Chris Selley on Tory and Keesmaat as election day looms.
TORY CAMPAIGN BASICALLY ‘TAKE HIM OR LEAVE HIM’
As recently as the morning of July 26, Mayor John Tory looked to be running for re-election effectively unopposed. No disrespect to Sarah Climenhaga, Saron Gebresellassi or any of the other smart, serious people running against him, but none has anything like the stature or the campaign they likely need to effectively challenge an incumbent mayor — never mind one who is widely considered to be, at worst, inoffensive.
Though polls suggest Tory will also handily beat Jennifer Keesmaat, her withering attacks on the mayor’s record are making his life more difficult. Toronto’s former chief planner burst like the Kool-Aid Woman into the registrar’s office at City Hall just minutes before the July 27 registration deadline, and her candidacy has energized left-leaning councillors who might otherwise have gritted their teeth through another four years of Tory’s overcautious (in their view) but earnest efforts to tackle the city’s universally agreedupon problems: Affordability, housing, transit and public safety.
“I like John. I think he’s a nice, decent man,” says progressive councillor Joe Cressy, who has stood beside Tory supporting safe injection sites, the King Street pilot project, the Bloor Street bike lanes and resettling Syrian refugees — and who is now staunchly behind Keesmaat. “(But) after four years in office, and with the potential for another four years to come, I don’t know what he wants his legacy to be.
“I know he wants to be mayor,” says Cressy, “but I don’t know why.”
Ouch.
Ironically enough, it was Doug Ford — Tory’s rival to the right in the 2014 mayoral race, and scourge of Toronto progressives — who suddenly forced a reckoning as to whether four more years of John Tory was good enough.
When the premier slashed Toronto City Council from 47 seats to 25, right in the middle of the campaign, Tory held a press conference to argue Ford, the self-styled “premier for the people,” ought to put the matter to a referendum. To many, though, that sounded like capitulation. A narrative immediately took hold that Tory had done far too little to “stand up for Toronto.” And it seemed to uncork every frustration those to Tory’s left have with the self-styled city-builder: wrong on the Scarborough subway and the Gardiner East, wasteful on SmartTrack, too timid on cycling and pedestrian fatalities, too obsessed with low taxes — their list of grievances goes on.
Tory is wholly unrepentant about how he handled Ford’s bombshell. “I couldn’t have objected more profoundly,” he says of a conversation with the premier the night before it became official.
Still, angry as he says he was, Tory makes no apologies for thinking of the big picture.
“You get up the next morning … and you have to call the very same people,” he says. “So in the middle of all that I was negotiating with (the province) about support for community safety: We got $25 million (over four years), which we’re matching … and we’re going to invest a lot … into kids and neighbourhoods. And you know, the next day, it’s transit, and the day after that it’s housing.”
“I think people wanted the mayor to be yelling and screaming and marching in a protest with a placard up to Queen’s Park,” says Beaches councillor Mary-Margaret McMahon, a centrist member of Tory’s executive committee who’s leaving council after two terms. “But that’s not his style. He is a collegial, cordial, polite gentleman. He’s going to be angry, but it’s … not going to be an activist kind of angry.”
Tory certainly isn’t promising to change. He has declined to debate Keesmaat one-on-one. Almost in so many words, his platform promises four more years of the same. Basically: Take him or leave him.
If this year’s mayoral campaign were a referendum on 2014’s, Tory might be in some trouble. Broadly speaking, his pitch four years ago was about “getting Torontonians moving again,” as he told a Canadian Club audience on May 27, 2014. But his purpose at the Convention Centre that day was to unveil what became far and away the dominant element of his campaign: SmartTrack.
“It will offer electrified, frequent, all-day, two-way express rail service along existing GO corridors from the airport corporate centre in the west, to Union Station … and back up to Markham in the east,” he vowed, “and it will offer this for the price of a TTC ride.”
There would be 22 stations. It would cost a mere $8 billion, to be funded through tax-increment financing. It would be up and running in seven years.
Even before election day, pieces started falling off: The western end would require tunnelling, which the campaign hadn’t bargained for. In the years since, staff and council have whittled it down to the point where it’s best described as six new stations added to pre-existing provincial rapid express rail (RER) plans, at a cost of nearly $1.5 billion to city and federal taxpayers, with just a small fraction coming from tax-increment financing.
Fortunately, SmartTrack was just one of three major components of Tory’s “One Toronto Transit Plan.” Unfortunately, another was the Scarborough subway he inherited from the previous council — a $3.5-billion money pit that only promises to get deeper, with Ford vowing to add two stops to the current plan.
The seven-year timeline is certainly not going to happen: Metrolinx’s GO RER projects currently have “Expected completion: 2025” stamped across them. “It’ll still be among the first Transit projects that will actually get finished, from a standing start in 2015,” Tory counters. “There’d been no work done on this (by city staff ).”
Quite right. But to Tory’s detractors, SmartTrack, however useful, also represents thousands of hours of staff time wasted wrestling a backof-a-napkin political calculation toward some semblance of reality. That’s time Keesmaat claims could have been far better spent on the Downtown Relief Line, which remains, unambiguously, the transit system’s greatest need. Tory notes the DRL is closer to reality than ever, council having approved $150 million in planning work. But it’s reasonable to wish it could be closer.
Election campaigns aren’t about previous election campaigns, of course. This one is about Tory’s record, which his campaign suggests is as follows: Free TTC rides for kids, and discounts for lowincome Torontonians; the two-hour unlimited transfer; the prospect of GO trips within the 416 for a TTC fare; accelerated completion of the University-Spadina line extension. Crackdowns on illegal parkers and other vehicular menaces; speeding up the Gardiner reconstruction. Fifty kilometres of new bike lanes, plus a 10-year cycling plan. Fifteen thousand more child-care spaces, and 5,000 more subsidies; a student nutrition program reaching 50,000 more kids; and a fully funded poverty reduction plan. A commitment to 40,000 new affordable rental housing units over 12 years. Hiring 400 police officers in 2018 and 2019, and $30 million for social programs aimed at crime prevention. Strong and profitable relationships with senior governments of all political stripes. The rail deck park plan. The Bentway park, under the Gardiner.
And, bottom line: a booming economy, with low property taxes.
Few question his work ethic or his advocacy for the city. “I think he’s a great ambassador and people really respect him. He’s smart and hardworking. He’s available and accessible,” says McMahon.
Indeed, Tory can legitimately claim to have made good on the centrist-toprogressive city-building agenda on which he ran. The decades-in-the-making King Street pilot project has measurably improved the commute on North America’s busiest surface transport route despite near-total lack of enforcement and obnoxious objections from some local merchants. Many progressives’ instinct was to tell them to go to hell; Tory’s City Hall placated them with endless consultations and parking discounts they might not have deserved.
But that’s how Tory operates, and there is no arguing with success.
Tory took the same approach with decades-in-themaking Bloor Street bike lanes, supporting them as a pilot project rather than a fait accompli — again to the annoyance of those who would prefer an activist mayor. And again it’s difficult to argue with the outcome. Some merchants predicted the loss of a few parking spaces per block would destroy their businesses; as on King Street, data from credit and debit transactions proved them wrong.
Cressy, who’s worked with Tory on many of these files, has a different take. The Bloor Street bike lanes are all well and good, but he notes Tory supported the opposite approach on Yonge Street in North York — maintaining six lanes of traffic, while installing bike lanes on a parallel street. “If the wind blows in a city-building progressive manner in downtown, he’s for it,” Cressy argues. “But if it blows the opposite way and in North York Etobicoke, he goes that way.”
In short, he asks: Where’s the vision?
Vision is what Keesmaat claims to provide. Why commit to 40,000 affordable housing units in 12 years instead of 100,000 in 10? Why pledge (realistically) to cut pedestrian and cyclist collisions with cars by 20 per cent in a decade when the (unrealistic) goal could be zero? (Tory eventually adopted the “Vision Zero” mantra.) Why (allegedly) focus on one transit line at a time when we should be focusing on building out the entire 30-year, $50-billion colossus?
In recent days, some potentially enthusiastic Keesmaat supporters seem to be turning the question back at her: With the exception of 3,000 or so homes worth more than $4 million, Keesmaat, like Tory, has pledged to keep property taxes at or below the rate of inflation, and she hasn’t proposed any other significant new revenues — something she publicly deemed essential as chief planner.
What good is vision without the cash to back it up? The question could as easily be put to Tory, who championed new “revenue tools” as head of CivicAction, and burned some political capital getting council to approve tolling the Gardiner Expressway and Don Valley Parkway only to have Kathleen Wynne renege on letting it happen. His “city building fund” — a property tax levy — will only top out at $65 million per annum.
So to answer Cressy’s question, why does Tory want to be mayor? What keeps him bounding out of bed at an ungodly hour every morning?
“We’ve … allow(ed) neighbourhoods that were already (socially) disconnected to become more completely disconnected from the city,” says Tory, pointing to how much time he’s spent getting to know and understand all parts of Toronto.
There are kids in Toronto who do “everything we told them to do” but find themselves unemployed in their early 20s and flirting with terrible outcomes, he says. He argues transit and housing, in particular, are key to fixing those disconnections and avoiding those negative outcomes.
“That’s what gets me up in the morning: That I know we can build the transit if we stick to it, and I know we can address the housing issue. It’s a painstaking one — both are, because they take a long time — but (we can) make a big difference in those neighbourhoods.”
It’s a goal no one would disagree with. Tory’s approach is too cautious for some, clearly; but Keesmaat’s own caution suggests ambition might not be a huge selling point — not if it costs money, anyway. With Tory, at the very least, no one can say they don’t know who they’re voting for.