A friend sent around a petition against Doug Ford’s abrupt late-stage reduction of Toronto’s city council. Once of her friends said that she thought it was a good idea: “it will save a huge amount of money & will make governance much less cumbersome. Savings can be redirected to more affordable housing, improved public health ,economic development initiatives/etc. As well, don’t forget that every person in Toronto can easily meet with their council member for the cost of a cheap TTC fare – unlike most of the rest of the province. I don’t see it as an abuse of power, but rather leadership to try to get things under control here.”
Obviously, I disagreed, and responded:
I think a bit more information needs to be put in here. The salaries of the councillors cut would be a total of $2.28 million a year. This city’s budget is $11.1 billion. The TTC budget is just short of $2 billion. The salaries of the councillors cut would be equal to 0.1% of the TTC budget. And since staff would have to be hired to do some of the functions that the councillors will no longer have the time for, the savings will be even less. (Doug Ford stated that the plan would save $25 million, but he has not offered any breakdown or support for that number, and we need to remember that throughout the campaign and throughout his brief career in civic politics before that he had a considerable record of statements that were at best unsupported and at worse directly at odds with available facts. In any event, in Toronto’s budget, even $25 million is much less than it sounds, and the negative results would vitiate the savings.)
Add to that the extra cost of redoing the election on very short notice. It takes 9 months to prepare for an election. It is a very large and expensive logistical task. It is in fact unlikely that the necessary work even can be done in the time remaining; the revised deadline for councillor nominations would not even allow enough time to get the ballots printed. And since the school boards would not be redistricted, it would make future elections much more expensive and complicated than they are now.
With a council of 25, each councillor would represent a population equal to that of Thunder Bay. No other city is having such a reduction in local representation proposed. One person representing 100,000 people directly is not efficient (it also makes the ease of getting to their office moot; a councillor would not have enough time to meet with twice as many people). Saying that fewer councillors would be more efficient is like saying you can be more efficient in a busy restaurant by cutting the number of cooks or waiters in half.
Councillors do far more than just argue in council; they are responsible for quite a lot of coordination, management, and decision making. The things they make happen will not stop needing to happen. The public health and development initiatives you would like to see are much less likely to happen with half as much councillor (and councillor’s office) time per resident to help make them happen.
I should also mention that the reason we do not have more transit already is not due to there being too many councillors. The Transit City plan, had it not been killed by Rob Ford, was fully funded by city and province and was the product of a full-sized council. would already be delivering improved transit across the city. The Line 1 extension and the Eglinton Crosstown, the only two recent initiatives to go ahead, were both put in place under Miller, and the Eglinton nearly also got killed by Ford. Ford replaced a fully agreed, funded plan with an unfunded plan that never got started. John Tory then put in his own back-of-napkin plan, also unfunded, that still has not moved forward in 4 years. This is not because there are too many councillors. It is because two mayors decided to throw out plans that had already been put in place. It is an argument for a stronger council, a weaker mayor, and more control by experts. Tory has pushed through initiatives that will cost the city billions (yes, billions) in place of more efficient, cost-effective initiatives that had the support of experts. What we need is specifically not a mayor who doesn’t have to listen to others.
Beyond this, what Doug Ford is doing is a blatant violation of established principles and agreements (such as the Toronto-Ontario Cooperation and Consultation Agreement). It is a single-handed rubbishing of a decision that had been made with extensive consultation and expert analysis. It has quite obviously not been thought through. It is directly disrupting a democratic process and overriding the will of a city’s elected representatives. It shows open contempt for democracy and process, and it does so transparently in the service of score-settling against political opponents and of centralizing of power.
I find it truly distressing that any reasonable person could speak in favour of this frank abuse of power. Doug Ford’s behaviour is unworthy of an elected official and unworthy of the office he has been entrusted with, an office that is charged with representing the voice and will of the people. Single-handed overriding of a districting that was done with extensive consultation and consideration is not leadership. Bossiness, yes, but in no way leadership.
trollsbane. 