‘I’m never satisfied,’ says Mayor Tory on eve of another year of the pandemic

Thestar.com
Dec. 20, 2021

As figure skaters twirl around a busy Nathan Phillips Square rink outside his city hall office window, Mayor John Tory is troubled about the year ahead.

Another pandemic budget the city can’t afford, rising cases of a fast-moving variant of COVID-19 that threatens another holiday season together and uncertainty about Toronto -- which he often refers to as the “economic engine” of the country -- revving back to life in 2022 as hoped.

If the mayor had a wish list this holiday season, it would include this: committed funding from the provincial and federal governments for the cost of shelter and to cover the lack of TTC fares, the arrival of previously promised money to fight gun violence and agreement on council for a path forward on housing options across the city.

“I'm never satisfied because there’s always things to be done,” Tory said in a wide-ranging year-end interview with the Star.

Here is what the mayor had to say going into the final year of the 2018-2022 council term on COVID-19, the upcoming budget, encampment clearings and more.

On gathering for the holidays:

“Well, nobody’s kind of finalized their advice yet. It’s going to be advice, I think, that will be along the lines of saying we'll socialize really carefully as opposed to last year where you don't see anybody, anytime, anywhere, no matter who it is, unless you live with them.

“So, I would say to people that they should feel a sense of hope that we’re on the right track and that we are dealing with something that is unknown and that what they should do is stay the course.

“Please get vaccinated and make sure everybody else around you has done so if you can persuade them, please continue to follow the public health guidelines and most of all over Christmas and the holidays, socialize carefully.”

On the upcoming 2022 budget launch:

“I think it’s going to show that the areas of greatest need for vulnerable people and so on have been protected and enhanced, that everything else has been held to pretty strict discipline only because, first of all, the people, in my view, cannot afford a significant tax increase. And secondly, and probably on a par with that, it’s pretty hard for me to go to the other governments and say, ‘Well, please help us with the transit and the shelter money’ if we're then taking that and sort of deciding, we’re going to go out and announce every program we have is being expanded dramatically.”

On whether he regrets the forcible clearing of homeless encampments this summer:

“Of course I don’t like those images. I don’t like that reality. And I think we continued to try hard after those incidents to re-house people in a way that is working with them one by one … I will maintain this view and I’ve been entirely consistent all the way through with this: the encampments were inconsistent with the open use of public parks and public space by all citizens of Toronto -- Number One.

“Number Two: they were and are -- where they exist -- unhealthy, unsafe and illegal.”

On de-tasking the Toronto police and reallocating funding to the community:

“We’re looking all of the time, believe me …We’re having this thing that started in January -- the alternate way the city’s going to run to deal with people in distress. I ask all the time for a sort of a rigorous account of how many of these 32,000 … cases of people in distress will no longer be at your doorstep. Therefore, you will be able to devote those resources to other things or not ask for it. So there is that on the one hand.

“But then on the other hand, there is the continued pressure that exists. So, for example, we have today neighbourhood police officers and it’s something that is desired by many councillors and by many neighbourhoods that don't have them today because we've just been bringing them in as we had the money to pay for it.”

On continued youth violence in the city:

“Those things absolutely sear me when I hear them and I think to myself, ‘Well, is there a program, if we had done more of this or more of that?’ I think we’re trying to do the right thing.

“And certainly the community told us we had to do less of announcing some new program and more of getting people around the table to actually sometimes look at individual cases of kids … I’d love to have even more money for those programs, because I think it just allows us to reach more kids. But I’m not sure that ever expanding those is the answer by itself.”

On getting rooming houses approved across the city:

“On something like rooming houses, I went to great pains to say it wasn't ideological because you had people like (Coun.) John Filion adamantly opposed to it and you had other people that were willing to look at it who were part of my normal coalition of support on the council.

“And so it made the issue more difficult. You had this kind of odd sort of composition of people who had different kinds of concerns about it.

“But I think a large part of it is just public education. We have to sort of help them by telling their constituents what this is and what it isn’t and how it’s actually is going to be a help to us, both in terms of regulating the illegal rooming houses that exist and in terms of providing more affordable housing over time that some people need.”

On the future of Toronto as a destination city:

“We’re doing these kind of virtual trade missions because I couldn’t travel…and the number of people who want to come here and they’ve gone through this analysis of all the different places they could go in North America, and they want to come here because they think that on all of the accounts we’ve talked about today -- on economic prospects, on quality of life, on the arts and culture, how we respect each other, that whole relative lack of divisiveness -- the smart people that are here.

“And I think the future of the city is very bright. And I’ve said this repeatedly for the last 12 months now that we are going to be back to the same kind of position in the world and the kind of booming status of the city.”