CROMBIE NEVER QUITS
Four decades after he ruled the city, David Crombie is still a force,
The argument wasn’t about to stop just because they were washing the dishes at their mother’s place in Port Credit.
David Crombie and his sister didn’t have disputes like that. They had titanic tussles.
And so it continued, with Crombie insisting that daycares ought to be in public schools and his sibling — Ruth Thompson, the teacher and school board trustee — proclaiming precisely the opposite.
“I remember my mother saying, ‘What are you fighting about?’ She said, ‘Why not just have a crèche class?’ ” says Crombie.
“We both looked at her: ‘What’s a crèche class?’
“During the war, when the men were overseas and the women were walking down Windermere Ave. to work at the steel company, they had to have some place to put the kids, and the only community facility in Swansea that could do it was the school. So they called them crèche classes.” As in day nursery, from the French. Crombie laughs at the memory, now decades old, as he slowly tucks into his bagel at a Yonge St. coffee shop — slowly, because he’s too busy talking, the words tumbling forth with undiminished passion and rapidity, the chuckles and self
deprecating charm untempered.
IT’S NOW 40 YEARS since Crombie was Toronto’s newly ensconced mayor, an era that, through the flattering lens of time, seems like some cosmic foil to the present.
There was then no irony in dubbing Crombie “the tiny perfect mayor,” back when Toronto was “the city that works,” its transit system the envy of North America.
Crombie, who turns 77 in April, may not be a recurring feature on the nightly news, but he remains quietly ubiquitous in the hallways of civic life.
These days find Crombie serving as chair of Toronto Lands Corp., which aims to maximize real-estate revenue for the Toronto District School Board, as founding chair of the nearly 800-kilometre Waterfront Trail along Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River, and on the board of the Ryerson Image Centre.
Then there are all of Crombie’s recent initiatives, such as working to create a museum of Toronto history (still, alas, a work in progress) and turning the Rouge Valley into a national park.
Or look at any of the letters cobbled together by Toronto luminaries to protest this or that proposal by Mayor Rob Ford — such as gutting Waterfront Toronto or selling off parts of the Toronto Community Housing Corp. — and Crombie’s name is apt to be prominent among the signatories.
Not that Crombie wants to go out of his way to criticize the current mayor directly — partly because it’s too easy and would, at any rate, be bad form, but mostly because Crombie remains a “chronically cheerful” civic booster, always wanting to bring as many people into the tent as possible.
Which is where the crèche class comes in.
IN THE UNLIKELY event that Crombie were ever to settle on just one cause, it might well be “community hubs” — using a single property to house the local school, daycare, swimming pool, community centre, health centre and library, as well as other city services.
Places like Seattle have embraced that approach; Toronto, not so much, where instead various institutions tend to occupy their very own sliver of land.
There are numerous advantages to combining functions, not least the convenience of a kind of one-stop civic shopping.
“It’s more efficient to do it that way and it strengthens the community,” says Crombie.
It would also help break down the silos that separate government functions at all levels from one another. But Crombie says you’d have to force the issue for that to occur.
“If you say we’re going to fix it so there are no silos, you’ll spend forever on internal papers and internal committees and everybody will just hold on to their turf.”
If, on the other hand, the province were to put its muscle behind community hubs with site-specific initiatives, the various groups would have no choice but to work together.
“They’ll be pushed, and they’ll break down the silos by building up,” argues Crombie. “If you make it site-specific, then people actually have to work toward a real goal. Slowly, you’ll break down those barriers.”
There is, after all, a fiscal attraction for everyone involved.
The school board, city and province all own massive amounts of real estate in Toronto. What if, courtesy of community hubs, you could free up all the now-redundant real estate left over?
“You take all the land that those three have, the waste in terms of land and money at a time when everyone’s talking
about getting money,” says Crombie.
“You’ve got surplus land like crazy. We’ve got money lying in the street, not being used.”
His efforts to highlight the cause have, he admits, stalled a bit of late, but Crombie says he wants to go back at it in earnest, which mostly means spreading the word to as many contacts as possible, trying to build a groundswell of interest.
“It’s creating a constituency,” he says. “Constituencies aren’t given to you. You have to go and get ’em. It’s grassroots. It’s working at all levels and we’ve started.”
IF THIS ALL SOUNDS
a bit like wartime Swansea, then it’s a tribute to how much the sensibilities of that little community between High Park and the Humber River have imprinted themselves on Crombie.
Growing up there with three brothers and a sister, he got used to going on long walks with his parents, both members of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, forerunner of today’s New Democratic Party.
Politics came to Crombie by such easy, living-room osmosis that at age 9 he was already trying to organize a students’ union, until the principal had a quiet word with the youngster’s parents.
He’d go on to study economics at the University of Western Ontario and take a master’s degree in political science from the University of Toronto before ending up on the teaching staff at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, as it was then known.
It was a heady time for city politics, with growing opposition to the unchecked growth of the postwar years, the battle lines drawn over saving neighbourhoods such as Trefann Court from the wrecking ball, or scuttling the Spadina Expressway.
In 1969, Crombie himself arrived at city hall among a group of freshmen councillors that included such firebrand reformers as John Sewell.
What they mostly shared was a great distaste for the rampant redevelopment that was threatening to take Toronto down the path of so many American cities — a future in which people lived in the suburbs and commuted, as often as not by car, to jobs in an otherwise hollowed-out city core, one filled with glass towers and nary a heritage building in sight.
Just three years later, Crombie was running for mayor and publicly assuming the reform mantle, one the harder-line reformers would never have willingly bestowed on him.
As Jon Caulfield put it in The Tiny Perfect Mayor: “. . . when expressed by Crombie, the burning issues of reform seemed rather like motherhood, somehow cardboard, and drained of excitement.”
Crombie was too leftish for the development crowd, too conservative for the ardent left-wingers. A Red Tory, in short, the sort of thing that in hindsight seems like the natural product of a CCF household in Swansea, where community and dialogue mattered.
So you find Crombie telling Time magazine, for a 1975 cover story in its Canadian edition: “If we end up with a population without a sense of belonging, we will have lost the war. Commerce depends upon investment. Investment depends on stability. Stability flows from neighbourhoods, and neighbourhoods are based on roots. It’s the domino theory in reverse.” TO THIS DAY, he’s often remembered simply as the mayor who banned buildings higher than 45 feet in the downtown core. “There’s no doubt it put a mark on my forehead forever,” he smiles.
In truth, it was really a negotiating tool used against developers to protect historic buildings and influence redevelopment while giving city hall a couple of years to fashion its own guidelines and visions of a better downtown.
People paid attention. In 1974, Time magazine’s American edition put Crombie among 100 world leaders of tomorrow, one of seven Canadians on the list.
In 1978, Crombie duly left the mayor’s office to win the federal riding of Rosedale as a Progressive Conservative.
He ran for the party leadership five years later, losing to Brian Mulroney, but Crombie and Ottawa never really warmed to each other. The party was already beginning its rightward lurch, leaving Red Tories like Crombie on its disillusioned fringe.
WITHIN FIVE YEARS,
he was back in Toronto heading a royal commission on the future of the waterfront and, later, as a kind of waterfront czar.
The city’s waterfront has long had a checkered history and the reviews of Crombie’s watch have often been mixed. But that’s partly because so many levels of government were involved, and even the ostensibly public lands were a patchwork of ownership.
So it’s little wonder that Crombie was recently among those coming to the defence of Waterfront Toronto, the agency that eventually emerged with long-term funding from three levels of government to oversee development.
“This waterfront is fantastic,” says Crombie, who still regularly strolls along its necklace of parks and boardwalks. “People will discover it in 2015 with the Pan Am Games and they’ll say, ‘oh, just like that!’
“No it wasn’t. It was 25 goddamn years of, sorry, of everybody dissing it while at the same time there were a lot of people working on it.”
Crombie suspects Torontonians don’t like to talk about how great the city has become for fear of tempting fate. “I guess it’s an old Presbyterian thing,” he says. “We’re always fearful of saying we’re doing OK.”
Not that everything is rosy, not even with Crombie’s pet projects, such as establishing a museum of Toronto history, an adventure that has at times seemed quixotic.
There’s a slim chance one could be created at Casa Loma, though Crombie’s not optimistic. And at any rate, he’d much prefer his original choice, St. Lawrence Hall, itself a historic building.
“We almost had it and (mayor David) Miller knocked it out because he had this other vision. He wanted it at the (waterfront) silos and then he wanted it at old city hall and, so, we were toast, and we’d worked pretty hard.”
On other fronts, such as Crombie’s origi- nal hope of tearing down the Gardiner Expressway, his views have simply adapted to circumstance, namely the ruinous cost of dismantling the thing.
Better to make what’s there more attractive, with better use of the space underneath for parks and shops, as other cities have done.
Or, perhaps, creating a park on top of the expressway by adding another layer, something similar to the High Line in New York, formerly a raised rail line. “You’d get a helluva view of the city and the lake.”
If the city now has one big failing, says Crombie, it’s an inability to see itself as the heart of a region, even of the Golden Horseshoe, rather than a city unto itself.
He dates that, in part, to the amalgamation that turned what had been a collection of cities and boroughs under Metro into the megacity.
Somehow, we stopped looking outward to neighbouring municipalities, a void Crombie says Queen’s Park could help rectify by reinstating an office of the GTA to act as a clearing house for regional issues.
It would, he figures, go a long way toward making decision-making more transparent, and various levels of government more accountable on developments affecting the region.
“They need to at least start with opening the goddamn office with a phone number,” he says. GOOD RED TORYthat he is, Crombie has always looked on government as a source of solutions, not a problem to be minimized.
“It is the worst thing in the world for anybody to say, ‘I want smaller government and lower taxes.’ If they do, then they should probably book an appointment with someone who will take them out of this world, because it doesn’t work. Go to Detroit.
“Anytime anybody says they’re going to freeze taxes for three years or whatever, we should ask them for a list of things that will not be done.”
Topping any such list will always be regular maintenance on city infrastructure, in the hopes that this or that sewer main, say, can survive another year or two, fingers crossed. “If you’re looking to save money, treasurers and politicians and bureaucrats will always save money with things you can’t see. We’re all guilty of it.”
So, no, don’t count Crombie as a member of Ford nation, but he can still conjure a kind of backhanded sliver of sunshine on the Ford brothers’ reign.
“They were democratically elected. What did they do that was a good thing?” he asks. “Well, we’ve got labour peace for the next five years. There are lots of places where that didn’t happen, doesn’t happen.”
They’ve also brought greater scrutiny to spending, never a bad thing. FOR CROMBIE, there’s also one upside to the sometimes acrimonious relations between the Ford brothers and council.
“In some ways even the struggles between (Mayor Ford) and the council are helpful because you’re giving leadership opportunities to new councillors,” he says. “There are a lot of really impressive people on council and they know they have to organize the agenda.”
So we’re back, metaphorically, in Swansea, thinking about solutions like crèche classes.
“Old Quakers understood that dialogue is how you figure out where you’re going. It’s not just listening to the other guy. It’s to find the new space that you can go to, that everyone can own.
“The wider the circle, the more that will work. It’s not just a nice thing to do. It’s vital.”