Tag Archives: Federation of Canadian Municipalities

(Mis)Governed

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I’ve been mulling over our state of governance these days. Spurred on by the news of Councillor Adam Vaughan’s planned departure for federal politics, ponderingI kept wondering why anybody would make that particular jump. Sure, there’s the clout and prestige. In theory, the real levers of power are operated from Ottawa.

In theory.

Reading through John Lorinc’s piece today about Vaughan and the role the federal government plays in the running of cities, I have my doubts about the efficacy of delivering effective municipal policies from the federal level. You can offer up money, maybe even ideas. But hands-on tools to contribute directly? That’s a little more complicated.

According to a document that’s nearly 150 years old and a handful of court rulings during that time span, municipalities are nothing more than “creatures of the province” and “exist only if provincial legislation so provides…” dustydocumentCities fall in that place of dark matter between federal and provincial jurisdiction. To propose any sort of strategy, say housing or transit, for municipalities, Ottawa could be seen to be stepping on provincial toes. Why risk antagonism if you can just ignore these issues instead. We’d really love to help but our hands are constitutionally tied.

There have been attempts, for sure. The Liberal government’s New Deal For Cities Municipalities Communities (or whatever it wound up being called) under Paul Martin delivered increased funding that remains in place but little in terms of clarity. Nearly a decade on, cities remain without any sort of national housing or transit strategy. According to the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM), cities face more than a $200 billion infrastructure deficit.

Frankly, it’s hard to imagine how a change in government in Ottawa is going to reverse that. powerlessAt least, not in the short term.

I was boring family and friends over the long weekend, talking about this particular challenge of governance. Citing a certain Paisley Rae who had paraphrased Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi for me, talking about the importance of the various levels of government in our lives. (If I get this wrong, it’s all on me). Imagine if just out of the blue our federal government disappeared. Poof! Suddenly gone. How long would it take you to notice a real impact on your life? A month? Do the similar thought experiment with the provincial government. Poof! Gone. You’d notice in about a week? Now your elected representatives at City Hall. Vanished into thin air. Almost as soon as you step out the door, their absence would be evident.

Of course, it wouldn’t be that simple. It would depend entirely on where you lived and other circumstances. There’s much more overlap than that.

Still.

I think the role of our municipal level of government is highly under-valued and egregiously under-funded. oldendays1They are expected to do things that they have no jurisdictional command of or the fiscal tools to deal with. As the above article points out, the FCM claims that Canadian cities receive only 8% of the country’s tax revenues but are responsible for 60% of the infrastructure.

I’ve long contended that this political mismatch between the responsibilities demanded and the lack of capacity to deal with them has resulted in an increased presence of buffoonery at the local level of representation. Of course, we can elect somebody like Rob Ford because, in the end, it doesn’t matter. There’s no real power invested in that office. When we do dare to elect somebody with ambitious ideas for our cities, David Miller for example, they are destined to disappoint us because, in the end, they lack the real power to fully enact their plans.

What is clearly needed at this point of time is a complete constitutional overhaul. This isn’t 1867. Much, much has changed including where the majority of people live in this country. kickupafussCities. The hierarchy of revenue and power needs to be shuffled and rearranged.

Of course, that isn’t going to happen any time soon. So politicians like Adam Vaughan with ambition and big ideas gravitate to where positive change is possible even if it hasn’t been much in evidence, well, during our lifetime. All we can do is cross our fingers, wish him well in his endeavours and look for new politicians to represent us at City Hall who aren’t content with the severe limitations that will be placed on them, and who have their own plans to shake up the status quo that serves fewer and fewer of us.

— hopefully submitted by Cityslikr

Wasted Effort

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$16.4 million.

According to the Globe and Mail’s John Lorinc, that was the “Total council cost (including mayor’s office)” to the city of Toronto in 2011.

$16.4 million.

Any way you want to parse that number it’s nothing but peanuts. As a percentage of the operating budget? Even rounding it down to the nearest billion which would be 9, $16.4 million works out to roughly .18%. Yeah, less than a fifth of a percent.

How about per population? Again, rounding it down to a workable round number like, say, 2.5 million, divided by 16.4 million comes to about 15 cents. That’s right. City council costs every man, woman and child in Toronto 15¢ per year. [Or, if you do the math properly, $6.56/Torontonian/year. Still a pretty sweet deal. h/t Mg]

Yet our deputy mayor, ostensibly the 2nd most powerful politician in the city, has spent what seems like an inordinate amount of time and energy in an attempt to reduce that number even further. To where, I wonder. What amount are we willing to give to our elected officials in order for them to govern the city? Are we looking for a corps of volunteers like the fire department of Councillor Holyday’s youthful days in Etobicoke? (I completely made that up. I have no idea if Etobicoke’s fired department was ever volunteer or, even, if our Deputy Mayor spent his youth there.) Or maybe, we want part time positions, no benefits; just dedicated folks coming in every now and then in between their other jobs in order to fill out the necessary paperwork.

If the city needs to be run like a business, doesn’t another shopworn cliché need to be trotted out? You get what you pay for.

Unsurprisingly, Deputy Mayor Holyday has run up against the stony wall of reality. New rules that he’s proposing to the Executive Committee this month “…would allow councillors to offload various costs, such as smartphone bills and office renovations, onto the general council budget,” Lorinc writes, “in effect freeing up more funds for other councillor office expenses.” Let the good times roll, folks. Bunny suits all round!

That’s right. In his search for further cuts to the ways councillors use their office expenses, the deputy mayor is, in fact, proposing to restore some of the cuts Mayor Ford made a successful campaign platform from. Could it be good sound bite politics that bash at the hornet’s nest of electorate anger turn out to be terrible policy ideas?

One of the items off the table for consideration, however, is any agreement to have the mayor sign off on councillor travel expenses. In his bid to rid the city of gravy, it seems the mayor thought it necessary for him to micromanage the oversight of $53,000. I’m not even going to bother to figure out that percentage of the operating budget, suffice it to say, it’s a ridiculously infinitesimal amount that would be a colossal waste of energy for a mayor of a major city to expend.

Of course, how long would it take for Mayor Ford to just rubber stand a ‘Denied’ across every request to reimburse travel expenses? We all know the mayor isn’t much of a traveller, except stateside for Florida jaunts and to take in NFL games. OK. There was that one time he went down to Mexico on official PanAm Games business but that was forced on him by the previous mayor.

If the mayor had his way, councillors would stay put here at home or pay for any trips on their own dime. It’s called city council for a reason. The city. Stay here. Do your job. There’s nothing to be gained, nothing to learn by spending your time elsewhere.

There’s certainly no need to be going to something like the Federation of Canadian Municipalities conference for example. That ‘lefty shmoozefest’ according to the Toronto Sun’s and Team Ford typist Sue-Ann Levy. Nearly one-quarter of Toronto councillors were in attendance when, surely, just Giorgio Mammoliti and an assistant to take notes and file a report would do.

What are other cities and their representatives going to tell Toronto that it doesn’t already know? Look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves. You need a weekend living large in Saskatoon to find that out?

Such continued myopia is a serious detriment to this city’s well-being. The mayor’s right hand man (or the mayor’s right hand man’s right hand man) is discovering the limits of cutting our way to fiscal health. Our structural deficit has little to do with bloat in the operating budget and everything to do with limited access to proper revenue tools outside of property taxes. Just like every other city in this province and in this country. Getting together at an annual conference to air out and hear ideas on how to go about fixing that can only help. Travel expenses for 11 councillors to attend is a very, very small price to pay.

But as we’re discovering, there is no price to pay that is too low to escape Mayor Ford’s notice. Every expenditure is suspect, every dollar must be contested. It gives the appearance of doing something substantive without really doing much at all.

— on the cheaply submitted by Cityslikr

How About That Infrastructure Deficit?

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Do you want to leave our grandchildren our deficit to deal with?

It is a mantra often sited by deficit hawks to guilt us into cutting government spending. An iteration of it was pronounced in the U.S. by former Senator Alan Simpson when he was appointed Republican deficit commissioner last year. “If you don’t want your grandkids picking grit with the chickens, better ignore soundbite politics and get lawmakers to find real solutions to the deficit,”  so said Simpson who seemed unaware of the irony of using a soundbite to criticize ‘soundbite politics’.

Two can play at that game, Senator Simpson. What if we plug one word into that phrase? Do you want to leave our grandchildren our infrastructure deficit to deal with? How does that change the equation?

I came across an article last week in my Kawartha.com via the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. In it was a laundry list of infrastructure needs for Ontario cities, towns and communities that amounted to $100 billion of unfunded ‘unrepaired and unbuilt’ infrastructure according to the provincial government’s own estimates. “… delaying upgrades means higher costs in the long run,” according to the FCM’s Gabriel Miller.

‘Higher costs in the long run’. Try using that phrase with fiscal conservatives and watch their heads explode. We don’t have the money, they’ll yowl. But if we don’t find the money now it will end up costing more later. Thus, the infrastructure deficit is born.

What’s doubly interesting in this debate is that it is not simply we here in ‘tax and spend’ Toronto facing such a dilemma. Places big and small, conservative and liberal are under similar pressures. According to myKawartha, every Toronto resident would have to pay more than $1,000 extra on their property tax bill to deal with its infrastructure gap while residents of wee places like Prince Edward County and Perth face closer to $2,000 per person. Even the Fords’ favourite frugal city, Mississauga, is looking at nearly $450 million of debt in the next decade needed to fund infrastructure projects.

Clearly, it is a situation beyond the control of municipalities to deal with on their own. The revenue tools necessary to grapple with it are not at their disposal. So the internecine, right-left battles we’re now witnessing here at city council are fruitless. We can slash and burn all we want but we’ll still have an infrastructure deficit. Probably even more so. Since our ability to generate more revenue is severely limited, neither can we tax our way to better infrastructure health because the costs would be too unbearable for most households to carry. Although claiming we are over-taxed as a way to cut and freeze taxes is fallacious at best, highly destructive at worst.

This is a fight that needs to be re-directed at so-called ‘senior’ levels of government. Their coffers are where our tax money goes (90%+ by most estimates). They, both Liberal and Conservative, have been the laggards on this issue, dating back to the 1980s. For the past 3 decades, successive federal and provincial governments have been able to ignore this coming perfect infrastructure storm as it manifests itself mostly at the local level. Disintegrating roads and sewer systems. Dilapidated community centres. Diminishing social housing.

In fact, one could argue that both Ottawa and Queen’s Park have attempted to balance their books on the backs of cities. We need to start calling them out on that. Municipal politicians who don’t are simply doing the dirty work of their provincial and federal masters. They are the ones burdening our grandchildren with an infrastructure deficit and should be judged accordingly.

— judgmentally submitted by Cityslikr