Corp Comm Connects

Toronto committee tasked with rethinking city’s governance may wind down. Advocates say it just started

Thestar.com
Nov. 1, 2019
Jennifer Pagliaro

In the immediate aftermath of a chaotic election last year, the first substantive thing that the new, much smaller council voted to do was to strike a special committee to review the city’s governance.

That committee was to be responsible for making recommendations on “further changes” to the city’s governance structure, after Premier Doug Ford’s provincial government cut the number of city councillors from a planned 47 to 25. The committee was also asked to consider the impact the reduction.

But as the committee appears poised to wind down as of Friday after less than a year of work, researchers and advocates following the process say that work has only just begun. They are urging the committee to continue, while at least one councillor is planning on trying to push the committee’s work forward.

“It’s really, really quite limited,” said Patricia Wood, a professor of geography at York University and co-founder of its City Institute of what the committee has accomplished to date. “And it worries me because it is itself a practice of local democracy and if we say that this is OK that this is how when we have major issues we give them sort of a little bit of our attention and then we move on, that’s not a model of strong local democracy to me.”

Wood, with University of British Columbia researcher Alexandra Flynn, as well as the directors of two advocacy groups who have pushed for better local governance, Devika Shah at Social Planning Toronto and Michal Hay at Progress Toronto, authored a letter to the committee, which meets Friday, to ask them to extend their work plan for at least two more years. It’s been signed by more than 30 other researchers, advocates and community leaders.

“We have followed and contributed to the special committee over the last year because we believe that at this moment in time, it is fundamental to building a more equitable and livable city for everyone,” the letter says. “However, we are disappointed by the scope and level of consultation and research that was undertaken to inform the staff report that was submitted to the committee on Oct. 23, 2019. What has been done to date can only be considered preliminary.”

The authors of the letter say the committee can and should explore fundamental questions surrounding city governance, that range from the city’s existing powers under provincial legislation to whether Toronto’s 311 service, which assists residents with questions and complaints, is adequate.

Councillor Stephen Holyday, who chairs the committee, said he did not want to preclude how his colleagues would choose to move forward ahead of Friday’s meeting, but he believes the staff-recommended model council adopted in the immediate aftermath of the Ford’s cut seems to be working and suggested the work of the committee was now complete.

The staff-recommended model included amalgamating the regular committees that councillors sit on, reducing the number of councillors required to sit on certain boards, and an increase in councillors’ staffing and office budgets.

“Really my focus has been on delivering on that idea, did we get it right when just after the election we reorganized things?” Holyday said. “And it seems that we have.”

Spokesperson for Mayor John Tory, Don Peat, said that the mayor believes the committee has done “valuable work in short order.”

“This is work it was tasked by council to address,” the statement said. “If there are further issues that need to be addressed by this specific committee rather than one of the existing standing committees, the mayor is confident that the chair and the committee are ready to serve.”

Councillor Gord Perks, who sits on the committee, said he wants to see more specific proposals put in front of the public based on the first year of consultation.

“When the premier cut council in half, city staff came up with a temporary plan for how to manage the city’s affairs with a smaller council, but we knew that that was temporary and created this committee to find a permanent way of governing the city,” Perks said. “The reports we have today don’t accomplish that goal.”

Perks said he is hoping to hear from staff Friday on what kind of budget would be needed to proceed with further committee work.

The committee, which will have met just five times as of this Friday, has garnered little attention as they worked through a public consultation process.

The new report from city staff to the committee concluded that there are “no consistent concerns” with the structure of committees and other processes based on consultation with the public.

A previous report, however, highlighted that the public consultation has been very limited.

Forty seven people attended five public sessions, staff reported. Two of those had just five participants each. There were someone 600 responses to a staff-created survey, but fewer than half completed the questions.

Staff reported ahead of the latest meeting that a total 39 people have spoken to the committee directly and staff also received 100 written submissions.

Some of the themes that emerged from consultation, staff said, included electoral reform, changes to how committee meetings are held and changing how local issues are decided. None of those issues have been addressed by the committee.

But staff, in the findings report, have only made two recommendations: First to leave the structure set up after the council cut as is and secondly to further study how the committee of adjustment, which handles minor building variances to private property, functions.

Wood said the city has not even begun to address many issues within its existing mandate.

“No one ever wants this to happen. Like, no one ever wants someone to come along and flip the table and set everything on fire,” Wood said, referring to the province’s cut to council. “But when it does, it gives you an opportunity to have the larger conversation.”

Even the basic questions arising out of council cut, she said, like, “Do we want 47 wards or do we want the authority to decide for ourselves?”

Gabriel Eidelman, director of the Urban Policy Lab at University of Toronto’s Munk School, agreed the mandate of the committee has been interpreted “extremely narrowly” and that it should become a permanent fixture to look more broadly at governance concerns.

“They weren’t asking questions such as are people really happy with how city hall works? Or could we do better?”