Toronto’s leaders ignore the big picture

Report suggest redrawing ward boundaries, but is that enough?

Thestar.com
Aug. 20, 2015
By Christopher Hume

Toronto, we tell ourselves at every opportunity, is a city of neighbourhoods. That may be true; but it’s also a city of fiefdoms, political fiefdoms. We call them wards and each one is a realm unto itself, and even though they are all part of Toronto, it can feel as though they only happen to be in Toronto.

The answer, some argue, is to redraw the ward boundaries, among other reasons, to eliminate significant population imbalances. Obviously, it’s anti-democratic that some wards have almost double the number of residents as others.

Though such inequalities have long been tolerated at the federal and provincial levels, city governments are closer to the people they represent and must, therefore, be more responsive.
However much one may agree Toronto wards could be better delineated, the fact is that there’s still only one person whose job is to consider the larger city. That, of course, is the mayor.

The remaining 44 councillors focus primarily on their own jurisdictions, which are often at odds with those of Toronto. The most dramatic example of the growing post-amalgamation antagonism was Rob Ford, the personification of anti-urban resentment. This is the backdrop to lunatic decisions such as the Scarborough subway. Though endorsed by everyone from Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne and federal Opposition Leader Tom Mulcair to Toronto Mayor John Tory, it makes no sense and never will.

Sadly, however, new ward boundaries won’t change the fact that a city as large as Toronto is failed by a system of governance that leads consistently to bad decisions. When every voice on city council but one speaks the language of local self-interest, clearly something is missing.

Vancouver’s answer is a council comprised completely of councillors-at-large. That opens the door to political parties at the municipal level, but also provides a forum for community-wide issues to be discussed from a community-wide perspective.

The relative speed with which Vancouver is implementing a bicycle-transit system, for instance, would be impossible in Toronto, a city where politics is too parochial to take on transformative change.

To make matters worse, Toronto’s weak-mayor system naturally leads to ... weak mayors. Rather than lead, they follow. And given the preponderance of suburban councillors, that means our chief magistrate tends to go along with the anti-urbanist sentiments they espouse, regardless of how self-destructive they may be.

Electing councillors-at-large might help shift the balance of power away from the nattering nabobs of NIMBYism to something more positive, cosmopolitan and inclusive. Freed from the pressures of the strictly local, these councillors-at-large could address city-wide issues without fear of offending the neighbours.

It’s not that local representation isn’t needed, but that cities have more to deal with than the issues about which they get most calls - dog owners that don’t clean up after their pets and parking.

The current system keeps Toronto in a state of permanent infantilization, forever reluctant to admit the small town has grown up into a big city. This doesn’t explain why lowest-common-denominator thinking is taken seriously. But it helps us understand how a city-hater gets re-elected.

There’s no easy fix for a political system that is democratic in name only. We are happy to go through the motions, but most Torontonians can’t bother to cast a ballot. Incumbents win simply because people recognize their names.

Having to pitch themselves to a larger population, councillors-at-large would be forced to move beyond micro-politics to something larger - Toronto.