Status quo can always outvote a good idea like food trucks
City council reliably finds itself defending today’s jobs, industries and residents at the expense of more possibilities tomorrow, writes Edward Keenan.

thestar.com
May 15, 2016
By Edward Keenan

So, again with the food trucks. Or not.

On Wednesday, the square outside City Hall hosted a little food-truck lunch festival, to celebrate a year since they made it slightly less impossible to own and run a mobile lunch-service business in Toronto. But rather than celebration, the event yielded a familiar debate.

Food-truck operator Zane Caplansky said the city needs to revisit the regulations that charge $5,000 a year and force trucks to set up shop at least 30 metres from a bricks-and-mortar restaurant, in order to allow food trucks to be more viable. Mayor John Tory, meanwhile, said he thinks the current rules are working and pointed as proof to the fact the number of permits for trucks has roughly doubled.

They have more than doubled, but it’s hard to see that as some roaring success for a burgeoning new market. This city of 2.6 million people is now served by 49 food trucks. By comparison, the Eaton Centre alone has 54 food-service stands and restaurants.

As noted municipal politics smart guy Brian Kelcey pointed out on Twitter, Buffalo has 47 food trucks serving a metropolitan-area population one-fifth the size of Toronto’s. He has an observation about city politics he applies often that he calls Kelcey’s Law that may apply here: “No big decision in city politics is ever made only once.” And so here we are, again.

Mayor Tory, though, says he’s in no hurry to revisit this, and to food-truck operators’ (and wannabe operators’) frustration, it will likely be another year before city council does.

“What we’ll have to see is how do they all do and what is the impact on the existing restaurant business,” Tory said.

In this he underlined another feature of this long debate that illustrates an observation of my own I’ve been formulating into a rule - maybe not proven a law yet, but a Hypothesis of City Council Dynamics: “Except in extraordinary circumstances, Toronto city council will consider protecting the interests of incumbents its primary responsibility.” The corollary would be that “extraordinary circumstances” can almost always be defined as a non-incumbent interest that has boatloads of cash.

This observation may seem blisteringly obvious to some, but I have still found it clarifying to consider plainly. It may apply to other levels of government - I haven’t watched them close enough to say.

It’s related to, but more than just, run-of-the-mill status-quo bias, in which most of us, most of the time, think that the way things are is the default option - normally and naturally the way they should be - and any change is viewed mostly as a potential loss. And it’s related to the standard political wisdom that a vote (or political donation) in the hand is worth two in the future, the principle that leads politicians to dance with them what brung ’em.

But it isn’t just protection of the status quo against change. It’s that motion or inertia are determined primarily on the basis of whether they’ll enhance or detract from the existing privileges of entrenched players - whoever they may be in the circumstances at hand. It usually boils down to allowing those who have been winning in the past to have the most say in any change to the rules for the future.

So in the food-truck debate, the primary thing to consider is not what dining options would best serve food consumers in the city, or foster an interesting street life, or encourage entrepreneurs to try new concepts. Those things are the reason to have the debate in the first place. But when push comes to shove, the primary consideration for what to actually allow is, as Tory says, “the impact on the existing restaurant business.”

Similarly, when a development application is received, the loudest and most listened-to voices are from landholding incumbents - existing property owners - talking usually about the effect on their property values. In the Gardiner debate, the most important consideration for many was not the optimal use of $1 billion in moving people around the city, but the travel time effects (measured in single-digit minutes) on a few thousand existing daily users of the road. Changes to ward boundaries are thought of in terms of how they would benefit or hurt existing councillors (and blocs of councillors).

You could see this vividly play out in the final Uber-taxi bylaw adopted by council. Uber was an exceptional circumstance, a multi-billion-dollar company forcing its way into the car-for-hire market. The decisive bloc of council votes, meanwhile, considered its primary responsibility to be to the incumbent taxi plate-owners. So a solution that catered to the interests of both of those two groups finally passed, rather than other proposals that tried to put the interests of car shift-drivers and passengers at the forefront.

Maybe this is all just natural. The schoolyard instinct to respect those who called “dibs” is a powerful human impulse. Our inherent sense of morality seems to insist that taking something away from someone is a bigger injustice than never giving something to them in the first place.

It’s not a left-right-or-otherwise thing: residents fighting a highway redevelopment through their neighbourhood appeal to squatters rights every bit as much as those trying to fight a homeless shelter or a condo tower or a chain fast-food restaurant in theirs. Sometimes the result is good, sometimes it’s bad, sometimes it’s ugly. But the primacy of the root argument seems constant.

And so maybe the gradual, gradual, decide-and-re-decide approach to food trucks makes sense. After all, eventually those who stick it out long enough become incumbent interests themselves, and then maybe they can finally get a reasonable hearing.