Don’t let one bad trip ruin council’s need to wander
When done right, travel is a beautiful thing. It can expand minds, cross cultural divides and increase understanding. Travel can also be a waste, folly or misadventure.
The latter seems to be the case with the trip Toronto city councillor Nick Mantas took to Turin, Italy, his own National Lampoon’s European Vacation. There to visit and learn from the European Commission’s Cities Forum, Mantas and a staff member racked up more than $16,600 in expenses. Officials going to a conference and seeing other cities at work is a good thing, but this case might make it hard for that to occur, tarring all travel as frivolous or worse.
A Star investigation last week revealed the trip included a luxury car rental, extra nights in a hotel, accommodation upgrades and missed flights. Further details demonstrate more incompetence and naivety than one might expect from a city councillor.
Missing a flight due to a miscalculation of driving time to the airport when there’s both Google and extensive, frequent rail connections in Italy is baffling. So too is having to abandon an Airbnb for a hotel because it’s in a “bad neighbourhood,” something that, if true, is also easy to look up beforehand on many legitimate travel information sites, or even in the accommodation reviews itself.
It all doesn’t sit right, but neither does the rubber stamp reimbursement most of Mantas’s council colleagues gave him in February.
They should have done their own due diligence before the full reimbursement, not leaving it to the press. This undermines the public’s trust.
What happened with Mantas is bad, but when these kinds of egregious cases come up, there’s a risk the blowback or correction will steamroll a good practice, tossing the baby out with the hotel bathwater, as the saying goes.
Government officials travelling on the public’s dime is good, even necessary. Sometimes it might be to a glamorous location like Turin, other times it might be a conference centre surrounded by parking lots on the edge of town, but it’s important we allow for and encourage learning from other cities and experts.
Toronto has two pervasive, pernicious traits that have plagued it for decades. One is provincialism. A narrow-minded, self-centred, selfimportant view of the world and Toronto’s place in it. This view holds that somehow we are so unique, so exceptional, that what happens in other places doesn’t matter much here, leading us into some poor or unnecessary policy directions.
The other trait is related: the idea that Toronto has to reinvent the wheel every time, sometimes going through an excruciating process while doing so when excellent and easy solutions exist in cities around the world, ones we could simply adopt or augment to our local conditions. Best (and obvious) practices are a good thing to study.
A recent example of this is the years-long booze in parks debate in Toronto. First the attempts to loosen Toronto’s uptight restrictions were denied numerous times and then a pilot project with embarrassingly huge signs was set up and, just as in Italy and so many other places that aren’t hung up on drinking in public spaces, nothing bad happened. It was a non event.
In April, council voted to make the program permanent in 50 parks across the city, including one in every ward, a condition that multiple councillors still objected to. Happily, they lost and the policy will roll out this summer, but in practice Torontonians will likely have a drink in other public parks too, when and where they feel like it — just as people in Italy do.
Travel teaches lessons like these. Think about what else Mantas may have learned in Italy. While touring Turin perhaps he took note of how organically café and restaurant patios flow into the streets and piazzas, without fences or fretting, where you might even wander away from the area with your wine.
Perhaps Mantas also saw how dense Turin’s urban landscape is, with lowrise apartment buildings everywhere.
Very livable, but something apartment fear mongering here in North America often paints as a bogeyman. Those apartments are often on narrow, human-scaled streets, unlike the wide wind-and-car-swept avenues standard over here. There are also 10 tram lines that snake their way through the city streets.
See, there’s lots to learn by travelling, and I want my city councillors and other officials to know such things so Toronto can borrow great ideas from all over. That’s why it’s important to strongly condemn abuses of this privilege.