Should celebrities have power to shift the agenda at city hall?: Keenan
A tweet from Olympic swimmer Penny Oleksiak this week drew a pledge from Mayor John Tory on school pools.

TheStar.com
Jan. 12, 2017
Edward Keenan

“Over the last week,” budget chief Gary Crawford said Thursday, “the budget committee has held 12 meetings at six civic centres all around the city. The budget subcommittees have heard from 230 residents of the city of Toronto over 23 meeting hours.” Meanwhile, 44 councillors have been bandying about their own thoughts. But so far as I know, only one person has yet inspired a direct, public commitment from the mayor to make a change in the budget.

Add it to the list of things swimmer and Monarch Park Collegiate student Penny Oleksiak has already accomplished in her 16 years on this earth: she’s won as many Olympic medals as any Canadian swimmer in history, and added Lou Marsh Award honours as national athlete of the year, which would be a great resumé for a retiring athlete, never mind one not yet old enough to vote. Now, with a tweet, she’s become an influential political adviser, too.

Despite what you may have heard, Oleksiak probably hasn’t saved any pools from closing — at least not directly, since no one was directly planning to close any pools. But she did provoke a pledge from the mayor to try to make a change to the city’s plans. Buried in city budget documents were details of a decision already made by staff to move city programming from three school pools to nearby city-owned ones. Some parents became concerned that without the de facto subsidy of city rental fees, the school board would eventually close those pools. It’s hard to say for sure if that would be the case, or that the city would be responsible for the school board’s decision if it did. But either way, Oleksiak took up the cause.

When she tweeted Tuesday that “it’s important to teach kids how to swim,” under the hashtags #saveSHpool and #TObudget, John Tory was able to grab headlines on Wednesday by responding, “Gold medal message received … I’ve asked budget chief Gary Crawford to find a way to save these pools.”

And while Crawford himself seemed to hedge a bit on confirming the reversal when talking to the press, the mayor and staff in his office appeared firm in the decision. The budget implications of the reversal are minimal — less than $300,000 per year total. But there’s a lot of publicity bang for those bucks.

And some questions about why exactly a celebrity intervention seems so instantly effective. “I’m going to run out and find me some Olympians who believe that we have to have an equitable city where services are available to all, and then, hey, maybe we’ll get there,” city Councillor Gord Perks said Thursday, concerned that user fees continue to go up, while reserves continue to be raided, and while waiting lists for child care and public housing continue to lengthen as property taxes are kept the lowest in the region.

Longtime watchers of this process will be reminded here of Margaret Atwood rising to the defence of libraries during Rob Ford’s term. No library closures were ever under serious consideration by the budget committee or council, but Doug Ford was musing about it off the cuff, and he and Atwood both seemed to relish a war in the media about how big a deal it would be. The attention that spat drew — and the alarm with which many people reacted to even the suggestion their local library might be taken away from them — was part of what rallied the public to participate in famous all-night meetings, speaking out against all kinds of proposed cuts. That reaction, in turn, led to genuine changes in the budget — city council rewrote it to undo many cuts Ford and his allies had been planning — and was a turning point in Ford’s ability to get his way.

It seems unlikely that Oleksiak’s intervention will have similar knock-on effects on the budget process, partly because many of the budget measures are less dramatic than the ones Ford actually endorsed, and partly because of Tory’s quick and savvy genuflection to the Olympian’s plea.

To be sure, we’ll hear more in the next couple of weeks about items being saved. Indeed, many of the cuts listed in this budget for consideration seem to be there specifically so they can be rescued. This is likely true of the most dramatic cuts not yet included but assembled for consideration (closing city pools and wading pools, retiring fire trucks, ending nutrition and dental programs for the poor), of new expenses not yet included either (the programs that are part of the mayor’s anti-poverty program) and those that are already factored into the budget but have drawn the most public objection (the end to a rent-deal with the school boards that functions as a child care subsidy for market-rate-paying parents, which could amount to several hundred dollars a year per child). These things could wind up cut, but it seems likely most or all of them will wind up funded when the smoke clears, even without high-profile intervention.

Still, it is interesting to observe in the cases of Oleksiak and Atwood how much celebrity chatter changes what it is people think we’re talking about. It would be nice to imagine a world in which budget debates didn’t require the attention of bestselling novelists or Olympians in order to attract the public’s interest, but maybe that’s unreasonable — after all, famous people are famous, almost by definition, because we find them fascinating, and budget calculations are widely thought to be inherently less compelling. But it would still be refreshing if our politicians, whose job it is to be interested in the budget, didn’t allow these celebrities to shift the agenda so easily. And if that’s too much to hope for, perhaps instead someone can check to see if Drake has an opinion about property tax rates.