Canadian cities deserve more respect
“Secession.”
It was a cry of Toronto frustration, but it could also be our Greta Garbo moment: Leave us alone.
On the day Doug Ford announced Bill 5, the Better Local Government Act that would slash the size of Toronto’s city council midway through an election, Jennifer Keesmaat tweeted out that word, suggesting Toronto secede from Ontario and become its own province. Later that day she joined the mayoral race.
Perhaps intemperate, it was a word that summed up the feeling of a large part of the city that felt like it was being attacked. This week Doug Ford, speaking to the Association of Municipalities of Ontario, assured relieved elected municipal officials across the province he had no similar plans for them, despite many municipalities having even more city councillors per capita than Toronto currently has.
As a Torontonian it’s hard not to take this personally, that this might be a vendetta towards a city that didn’t elect him mayor.
Doug Ford thinks about Toronto a lot and the rest of the province should start wondering if he’d rather be the mayor of Toronto than their premier.
In an August 3 column in the Ottawa Citizen, David Reevely wrote that Ontario was literally on fire, with tens of thousands of hectares of the province burning, but the Ford government had turned all attention to Toronto. It’s attention few of us wanted and, like Garbo’s oft-quoted declaration, we would rather not receive it.
While Keesmaat’s partisan critics have suggested her tweet was a sign of recklessness, there’s long been a slow simmering and sporadic movement to turn Toronto into what would be the fifth most populous province. Even former mayor Mel Lastman publicly considered it. John Tory was a member of Lastman’s backroom “kitchen cabinet” advisory group, so the notion of a province of Ontario is hardly radical or new.
It is, however, unlikely. It’s most often used as a bargaining position in the perpetual quest to give Toronto more control over its own affairs and a sign of the frustration of having those affairs often meddled with. I have to continually remind myself that halfway through a democratic election the rules and playing field of that election were arbitrarily and dramatically changed. In 2018. In Canada, a “bastion” of democracy. Even if you think cutting the size of council is good, tampering with an ongoing election is a shocking precedent we shouldn’t forget.
“Secession” is an old sounding word. That it sounds like something you might hear in a historic political drama is apt because the relationship between cities and provinces was forged at Confederation. In 1867, 80 per cent of Canadians lived in rural settings. With just 3.3 million people in the country at the time, cities were small, few and not terribly important to the new nation as a whole. Putting them under provincial control made sense.
Today Canadian cities are still relatively few in number but over 80 per cent of us now live in them and they’ve become important economic drivers of provincial and national economies and have developed distinct social and political cultures of their own. Yet they remain vulnerable to the kind of chaos-making attack Toronto received from the province, all without any consultation with residents.
Ford is a Torontonian himself, so secession won’t magically remove him or his existing supporters from Toronto, but if he had been elected mayor, a job he reminds us daily he wishes he had, he couldn’t do what he’s done as premier. Even the change from 44 to 47 councillors and reshaping ward boundaries, thrown out with the passage of Bill 5, was a years-long process and involved much citizen consultation.
Warren Magnusson, a political theorist at the University of Victoria, has written extensively on the importance of local government and that the notion of cities as “creatures of the province” is a 19th-century concept. As an example, he says with a traditional view of Ontario’s provincial powers it could abolish Toronto if it saw fit. While provincial sovereignty was paramount at Confederation, he argues democracy has become the organizing principal of constitutional interpretation and that local democracy and municipalities have evolved to become incredibly important institutions.
This is what makes the court challenge Toronto city council agreed to undertake this week so interesting, as the Constitution is, as Magnussen contends, a living document and interpretation of it evolves.
Regardless of what happens, and whether or not local government needs reform, it’s time for Canada to re-evaluate how all its municipalities exist constitutionally. I think many Torontonians share my view that I don’t want to secede from Ontario — I like being part of this province, contributing to it and benefiting from it — but I want respect and more autonomy for Toronto and all local municipal governments. A “semi-Garbo” relationship, if I may.
We need a Meech Lake-style constitutional renegotiation, but for cities. It’s not 1867 anymore.