To fill the leadership vacuum, a rotating series of councillors, mostly from the centre and centre-right of the political spectrum, have seized the chain of office on an issue-by-issue basis—Jaye Robinson on the port lands, Ana Bailão on social housing, Josh Colle on the budget, Karen Stintz on transit. They’ve championed various resolutions and negotiated with council’s more unified left and centre-left members, led unofficially by Shelley Carroll, Adam Vaughan, and Gord Perks. It’s led to some surprising breakthroughs that couldn’t have happened otherwise, including the OneCity transit proposal brought forward last week by conservative midtowner Karen Stintz and left-leaning Scarborough councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker. The map they put together represents a comprehensive plan to improve transit in virtually every part of the city, and suggests the beginnings of a plan to pay for it.
But this informal mayor-for-a-day system only leads to speculation about a more long-term solution, and our eyes turn to 2014: Who should run against Ford? Who should replace him as our next mayor? Even Ford himself is thinking about it—boasting that he’s already started his reelection campaign.
There’s only one problem. We’re not even at the halfway point of the current term—the election is still more than two years away. People won’t be able to register as candidates and begin campaigning until 18 months from now, in January, 2014. Two years is an eternity in politics. As I’ve written recently, no one would have predicted a Rob Ford win two years before the last election, and David Miller wasn’t considered a contender in 2001. It’s way too early to start handicapping the 2014 race. But it’s reasonable—essential, in fact—to start listing the criteria we need in a mayor before we start interviewing candidates for the job.
According to the thumbnail sketch that’s emerged, our past two mayors have represented opposite sides of the key divide in Toronto politics: Miller was the mayor of pinko downtowners oblivious to the frustrations of their fellow citizens, while Ford is the mayor of alienated suburban nitwits who want to exact revenge on the city’s prosperous elite.
This characterization falls apart in the details. Miller, for instance, pursued policies that directly addressed many of the problems that exist in the suburbs (transit, poverty, revitalizing concrete-tower communities). Still, voters’ perceptions, simplified or not, are important, and in the different ways Miller and Ford have conducted themselves as leaders, the caricatures hold up.
The son of a single, working-class immigrant mother, Miller (via scholarship) became an Ivy League–educated lawyer living in High Park. He spoke the language of urbanism fluently and demonstrated the kind of cosmopolitan worldview and confidence common among the city’s economic and cultural elites. When he ran for mayor, he spoke of how the city was populated by “citizens,” rather than “taxpayers”—the difference being that citizens are participants in shaping their city, while taxpayers are simple consumers of services who wonder if they’re getting value for money. Miller was an avatar for the communities in Toronto who have shared in the boom times, who have accrued financial or cultural capital or both, who feel they are part of building something. These groups are increasingly concentrated in the most livable parts of the central city, where Toronto’s social and physical infrastructure is strongest and, correspondingly, the rents are highest.
Ford is a university dropout from Etobicoke who is dismissive of sophisticated thinking altogether—his own thought processes tend towards proud simplification, and are almost entirely based on the premise that saving money is the ultimate virtue. He’s a man who inherited wealth and a political machine, but he has still felt like an outsider and rages against being disrespected. His political worldview, if you want to call it that, is based on a laundry list of personal frustrations—with being stuck in traffic, or with neglected concrete buildings, or with a tax bill—which he assumes someone is benefitting from. In his own campaign, he spoke forthrightly of the population as straight-ahead consumers of government: He talked about “respect for taxpayers” and “customer service” to the exclusion of almost all other topics, and his bottom-line message was that the consumers of Toronto were being screwed over. His own bumbling, inarticulate, unsophisticated persona deeply resonated with those voters who felt left out of the city’s growing prosperity and excitement.
The downtown versus suburbs division was electoral gold for Ford, but it has proven toxic to the city’s conversation, and unworkable as the basis for local government. Miller was an astonishingly effective mayor, in the sense that he implemented his agenda while his opponents at City Hall flailed on the sidelines. But he failed to communicate with those councillors outside his constituency—and didn’t care enough about doing so, because he could implement his plan just fine without persuading those who disagreed with him. Meanwhile, Ford, with his in-your-face, with-us-or-against-us rhetorical style and his outright lack of interest in persuasion, has proven in recent months to be a dismal failure. His only argument is that “real people” like his policies, and he says that even when polls show it to be untrue. Miller’s arrogance gave way to Ford’s petulance, and certainly neither trait appeals to voters.
Our next mayor will need to speak to (and for) all of Toronto. The us-against-them mentality not only creates deep divisions where none need to exist, but it leads us to fight the same battles again and again. The Vehicle Registration Tax was passed after a long debate, then cancelled. Transit City was approved, cancelled, then un-cancelled, and Ford wants to make it an election issue again two years from now. The Jarvis bike lanes were approved and installed, then scheduled for removal, and the issue may come back to council this fall. We’re stuck in Groundhog Day politics.
The emphasis on divisions—suburbs versus downtown, cyclists versus drivers, subways versus LRT—also obscures the more significant fact that these constituencies need to find common ground. And much of it already exists. Congested roads are a problem for all of us; an inadequate transit system is inadequate for all of us. The community-building (and physical building) challenges of condominium developments are roughly the same south of Front Street as they are along Sheppard and near the Scarborough Town Centre. The strength of the city’s economy and job market will propel everyone forward or hold everyone back.
It seems clear that we all want to pay as little tax as is necessary to have a vibrant level of service. We all want less congestion on the roads. We all want lower crime, less poverty, and less pollution. We all want the government to deliver services as effectively as possible, to see as little money wasted as possible, to have interaction with the bureaucracy become less of a chore and more of a pleasure. There is material there, plenty of it, for policies that would appeal to the city’s supposedly divided constituencies.
Our next leader will need to talk realistically about costs and benefits. Miller was realistic about the costs of introducing new taxes, but the message about the benefits of those taxes didn’t reach or persuade everyone. Ford refused to acknowledge that services have costs, promising to cut taxes while improving and expanding services. We are now paying for his delusion.
The OneCity transit plan shows an encouraging way forward. A quick public opinion poll registered 80 per cent support for it, a positive sign that defiantly overriding the Toronto political divide can pay electoral dividends. Stintz and De Baeremaeker characterized their proposal as the beginning of a conversation, and the follow-through on that conversation will be crucially important, for both the plan and our next mayor.
The message of Ford’s election seemed to be that some people felt left out of the conversation Miller was having about the city we were building and who we were building it for. The message of Ford’s mayoralty seems to be that many other people feel their city is being dismantled and their neighbourhoods changed without their say-so, and they have shown they’ll line up for hours at a committee meeting to express that sentiment.
Miller was right that City Hall needs to treat voters as citizens—a source of solutions as much as they are consumers of them. City Hall is now operating in a leaderless vacuum by finding consensus on issues from politicians who represent various points in the city and various points on the political spectrum. The councillors building that consensus are taking their cues from their constituents. The next mayor should learn from that process.
Whoever runs will have to be viable as a representative of both sides of Toronto’s current conversational chasm, equally at home in a mall in Scarborough or in Kensington Market. A personal style somewhere between Miller’s ostentatious eloquence and Ford’s red-faced folksiness-by-slogan would seem to be in order. Someone who can not only find a creative way through the budget but also articulate why some services are worth the cost. Someone who can rise above the same old battlefields and lead us instead to completely new territory. This candidate will have to play nice with others and be able to talk to councillors and residents from all over the city.
We’re not looking for compromise, and perhaps consensus is too much to ask for, but we need someone who can see the value in differing points of view and still find a workable—or, preferably, brilliant—solution. And when the next mayor has found that solution, he or she should be able to look all of us in the eye and explain why it will work for all the people of Toronto.
Original Article
Source: the grid to
Author: Edward Keenan
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