anything but a good soldier.

Until, that is, the Great Transit Takeback when the TTC Chair led a group of moderate conservative, centrist and left wing councillors to assume control of the transit file. Then it’s all Turncoat/Streetcar Stintz who stabbed the mayor in the back, suddenly becoming a leftie in the process. While Councillor Stintz has been very temperate in her reaction to the hurled invective, saying that transit was a one-time issue and there’d be no problem working with the mayor on other matters, it’s hard to imagine how. I mean, how do you continue working with someone who turns nasty and petulant anytime there’s a disagreement? That isn’t what I’d call a positive work environment.

Now the mayor and his brother have turned their sights on Councillor John Parker. During their radio show musings about running a slate of candidates in the next municipal that better reflect Mayor Ford’s political leanings and do his bidding, the mayor openly praised Parker’s opponent in the 2010 election, an election determined by just 415 votes. (The councillor won his ward for the first time in 2006 by just over 200 votes). “They [Parker and Kristyn Wong-Tam’s opponent] ran — they came very close seconds — but these are the type of people, we have to get them on council,” Ford said.

Folks (if I can borrow some Ford vernacular), I don’t see a winning strategy with this. Pitting conservatives against even more conservatives? Isn’t that what they call, splitting the vote?

Not to mention that with still more than two and a half years to go until the next election, doesn’t this just help forge further the growing alliance between moderate conservatives and centrists, a substantial voting bloc at council? I know there’s been much talk about Mayor Ford in campaign mode, going rogue and running for re-election on his lone wolf ticket but what if council gets into the groove of running things smoothly without him? If in 2014, voters see the mayor only for his bullying, his intransigence? That’s a real leap of faith hoping enough voters are looking for those qualities in a mayor.

Besides, even I who have little politically in common with the likes of Councillor Parker are siding with him in this battle. Yes, we’re uncomfortable with his Mike Harris Progressive Conservative connections and the damage he helped inflict on this city. We largely abhor his fiscal policies and his regular evoking of Greece and the fate that awaits us if we don’t cut, cut, cut. And he joined in on the slime fest by sandbagging Councillor Wong-Tam with the move to tear up the Jarvis Street bike lanes in Public Works and Infrastructure committee,

But in terms of preference to the full on Ford way? No contest. Councillor Parker seems like a decent enough fellow, no willful dummy. He’s quietly funny, much of the time in a self-deprecating way.

Not actually Paul Ainslie

Hell, in the face of a Ford-friendly foe, I might go to work for the councillor to get him re-elected. Ditto Councillor Lindsay Luby.

That’s a kind of consensus that couldn’t possibly be helpful for Mayor Ford’s re-election chances. The left and the right, setting aside their differences to unite around a common foe, the mayor of Toronto. Send up the evil genius signal! Calling Nick Kouvalis! Calling Nick Kouvalis!

Like the TTC chair, Councillor Parker is trying to make nice with the mayor and put all this negativity behind them. Calling the Mayor Ford ‘a man of great passions’, the councillor confessed that he didn’t “…think it is ever going to be a quilting bee around here. We need to keep focused on the job we are here to do.”

Noble words, nobly stated. And if the councillor truly wants to focus on the job he elected to do, might I recommend the next important step in that direction? Ridding the council of its current speaker and replacing her with the deputy speaker, John Parker. Where she brings nothing but shrill partisanship, he is all calm and courteous. Speaker Nunziata wears the mayor’s divisiveness on her sleeve, prone to escalate tensions rather than lessen them. If council is really determined to get on with the business of governing, there’d be no better start than to divest itself of the worst excesses of Mayor Ford’s bid to politicize everything.

Replacing Speaker Nunziata would be a sign that while the mayor operates only in terms of electioneering, two-thirds of councillors are capable of putting Toronto’s interests before their own and getting on with the business of running the city.

— helpfully submitted by Cityslikr

Waning of the Thumb

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(A repost of our Friday Torontoist piece. Title is all theirs.)

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A two day meeting dragged into three. As the third day ground to its inconclusive conclusion, participants voted to defer all remaining items to the next regularly scheduled meeting in February. Decisions put off. The business of municipal governance delayed.

Perhaps it was because council members were looking ahead to the big game, the 2012 budget battle. Beginning almost immediately, today in fact, as the Budget Committee kicks off the first of seven meetings over the course of the next eleven days, including two for public deputations, to hash out a budget for city council to consider and implement next month. That’s the big fish to fry, where energy needs to be expended. This week’s council meeting was simply the warm up session, getting loose, stretching the body into fighting shape.

Or it simply could be seen as the precursor to how things are going to happen over the next little while. A war of attrition. Gone are the early, glorious days of shock and awe that saw quick and surprisingly decisive victories for the Ford administration. The VRT gone! Councillor office budgets slashed! Transit City mauled in its infancy. The mayor is still pushing ahead but it’s now become a tough slog, a slow grind. Some of the more egregious intentions are being picked off by sniper fire, some even coming from friends and allies. His opponents’ Maginot line is still holding.

Councillor Shelley Carroll amended out the possibility of large industrial water users being given carte blanche to ignore city sewer by-laws in the Rate Supported Water and Waste Water budget. It reserved the city’s right to monitor ‘effluent’ – essentially waste water dumping – and to keep aiming for water conservation targets. The mayor found himself on the losing side of what turned out to be a drubbing on that one, abandoned even by his brother and budget chief.

Mayor Ford also took it on the chin (even if symbolically) on the Rate Supported Solid Waste Management budget when Councillor David Shiner, a usual Ford loyalist, maintained the current 44 environmental days that Public Works and Infrastructure Committee wanted to chop back to 11. Certainly, Councillor Shiner’s amendment scales back the events and doesn’t threaten the mayor’s desired 0% increase in waste collection rates. It was, however, a definitive poke in the eye of those looking to do away with remnants of green initiatives in the city.

Councillor Shiner was also front-and-centre in negotiating a compromise with noted foes of the mayor, Councillors Adam Vaughan and Mike Layton on the relocation of the youth shelter, Eva’s Phoenix. It was sitting on property Team Ford has its eyes on selling as part of the revised Fort York bridge plan. The shelter poised an obstacle in the march to ‘monetize city assets’ and in finding it a new home, Shiner brokered a deal that kept both sides, if not happy, at least content.

It could also be that what we’re witnessing is the formation of a consensus building model at city council. The hitherto unuttered word since Rob Ford took office, ‘compromise’ is becoming part of the vernacular. Many of the mayor’s most ardent opponents including Janet Davis, Joe Mihevc, Kristyn Wong-Tam, Paula Fletcher and Raymond Cho made amendments to the direction of child care services in the city. Mihevc managed to get everyone present at council except for Councillor Minnan-Wong to agree to work at not closing any day care centres until hearing what the provincial government, who has been slow and unsteady holding up its part of the funding formula, will say about the matter in next year’s budget.

Compromise may be a word the mayor has to come to terms with. Winter is indeed blowing in, issuing a serious threat to further bog down his troops and heavy artillery in the muck and goo of the 2012 budget process. (Yeah, I wasn’t going to let go of the military metaphors that easily.) Talks of cuts to services at the TTC, elimination of pools and programs, reduction in library hours, all are emboldening the opposition outside council to set up and stand their ground. Within council, allies are exerting their independence and not bending to the mayor’s bully tactics. Witness just how far the moderate, small c conservative, Councillor Chin Lee has drifted from the Ford fold.

The mayor has expended on awful lot of political capital in his first year, tilting at long standing pet peeves of his that represent the worst excesses of tax and spend governing. Non-automobile forms of transit. Community engagement and outreach. The arts. The environment. Anything that smacks of ‘nice to haves’. All before it truly gets ugly for him. When that bus doesn’t arrive for that little old lady going out grocery shopping in Scarborough. When that library is closed on Sunday for that little girl looking for some quiet study time. When the family has to go even further afield to find affordable swimming lessons.

The battles are going to get more intense over the next 6 weeks, the pushback stronger and terrain more treacherous. Already besieged, it’s hard to see how Mayor Ford can simply bludgeon ahead in that damn the torpedoes fashion that has been his governing style to date. His arsenal has been severely depleted. While hardly a spent force, Mayor Ford is not the indomitable powerhouse he was earlier this year. The one that caught everybody flat-footed, surprised and easily overwhelmed. It’s now trench warfare (you know I had to go there) and any gains will come with great cost. If he fails to adapt to the new reality, the mayor may find that the 2012 budget is the hill he will die on.

— repeatedly submitted by Cityslikr

There’s A Better (Ballots) Way

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I am not prone to giddy bursts of optimism. Like most of us here at All Fired Up in the Big Smoke, my predilection tends more in the other direction. Bouts of downward fear and loathing that intersect dangerously often with paranoia. The office windows are almost always open to air out the toxic atmosphere.

But put me in a room full of enthusiastic voting reformers and I am over the moon, Up With People, Schweppes bubbly effervescent, that veritable ant that could move the rubber tree plant. So it was last night at the Oakham House on the Ryerson University campus for a Better Ballots get together, Thinking Ahead to 2014: Taking A Critical Look at Local Elections. Colour me activist. I’m thinking, teal-ish?

In short, this: Local Choice.

I am a firm believer that the desultory relationship we have with our politics and politicians boils down to one key element. It’s how we vote (or don’t for far too many of us) and elect our representatives. At the federal and provincial levels, the whopping majority of us don’t wind up voting for the ultimate winners. Right now in Ottawa, the party which less than 4 in 10 voters voted for now controls more than 50% of the seats in parliament. Each and every day they enact, pronounce and dictate in matters that a solid majority of Canadians don’t agree with.

That’s not a partisan statement. Here in Ontario, there hasn’t been a provincial government in power that more than 50% of voters cast their ballots for in nearly 75 years! How can that not sour our relationship with those who govern us? Don’t look at me. I didn’t vote for the guy. Yes, I said ‘guy’. Why? Because in our first past the post system, the status quo is usually maintained. Thus, the continued preponderance of doughy white guys in the corridors of power.

The list is long of ideas to reinvigorate our political process. In townhall gatherings last year, the Better Ballots folks winnowed down suggestions to 14 (pages 18 and 19), ranging from moving election days to weekends, introducing phone and internet voting, municipal parties and term limits. At last night’s session, the emphasis was on 4 areas: ballot or voting structure, extending voting rights to permanent residents, lowering the voting age to 16 and campaign financing.

My particular bailiwick happens to be how we vote. Over the next little while, I’ll be regularly writing on the subject of various voting systems, trying to figure out which one would fit best at our municipal level. The overarching theme will be that the first past the post system has got to go.

Based on the strength of last night’s presentations, lowering the voting age is also very intriguing. William Molls at Voteto16.ca made a highly entertaining and persuasive case. As did Leonardo Zúñiga of iVote Toronto in talking about extending voting rights to permanent residents. Both ideas couldn’t but help to reinvigorate the political process. The more people don’t have the right vote, the less politicians will feel the need to reach out to them and the less reason these people will be have to actively participate.

Bob MacDermid had the rather unfortunate task of pointing out our continued problems with campaign financing that inevitably favours those with money and those with influential friends with money. Vote Toronto does yeomen’s duty trying to keep on top of this byzantine business but it is a multi-headed monster that constantly shifts and morphs, always to the advantage of those with deep pockets. It seems that vested interests just don’t think that there should be a level playing field in our elections.

Which also explains why it is so hard to change what is so obviously broken. The status quo is a stubborn beast, made even more stolid by those who’ve expertly learned how to work the ref in the game. Any sort of change threatens the standard operating procedure. It is fought tooth and nail.

That’s why more of us have to get involved. Some of these proposals Toronto can enact on its own but others need a provincial go-ahead to happen. That’s two levels of politicians who have won under the current system, so may not be overly enthusiastic to altering something they’ve already mastered. (Hat tip should go out to councillors Shelley Carroll, Josh Matlow and Kristyn Wong-Tam for coming out to the event and showing their support.) Much pressure must be brought to bear to get this conversation going and put the wind in change’s sails.

It is change that is tantalizingly close and many of these ideas are easily implemented if a critical mass can be achieved. Grab an issue that catches your fancy. Talk to those already involved, see what you can do to chip in and help. If you’re like a majority of Canadians and Torontonians and don’t like the way the game of politics is played, demand change. If we change how we elect our politicians, we may start changing who we elect, and if we change who we elect, there’s every reason to expect we’ll change how politics is played. For the better.

— activistly submitted by Urban Sophisticat