During the 2010 election, Toronto mayoral candidate Rocco Rossi pledged that if elected he would ask the province to approve legislation to allow voters to recall — or fire — the mayor or a city councillor.
At the time, Rob Ford was the biggest supporter of Rossi’s idea.
“There are many priorities when it comes to bringing accountability to city hall and recall legislation is certainly one that I support,” Ford said enthusiastically.
Today, many voters are wishing they could recall Ford right now. Blogs and the Twitter world are filled with outraged voters demanding that the mayor, whose popularity has fallen dramatically since he took power, be sent packing before his term is up and before he can do more damage to the city.
Ford’s job, though, is safe until the next election in 2014. But until then, to whom is Ford accountable, especially when he fails to bring the very accountability and professionalism that he promised voters?
It’s easy to understand why voters are fed up with Ford, from his dismal budget performance to his shameful bully tactics, culminating Tuesday in his orchestration of the kangaroo court of Ford allies on the TTC board that fired TTC boss Gary Webster because he disagreed with the mayor on subways.
And that’s not even mentioning his petulant displays of rudeness and disrespect, such as giving the finger to people photographing him as he yakked on his cellphone while driving or his boycott of all Pride events.
While Rossi’s mayoral bid failed, his recall proposal was highly popular, with 73 per cent of voters telling pollsters they supported it.
Under a recall system, any voter can launch a petition which, if it garnered an established number of signatures, could bring an abrupt halt to a politician’s term in office and set off a special election.
Several American states have recall legislation. The most notable is California, where Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected governor in 2003 in a special recall election.
Currently, British Columbia is the only province with recall legislation. Queen’s Park has long been cool to the idea, although the Conservatives toyed briefly with it, including for municipalities, in the lead-up to the 2011 provincial election.
Under B.C. rules, a byelection is called once 40 per cent of voters in a provincial riding sign a petition to dump their member of the legislature. B.C. voters have launched 20 recall petitions since the legislation was enacted in 1995. Nineteen failed to collect enough signatures and one was dropped after the targeted politician, Liberal MLA Paul Reitsma, resigned his seat suddenly.
Naturally, most elected politicians, regardless of their party affiliation, hate the idea of recall legislation. They argue it would lead to chaos and conflict, forcing them to be in constant campaign mode, having to fight off recall petitions by bands of angry voters and special interest groups rather than focusing on fixing government.
However, critics of such legislation lack any answer — other than wait until the next election, possibly years away — for voters who are stuck with politicians who turn out to be lazy, incompetent, liars or just plain useless.
It would be relatively easy for Queen’s Park to enact recall legislation in Ontario. The key would be to set the bar of how many signatures are required on a recall petition at a level that isn’t so low that it paralyzes politicians from making any controversial decisions or so high it actually protects the politicians.
Also, it should be easy to start the recall process. In B.C., it only requires a person submitting a signed application form, a statement of no more than 200 words on why the politician should be recalled and a $50 processing fee. The applicant has 60 days to collect the signatures. To give politicians a chance to prove themselves, no recall movement can be launched until 18 months after an election.
Properly drafted, recall legislation could be the right policy for Toronto.
Even if Queen’s Park passed it quickly, it likely wouldn’t be soon enough to see Ford fired before the 2014 election.
Still, I doubt Rob Ford supports Rocco Rossi’s proposal as enthusiastically as he did before being elected mayor.
Original Article
Source: Star
Author: Bob Hepburn
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