Pool melodrama makes waves at City Hall
Mayor John Tory’s cheerful missive at 8: 55 a. m. on Jan. 10 did not immediately seem like a tweet he was likely to regret. He merely promised medal- festooned Canadian swimmer Penny Oleksiak that he would investigate whether he could “save” some swimming pools that were ostensibly under threat in the City of Toronto’s 2017 budget-making process.
“It’s important to teach kids how to swim. It saves lives and is a good physical activity,” Oleksiak had tweeted the previous day.
“Gold medal message received,” Tory replied. “I’ve asked budget chief Gary Crawford to find a way to save these pools.”
Fast- forward a month, and here’s a headline on the Toronto Star’s home page: “Tory votes against funding the pool Penny Oleksiak fought to save.”
Indeed he did — sort of — when his executive committee considered the 2017 budget on Tuesday. And bad press ensued.
“Tory breaks promise to Olympian,” tweeted Coun. Paula Fletcher. Tory “got lots of media attention and applause” for his tweet, the local public school trustee observed. “Today he broke that promise.”
“I know I got major media f or reassuring you, Cdn Olympian, but turns out I care about property taxes more than TTC, housing, AND pools,” mimicked transit activist Cameron MacLeod.
The fight to “save” the pools in question will continue at City Council next week, when 43 councillors tear apart a $10-billion operating budget months in the making, line by line, and try to cobble it back together into something ever so slightly more to their liking. The $ 261,000 parks and rec hopes to save with its pools plan might well be found elsewhere amidst the horsetrading.
But let’s look at what we’re really talking about here — as Tory did Wednesday in an open letter of quasi- apology to Oleksiak.
The Toronto Distric t School Board ( TDSB) owns the pools that are ostensibly in jeopardy: at Don Mills and York Memorial collegiates and at Duke of Connaught Public School. Under an agreement with the TDSB, the city paid all the operating costs of these pools in exchange for their use 58 per cent of the time.
That agreement having expired this year, staff found some rationalization opportunities: Don Mills pool hosted just 240 program hours per year; the city used only 22 per cent of the time it paid for at Duke of Connaught; and the new city- owned York Recreation Centre could easily absorb programming from York Memorial.
If you live next door to any of those pools and use city programming there, the farthest you’ll have to go out of your way is about 2.5 kilometres; presumably some of your fellow citizens will actually find this more convenient, not less.
While it’s certainly true this doesn’t address the issue of program capacity — in 2015 there were 61,000 names on a waiting list for city- run swimming programs — neither, according to staff, does it take any capacity away. And while it leaves the TDSB holding the bag, school funding is not a municipal responsibility and there is no reason to assume the three pools will be drained.
“The city has relocated programming from 11 TDSB pools since 2007,” staff observed in a briefing note, and “the TDSB continues to operate all 11.” People who used those pools for non- city- run activities should still be able to use them; they’ll just pay their fares to the TDSB instead of the city.
In short, this is a bog-standard managerial decision the likes of which gets made every day in every big city that’s trying to keep costs under control: reducing a library’s hours for lack of demand; altering swimming pool or ice rink seasons based on recent years’ weather; raising the price of greens fees or tennis court bookings; not clearing littleused pathways in parks in winter. Of course people are going to raise a fuss; you manage the fuss as best you can and soldier on.
But in Toronto, especially when a celebrity gets involved, these minor decisions inform a sort of battle-of- civilizations narrative in which the mayor of the day seeks the ruination of all things good about the city — and they all end up on the floor of council.
Even in apocalyptic times for media, City Hall is relatively well covered; council meetings in particular will bring out the cameras, in certain knowledge some elected officials will make asses of themselves and others will burst into tears over the smallest things, let alone the largest.
You could hardly do any worse for entertainment value, but if you wonder why city councillors can’t seem to make any big decisions properly, tune in next Wednesday for budget deliberations and watch them try to make a bunch of small ones. You will wonder no more.