Toronto city hall exploring options to fight Ford’s council cut

Thestar.com
August 7, 2018
David Rider

Plans are forming to fight Premier Doug Ford’s bill to slash the size of Toronto city council as some opposition builds from conservative quarters.

Mayor John Tory met with outside legal experts Friday, who suggested an injunction -- to put a hold on the midelection change from 47 seats to 25 seats pending a possible court challenge -- is possible.

Plans are forming to fight Premier Doug Ford’s bill to slash the size of Toronto city council as some opposition builds from conservative quarters.

The constitutional and municipal experts were not giving legal advice -- Toronto has a city solicitor who advises council and will report back to a special Aug. 20 meeting where council will decide any official legal action. Rather, the experts offered thoughts on possible avenues to fight the Better Local Government Act that will be before the Legislature this week, said acting mayoral spokesperson Siri Agrell.

“It’s really about the process. Should the premier have consulted people on municipal changes that were applied across the province in time for the 2022 election,” Agrell said, rather than ram it through during a campaign that started May 1, shocking council candidates and even some PC MPPs.

“The experts’ opinion is there is a possibility of getting an injunction, but whether it would be successful (in a court challenge) after that depends on a number of factors, including the ability for a democratically sound election to be conducted within the time frame after the introduction of new legislation,” Agrell said.

“We’re in uncharted territory.”

While the Ontario government has constitutionally conferred power over municipalities, one expert wondered about limits on that power. Could the province, say, install one Etobicoke councillor as leader of Canada’s biggest city?

Tory, who is running for re-election and initially seemed to doubt the city’s ability to fight the cut, will this week send Ford and MPPs notice of city council’s vote to oppose the move, and to ask the province to hold a binding referendum on council size before the Toronto election takes place.

Councillors at the Aug. 20 meeting will get advice from city solicitor Wendy Walberg.

City clerk Ulli Watkiss will advise on the city’s ability to jump logistical hurdles to holding a legal Oct. 22 election with new wards following the same boundaries as provincial ridings, and nominations for council candidates closing in mid-September.

Ford, who served one term on council when his scandal-mired brother Rob was mayor, told the Legislature the quick cut is necessary to make “dysfunctional” Toronto council more effective and to save what he estimates will be $25 million over the four-year council term.

The premier said those opposing his desire to cut council just want “to protect a bunch of downtown politicians.”

But an opinion poll conducted July 30 to Aug. 1 by Abacus Data found that, by a wide margin, Torontonians thought the province should either consider postponing the council cut until after the election, or scrap it entirely.

The survey of 907 Torontonians found 47 per cent wanted the province to consider postponing the change until after the election given the timing and lack of consultation, while 22 per cent said scrap it. Just shy of one-third of Torontonians wanted Ford to proceed with the cuts now.

The online survey was commissioned by the left-leaning Broadbent Institute and Progress Toronto, formed to help progressive candidates win seats in the civic election. The margin of error for a comparable probability-based random sample of the same size is 3.3 percentage points 19 times out of 20, Abacus Data said.

One in three respondents who said they voted PC in the June provincial election want the council cut postponed or cancelled.

Asked if they approve of the way Ford and his government handled the issue, 47 per cent of survey respondents disapproved, 40 per cent approved and 12 per cent didn’t care either way. Other findings include most people thinking Torontonians and city officials weren’t consulted enough, and that council itself should decide the number of council seats.

It was council that voted to move from 44 wards to 47 for this election, after a four-year process aimed at equalizing ward populations. New wards downtown were expected to shift some power to downtown progressives now routinely outvoted by suburban conservatives.

Michal Hay, head of Progress Toronto, called the cut “fundamentally undemocratic” and said it could break Torontians’s trust in the electoral process.

“This week MPPs will be voting on whether or not to bypass any consultation on Ford’s reckless interference in Toronto’s elections,” she said in an email. “We want conservative MPPs to know that Torontonians, including a significant number of Ford voters, don’t approve of how Ford is doing this. They want consultation, they think it should be up to Toronto city council and they don’t want this done in the middle of the election.”

Ford’s plan is also under fire from the right-leaning Fraser Institute, which said in a blog post the council cut will not save taxpayers money in the long run and will reduce political scrutiny of the city budget, leaving important decisions to city staff over whom voters have no control.

Josef Filipowicz, a senior policy analyst at the B.C.-based think tank, reviewed research of then-premier Mike Harris’s decision to amalgamate Toronto in 1998, ostensibly to save money.

“Government spending (per household) on important services such as fire protection, garbage collection, and parks and recreation has increased, not decreased,” he wrote.

“As a former Toronto city councillor, Premier Ford wants to improve fiscal efficiency in his hometown, and that’s understandable. However, reducing the number of seats in council -- while perhaps a strong symbol -- is not an effective way to achieve this goal. In fact, it may grow the size of government, consume more taxpayer money and reduce democratic accountability to boot.”

But to Jim Karygiannis, one of 11 Toronto councillors on record supporting Ford’s council cut, all the pushback is a waste of time.

Any attempt at an injunction will fail, much like legal attempts to stop amalgamation, he said, and councillors need to accept the fact the city is a ‘creature of the province.’

“This is what we’re dealing with and we should move on,” he told the Star on Monday. “You don’t fight city hall. I guess you don’t fight Queen’s Park either.”