SHOUTING MATCH
Critics on both left and right have taken to grumbling at Tory while he’s busy making plans.
One year and one month, just about, into John Tory’s mayoralty, and his critics from the left and right are crying, “I told you so!”
Suddenly, after 12 months in which he has had few tangible successes to point to other than establishing a new tone around city hall, the rubber has hit the road for Tory’s mayoral agenda. He’s about to deliver the first budget developed completely by his team; we’ve just finished a weeklong avalanche of transit announcements that have redrawn the track forward; the possible fiasco of the Gardiner Expressway rebuilding is being reworked; and now a detailed plan to restructure and repair the city’s troubled social housing agency has been launched.
With each piece of news, you can hear those who opposed Tory from the start shaking their heads and saying that this is what they warned us would happen. Critics on the left point to unfunded poverty, housing and child-care priorities in the budget and ask why he’s so afraid of revenue tools, while those on the right get red-faced about proposed new taxes and fees the mayor and his budget chief are championing.
Those on the left scream that the reversion to the western Eglinton LRT plan is proof his campaign SmartTrack plan was a cynical lie to begin with, while those on the Fordian right say his changes to the Scarborough plan show he’s abandoning the subway he once insisted was a done deal.
Those on the left who wanted the eastern Gardiner torn down say his elaborate proposed compromise is a flat-out waste of hundreds of millions of dollars; those on the right who insisted the road should be kept up say, well, the compromise is a flat-out waste of hundreds of millions of dollars.
And then there’s the frequently whispered underlying criticism that Tory doesn’t have the spine to do the “right thing,” whatever it is the particular critic thinks that is: He either wants too much to be liked and respected by the left to stand up to them, or he’s too beholden to his corporate and lobbyist friends and too afraid of Ford voters to stand up to them.
And in many cases, the criticisms are valid enough on their own terms: from a guy who promised to freeze taxes at inflation, the new fees and proposed taxes are a reversal; from a guy who insisted critics of the details of his transit plan were “nervous Nellies,” the changes are some high-order backpedalling. And the policy substance of the criticisms is often good.
But here’s the thing: I’m pretty sure those who voted for John Tory expected this when they voted for him. And in the broad strokes, if not each individual detail, I think this is what they wanted when they voted for him.
Tory promised a lot of specific things on the campaign trail, and a lot of them were unfeasible on their face, and people (his opponents and media types alike) said so. And those critics have been proved right in a good number of instances, beginning almost right after he was elected, when he suddenly said “oops” and implemented something close to Olivia Chow’s bus plan.
But anyone who cared could see those things coming, and a lot of them voted for Tory anyway, fully expecting him to acknowledge reality when push came to shove.
If my own interpretation of the electorate’s mood is right — and I admit, divining voters’ intentions may be among the most imprecise sciences of all — the key promise of John Tory as a potential mayor was twofold: that he would be polite and presentable and agreeable, first of all; and that he would be reasonable above all, that is, not plagued by the hobgoblin of foolish consistency.
Those were the two biggest traits that set him apart from his predecessor, who — setting the eventually all-consuming substance-abuse problems aside — ran a three-ring circus defined by stubborn resistance to reality and crude divisiveness for its own sake.
After that, people wanted a nodrama mayor who could also be a great compromiser. And I think those who supported Tory in large part saw much of his platform as “aspirational” (to use a word the mayor has applied to his anti-poverty program). A statement of goals that indicate priorities for which to strive.
Some of those goals didn’t and don’t rest easily in the same bed — low taxes and massive new transit, for example — but there you are. He won the election coming up the middle between Ford and Chow, and so far most of his big policy decisions have shown some attempt to occupy the middle ground, too.
Now, one thing about insisting on compromise is it takes a lot of time; it’s taken a year to announce new plans for many things that were thought to be settled.
Another thing is the cost of giving everyone a little of what they want can add up (see the Gardiner hybrid proposals, for example). And then compromise means that you wind up with a coalition of people who’ll accept a proposal, rather than a rabid base of “winners” who remain vocal champions during the hard slogging through the details, delays and practical obstacles that inevitably arise.
The middle ground is big territory, but it’s terrain that often gets soft in rough weather. Which means that the next phase, getting his dizzying (and possibly still growing) list of new plans accomplished, is tricky in any number of ways, and important.
Tory has fulfilled part of the promise voters saw in him, in applying his approach to doing things. But, eventually, the measure of success will be whether that leads to getting those things done. Edward Keenan writes on city issues. ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwire