As usual, council flees from choice

Councillors are trying to explain last week’s ranked-ballot antics, but the explanation is a bit sad

My 4-year-old daughter will often explain that she doesn’t yet know or understand things by saying “I’m still just a little JK,” meaning she started junior kindergarten a month ago and she’s just learning a lot of basics now.

But for the past couple of years, she’s had a firm grasp on the concept of ranking things: her favourite colours are: 1) orange; 2) pink; 3) yellow.

She knows how to apply this to options she’s presented: she’d prefer her milk in the orange cup, but if for some reason that is not available, she’d like the pink cup, and if that one too is off the table (say, in the dishwasher), she’ll accept yellow. First, second and third choices. Easy.

This puts her ahead of many of our city councillors, who recently voted to request the province not give them the option of employing a ranked ballot system in municipal elections (reversing a request city council made in 2013).

Apparently they simply cannot get their heads around the concept of numbering things in order of preference and are convinced their constituents suffer the same fathomless simple-mindedness.

Here’s Councillor Michelle Berardinetti, who voted to ask the province for ranked ballots last time and switched her vote this time: “It’s a very confusing system.” And what’s so confusing about it? “It’s explaining it to voters.”

This is a logic she shares with Justin Di Ciano, who introduced the surprise motion last week: “Ranked ballots — from a language standpoint, it’s very, very confusing,” Di Ciano told the Star. “I’ve had city staff charged with implementing this come to me and say ‘I’m going to pull my hair out trying to explain this in 200 different languages.’ ”

Since I have less to fear from pulling because I have so little hair left, let me just try it in one language: “Instead of putting an X beside your favourite candidate, rank them by putting a number beside them.” There. Bring in the translators.

It really isn’t complicated, see. City council already uses a variation of this run-off system when appointing fill-in councillors and every single political party in Canada uses it to select its leader. Academy Award voters use it to select the Best Picture winner and they are a body so intellectually unsophisticated that they once chose to give the statue to Forrest Gump instead of Pulp Fiction.

But as Forrest would say, stupid is as stupid does. To wit: Councillor Paula Fletcher, the leftist representative of Toronto Danforth whose own explanation in a letter to constituents says she voted against the city having the option to implement ranked ballots because she’s excited about ranked ballots and in favour of electoral reform — and in fact thinks it “should be a priority”! Wait, what? Fletcher goes on to invoke Rob Ford to no comprehensible purpose, before settling on her actual excuse for voting to eliminate an option she claims to want. “When we change our voting system, I believe it has to be based on thoughtful, considered debate and best advice from city officials after broad citywide public consultation.”

Fletcher is not alone in this: Di Ciano and others were also invoking the pressing importance of consulting voters, when they weren’t proclaiming the apparent mental incapacity of those same voters.

I know, I know: consultation is good. But in this case, nothing was happening or going to happen to prevent consultations by the city from stretching on from here to eternity. The only thing that was going to happen — possibly, if the province followed through on it — was that an option would be extended to city council, to implement or not at its leisure. This was a vote begging the province not to give Toronto a choice. Which means that if the province grants the city’s request to drop the whole rankedballots thing, there’s really nothing for the city to consult voters about. Right?

A sort of stunning thing you notice after a while watching Toronto city council is its steadfast aversion to being given the power to make decisions you might think a government would want or even need to make. Former city manager Joe Penachetti said this year that the province should give the city the power to levy sales taxes or income taxes (like New York and Chicago can), to which the mayor quickly said no way. Of course, this is a city council that showed in 2013 it would demand money for transit from the province and in the very same motion explicitly reject any proposed method of raising it. During the crack-scandal crisis, the premier said she’d give the city the power to remove a mayor if it asked for it, but city council did not want that power.

Toronto City Council appears sometimes like a government — the sixth-largest government in Canada, it is so fond of reminding us, larger than a majority of provinces — refusing to grow up, preferring to leave the difficult and important decisions to Mom and Dad at Queen’s Park and on Parliament Hill, the better to sulk and mope about the inadequacy of those decisions once they’re made. It is a self-infantilizing instinct to avoid the responsibility that comes with authority: if city councillors are given the option of making decisions to solve problems, they will have to answer to voters about why they are not exercising that option (or why they are).

Perhaps that’s fitting. A lot of these city councillors are not so good at explaining the reasons for their decisions.

When they do, as in the case of the recent ranked-balloting vote, they make it obvious their self-infantilization renders them less sophisticated than, as my daughter would say, “just a little JK.” The difference is that my 4-year-old is actively trying to learn more to increase the options available to her as she goes along. With files from David Rider.

Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwire