Some Great Idea

by Edward Keenan

  But for the purposes of Toronto’s story, the thing you need to know about the former golf pro from North Bay is that, unpromised and unprompted, he radically altered the structure of our municipal government and school boards. And in Toronto this transformation was not, everyone agreed at the time and has agreed since, for the better. His thorough screwing of Toronto went further than that, actually. Harris cancelled an under-construction subway line being built on Eglinton and drastically reduced a planned Sheppard subway into Scarborough into a stubby, mostly useless, tiny North York boutique line. He downloaded the cost of transit and social services like welfare and low-income housing onto the city, without transferring any means to pay for them. But the thing the premier accomplished that’s most bitterly remembered in Toronto is amalgamation. Harris had never mentioned he wanted to amalgamate the cities of Metropolitan Toronto during his campaign. In fact, he was on the record opposing the idea, and suggesting instead eliminating the umbrella Metro government. However, the political establishment of the old central City of Toronto was hostile to Harris’s Conservatives – and its mayor, Barbara Hall, and her government were openly defiant of the Common Sense Revolution – while the suburban municipalities had tended to be friendlier.

  This political reality seems to have occasioned a change of heart. In late 1996, Harris sent Bill 103 to amalgamate the cities of Metro straight to first reading (rather than introducing a position paper first, the usual process for such a change). Another surprise came shortly after: a second bill that would make cities responsible for 50 per cent of welfare costs (instead of the traditional 20 per cent), as well as a shift in how education was paid for and a retooling of the property tax system. In total, the changes were projected to cost Toronto about $1 billion per year.

  Harris’s government said amalgamation would save tons of money; critics said it would likely increase costs. The critics have been proven right. Most of the services that would provide economies of scale through bundling into a larger organization were already amalgamated: indeed, more than 70 per cent of the expense and authority over municipal issues – including police, transit, sewage, water and ambulances – were handled by the Metro government. Meanwhile, what was lost under Harris’s amalgamation was regional identity, local control over issues like zoning and garbage pickup and parks, and political representation – the 106 local councillors that represented pre-amalgamation residents were replaced by forty-four city councillors.

  I don’t want revisit the ins and outs of the debate. But I do want to recall the reaction from inside what is now Toronto. The mayors of each of the former cities – all of them, including Barbara Hall of Toronto and Mel Lastman of North York – vocally opposed amalgamation. A group called Citizens for Local Democracy was set up by John Sewell, whose weekly meetings in downtown church buildings attracted crowds of over a thousand outraged citizens. A referendum was held across Metro, and more than 75 per cent of voters rejected the amalgamation proposal. People were worried at the time about the effects of amalgamation and, especially, that the administrative changes would put a huge burden on the property tax base. But on those issues, there was room for argument. What really seemed to unite the opposition to amalgamation was that it was being imposed unannounced, without even consulting local governments and residents. But even when the existing mayors and councils did consult, holding the referendum, Harris ignored the result. A board of unelected trustees was put in place to impose amalgamation on the former cities of Metropolitan Toronto. And so it was done.

  In the first megacity election for mayor, there were two main candidates: Barbara Hall, who’d served a term as mayor of the former City of Toronto, and Mel Lastman. Hall was well-liked in Toronto, but soft-spoken and pinched in manner and sort of defined as a politically correct consensus builder above all else (she went on to head the Ontario Human Rights Commission). Lastman, a famously brazen huckster, was the preferred candidate of the provincial Conservatives and the business and development establishment – he was friends and allies with long-time politician/lobbyist Paul Godfrey and the cabal of backroom operators Godfrey ran with.

  It could be argued that the new city, big and shaky and now even more undefined, needed for its first head honcho a larger-than-life personality. If we were going to spend a few years trying to figure out what this new Toronto meant, then perhaps we could paper over our insecurities with a little of the loudmouthed bravado Lastman specialized in. As well, Hall emerged as the candidate of the neighbourhoods of the old City of Toronto, while Lastman, though he was born in Kensington Market and began his business there, was firmly associated with North York and, by virtue of that, the old Metro suburbs. In Scarborough and North York and Etobicoke, where people felt amalgamation would result in their cities being swallowed up and assimilated by the famous downtown whose name defined the new city, having proud suburbanite Lastman in charge seemed reassuring.

  Lastman won, and served two terms, essentially running unopposed in his re-election bid. His administration, however, was disastrous, characterized by bumbling and corruption. Under Lastman, and in the newly amalgamated Toronto, official business was conducted in a climate of chaos, sleaze and incompetence. The period is nicely summarized in the case of the MFP computer-leasing scandal. I won’t go into depth here – the inquiry’s report, as vivid and tightly plotted as a mystery novel, is available online if you want to revisit the sordid details – but it revealed a culture of widespread cronyism and influence-peddling (and even outright bribery) that implicated both Lastman’s chief financial officer and budget chief.

  Equally important, and equally disastrous, for the city, was the business that wasn’t being done. Like, for starters, collecting adequate revenue. In the face of the thorough shafting Harris’s downloading program had inflicted, Lastman galloped into office on a pledge to freeze taxes for three years, a promise he kept. But costs were ballooning, and the city’s infrastructure suffered. Not only did Lastman stop building at the necessary pace, his council was letting basic maintenance go by the wayside.

  Harris, with the help of the feds, also hobbled the Toronto Transit Commission. No other major city in the world runs a rapid transit system by funding all operating costs locally; most American transit funding comes from federal and state subsidies. In the 1980s, under Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and Ontario premier Bill Davis, the operating costs of the TTC were split evenly between the three levels of government. But in the 1990s, the TTC was forced to get 80 per cent of its revenue from the fare box and the rest from the city property tax pool. As a result, basic maintenance was neglected, service levels were cut – especially on bus lines – and ridership dropped. And forget about expanding the transit network to suit the needs of a region that was becoming more populous and, through urban sprawl, more spread out.

  From the 1950s through the 1980s, the TTC had constantly built new subway lines and streetcar routes, and added new bus service. Seventy-five per cent of the capital funding for that expansion came from the provincial government. Under Harris (who literally appointed a car salesman as his transportation minister), a series of planned subway lines, including one on Eglinton, was cancelled, and the provincial contribution to capital costs was reduced to nothing. Lastman’s government’s response was commensurate; it found no other sources of funding to make up the difference and the TTC was slowly strangled. Other than a short, unhelpful stub of expensive, mostly empty subway tunnel running for a few stops along Sheppard that Harris paid to build as a political favour to Mel Lastman (an ‘expansion’ that required an $8-per-rider subsidy in its first years of operation), the transit network, in fact, started contracting through service-level cuts.

  A similar horror story was emerging in the water and sewer systems, neither of which were adequate for the needs of the city’s swelling population. And if the business climate of the city can be considered infrastructure, then that was slowly crumbling, too. Between 1989 and the beginning of the tw
enty-first century, Toronto somehow lost about 100,000 jobs while the rest of the surrounding GTA gained more than 700,000. The explanation, according to several reports, was that Toronto had far higher commercial property tax rates than the other GTA municipalities. (Even as our residential property taxes were by far the lowest in the region and among the lowest in the province.) The 1998 province-wide switch to Current Value Assessment of property taxes exacerbated the situation. These high business tax rates gradually reduced the city’s commercial and industrial diversity, hollowing out the range of jobs and services available in neighbourhoods across the city, and nothing was being done at Lastman’s city hall to address this.

  Many of the social services the city was now required to foot the bill for were ‘mandated’ by the province; that is, the city had to pay for and deliver them but the provincial government dictated the level of service and the cost, taking considerable budget flexibility out of city council’s hands. So every budget season began with a rush to slash costs for services that were not mandated by the province, then concluded with a session of begging Queen’s Park to write a one-time bailout cheque to get Toronto through the year so the slashing could continue anew the following budget season.

  For all that, Lastman’s years as mayor had some bright spots. One of his redeeming qualities – or mitigating qualities, anyway – was that he was a glad-hander by nature and he liked to be liked. He wanted to get along, even with his opponents on the new city council, and so he allowed leftists like future NDP leader Jack Layton and his wife, Olivia Chow, to control portfolios that were important to them. As a result, the skeleton of a network of bike lanes was initiated (part of an ambitious bike plan his council adopted); in homelessness strategy, a shift from shelters to supportive housing began to move forward (if a little too slowly); and a bunch of active citizen advisory committees, including a youth council and a pedestrian committee, were actively involved in shaping some city decisions. A vigilant council was able to mitigate damage even without co-operation from the mayor: as head of the audit committee, Councillor Bas Balkissoon noticed some procurement irregularities and doggedly pursued them, leading to the MFP inquiry; a group of councillors was able to defeat a controversial proposal to bury the city’s garbage in the Adams Mine, near Kirkland Lake.

  But a lot of the real action was taking place far away from city hall. Despite the crazy politics and government chaos, something was bubbling up from the citizens themselves. They were actively working to improve Toronto, sometimes with the city’s co-operation, sometimes without. And they were getting results. For example, in 2001, an activist named Dave Meslin launched the Toronto Public Space Committee, a group concerned about, among other things, urban streets, pedestrianism and the proliferation of billboards. The TPSC approached its work playfully – Guerrilla Gardening campaigns planted flowers on neglected patches of dirt on city right-of-ways; the Toronto De-fence project offered to remove unsightly chain-link fences from people’s properties for free; the Billboard Battalion showed up at dull variance meetings to speak against the installation of new corporate advertising. The group was surprisingly successful – fending off a bylaw that would have banned utility-pole posters in 2002 – and gave birth to Spacing, a political conversation leader founded and run by Meslin’s friend and colleague Matt Blackett (full disclosure: I’ve been a columnist for Spacing since almost the beginning). Spacing has been arguably more influential than the tpsc, providing a lively, popular forum for geeky topics like land-use planning and transit, and it quickly became must-read material both inside and outside of city hall.

  Another Lastman-era activist took his fight to the city’s waterfront and beyond. Mark Mattson has a life that sounds like the basis for a prime-time television drama: part private investigator, part scientist, part crusading lawyer and part media advocate. In 2001, the handsome, forty-something lawyer began patrolling Lake Ontario at the helm of his private boat, the Angus Bruce, looking for leaky sewage pipes and other signs of pollution. He took photographs and water samples from contaminated sites, documented the lab results and presented legal briefs on violations of environmental law to the authorities. If they wouldn’t prosecute, he sometimes did, utilizing private-prosecution provisions in the Fisheries Act that allowed him to bring criminal charges against companies and governments that broke the law.

  ‘These city cops are not enforcing environmental law,’ Mattson told me aboard the Angus Bruce one spring day a few years later, gesturing toward a Toronto Police Service boat a few hundred metres from the mouth of the Don River. Pointing at bottles and hunks of unidentifiable crap floating around us, he said it was easy to tell when you’re getting close to the Don. ‘Just follow the trail of garbage,’ he said. ‘The laws protecting that river are just as strong as the laws against welfare fraud, which they do enforce, or the laws against smoking indoors or drinking and driving. We’ve been told that 80 per cent of fishers are checked for their fishing licences while they’re on the water. But this river, which is protected by statute, is for all intents and purposes dead.’ And the cops, he pointed out, have no training or policies that would enable them to do anything about it.

  That’s where Mattson came in. A former criminal lawyer, Mattson was, and is, the Lake Ontario representative of the U.S.-based Waterkeeper Alliance, led by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The Waterkeeper Alliance’s literature at the time compared its mandate to ‘an environmental neighbourhood watch’ program. Its members roved the lake and the rivers flowing into it looking for pollution, then used legal and public-awareness tactics to try to enforce water-quality standards. The charitable organization Mattson fronted was one of six Waterkeeper groups in Canada, and the only one responsible for an entire Great Lake. When he joined up with Kennedy’s group in 2001, he’d already been pursuing much the same goal for more than four years. In 1996, Mattson had co-founded the Environmental Bureau of Investigation (‘They pollute, we prosecute’ was its slogan), which won, among other court decisions, a judgment against the City of Kingston over a leaky toxic dump.

  A tour of the Toronto harbour with Mattson and Krystyn Tully, the executive director of Lake Ontario Waterkeeper, yielded near-immediate concerns. Five minutes into the trip, Mattson pointed out a concrete block near the Redpath sugar factory that was gushing a white froth into the lake. Tully snapped photos as Mattson remarked that they’d return later to take samples. We viewed the south side of the Leslie Spit as trucks drove in to dump construction waste along the shore, adding to a long shoreline made up almost entirely of broken concrete and bricks.

  Heading toward the Humber River, Mattson indicated one of his big projects for that summer. ‘Sunnyside Beach is a stolen place,’ he said. ‘It used to be a hallmark of the Toronto social scene. Then they built the expressway and just cut it off.’ Beaches were a major concern for Mattson. Asking cities to ensure Lake Ontario is clean enough to swim in might seem like asking them to take responsibility for the weather, but Mattson pointed out that much of the pollution in the Toronto harbour was caused by old city-owned dumps leaking pollutants into the water and city storm drains’ sewage overflowing into the water. Besides, he pointed out, the prosecutor’s job is not to find a solution, but to point out the problem and assign guilt. ‘If you broke into my house and stole my jewellery, and the cops take you to court,’ Tully told me, ‘they don’t have to explain to the judge how to get you to stop stealing. That’s not their responsibility.’

  Up the Humber River near Old Mill subway station, we encountered King’s Mill Park, a Waterkeeper success story. It was a small, grassy marina where families barbecue and people come to fish. It’s also the site of a former dump. In 2001, Mattson found that ammonia and PCBs were leaking into the river in outrageous quantities. He took samples and submitted a brief to the Ministry of the Environment. Eventually, in 2003, the site was cleaned. Good thing, too – two fishermen were casting lines nearby.

  Activist energy was hardly restricted to th
e likes of Mattson or Meslin and Blackett. In fact, the further you got from city hall and the issues that typically motivate protest movements, the more you saw the city’s business and cultural communities still thriving. In fact, they seemed to be thriving even more than before. Trampoline Hall was one tiny pebble in an avalanche of cultural activity that was creating excitement in a thousand small and large, and variously interconnected, ways. As Misha Glouberman, the Trampoline Hall host, told me then, ‘Cultural history is happening.’

  There was the Wavelength music series and the monthly Vazaleen, a queer dance party, which together gave birth to a Toronto music scene that produced acts like Feist, the Constantines, Broken Social Scene, Metric and the Hidden Cameras. Outside the clubs, you could find it in the parks: in the mid-1990s, local residents led by local gadfly and organizer Jutta Mason, took over the neglected, drug-infested Dufferin Grove Park and slowly started transforming it into a community hub, installing pizza ovens, rebuilding the playground and adding a weekly farmers' market. As Mason once told Toronto Star journalist Catherine Porter, the Friends of Dufferin Grove Park, as the group calls itself, has worked against the bureaucracy of the city, finding loopholes in regulations to allow their volunteer construction and supervision of activities, and persistently doing things for itself – with or without permission – rather than waiting for the city to act on requests.