Some Great Idea

by Edward Keenan

  If you are aware of the efforts to make your neighbourhood more like the ones downtown – and you need to be paying close attention to really know about those efforts – you can also see how long that kind of transformation is likely to take. Installing a bike lane on Markham Road is not going to do much to make cycling a viable means of regular transportation out in Woburn. And so maybe there’s some chance that in twenty or thirty years your neighbourhood might be more walkable and vibrant and have real rapid transit, but your taxes are going up today, and are apparently helping to pay for the renaissance of downtown urbanism. When you do start paying attention come election time, things like $12,000 parties just confirm the gut instinct that the money isn’t coming back into your neighbourhood.

  It’s an uphill battle explaining how building new roads will increase gridlock (since traffic always rises to meet the supply of roads), while getting people on bikes and, especially, onto streetcars will actually decrease congestion. It isn’t an intuitive idea. What is intuitive is that the city could save money by getting staff to water their own office plants, as Ford repeated often on the campaign trail.

  You could call Rob Ford profoundly uninformed, unpolished, hotheaded and simple-minded – and I think he is all of those things – but those qualities seem unimportant next to the fact that he seems to get it and to genuinely care about the people who are not involved in the urban conversation. In his shaddap-about-nuances rhetoric and his rage at seemingly unnecessary waste, they see their own frustrations reflected, their own impatience with the condescension of a so-called elite. And in that, they see a lot to like.

  4

  Toward the end of the campaign, I was having a late-night drink with a political insider who had been a key part of the crowd around David Miller’s administration. It was not someone I knew particularly well, but it was a drunken after-party kind of conversation, and it was pretty straightforward. Both of us agreed that it was difficult to see how, if Ford was elected, he would actually accomplish anything. His agenda was extreme – far to the right of anything proposed by the likes of John Tory – and in parts transparently unworkable. He had never had any real council allies and had never shown the ability to twist arms or sweet-talk anyone else into agreeing with him. And he had a short temper to boot. He seemed destined to be a one-term mayor, a complete flame-out.

  And here’s the interesting thing: to the person I was talking to, that scenario seemed preferable to a Smitherman victory. In his eyes, Smitherman looked like a kinder, gentler, slow-motion Rob Ford – he was far slicker and was certain to be more effective at the backroom deals and public diplomacy that would get his agenda implemented. And that agenda, as he had laid it out and the coalition of big-money backers he’d assembled seemed to show, involved cutting city services, playing hardball with unions and keeping taxes down at the expense of infrastructure – all the things Ford was promising but presented with a more moderate, sympathetic face.

  As another lefty politico who was there looked on in shock, this guy said, ‘If Pantalone doesn’t get above 30 per cent in the polls, I’m voting for Rob Ford.’ Ford’s very extremism and more objectionable qualities would make him easier to rally against and easier to beat. I did not disagree with his logic.

  But shortly after the election, it started to look like we might have underestimated the new mayor.

  On his first official day in office, Mayor Rob Ford declared Transit City ‘dead’ and instructed the TTC’s general manager to start working on a new plan based around subways. The province, who was paying for Transit City and had already signed contracts for much of the work and begun construction on Sheppard Avenue, announced it was going to renegotiate based on the mayor’s wishes. It appeared the mayor was able, suddenly, to govern by fiat, without consulting City Council.

  For his first formal City Council meeting, during which he was sworn in as mayor, Ford invited loudmouthed Hockey Night in Canada commentator Don Cherry to speak. Cherry took the opportunity to verbally face-wash all the ‘left-wing pinkos’ who ‘ride bicycles and everything.’ He said to the mayor’s detractors, ‘He’s gonna be the greatest mayor this city has ever, ever seen, as far as I’m concerned! And put that in your pipe, you left-wing kooks.’ So much for the city being united.

  At the first working meeting of council, Ford rammed through many of his marquee campaign promises: the Vehicle Registration Tax was eliminated, councillor expense budgets were cut almost in half and TTC workers were declared an essential service, denied the right to strike. The moves were fiscally reckless. Cutting the vehicle tax would cost the city more than $60 million per year in revenue. Because arbitrated contracts almost always give unions a better deal than negotiated ones, some staff and outside analysts – including the right-wing C. D. Howe Institute – estimated the essential-service designation would add about $25 million over three years to the TTC’s labour costs (compounded over time with jumps whenever a new contract was signed). As for the expense accounts, Ford’s smoking-gun evidence of gravy and waste, reducing those budgets would save the city roughly a million dollars.

  Councillors tried to debate him on this, but he refused, politely, to talk about the numbers beyond saying he’d promised to save taxpayers money and cut waste, and that’s what he was doing. His supporters on council did not speak about most of the items or engage in any debate – new TTC chair Karen Stintz stayed silent even on the question of declaring public transit workers an essential service – and Ford won pretty much every vote 29–16 or 28–17. This was the pattern for his first six months in office.

  He announced – surprise! – that despite his impression that the city was in dire financial straits, he would insist on a property tax freeze in his first budget (since property taxes do not rise with inflation, a freeze is equivalent to a tax cut), that TTC fares would also be frozen and that the writing and passing of the budget would be ‘accelerated’ – there would be limited debate and no public hearings. Council granted his wishes. He ticked off a list of populist initiatives: contracting out garbage collection in the west end of the city, firing the Toronto Community Housing board after an unfavourable expense report from the auditor general, cancelling construction of a pedestrian bridge near Fort York and removing the bike lanes on Jarvis Street. Almost all of this was stealthily pushed through at the end of meetings and then fast-tracked to avoid any significant public debate. He said the $8 billion in provincial money slated to deliver the four new LRT lines in Transit City would now be spent to bury the entirety of the Eglinton line underground. In addition, he would try to find $4 billion or so from the private sector to extend the Sheppard subway into Scarborough. Ford signed an agreement with the provincial government outlining this change of plans. He did not seek council approval for his new transit measures, although the provincial funding was contingent on eventual council approval.

  In those first six months, was Rob Ford winning? On most scorecards, he didn’t lose a single round, and his opponents hardly landed a punch. And yet he threw his larger ideological promises – fiscal responsibility, transparency, better customer service – into jeopardy. There was a discernable pattern: first, the mayor made a rash, poorly reasoned statement in the press that nonetheless channelled the public’s legitimate anger. He then did an end-run around all the usual procedural checks – public hearings, committee debates – to ram the policy through. Council’s left-wing members put up a fight that impressed their base while earning no concessions and looking worse for it to the general public. Then Ford won a landslide victory in the council vote, and his will was done.

  With each decision, the city was left worse off – financially and otherwise – than it was before Ford took office. Ford blew through the city’s savings – the $367 million surplus from the 2010 budget – while cutting off revenue to the tune of $60 million from the vehicle tax and tens of millions more due to his surprise property tax freeze. And while declaring the TTC an essential service gave frustrated riders the satisfactio
n of knowing they won’t face a strike, it will almost certainly, over time, raise the cost of transit salaries by tens of millions of dollars a year.

  Putting it all together, Ford’s 2011 budget was higher than Miller’s 2010 budget. The projected annual shortfall in the budget when Ford arrived was less than $200 million (when the existing surplus was taken into account), yet Ford worked his magic so six months later we faced a projected deficit of $775 million for 2012. Even with Ford still enjoying a 60 per cent approval rating and winning every vote, it was obvious to many that, since he had so explicitly vowed not to cut services, this would pose an obvious conundrum.

  Ford promised fiscal responsibility but was steering the city toward a financial cliff. He promised respect and transparency but governed by fiat. He promised no service cuts and enhanced customer service but was suddenly planning a massive slashing of front-line services. And it was at that point that things started to turn.

  5

  Here’s a Toronto story that shifted the whole political landscape of the city.

  Beginning in the morning on July 28, 2011, the longest continuous meeting in the history of Toronto municipal government was held at city hall. By the time it wound down the next morning, tables across the second floor were littered with empty Timbits boxes and coffee cups. The committee room, still packed, as the meeting endured into its twenty-third hour, smelled a bit like a hockey locker room, and the people there displayed the kind of slouched giddiness you’d expect from a game after double overtime.

  Ford had been chugging Red Bull at the head of the table where he sat with his executive committee, and now he stood to close the meeting. ‘I’ve been in politics eleven years,’ he said to the participants in what was being called a ‘citizen filibuster,’ ‘and this is one of my proudest moments. Whether you agree or disagree, you’re here.’ It had been an uninterrupted marathon, with some 169 speakers weighing in on proposed cuts to city services. Ford thanked the members of his executive committee who had cross-examined the speakers with him, the other (mostly hostile) city council members in attendance and the people of Toronto who had lobbed insults and criticism at him. ‘I respect you for your integrity and for fighting for what you believe in,’ he said. ‘You pat yourselves on the back because I think we all did a great job and we are going to get this city straightened out.’

  There was applause and cheering from the otherwise hostile crowd. It was one of those rare moments in the life of the Ford administration (then just over seven tumultuous months old) when all parties, left, right and otherwise, seemed to agree on something. Look at all this democracy, everyone kept saying.

  Ford had put the whole thing in motion months earlier when he commissioned the consulting firm KPMG to undertake a broad but cursory investigation of every service Toronto’s government offered, with notes about which programs might be expendable. The mayor was trying to thread a very tiny needle here: he had campaigned loudly on slashing government spending and waste, promising billions in savings for taxpayers, to be returned to them in tax cuts. But he had been equally insistent in his campaign that the cheaper government could still do all the same things it had done before. The magic word in Rob Ford’s vocabulary was efficiencies. And yet when KPMG issued its report, it made no note of possible ways to make service delivery more efficient – studying operations was not part of its assignment. Instead, it put an X through a wide range of services that were not absolutely essential, suggesting they be considered for demolition. Among the proposed cuts in their report, the city could stop fluoridating the water; it could reduce library hours and close some branches; it could decrease the level of snow removal; and eliminate community grants and funding for Business Improvement Area associations.

  At Ford’s request, KPMG had essentially proposed a whack of service cuts. The mayor gamely denied this was the case, again calling for ‘efficiencies.’ But the people of Toronto disagreed with Ford’s eccentric semantics, and as KPMG’s proposals were rolled out gradually, dominating headlines every day for weeks, they were received like a series of punches in the gut. Closing libraries? Cutting jobs in the police department? (Ford campaigned on hiring 500 more officers!) Eliminating snow removal on side streets? (Snow removal? In Canada? In a city as gridlocked as Toronto?) But here’s the punchline: KPMG estimated that if the city implemented every single one of the possible cuts it discussed, the city’s budget would shrink by only $100 to $150 million per year, equivalent to about 1 per cent of the budget. As a point of comparison, the tax cuts and freezes Ford had implemented to start the year cost the city about $100 million in annual revenue.

  Centrist city councillors, whose votes Ford depended on to govern, and who until then had been reliably, if meekly, taking his side – started responding to constituent outrage, saying publicly they were uncomfortable with the proposals. Even staunch Ford allies such as James Pasternak and Karen Stintz, who had each voted with the mayor 100 per cent of the time, announced they would not support the closing of any library branches.

  But, of course, the fight was not just about libraries. Instead, the KPMG report made it about pretty much everything; the massive breadth of the proposals alerted almost every constituency that their own sacred cattle were being led to the slaughter. This was not like contracting out garbage collection, which had outraged labour unions, or removing the recently installed bike lanes on Jarvis Street, which pissed off a very vocal but very narrow constituency of cyclists. This wasn’t even like the mayor’s stubborn refusal to support the Gay Pride celebrations, which polls showed reflected poorly on him but still might be seen as a niche issue.

  By looking at every goddamn thing that was not nailed down, the Core Service Review made the conversation about every goddamn thing at once. Which means the heritage preservation folks and the AIDS program supporters, the library users and the dental health advocates, the labour unionists and the people who own small businesses, all kinds of people who are not typically on the same side of things suddenly found themselves rowing a single boat against the cost-cutting tide.

  Ford went on TV a week before the executive committee meeting to dismiss the fuss – it’s just efficiencies, he said again – and invited everyone to come on down to city hall to meet each other. ‘I’m inviting the whole city,’ he said to Stephen LeDrew of CP24. ‘I don’t care if we have to sit there for three days. Come and let me know what you think we’re doing right, what we’re doing wrong, and share your ideas. I’m interested in hearing from the taxpayers.’

  Come, Rob Ford said, and so they did. More than twenty-eight dozen people signed up to speak, and more people than that crowded into the second floor of city hall, in Committee Room 1, where the committee was gathering, and into Committee Room 2, where a live feed of proceedings was being broadcast for the overflow crowd, and into Committee Room 3, where another live feed was onscreen and a potluck buffet appeared on side tables filled with pots of chili, boxes of pizza and doughnuts, and urns filled with gallons and gallons of coffee. Senior citizens, high school students, business owners, artists, doctors: they waited around for hour upon hour, listening to each other’s three-minute sermons on civics and waiting for their own turn at the mic.

  I’ve spent more of my life than I’d like to have sitting through meetings at city hall, and I can say the speeches from the citizens that night were substantially more interesting, and somewhat more succinct, than the standard speeches of the politicians who work there. There was a puppet show, a few poems, a spirited rendition of a Toronto political show tune, the requisite quotations from Oliver Wendell Holmes (‘I like taxes, they buy me civilization’), Winston Churchill (on the suggestion that arts funding be cut to fund the war effort: ‘Then what are we fighting for?’) and Peter Ustinov (‘Toronto is like New York run by the Swiss’). There were readings from books by Margaret Atwood and Dr. Seuss.

  The über-activist Dave Meslin had drawn a lot of scorn from anti-Fordists like NOW magazine because he’d publicly said he would t
ry to work productively with the mayor. But here he stood up and shouted, stabbing his finger in the air, ‘As a person dedicated to consultation, I don’t think the previous administration was perfect. I expected you might do better, and you’ve done much worse. And that is shameful.’ Former mayoral candidate Himy Syed gave an impromptu comic masterpiece of a speech full of very specific and apparently workable budget solutions, tailored to each councillor on the committee.

  But the moment that was later memorialized in news reports and in blog posts occurred at two o’clock in the morning. A very nervous fourteen-year-old, Anika Tabovaradan, spoke against the library closures. She explained how she needed the computers at Woodside Square library in north Scarborough for her homework, and that there were already long waits. How she often had to sit on the floor because all the chairs were already taken. She spoke haltingly, choking on her tears. ‘I hate public speaking,’ she gasped. ‘But this branch is so important to me … I’m no taxpayer, but when I get to use the computers in the library and do my homework, I’ll be able to get a good job someday, get some good education. And when I can pay taxes I’ll be glad that one day years before people paid extra taxes to keep the system going.’ The crowd cheered, applauded. I looked beside me in the press gallery, where grown men and women were weeping.

  And it went on: don’t cut libraries, they said. Don’t cut grants, they said. Don’t outsource parks maintenance or TTC service or school breakfast programs, they said. When Councillor Mammoliti, the former Ford opponent who had by then assumed a role as the unbridled id of the administration, jeeringly asked each speaker where they lived (he assumed they must live downtown) and what solutions they’d offer to the city’s budget riddles, they said over and over that the city should raise taxes if it needed to, and look harder for ways to find revenue. At the beginning of the meeting, Ford had said the review was about looking at which things in the city were ‘need-to-haves’ and which were ‘nice-to-haves.’ He pointed to a budget gap he then claimed was $775 million and said, effectively, this is why we can’t have nice things. To which one of the speakers said, ‘What everyone has been saying is that the “nice-to-haves” are the things that make the city worth living in.’