Tory hasn’t made case for more power
Toronto’s mayor, John Tory, feels like he’s too weak.
Or rather, that the office he holds is. He told the Star on Tuesday he has come to agree with Premier Doug Ford that Toronto should have a “strong mayor” system, where the person elected to lead the city has more authority to make unilateral decisions.
“Tory cited his need to convince city council to spend about $4 million to double the number of surveillance cameras and invest in gunshot detection technology,” my colleague David Rider wrote, “as something a more muscular mandate could allow him to do unilaterally.”
Imagine the hassle: there’s his police chief, asking for the immediate implementation of a controversial new surveillance apparatus across the city, and Tory cannot say, “You know what, you can have that. That’s a decision I can make,” as he fantasized a strong mayor might.
No, he had to bring it to city council five whole days after he first proposed it, and endure questioning and then hours of debate before having every single thing he wanted approved by a majority of council.
On reflection, maybe it isn’t as compelling an example of his forced subservience as he thinks it is.
You can look at his whole term in office, and the big issues that have defined him: Scarborough subway, Smart Track, Gardiner, TTC service and fares, property tax rates ... all down the line, you see something similar.
Some exhausting daylong debates, some insolent rhetoric all around, then Mayor John Tory getting just what he asked for.
That’s certainly, at least, how it appears from the outside.
Maybe we’re just seeing how the sausage gets stuffed into the casing out here in public, and it’s off camera where the meat’s ground up that the habitual kneecapping of the mayor is taking place.
Maybe. But it’s hard to see how. It is not as if the mayor is out talking about big dreams that need to be watered down before they get to council to make them passable.
If he’s making realpolitik compromises to temper his ambitions to suit the tastes of, say, his own low-tax, hard-line conservative deputy mayor Denzil Minnan-Wong, or of his own anti-cycling crusader deputy mayor Stephen Holyday, or his public works chair Jaye Robinson, or of leftists such as Joe Cressy and Mike Layton, it’s not visible from the outside.
If it is the case that those folks are kicking sand in his face forcing him to abandon his policies, he ought to try oldfashioned strong leadership of the sort that sees him making the public case for the things he wants, and persuading or cajoling those inclined to disagree. It’s a first step, at least, before seeking out legislative steroids.
But step back from Tory’s specific case.
The best argument against a strong mayor system here, generally, is Rob Ford. That’s obvious to many people immediately.
The best case in favour of one is probably Mike Bloomberg. That may seem less obvious, since Bloomberg was the mayor of New York City and seems to have nothing to do with Toronto politics. But sometimes the question comes up, “where’s our Bloomberg?” from people wishing we had a bold Mr. Fix-it genius mayor who could, as the richest man in Manhattan did over three terms there, transform the city quickly and decisively. When that question comes up, part of the response is always that there’s no way that person would run for mayor of Toronto. Because the mayor of Toronto doesn’t hold enough power to act in the way Bloomberg did.
The argument is that the best candidates never run, because the level of authority doesn’t justify the hassle. There may be something to that, though it’s hard to know because frankly none of the names that get circulated in the draft for Fantasy League Mayoral Pools get me jazzed enough to want to change our whole our system in order to lure them into the game.
And somehow, I don’t think Mayor John Tory and former mayoral candidate (and mayoral brother) Doug Ford are taking “all the recent mayoral candidates are terrible” as their guiding principle for reform.
One other thing to make some of us reluctant: if Ford does reopen the City of Toronto Act, I wouldn’t bet on him doing so simply to give Tory a bit more power over council. It seems likely to me he’d cut the size of council and change other r ules, possibly to further cut the influence of the downtown, and to limit the city’s ability to raise money independently. Those are reforms — destructive ones — that are actually dear to the premier’s heart.
These aren’t idle fears. See, we already have a strong premier system. Some days that looks more like a problem than a solution.