Kelly considers asking army to aid cleanup
Deputy mayor at odds with Ford over ice storm response, highlighting split leadership
Toronto’s two mayors are at odds over the city’s ice storm response, revealing the imperfections of an “awkward” power-sharing arrangement that left the city without a distinct leader, several councillors say.
Deputy Mayor Norm Kelly said Friday he is making “exploratory calls” to find out whether calling in the army might help to ease the massive ice storm cleanup effort, which is projected to take up to eight weeks.
“If the army said, ‘Look, we could give you the relevant manpower,’ and our staff here could integrate them in a meaningful way, why wouldn’t you accept that assistance?” Kelly said. “What happens if another storm hits us here and we are caught with our pants down?”
Rob Ford fired back on Twitter on Friday evening. “I see no need to call in the army when we have over 600 staff dedicated to clean up efforts,” he wrote. “The City of Toronto is on top of the situation.”
Josée Picard, spokeswoman for Public Safety Canada, confirmed that any request for troops would first be made to the province, which would then decide whether to forward it to the federal government.
In order for a request for military help to be granted, she said “the assistance must not be available otherwise within the private sector because of timeliness, magnitude or specialty of service.”
Ontario’s Ministry of Safety and Correctional Services did not respond to questions about the circumstances that would warrant passing along a request for help from the army to the federal government. More than 500 troops descended on Toronto in 1999 when then-mayor Mel Lastman asked for help digging out after a major snowfall.
According to Picard, “Military assistance to ‘clean up’ has not been provided in recent history.”
On Friday, Kelly also criticized Ford’s decision to ignore his advice — and the initial advice of city staff — to declare a state of emergency as the winter storm whipped through the city.
“You don’t know what resources you have unless you’ve called for a state of emergency and alerted everyone to the seriousness with which you are approaching the issue,” Kelly said.
Ford remained steadfast in his opinion that the state of emergency was unnecessary and would only incite panic.
“This is not a state of emergency,” he told a press conference on Christmas morning. “We’re not even close.”
The unprecedented transfer of mayoral powers that city council ap- proved in November following the crack scandal and police investigation left the ability to declare an emergency — a statutory power — in Ford’s hands. But had Ford made such a declaration, Kelly would be in charge of the emergency response. “The current arrangement is awkward,” Councillor Denzil MinnanWong told the Star. “I don’t think it would be unfair to say that the deputy mayor’s enthusiasm to declare a state of emergency might have something to do with the fact that he wanted to be in charge,” Minnan-Wong said. “By the same token, I think that the mayor may not have wanted to declare that state of emergency because he didn’t want to hand over control to the deputy mayor.” In the storm’s aftermath, Kelly and Ford held separate briefings with city staff, he said. Meanwhile, Kelly was Premier Kathleen Wynne’s main city contact on storm issues. Politicking — whether real or imagined — aside, the result, according to Councillor Karen Stintz, was the absence of clear leadership. “We needed one person in charge, and we didn’t have it,” Stintz said. In the early hours of the storm, Toronto city spokeswoman Deborah Brown said the city’s deputy manager, John Livey, sent an email to both Kelly and Ford suggesting a state of emergency be declared because he believed provincial funding “might be conditional” on that declaration. Livey later clarified that “assistance would be forthcoming from the province without declaring,” she said. “The decision was that the city would monitor the situation and if things worsened, that decision would be revisited,” she added.
Brown said in an email on Friday that the deputy minister does have the authority to request troops be called in, but that it “would ideally be exercised in light of conclusions reached by the (city’s) emergency management committee.”
Minnan-Wong said he is not sure the cleanup effort would warrant help from the army, because “it does not appear . . . that there are significant health and safety issues.” With files from Daniel Dale