Restructuring Toronto Until It Sinks
by John Sewell

There have been extraordinary complaints in recent years about how dysfunctional Toronto City Council has been since the megacity was created in 1998. Council agendas for the monthly meetings are usually more than 3,000 pages long which ensures that most city councillors have read only a small portion of the agenda that they are expected to debate. The city itself is geographically so large that few councillors can say with assurance they know the lie of the land in any particular location being debated at any particular moment. With 45 members the council is so big a serious debate on the floor of council is difficult, given the strict limitation on the length of speeches and the fact that after 20 people have spoken, no one remembers what the first 15 have said. The influential players on almost all important decisions are lobbyists, and citizens find their access to City Hall very limited.

These are just some of the complaints about how the city is governed. A related problem is money: the city is financially unable to present the programs expected of a modern city, such as fixing potholes, keeping the litter off the streets, and running a good array of recreational programs. Recent murders among black youth using guns -- the murder rate in Toronto has climbed ominously this year -- are a good indication of just how sadly the city has been attending to normal business in recent years.

Many people have suggested that it would make more sense if Toronto were divided into smaller self-governing parts linked together by some upper tier or regional government. But when city council said six months ago that it was appointing an advisory panel to review city governance, that kind of an option was specifically not part of the terms of reference of the panel.

The panel was chaired by Ann Buller, chair of Centennial College, and included Sujit Choudhry, professor of constitutional law at the University of Toronto Law School, and Martin Connell, chair of the Calmeadow Foundation. None have previous direct experience in city politics. As they state in Appendix 1, "we started with only the most rudimentary knowledge."

The panel's recommendations were made public on November 23. The key proposal is to treat the mayor as the key player in city government, at the expense of virtually every other member of council. Thus the mayor would appoint the chairs of all the standing committees, the community councils, and the Toronto Transit Commission. These individuals would form an executive committee which would set council's agenda and prepare the budget. The mayor would direct, appoint and dismiss the city manager, so that all city staff would owe their allegiance to the mayor, not to city council, and certainly not to the public. The notion that city staff are independent professionals would disappear.

None of the other recommendations mean much in light of the extraordinary centralization being proposed.

Toronto has some sense as to how the kind of system being recommended by the panel will work in practice. That experience was picked up when Mel Lastman was mayor from 1998 until the end of 2003. Senior staff reported directly to Lastman, the two most notable examples being the City Treasurer, Wanda Liczyk, and the Commissioner of Development Services, Paula Dill. Ms. Liczyk's activities have been carefully reviewed in the public inquiry recently concluded by Justice Denise Bellamy looking at the MFP scandal in which Ms. Liczyk was a leading errant actor. The activities of Paula Dill , besmirching her vote in a critical process so that the bid for control of Union Station was eventually awarded to the client of the mayor's son, was also exposed by a judge. The only person who hinted at staff wrong doing was Rita Reynolds, the Privacy Commissioner and she was fired for not being "a team player". Why anyone would think that Toronto should be restructured to formally embody the power Lastman exercised is hard to fathom. But as noted, none of the three people appointed by Mayor Miller to the panel were familiar with the machinations of Toronto City Hall.

A copy of the report can be found at http://www.toronto.ca/governingtoronto. The panel commissioned two research studies, both of which are on the web site. One summarizes urban governance in London, New York, Vancouver and Chicago; the other looks at citizen participation in Montreal, Vancouver, London, Portland, and several Brazilian cities.

It remains unclear what kind of public process will be followed in considering these recommendations. The panel held just one public session, and it was but seven days before the published report was released, so one can assume that it had no impact on the panel's recommendations. Perhaps the recommendations will go to Toronto City Council for discussion.

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