What a reduced council could mean for Toronto

How does Toronto compare to other cities when it comes to council size?

Premier Doug Ford used Los Angeles, where there are 15 councillors for almost 4 million people, as an example of a place where city government is small and streamlined.

But the Southern California city also has almost 100 neighbourhood councils with 1,800 elected board members serving on them, according to their website.

The councils, created in the late 1990s to improve access to local government, act as grassroots advisory bodies. They’re made up of people who live, work and own property in the area, who are not city councillors.

Toronto has community councils, but they are groupings of wards and made up of councillors in those wards.

Under Ford’s proposal, the ratio would be one councillor per 109,263 people in Toronto, much less representation per individual than L.A., including neighbourhood councils.

By comparison, Chicago, a city of 2.7 million according to 2014 U.S. census figures, has 50 aldermen — a ratio of one alderman per 54,380 people.

Ottawa has 23 councillors, but a ratio of one councillor per 38,408 people, according to a 2014 report on Toronto’s ward boundary review. How did Toronto get to 47 councillors?

Ford said repeatedly during his Thursday announcement that no one has ever told him they want more politicians.

But, during extensive consultations for the ward boundary review the city did to get to the 47-ward plan, people did say they wanted to have more access to their councillors, said Alexandra Flynn, an assistant professor of human geography and city studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough.

The city undertook the ward boundary review in 2014 to determine if all residents were being fairly represented. It took into account a Supreme Court decision that said all votes should have equal weight; meaning the vote from a person living in downtown Toronto should have as much influence as a vote from a person living in Scarborough.

The logic behind the 47-ward model was to fix a ward-to-population imbalance, which was only going to get worse with rapid downtown growth.

In November 2016, council voted 28-13 to approve consultant recommendations on the new ward boundaries, adding three wards downtown while taking one away there, and adding one in Willowdale. This structure was supposed to keep the councillor-to-person ratio at about one per 60,000. Would suburban voters really be under-represented under the plan?

Jim Karygiannis (Ward 39 Scarborough-Agincourt) told 680 News he supports Ford’s proposal because it will fix the “unequal balance” for the suburbs.

In the ward boundary review process, the consultants hired by the city looked at the projected population for 2026, rather than past census data, Flynn said. The 47-ward model would have added councillors downtown, as that population is expected to grow at a faster rate than the suburbs.

“In the short term … there will be fewer people downtown but more people in the suburbs so it will still be unequal but because of the projected population it will not be unequal for long,” Flynn said. How much will the seat reduction save?

Reducing the size of Toronto city council is estimated to save Toronto taxpayers $25.5 million over four years, the premier’s office said in a statement. That breaks down to a savings of about $6.3 million per year.

Last year, the salaries and expenses for Toronto’s city councillors totalled $17,349,526. That averages out to $394,307.41 per councillor.

There will be 25 remaining city council positions. Using the 2017 numbers, the Star can project that the total remuneration and expenses would amount to $9,857,685.23 a year for the new city council.

That’s a savings of $7,491,840.77 per year — or $4.61 for every city of Toronto resident 15 or older. What do the changes mean for the Oct. 22 election?

“They’re going to have to do a lot of adjustments with very little time,” said Duff Conacher, co-founder of Democracy Watch.

At city council on Friday, the city clerk flagged potential difficulties with advance voting and ballot counting. “I’m not surprised at all that they would be projecting problems with meeting deadlines to actually implement this fully,” Conacher said. What challenges could the reduction in seats create?

“If they’re going to maintain the same service levels, then you’re going to have to double the staff of each councillor,” Conacher said. “If you’re doubling the staff of each councillor, then those costs will not be reduced.”

Greg Albo, a professor in York University’s politics department, agreed that staff may need to be expanded if the number of city councillors is reduced.

“At the level of representation we have, which is already on the low end, staff can barely handle the issues related to constituency issues: problems with the neighbour, problems with parking, problems getting Ontario hydro to respond, all those things.”