READ SELLEY ON THE SCENE AT QUEEN’S PARK,
Early Monday morning, Municipal Affairs Minister Steve Clark stood in the Ontario legislature and launched a calm, but concerted attack on what he called the dysfunctional, time-wasting governance at Toronto city hall. He cited in particular the 2017 budget process: “After days of debate at the committee level, city council took 15 hours to pass its budget — 15 hours, Speaker, of going back and forth and back and forth on a document that was already nearly set in stone,” Clark said. “Speaker, that’s not an efficient way to run a government.”
The minutes say council took roughly 12 hours to pass the 2017 budget. That’s a fair number of hours. Mind you, 10 billion is a fair number of dollars.
Since Premier Doug Ford decided to hack city council from 47 seats down to 25 weeks before the Oct. 22 municipal election, observers have debated how the undeniably ludicrous nature of many meetings of Toronto council relates to its decision-making prowess.
I admit it’s difficult to separate my view of this from my occasional professional obligation over the years to sit through council’s soul-destroying pageants of mediocrity. For every smart, hardworking and forward-thinking member — and thank God for them — there is a chair-moistening dullard whose greatest pleasure in life is to spend four minutes of a council meeting making an ass of himself, then implore his colleagues for two minutes more.
City council didn’t spend an entire 12 hours debating whether to ban shark fin soup, as Ford contended to Global News over the weekend, but that debate did feature dullard Coun. Glenn de Baeremaeker deploying a remote-controlled flying shark in the council chamber. Council eventually banned shark fin in 2012 over staff advice it might be overstepping its jurisdiction. The ban was overturned months later by the Ontario Superior Court of Justice. Time well spent.
All in all, Toronto is going gangbusters. But there’s a lot of nonsense going on under the clamshell. The biggest flaw in Clark’s argument was how reminiscent Monday morning ’s proceedings at Queen’s Park were of what he was ascribing to city hall.
For starters, Clark made his opening argument Monday in favour of Bill 31 at around 12:30 a.m.
I have been at city hall past midnight many times. I have never arrived at city hall at midnight to hear a debate begin.
The nocturnal edition was necessary — if you accept that any of this was necessary — for a few reasons. Start with the inherently madcap timeline of Bill 5, which was Bill 31’s nearidentical predecessor: It received royal assent Aug. 14, just 10 weeks before a municipal election in a city of 2.3 million people where the campaign was already well underway. Justice Edward Belobaba’s unexpected decision to quash Bill 5 on charter grounds made the timeline even dodgier, despite the government invoking the notwithstanding clause for the first time in Ontario’s history.
The opposition refused to give Bill 31 speedy passage. Standing orders dictated there needed to be two sitting days between first and second readings. Because the legislature was scheduled to recess Monday and Tuesday so provincial members could attend the International Plowing Match in Pain Court in southwestern Ontario, the bill couldn’t have been passed until late next week. So we got an “emergency” weekend sitting: all of 45 minutes Saturday, then another beginning Monday at midnight.
All things considered, the debate was remarkably civil. But when I popped back into the chamber at around 5 a.m., fewer than 30 of the legislature’s 124 members were in attendance. Earlier, at 2:13 a.m., NDP MPP Peter Tabuns had moved to adjourn debate. It was a stalling tactic that ultimately failed, but not before setting the deafening bells at Queen’s Park — used to call members in to vote — to ringing for 30 sanity eroding minutes.
Meanwhile, outside — audible at times to MPPs in the chamber — we had a quintessentially Ford-brand scene: perhaps 300 chanting citizens demanding entry to the legislature, even after the Speaker had cleared the public galleries. Several attendees had let Ford and his government know what they thought of him in most unparliamentary language and unlike at city council, there’s zero tolerance for that at the legislature.
“I’m a candidate!” one man bellowed before being escorted out. “This is f---ing bulls---!”
He’s not wrong.
Debate concluded just after 7 a.m. and MPPs are sure to pass Bill 31 on second and third readings this week. One might reasonably say it was already nearly set in stone, to borrow Clark’s phrase. One might reasonably call Monday’s proceedings dysfunctional, if not a colossal waste of time in pursuit of a bad or at least woefully premature idea.
Amidst all this chaos, many have suggested it’s ironic to see attendance at the plowing match, of all things, stand as an inviolable political norm. But it is a pressing moment for Ford’s government to reaffirm its concern with rural folk. In the early days of his tenure, Ford has created a historically massive crapstorm about a purely Toronto issue. In his final speech of the overnight session, he vowed to build Scarborough its three-stop subway at a cost of untold billions to be spread across all of Ontario’s taxpayers. And he has parried charges of being obsessed with Toronto by suggesting he might well target other local governments as well.
That is not where this government needs or should want to be. Get this man out of Toronto and into some overalls, stat.
I have been at city hall past midnight many times. I have never arrived at city hall at midnight to hear a debate begin.