City hall needs progress, not just good behaviour
Tory an improvement over Ford, but he’s marked time and failed on big issues that will define him
The absolutely brain-rattling, incomprehensibly gobsmacking era in Toronto city politics now resides only in memory, albeit fresh and still lurking above Nathan Phillips Square.
Rob Ford is still in the building, but not at its heart. Toronto can return to important things, like making gobs of money for the well-heeled even as the diminishing scraps fall to the swelling masses.
John Tory didn’t get elected to restore economic balance among his 2.6 million subjects. He was the people’s choice a year ago because the people grew tired of the clown show run out of the mayor’s office, and Tory represented the best hope of ending the circus.
He has done just that.
By most measures, Tory is a vast improvement over his predecessor. How could he not be? The bar had fallen so low that almost any of the 65 mayoral candidates from last October would have showed better, a year later.
Upon examination, though, Tory has exceeded expectations in some areas, has marked time in other important fields, such as transit, and failed spectacularly on the policing file.
A day after the elections, Tory held a news conference at Nathan Phillips Square. Reporters waited at the podium. He approached, spoke, answered questions and walked back to city hall — like how things were before his predecessor turned such events into a wild and dangerous adventure, jostling with the media and public. A city hall security guard, unaware of how ordinary and civilized the daily news scrum had been and could be, smiled and said, “Oh, that was easy.”
The tone has changed at city hall. Likely, the city will follow. Tory is ideally suited to accomplish this reset. His temperament is such that while he loves to talk — and rambles on with the best of them — he will give an ear. And he has learned how to suffer fools, if not gladly. Lucky for him; there’s no paucity of foolishness among politicians and visiting citizens at city hall.
Tory has avoided the public slagging and shaming and discrediting of the civic workforce. He often reminds city councillors to be respectful, even as he is respectful. He shouldn’t have to. But after the past four years, and because of the comments that frequently pour out of the mouth of Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti, for example, Tory’s calm voice is welcome.
The first sign that Tory is prone to stumble over pebbles was his selec- tion of his executive committee and the councillors chosen to chair key committees and help carry out the city’s agenda. City hall rules do not give the mayor carte-blanche control. He needs to cobble votes together. He must herd cats, not command obeisance. The best and most enduring way to accomplish this is to create alliances and co-opt your natural enemies and adversaries.
Tory failed to do this, when doing it is so easy. The first crucial step was to make one of the left-leaning councillors chair one of the city committees. In other words, put Councillor Gord Perks or Joe Mihevc or Janet Davis or Maria Augimeri or Mike Layton as chair of licensing or community services or government management. That would give them a seat on the executive.
Instead, Tory shut out the left — an action not lost on the 14 or so such councillors. Maybe that explains why he’s won few important votes by a huge majority. For no practical reason, he created a built-in opposition. One lefty on the executive would not have altered a single vote’s outcome there. And the chair’s influence on a committee can be offset by stacking the committee with Tory loyalists.
In other areas, Tory showed a similar propensity to create problems where none existed or to aggravate a situation by his intervention. The result is the biggest failure of his tenure so far: the police file.
Tory was warned to avoid the file. There was no public demand to spend political capital there. Bill Blair was leaving as chief and had refused to follow direction from the police board; a new chief would soon be appointed; leave well enough alone. But he didn’t stay away. Within months, Tory was being blamed for emboldening police refusal to end carding, a fat new police contract, removal of the only African-Canadian from the police board, a move to remove Alok Mukherjee as chair and replacing him with board member Andy Pringle and the selection of a pro-carding chief when a more progressive option was readily available.
Meanwhile, with his predecessor hovering nearby as a city councillor, promising to oppose him in the 2018 election, Tory spends too much time attempting to checkmate the far right-wing agenda. He might be better served governing from the middle.
He will be defined by how he handles the big issues. None is bigger than transit. Tory has been extremely good in securing provincial and federal government funding promises for SmartTrack, Tory’s key proposal. But there is no evidence SmartTrack will provide the ridership or the capacity relief, whether it makes transit sense, whether it’s even feasible.
If Tory uses the weight of his office to force through a second-rate solution to Toronto’s transit needs, all the civic peace and order he’s brought will be fool’s gold. Royson James usually appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Email: rjames@thestar.ca