Epiphanies on playing one’s cards

Polling numbers told Tory this was not a fight he would win

What an instructive few days it has been in Toronto, wherein the longtime chair of the police board, Alok Mukherjee, and the new mayor, John Tory, each went through great revelations and came to startling changes of opinion.

With Mukherjee, it was less surprising, in that he has shown what in the courts is called a pattern of abrupt switches in direction.

He is, after all, the same fellow who was on the police board for about a decade, much of that as chair, during which his board negotiated generous settlements with the police union.

Then, Mukherjee belatedly became an advocate for fiscal restraint, and when the board decided not to renew then-Chief Bill Blair’s contract, Mukherjee anointed himself the voice baying for nothing less than “transformation of the organization,” as he told CBC Radio in July last year, as though, you know, he’d had nothing to do with rendering the force an organization in need of such sweeping changes.

If he wanted transformational change, in other words, he’d been in an awfully good position to give it a whirl.

But never mind, Mukherjee was the first to be out and about in the public space — in his case, on a panel at a high school and then on a streetcar — when he was struck (struck, I tell you) by the need to end the controversial police practice of carding.

He explained his epiphany Friday in a piece in the Toronto Star, writing that a few days before, he was recognized on the streetcar by a middle-aged black teacher, who said he had been carded in the 1970s and who described the practice as disgusting.

The encounter, Mukherjee said, left him “profoundly disturbed,” and led, lo, to his carding revelation shortly thereafter. Then came Tory’s moment. He’d been out west, at a Federation of Canadian Municipalities meeting in Edmonton, and chatted about carding with fellow mayors.

Coupled, he said, with s t ori e s he’d heard from those affected by carding, it all caused his conscience to build up, and it was during a cab ride to the airport and only after “great personal reflection” that he abruptly decided that carding must be permanently cancelled.

And lo, so he proclaimed at an unusual, hastily called Sunday news conference. The matter will go to the board June 18.

Carding aside, what’s interesting here is that as of last week, presumably shortly before he hopped that plane to Edmonton, Tory was proudly standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Toronto’s new police chief, Mark Saunders, in defending the practice — always with a view to reforming it and improving it, he said (as indeed does the chief ) but defending it nonetheless, and seemingly with sincerity.

It was a brave, if politically dangerous, position to take, I thought, and reinforced the romantic notion I think I had of the new mayor. (Before running for mayor, he was the host of a radio show on Newstalk 1010, where I was a regular guest, and I came to like him very much, and still do.)

But he is a politician, after all, and one who after several unsuccessful forays in politics has landed in a job he absolutely loves and for which he seems tailor-made: He works like a dog, is out and about every weekend at this festival or that, and has been by most measures a pretty good mayor.

And politicians, perhaps particularly those who enjoy the work and relentless social contact it entails, don’t like being unloved.

The voices against carding were rising; nothing said that better than a press conference last week featuring all manner of former civic leaders (why, they ran the gamut from A to B, from Gordon Cressy to David Crombie) denouncing the practice. And the voices against it were also louder (the Star has made it a veritable campaign, with at least one of its columnists suggesting pretty directly that Tory was a racist for supporting carding) than any on the other side.

I suspect internal polling numbers told Tory this was not a fight he would win, and that his support, even for a reformed version of carding, might define his mayoralty. And it’s a more believable explanation than the revelation-in-a-taxi or the epiphany-on-the-streetcar.

I have no idea if Chief Saunders knew what was coming, but it’s for him, surely, that the epiphanies are most useful: He must never forget the lesson — he can count on the politician until he can’t count on him.

As for me, I feel a bit like Charlie Brown, getting fooled into trying to kick the stupid football again by Lucy. The mistake wasn’t John Tory’s — he’s going to be very well-loved this week — but my own.