I really, really resisted writing this. The tone, invariably, would be predictable, dreary even. I Told You Sos are boring, bringing little satisfaction to even the teller, this teller.
But Toronto’s mayor, John Tory, had a terrible, terrible week last week. Like, amazingly bad, exuding a willful, stubborn defiance of good judgment, an eager willingness to swipe aside anything that ran contrary to his rigid, preconceived notions.
Sound familiar?
At his Executive Committee meeting on Tuesday, Mayor Tory plugged his ears and refused to listen to City Manager Peter Wallace lay out all the reasons to consider new and increased revenues. Did you say, Find more efficiencies? Sell off city owned assets? That’s what I thought you said.
(NOW magazine’s Jonathan Goldsbie does an excellent job recreating the Tory-Wallace exchange.)
Also at his Executive Committee meeting on Tuesday, Mayor Tory punted the ward boundary review debate off into the fall, threatening the timeline that would see any changes in place for the 2018 municipal election. He pooh-poohed 3 years of work and public and stakeholder consultation that wound up recommending the addition of only 3 new wards, simply shook his head and shrugged his shoulders with a blithe We Don’t Need More Politicians down here at City Hall. Consult some more. Come back with the mayor’s preferred choice of 44 wards.
(David Hains in Torontoist explains why this is a particularly boneheaded and short-sighted direction the mayor seems determined to take.)
Fine. Fuck it. Whatever. None of this should come as any sort of surprise. John Tory is performing his duties as mayor pretty much as underwhelmingly as I expected.
And then his week got even worse.
That’s when the Toronto Police Services carried out its ill-advised raids of illegal pot dispensaries throughout the city, a course of action Mayor Tory seems to have encouraged in a letter he wrote 2 weeks earlier to the Municipal Licensing and Standards executive director. While this was happening, the mayor decided, not at all coincidentally I’m sure, to go plant some flowers while taking a crap on the head of a city council colleague and staff in the process. “Awful. A cheap stunt,” Metro’s Matt Elliott tweeted.
Indeed.
Isn’t this the kind of bullshit grandstanding we were supposed to have left behind in not electing a Ford mayor of Toronto? This isn’t Mayberry RFD. We live in a city of more than 2.5 million people with far bigger problems than a weedy street garden plot. It is not the mayor’s job to get involved in this kind of penny ante, day-to-day type of customer service.
If Mayor Tory really wanted to help the situation, speed the process up, maybe he should stop insisting on below-the-rate of inflation property tax increases and demanding across the board budget cuts to the departments that would take the lead on matters like this. Or he’d realize that in one of the fastest growing wards in the city where this neglected street garden plot was, the little things sometimes get missed and, in fact, we could use a few more councillor office’s at City Hall. If, you know, the mayor was interested in anything other than photo ops and playing political games.
After his sad sack performance this week, it dawned on me why, in the end, I believed electing John Tory mayor would be worse than Doug Ford. If Doug Ford had won, I think we would’ve remained on guard, prepared to fight the inevitable civic assault he’d attempt to carry out. With John Tory’s victory, we collectively stood down, many of us believing that whatever else, we’d elected a reasonable, competent candidate who might not do much but wouldn’t inflict too much damage.
Nearly 18 months into his tenure as mayor of Toronto, John Tory has proven to be anything but reasonable or competent. He has no ideas. He possesses an utter lack of imagination. His urban views are amber encased in the 20th-century, the mid-20th-century, no less. The only thing he’s proven adept at so far is avoiding our 21st-century challenges.
Let’s not mistake regular press conferences and media availability for dynamism. The boldness of this administration is inversely proportional to the number of times it claims to be bold. As the world moves on, continues forward, simply running on the spot still leaves us further behind. This isn’t a holding pattern we’re experiencing in Toronto. It’s just quiet regression that seems acceptable only after the noisy havoc of the Ford years. Little of that damage is being undone. The messenger has changed. The message remains firmly in place.
The frustrating thing about all this is that Mayor Tory has been given plenty of cover to adapt and rework his positions. A case has been made to consider new approaches to revenue generation, to civic governance, to the redesign of our streets and how we get around this city. The opportunities have been presented for the progressive side of John Tory to step forward, the red carpet rolled out for CivicAction John Tory to make his way into the spotlight, that side of the candidate voters were assured would figure prominently if elected.
“Progressive” John Tory has gone AWOL, if there was every such a thing as a “progressive” John Tory. I don’t want to say, I told you so but… I told you so. We’ll all probably be better off going forward if we stop pretending, and hoping for that side of the man and his administration to emerge. It was never really a thing anyway despite our insistence to believe otherwise.
— resignedly submitted by Cityslikr