Mayor Tory open to having more citizens involved in city government

Thestar.com
October 25, 2018
Samantha Beattie

Changes are coming to how Toronto is governed, but what exactly will be done to help 25 councillors juggle constituency and policy work remains unclear.

Mayor John Tory, speaking to reporters in his first post-election news conference Wednesday, said city staff are currently preparing a report with options on how to restructure a government that was designed around having almost double the number of councillors as there are now. In the midst of the just-past election, the provincial government cut the number of wards in the city to 25 from a planned 47. Tory said he expects to see the report in the coming days.

Toronto Mayor John Tory says he wants the city to strengthen its 311 and online services so councillors can spend less time tackling constituent problems.

The mayor said he is open to more citizens participating in city government, potentially filling spots on city boards, agencies and corporations.

“Having accomplished citizens come and be part of those discussions on boards and for that matter at the community level would not only be good for governance in terms of producing better results but would help alleviate some of the load on councillors who are now overseeing much bigger wards,” Tory said.

He also wants the city to strengthen its 311 and online services so councillors can spend less time tackling constituent problems and more time developing public policy.

“I am hopeful this will help us speed up ... substantially altering the way citizens interact with their government,” Tory said.

Currently, Toronto is divided into four areas each represented by a community council -- Etobicoke York, North York, Scarborough, and Toronto and East York. Councillors sit on the community council that their ward is in, hold public hearings and make decisions and recommendations on local planning matters. Most decisions made at community council end up going to city council for final approval.

Community council advisory boards would reduce councillors’ workloads by filtering through the number of deputations that go before community councils, said one of the paper’s authors, planner Beate Bowron, who wrote it alongside community activist Sue Dexter and political scientist Gary Davidson. They urged the city to form a task force to consult with the public on how these citizen-driven groups should be structured.

“These are suggestions to feed into public discourse. We are not pretending we have all the answers,” said Bowron.

The authors were motivated to write the paper because “we thought there was potentially a huge democractic deficit (with 25 councillors). The fear is the access of the community to councillors will be severely diminished,” said Bowron.

The paper also suggests consolidating city council’s 14 committees into three groups with seven to nine councillors on each, and replacing some of the 91 councillor appointments on the city’s 37 agencies, boards and commissions with citizens.

“We are not by any means saying those big important boards (like Toronto Transit Commission) should have no councillors on them, but might need to have fewer,” Bowron said. Some of the nine councillors on the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, for example, could be filled with citizens.

Tory must push for these kinds of changes if he wants to have an effective second term, said Gabriel Eidelman, a University of Toronto urban policy professor, who was part of a team that made recommendations in 2017 on how city council could improve decision-making.

“With a very strong mandate, this is Tory’s chance to leave his legacy,” Eidelman said. “He’s told voters he believes in prudent decision-making. He needs to start conversations of how to rework processes now, so there can be more fruitful debate on the big issues in the future.”