City hall has a reckless rubber-stamp culture
It hit me just the other day why our unique and famous city hall building at Nathan Phillips Square is so perfect for this city. Its two curved towers cradling the rotunda look like two halves of a tube. If you brought them together and placed them on top of the rotunda’s disk, you would get a great big rubber stamp. How appropriate is that?
Some of the well-paid councillors who hold court within the rotunda dither and flit about obsessed with minutiae. Or at least they do once they show up, that is. Mayor John Tory has already publicly taken them to task for their casual approach to start time. But there doesn’t seem to be great objection to certain councillors being conspicuously absent for votes that are critical to their respective wards. No matter. They’ll still all have their jobs come tomorrow.
Maybe it has always been this way, but in the age of Twitter, where journalists and average residents are free to report the proceedings in real time, we get to see more of just what unfolds. Tory recently said, “I thought (Wednesday) was an example where there were probably four or five hours just wasted on stuff that was sort of interesting maybe to a few people but it really wasn’t advancing the public interest.”
It’s not the time that concerns me so much as the content. It may indeed be a difficult place to work, given the large number of issues to be covered, but that is no excuse for a permanent lack of due diligence or accountability when it comes to spending Toronto’s money. This past week, council, in mere minutes, voted to spend $90 million more of our cash on the Spadina subway extension overrun. $90 million — just like that.
City council cannot find its way — cannot seem to rub two nickels together — to fund shelters for LGBT youth without procrastinating for years and insisting first upon hundreds of hours of “study.” It hems and haws over helping to fund the Red Door shelter for abused women, an ignored and deserving group if there ever was one. It cannot find enough money for seniors or homeless people. It routinely raises the fares for public transit while leaving those who drive cars and trucks undisturbed. Insects, mice and crime run rampant through dangerously crumbling Toronto Community Housing Corp. (TCHC) buildings, despite our past mayor’s tireless efforts to be photographed there. But for a subway extension that stretches out to Vaughan? Sure. Here’s $90 million.
This money was rubber-stamped without appropriate due diligence. It was handed out to a single company without a tendering process, apparently because that would be the best option for getting the project completed faster. A government held hostage by its own construction project? That has never happened before, said no one, ever. What guarantee do we have that there will not be another request/demand for a fresh pile of money a year from now, once Bechtel (the winning sole-sourced contractor) finds out that it, too, has been handed a “poisoned chalice,” just like professional transit manager Andy Byford discovered?
This keeps happening, over and over. This city is notorious for accepting lowball tenders from contractors who know they will get the contract and who know when the real bill comes due, a further blank cheque will arrive from the city. That actually means it will be paid by you and me. Again.
This is a scandal that has been rushed past the public eye in a blur, whisked away by a long weekend news cycle. Ninety million dollars, for now. How much more later?
This is a scandal created by the same council that spent hours debating whether Rob Ford should attend remedial racism school, then quickly rubber stamped an essentially blank cheque for a subway being built by people who should know better. This is a group of elected officials who have routinely sought to overrule and neutralize their own integrity commissioners in order to spend money quickly and without oversight.
This payment is, as the TTC union calls it, “a misguided attempt to gain a few months on a critical segment of infrastructure.” Infrastructure that doesn’t actually exist, while hundreds of other, more pressing problems do — problems that $90 million could actually fix. Before pulling out the rubber stamp once again, they really ought to remember that “Yes. Sure. OK” is not the only available response.