‘The best choice now’
The Star endorses John Tory as a mayor who can speak for the whole city and bring the new council together,
Toronto didn’t get the full-out, in-depth debate on city issues it needed and deserved this election season, and that’s on Doug Ford.
His decision to cut city council in half in mid-campaign, and the legal wrangling that followed, turned this election into a four-week sprint — not nearly long enough to properly discuss the challenges Toronto faces.
But on Monday, voters will have to make a choice for mayor and they should be asking themselves a couple of key questions.
Who will be best at making sure the new, smaller council works well together?
And who’s most likely to be able to work effectively with other governments — most importantly, Ford and his ministers — for the long-term benefit of Toronto?
Jennifer Keesmaat, the city’s chief planner for five years, has put forward the strongest challenge to John Tory, her old boss.
Keesmaat has a lot of things going for her. She has energy to burn and a lot of fresh ideas. Some of them — like building bike lanes on Yonge St. N. and tearing down the eastern portion of the Gardiner Expressway — gladden the hearts of those who find Tory far too conservative.
And Keesmaat has zeroed in on Tory’s most vulnerable spot — his lack of flash and fire, his tendency to try to please everyone. He isn’t a true leader, she says; he lacks “vision” and didn’t stand up strongly enough for the city when Ford launched his outrageous attack on civic democracy.
We’re sympathetic to all this. Our city is growing by leaps and bounds; tens of thousands of people flock here every year and it’s the destination of choice for tech firms looking for a true centre of innovation. We’re in the bigtime and we should be thinking big.
Yet Keesmaat hasn’t closed the deal. It’s hard to square her tenure as Tory’s chief planner, faithfully developing and endorsing his plans, with her ringing denunciations of him and all his works now. And it’s impossible to judge how effective she would be as a politician for the simple reason that she’s never held any sort of elected office. Coming up with good ideas is one thing; the measure of a political leader is how well you work with others to turn them into reality.
Her rhetoric is more exciting than Tory’s (that’s easy to do), but on key issues they’re basically on the same page. He backs the Scarborough subway extension (a very bad idea), and so does she, with a bit of a twist. He’s kept residential property taxes low; she says she would do the same. In other areas, she’d do pretty much what Tory promises, but (she claims) faster and better. It’s more about style than substance.
As for Tory, there’s little mystery. Toronto has had four years to see what he can do, and we haven’t hesitated to criticize him when he falls short or is just plain wrong. We wish, for example, that he’d been quicker off the mark last winter when the shelter crisis erupted. That was Tory at his timid worst.
But on other issues, Tory has shown real leadership. The influx of asylum seekers this past summer could have blown up into something ugly and divisive; indeed, elements in the right-wing media were trying to fan those flames. But Tory never fed the fears. Instead, he headed off the potential crisis. Likewise, he’s been on the right side of the debate over safe injection sites, another hot-button issue.
On highway tolls, he stuck his neck way out to demand that the city be allowed to raise new money for transit. He was shot down by the Wynne government, but he fought hard and came away with $170 million in new gas tax revenue. That was a big win.
And on transit, he is actually getting things done. Sure, his signature SmartTrack plan morphed into a lot less than was promised in 2014. But he’s right that billions of new funding is in place and transit is getting built for the first time in years. Planning for the much-needed downtown relief line is funded and underway. Of course we’d like to see it finished quicker, as Keesmaat promises. But the credit must go to Tory for pushing this project along after literally decades of delay.
Did Tory drop the ball when Ford slashed city council? It would have been more emotionally satisfying to have a mayor who yelled back at the premier. But the outcome would surely be the same. The key for the city is having a mayor who can work effectively with other governments, including (indeed, especially) when they don’t see eye to eye.
If he does win a second term, Tory needs to up his game. Housing and affordability are the biggest issues for most voters, and he should do more in this area. He should not hesitate, for example, to borrow freely from Keesmaat’s best ideas — including her ambitious housing plan. More broadly, he should reach out more to progressive city councillors. He does have a vision of a united city, even if he isn’t very good at articulating it.
Right now we need a mayor who can speak to the whole city, the suburbs as well as downtown, and get the new city council working well together. John Tory has shown he is best placed to do that.
Tory needs to up his game in a second term. He should not hesitate to borrow from Keesmaat’s best ideas