“I couldn’t say with certainty what’s going to come in the future,” Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday said in an interview. “I’ve not talked to him about what he’s planning to bring forward. As far as I know, I don’t think there are very many major — I think he’d like to get that bag tax out of the way, I think that’s one thing. Other than that, I’m not sure what’ll happen. There are others that want to do things.”
For better or worse, Ford’s left-leaning predecessor, David Miller, pursued an ambitious city-building policy program. Ford, who ran as a folksy government-shrinker, made his campaign platform deliberately thin.
After a hard-driving 16 months in office, he has already delivered on several of his campaign promises (abolishing the vehicle tax, cutting councillors’ office budgets, outsourcing garbage collection, reducing spending, standing tough against city unions). He has failed to deliver on others (extending the Sheppard subway, uncovering vast quantities of wasteful “gravy”).
Two other big-ticket pledges — scrapping the land transfer tax, cutting council in half — are so unpopular as to be non-starters. His effort to sell hundreds of Toronto Community Housing homes has essentially been taken over by a centrist rookie. And any future attempt to shrink government through service cuts is unlikely after council rejected such cuts in January.
Lost in the vote-counting chatter about whether the mayor still has the support to achieve his council agenda, then, is a more fundamental question: Does the mayor still have a council agenda?
He offered no real hint of one on Monday. Asked what is next for him now that he has succeeded in achieving labour peace, he said: “We’re always finding efficiencies and cleaning up the city. As you see, the graffiti’s getting removed. We want to live in an affordable, safe city. We want jobs. We have more cranes in the sky than any major city in North America right now. It’s fantastic.”
He has expressed even fewer grand designs on other recent occasions. In a talk radio interview in March, he said he planned to turn his attention to the 2014 election — “I’m hitting the campaign trail” — once the labour deals were signed. People close to him have struggled to persuade him to focus on governing rather than campaigning.
Of course, many taxpayers prefer an administration with modest nuts-and-bolts goals to an administration pushing expensive new initiatives. In the wake of a series of bruising council defeats, Ford has been advised by some allies to lie low and stick to uncontroversial topics.
For the first five weeks of his radio show, he advocated his contentious subway vision. On last Sunday’s show, he devoted extended segments to the Blue Jays, the economy and “roads, roads, roads.” During the roads segment, he came across as earnestly concerned about the smoothness of particular city streets.
“It’s part of his agenda,” Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, a conservative ally, said pointedly. “That’s part of his ‘Transportation City’ — addressing the roads backlog, we have to address construction delays, we have to address traffic and congestion. Those are all things that we can agree on, and it’s all part of the mandate. Getting back to those core values, principles and promises will set the mayor on the right course.”
Councillor Adam Vaughan, a Ford critic, argued that residents would mostly benefit from the mayor’s decision to cede the policy arena to a council he called “mature, capable, bright and engaged.” But he said the city is denied critical leadership “when the mayor goes silent and is only worried about whether your telephone call gets returned when you have a tree overhanging your parked car.
“We have a whole series of significant issues that require the city-wide perspective a mayor normally provides,” he said.
Ford, whose spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment, still holds sway with a sizeable council minority. He will exert significant influence on two more $9 billion city budgets. He may well use the flexibility he earned in the new collective agreements to push for far more outsourcing. And he has the city’s most powerful megaphone.
But it appears the era in which his wishes determine council’s focus every month may well have ended with his transit loss in March. In its place: a quieter era in city politics?
“It’s hard to say anything’s going to be quiet with Rob Ford,” Holyday said. “You never know what issues are going to come up, and you never know what issues are going to come forward.”
Original Article
Source: Star
Author: Daniel Dale
No comments:
Post a Comment