Strong mayor reforms quite democratic
Ontario Premier Doug Ford is being criticized as anti-democratic for implementing reforms that will grant the mayors of Toronto and Ottawa enhanced powers, including the freedom to override city councillors in some instances. These criticisms ignore both the democratic mandates given to Canadian mayors and the fact that “strong mayor” systems are neither new nor extraordinary.
The “strong mayor” system championed by Ford will allow the mayors of these two cities to prepare and table their city’s budget unilaterally, appoint a chief administrative officer and hire and fire departments heads (except statutory appointments, such as the auditor general and police chief ).
The mayors also will require less council support when advocating for certain provincial priorities, such as boosting housing supply. Bylaws that support these priorities will require only one third of council’s support, rather than a majority. The mayors also can veto bylaws that obstruct these priorities, although council can overturn this veto with a two-thirds majority vote.
Ford has justified strong mayor powers primarily as a means of turbo-boosting new housing. City councillors across Canada, abetted by municipal bureaucrats, have spent a generation strangling new housing supply, precipitating a crippling affordability crisis. In this sense, Ford’s reforms follow a national trend — British Columbia and Nova Scotia also are stripping municipalities of their housing responsibilities.
A chorus of politicians and other critics have called Ford’s strong mayor reforms an assault on local democracy. That’s wildly inaccurate.
People seem to forget that mayors are democratically elected, too. This reform is not about taking powers away from democratic institutions, but rather about transferring some power from one democratic office to another.
To empower mayors at the expense of city councils would be anti-democratic only if mayors had inferior claims to the popular will.
However, mayors and city councils have roughly equal democratic legitimacy — much like how, in the United States, the president and Congress also are equally legitimate. The mayor is vested with a broad democratic mandate through a citywide vote, while city council stitches together a similar mandate from smaller ward elections.
Not only are strong mayoralties not anti-democratic, Ford has the mandate to implement them. Voters gave him another commanding majority government just months ago, showing that they don’t mind his habit of unilaterally imposing structural changes onto municipalities (i.e. halving the number of Toronto City councillors).
Political theorists have spent millenia debating how democratically elected bodies should share power to best govern — and we see that reflected internationally by the diverse ways that countries organize their legislative and executive branches,
Municipalities are no different. Some have mostly symbolic mayors. Some have mayors with considerable executive powers.
In the United States, most large cities have strong mayors, with the ability to appoint department heads, exercise greater control over budgets or veto laws and sign executive orders, while small and medium-sized cities have weak mayors.
Considering that strong mayors are common and nothing new, Ontario’s hysteria over “despotism” is perplexing. Both systems are democratic. Each has strengths and weaknesses.
American history provides some lessons here. In the late 1800s, urbanization led to the rise of large municipal governments and, relatedly, questions about how to structure them. Initially, strong mayors prevailed. But, by the 1910s, weak mayors were preferred.
Some have argued that this was because strong mayors corruptly misused their powers, requiring a decentralized system.
In contrast, law professor Richard C. Schragger argued in the Yale Law Journal in 2006 that strong mayors were discontinued in order to undermine urban democratic power.
Centralizing executive power meant that mayors had more political capital and influence, which they used to push for their city’s interests — much like how Canadian premiers are powerful and visible advocates for their provinces.
This brought American mayors into conflict with competing power bases and alienated political elites who had anti-urban biases. Urban reform activists shifted toward a managerial model of municipal government — one where mayors were feeble and executive power was fragmented across city councils and municipal bureaucrats.
Cities were treated like businesses or machines and municipal leaders became glorified caretakers.
Generally speaking, this allowed cities to run smoothly at the cost of neutering their political voice. However, some scholars have argued that fragmented executive power made some American cities ungovernable in the 1960s and 1970s — without a strong guiding hand, these cities were consumed by infighting between diverse interest groups.
In Ontario, experimenting with strong mayor powers seems reasonable — obviously the status quo hasn’t effectively addressed crucial issues like housing, and desperate times call for innovation. This experiment also makes sense considering the growing belief that Toronto needs greater autonomy and to assert itself more confidently — which centralizing executive power would be conducive to.
By limiting strong mayor powers to a few key policy areas, these reforms should pre-empt the aforementioned corruption concerns. If the experiment doesn’t work, it can always be undone by voting in a new provincial government. The sky won’t fall, and accusations of despotism are inaccurate and unproductive.
PEOPLE SEEM TO FORGET THAT MAYORS ARE DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED, TOO.