Rob Ford, Toronto's New Mayor
After 10 months of election campaigning, Rob Ford is the mayor elect for Toronto. While the results are enough to induce thoughts of leaving the city that I’ve called home for the past five years (maybe Calgary is accepting applications for an environmental historian and sustainability/food systems planner?), I didn’t really find the results that surprising even though they have the potential to be devastating to the vibrancy and sustainability of our communities. The reason that I didn’t find Ford’s win surprising is the legacy of Mike Harris’ provincial government set up Toronto to be politically divided between its downtown and suburbs.
Mike Harris, for those of you who don’t know, was the premier of Ontario from 1995 to 2003 and is best known for leading a conservative tax cutting bonanza called the “Common Sense Revolution.” Among his many major cost-cutting and efficiency-seeking actions, Harris undertook a major restructuring of municipal governments, with the most controversial being the creation of a “mega city” of Toronto. Prior to this, Toronto was governed by two tiers – local governments (including the old city of Toronto, Scarborough, Etobicoke, York, North York, and East York)and Metro Toronto (that took care of services such as economic development, welfare and social services, police, transit, arterial roads, ambulance, and parks). The amalgamation created a tension that still hasn’t been worked out between Old Toronto and the suburbs. It was only in the past year that new city-wide zoning was proposed to replace the zoning of the pervious local governments. Residents from these former cities continue to have different needs and wants from their municipal government. The Harris Government also downloaded services to municipal governments. So, services that used to be paid for by the province became the responsibilities of municipal governments, adding a huge financial burden to their budgets.
The first mayor of the newly amalgamated mega-city was Mel Lastman. You may have seen him in ads for Bad Boy Furniture dressed in a prisoner costume: “Who’s better than Bad Boy?… Nooooooobody!” He is often remembered for embarrassing Toronto (he is the one who called in the army after a snow storm) and for saying shockingly inappropriate things (death threats to then CITY TV reporter and now city councillor Adam Vaughan and commenting during a visit to Africa that he didn’t understand why people would go there because “I just see myself in a pot of boiling water with all these natives dancing around me.”) He won with most of his support coming from the formerly suburban municipalities of North York, Scarborough and Etobicoke. And from what I can tell he relied on a structural deficit (spending the existing cash reserves), selling public assets and the public-private partnerships to provide services.
David Miller
Mayor David Miller (who is still acting mayor for a few weeks more) burnt a lot of his political capital to getting Toronto out of the financial mess left by downloading, amalgamation, and Lastman. One of his accomplishments was getting special powers from the province to tax in ways that other municipalities can’t as a way to address the deficit while still supporting all the services that the city has to provide. He implemented a car registration tax (the first thing Ford promises to dismantle) and a land transfer tax (also high on Ford’s list). Miller was not much of a “tax and spend” Mayor, as he cut the budgets of most departments, implemented a hiring freeze, and tried to tackled the unions (last summer’s garbage strike). Not all of this was ideal, but the city desperately needed to be on a stronger financial footing to prevent everything from crumbling.
Through this, Torontonians outside the urban core felt that services they were receiving didn’t match up with the higher taxes that they were paying. Ford’s slogan was simple – “Respect for Taxpayers”. And he’s thrown out lots of ways, most irrational and some just impossible to reduce city budgets and therefore taxes while maintaining or improving services. He has promised that we can have our cake and eat it too. And frankly I believe if he is able to fully implement his platform we’ll be back in a place just as bad if not worse than after Lastman.
At the same time as taxes were increasing under Miller, residents of Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough, saw one of their main issues, the amount of time they spend getting to and from where they need to be, getting worse. Miller’s government put a lot of work into planning a networking of cycling infrastructure and a significant public transit investment called Transit City (that focused on light rail). These plans however did little to help the residents outside of the urban core spend less time in their cars, especially in the short term where implementing these plans was actually making their commutes longer as they lost car lanes to bicycles on arterial roads and had to endure light rail construction that can drag on for years. It is not hard to see why these residents feel that there is a “war on cars” (and therefore them), even though what is being done is in my opinion necessary to return vibrancy and a sense of community to streets that have become commuter corridors and to prepare us for a future where peak oil and climate change will dramatically change the way we live if we don’t start getting ready now.
In this context of taxes and cars, the fact that Rob Ford won doesn’t surprise me. This doesn’t mean that I’m happy about the result. But the entire mayoral election campaign didn’t really offer a real option for anyone who wanted an inspiring vision for what their community could be. George Smitherman offered himself as the anti-Ford and liberal alternative, but had the lingering legacy of the E-Health Ontario controversy. And Joe Pantalone promised the status quo, using tacky name calling to attack both Ford and Smitherman and offering no original thoughts that I could see. It was a campaign that entirely lacked inspiration. And one where I really didn’t want to vote because of the struggle between voting strategically to try to keep Ford out versus voting closer to my values for someone that didn’t really seem to want to be mayor. My hope now is that the mayor only has one vote on council and that the 44 ward councillors will collectively be progressive enough to minimize the damage that Ford can do to the city in the next 4 years.