At around 10:15 last Wednesday morning, as this month’s city council meeting was gearing up, speaker Frances Nunziata uttered a procedural phrase that seemed especially apt. “The mayor has not designated any key matters for this meeting,” she said. No key matters—that’s about the size of things with Rob Ford these days.

The mayor was there in body, sporadically, throughout the meeting. But if he had any particular hopes for what might get accomplished by this council he was elected to lead, he was coy about it. City council itself rejected his inability to prioritize, and voted by a two-thirds majority to have a debate on transit revenue tools that the mayor had tried to keep off the agenda. As city manager Joe Pennachetti got up to speak about how important this debate was—in the professional opinion of city staff and, according to a poll he’d conducted, more than 85 per cent of Toronto residents—Ford got up and left the room.

Rather than participate in the business of governing, the mayor went to the McDonald’s near the Eaton Centre, where reporters caught up with him while he greeted the Hamburglar and posed for photos. He spent a few minutes behind the counter helping serve burgers as part of the corporation’s McHappy Day fundraiser, then he got himself a Diet Coke and, before heading back to work, spent a moment talking to reporters. They asked him about councillors threatening to bring a vote to defeat his will on the question of casinos in Toronto.

“Whatever,” he shrugged.

He said something about hating taxes and people voting for him and then he was gone.

Later, back at the meeting, he ducked out to check the score of the hockey game.

The next morning, as the transit debate he wanted to avoid pressed on, councillor Chin Lee stood up to complain about a lack of leadership at City Hall. “I will put my neck on the line to lead, and not be a coward,” he said. The mayor was not in the chamber.

The meeting devolved into chaos, as a rudderless council divided into 44 individual factions in a two-day debate, eventually voting on more than 50 convoluted motions. They wound up approving nothing of substance on the transit issues at hand. By widespread agreement, it was as low a point as anyone could remember at this council.

“I couldn’t be happier,” Ford told reporters afterward. “This is one of the greatest days in Toronto’s history right now.”

Of course he would think that. For more than a year, he’s repeatedly demonstrated that he doesn’t particularly care if the business of the city gets done. For Ford, chaos might be the preferred course for Toronto’s government. After getting elected, the mayor spent close to nine months intimidating city council into doing whatever he asked. As soon as some councillors started standing up to him last year—burying Ford’s transit fantasy plan and replacing it with an LRT plan he hated—he stopped trying to govern and started campaigning for the next election, which is still 17 months away.

Since then, council has staggered around under the temporary and varying leadership of a shifting cast of councillors, changing its mind on plastic bags, bike lanes, and zoning bylaws; all the while, Ford’s opinion has been absent from the debates, preferring to tell listeners to his radio show that the 2014 campaign has already begun. His fellow CFRB host (and former mayoral candidate and leader of the provincial Conservatives) John Tory has become exasperated by this, recently telling an Empire Club audience that with the election a year and a half away, “the public would have, in my view, every reason to remind the current administration that they were already elected to govern and to deal with issues like transit, not just to get ready for the next election.”

In the meantime—as we heard last week—the mayor is bringing nothing to the table. In recent months, his biggest talking points—perhaps his only talking points on issues of substance—have been about supporting a casino in downtown Toronto and wanting to cancel plans to provide bike parking at City Hall. He was comprehensively defeated in a council vote this week on the latter question, and appears set to be defeated on the former at a special meeting on May 21. Even on those issues, you can’t really say he’s engaged in the debate and trying to lead council. Beyond sloganeering, he has certainly shown no signs of making a case for any of his recent propositions.

The only thing he actually wants to get done is to find himself re-elected in 2014. Everything else, the business of actually governing the city—of building it, improving customer service, watching costs, all of it—is, as he might put it, gravy.

When word first started circulating that council would overrule Ford about the transit debate this month and raise the issue anyway, his chief of staff told the press how excited he was by the prospect of council defying the mayor. He said they’d make posters of the councillors who wanted to have a debate about raising taxes and use them in the next campaign. It seems that Ford is happiest when things are out of his control, and when council explicitly thwarts his will because it will provide another slogan for his election signs. In effect, Toronto’s mayor now acts as the official opposition to the municipal government.

When he won office in 2010, he did so as an outsider ranting about how the arrogant government was led by bums who never listened to regular people like him. And now that he’s proven incapable of changing that, he’s trying to position himself to run as an outsider opposing an arrogant government led by bums who never listen to mayors like him. His demonstrated incompetence at leading those bums, er, councillors, is presented as the key reason to re-elect him. It’s a bizarre proposition. Still, it could be effective. He appears to have a base of about 30 per cent of voters who are rock-solid supporters, and for them, anything that humiliates the mayor only serves to increase their sympathy for him—underscoring their conviction that the elites are out to get them, and him. And he’s carefully chosen which issues to sloganeer on—subways for Scarborough, no new taxes, and so on—to try to pick up a few more disaffected voters along the way.

But why would he want to remain mayor if he never gets to implement his policies? If he’s unwilling—as he’s shown he is—to perform the kind of negotiation and diplomacy that will actually move the city closer to the track he wants it to be on?

That is to say, why run again to lead the city if his defining characteristic is his refusal to lead?

Perhaps he’s already answered that question. When he said that the chaos, pettiness, and rudderless indecipherability that characterized last week’s transit votes made it among the “greatest days in Toronto’s history,” maybe he meant it. Because maybe the city government under Ford’s brand of non-leadership is showing signs of becoming the out-of-touch, selfish, directionless waste of resources he’s always said it was. City council sunk to the level of incoherence and undisciplined short-sightedness that has always characterized both Ford’s rhetoric and his performance. They’ve followed his lead, in a way, all the better for him to complain about the dysfunction and campaign to continue being the complainer-in-chief.

Maybe for Rob Ford and his close advisors, that has been the ultimate goal all along.

The 2014 campaign starts now! (And now. Also, now.)

Oct. 24, 2011

“I’m already out campaigning.” One year into his four-year term, Rob Ford celebrates the
vote to contract out garbage collection by declaring the next race open.

March 22, 2012

“We came up a few votes shy, but this is an election issue. Obviously, the campaign starts now,”
Ford told reporters after city council voted to replace his idea of a Sheppard subway with
the previously planned LRT.

Sept. 7, 2012

“So folks, I’m not going to list all our accomplishments, but I have to tell you one thing!
The campaign for the next election has started today. The next election is two years away,
we have to get out there, bang on the doors,” Ford says at a “Ford Fest” barbecue for his
supporters in his mother’s backyard.

Jan. 14, 2013

“I love campaigning, I love debating, I love knocking on doors and telling people what we’re
doing and then it’s up to [the electorate] to tell people who [they] want,” Ford told CP 24 as an appeal court prepared to weigh in on his possible removal from office on conflict of interest charges.

May 6, 2013

“If 30 councillors want to put their name to implement taxes on the back of hardworking
taxpayers in the city, I’ll hold them accountable in the next election. I’ll guarantee that.” Ford
suggests the battle at City Hall over transit funding is just the backstory of a vote 17 months away.

May 14, 2013

In the midst of a heated community council debate, Ford leaves during deputations to wander the parking lot, slapping “Rob Ford Mayor” magnets on vehicles. When asked by Toronto Star reporter Daniel Dale if he thought this behaviour might be considered strange, Ford replies, “Some people might find you strange.”

I forgot how much this hurts.

On Monday night, half a period away from the second round of the playoffs, the Toronto Maple Leafs held the game and the season in their hands. They had come back from an impossibly imposing deficit in the series. And then they blew an impossibly imposing lead in the final minutes of the last game. And then it was all over.

I shouted, loudly, in my living room. My wife turned off the TV. My seven-year-old son, up way past his bedtime to watch the game, burst into tears. He continued sobbing in his bedroom for quite a while, standing staring at the Leafs stickers arranged on his wall, clutching the hockey card of a long-retired Leafs player he’d dug out as a lucky charm for the team’s first playoff appearance of his lifetime. “I guess,” my wife said to me, “he’s learning what it’s like to be a Leafs fan.”

It’s the Toronto condition. If, like me, your twin preoccupations are the Leafs and Toronto city politics, this has been an especially punishing period emotionally. A week ago, poised to finally make a significant statement about transit funding—ready to take another step towards transforming Toronto—city council devolved into chaos and cowardice.

And now this.

I went to my son’s room and picked him up, and we slumped into his Maple Leafs beanbag chair and cried together. “I know,” I told him. “I know.” This is not the first time I’ve been reduced to tears by the results of a Leafs playoff game. It almost certainly will not be the last.

It seems silly to cry about it, to care about it so much. It’s a game. But it’s not just that. It’s a story—an ongoing narrative unfolding in distinct chapters over generations—and while we’re individually powerless to change its outcome, we participate in the story by investing our faith in the team, our belief in the significance of the outcome, and our close attention to how it unfolds. We’re part of something larger, a mass of millions who share our hopes and frustrations. It matters so much because we care so much.

That sometimes leads to pure ecstatic moments. And it leads just as often to crushing disappointment. Both are better than the kind of indifference inspired by the uninterrupted futility the Leafs went through for most of the past decade. A tough loss doesn’t rob a game of significance—that comes only from apathy, from losing faith in the possibility of victory, or from simply ceasing to care about it. Politics is like that, too—hopelessness can emerge in reaction to politicians turning an opportunity to improve the city into an orgy of selfish, grandstanding obstructionism. And the uninterrupted futility of a city government that’s mired in its own petty squabbles can be a breeding ground for cynicism.

There is much more at stake in politics than in sports, of course; the consequences can be literally life-and-death. Still, many of the lessons you learn are the same. You can be a part of a large community of people who care, who invest energy and hard work into a cause larger than themselves. (And you can change the outcome: Just this week, a group pushing the perpetual lost cause of electoral reform through ranked balloting won the chance to put the idea before council in June for a vote they could actually win.) Often, the common striving is a victory in itself, as important in its way as the result.

But when defeat comes, in politics as it does in hockey, there is solace to be found in the people alongside you whose belief in the possibility of a better outcome makes working towards it meaningful. As long as we have hope to invest in the future, the story isn’t over. Defeat is not permanent, even if it is recurring. The end of every struggle, no matter what the result, is the start of the next one. There will be other days, other fights, other votes, other games.

I didn’t say all of this to my son. We have a lifetime to reflect on the bigger picture. We had this moment to deal with the pain. I held him there in the dark, and we cried together. And I said, “I know. I know.”

Darkness was falling over the yard at Jesse Ketchum Public School on a wet Monday evening in late April, but the four teams of players on the soccer pitch at Bay and Davenport seemed not to notice—they were too focused on the games, their spring season openers. “Come on! Look around you, guys! Defence!” shouted a red-shirted player on the sidelines, a member of the Short Tempahs. He swore loudly at another lapse as a member of the opposing team—Man And Woman United—drove the ball wide of the net and out of bounds. “Sorry,” he said to a teammate. “I’m just intense.”

Minutes later, his teammate Siniša Colic, a PhD candidate in electrical engineering, drove up the centre of the artificial turf, deking back and forth, before suddenly striking the ball hard, a bullet into the upper right corner that gave his team a 1-0 lead.

At the other end of the pitch, filling in for an absent Short Tempahs goaltender, was IT engineer Dejan Dusic, usually a defender, who grabbed a ball that’d been fired at him and stared at his teammates. “Really?” he demanded, gesturing to the opponents who had just broken down the field unchallenged. “Really?” Though he did not allow a goal all night—the one-goal lead held up—none of the Short Tempahs were happy with the team effort.

“People take it really seriously,” explains Tanya Doroslovac, a veteran Short Tempah defender who works as a theatre producer by day. “Every game is like the World Cup—there are all these mini-World Cups every night in all different parts of the city.”

Indeed there are, as you might notice if you pass a schoolyard or park any night of the week. People of Toronto, especially those in their 20s and 30s, are out in droves playing soccer, ultimate Frisbee, volleyball, floor hockey, ice hockey, dodge ball, and various other sports in adult recreational leagues like the Toronto Sport and Social Club (TSSC), Extreme Toronto Sports Club (XTSC), Not So Pro Sports, and the Toronto Recreational Sports League (TRSL). Over the past decade or so, these leagues have emerged as major players in the city’s social landscape, building small communities in every corner of Toronto around shared interests and common goals. Now, with more than 85,000 people actively playing in such a league—on any given evening, more than 3,000 people are participating in TSSC games alone—it’s safe to say that rec league sports have grown into at least a $20 million a year business in Toronto. This doesn’t represent anything close to a peak in demand—organizers have barely advertised, and almost any popular sport that’s announced books up immediately. But the leagues have proven so popular that they are at capacity—there is no more space to play and, as businesses, the organizations have nowhere left to grow.

“Finding available quality spaces is the biggest challenge,” says TRSL General Manager Jeff Lerner. “If more spaces became available, we could fill them up fairly quickly.”

“There’s no shortage of people,” says Rob Davies, the TSSC director of operations, of the 75,000 active members of his club. He says there are 50-60 teams each season on waiting lists that cannot be accommodated, and because new registrations for popular sports and time-slots fill up online in less than five minutes, the league now runs a registration lottery to ensure all teams have an equal chance at playing.

The lack of good spaces means that many games wind up being played on far-flung and sometimes poorly-maintained fields that can make games less fun and less safe—compacted turf that’s hard on the knees, for instance. And moreover, many other people are denied the chance to play at all. There are some possible solutions to the problem, and one would think that in Rob Ford’s customer-service and private-partnership-oriented city hall, serving this demand might be a priority. But the truth is the city isn’t making more parkland available in any kind of hurry.

When we talk about civic resources or community-building initiatives—the kind of things that help people discover the city and meet their neighbours—many of us first think of official government-run programs, or activist groups, or neighbourhood associations who lobby governments for or against various changes proposed at City Hall. But in Toronto, sports leagues serve similar social purposes. They help people find friends, lovers, and business connections, and learn about the city.

When Tanya Doroslovac, 28, first moved to Toronto from Waterloo in 2006 while completing a co-op for Wilfred Laurier University, she didn’t know many people. She had played soccer all her life in school intramural leagues, and was hoping to find a way to continue. “It was the first time I didn’t have a team to play for. So I signed up with the TRSL.” It introduced her to different parts of the city. “It’s a good way to find out about Toronto—travelling along the TTC to all these different places for games,” she says. One game might be downtown, the next at Downsview, the next at Jane and Eglinton or Sunnyside Park. “It’s definitely a good way to meet new friends—I signed up as an individual, and I was put on a team of other individuals, and we wound up becoming friends—we formed a team that played together for a few years.” She once joined a team full of advertising executives on her friend’s suggestion that it could lead to romance. “That was a most awful plan,” she says. “I’m all sweaty and running around, shouting, competing.” However, she says there are people on one of her teams now who are dating after playing together.

It’s a story I heard from almost everyone I interviewed—the TSSC has even begun tracking marriages of people who met playing in their leagues. (They’ve counted at least a dozen so far.) Rob Davies is one of them. He joined a team of individuals called The Shaggers when he moved here from Kingston after university. Three years later, he married a woman who played on an opposing squad.

Davies also found a job on the field—with the TSSC. He was looking to make a change from his consulting work in 1999 when, at a game, he heard from a convener that the league was hiring. “It was exactly what I was looking for. I almost demanded to be interviewed.”

Because the demographic profile of the league’s players skews to young professionals, a lot of people see it as a networking opportunity—although not all the benefits are as straightforward as Davies’ direct hiring. Xtreme Labs, one of the city’s premier software development shops, has long had a soccer team that plays in the TSSC. “Our company sponsored the team as one of the perks for our employees,” says Boris Chan, Xtreme’s director of engineering, who has played a few years for the company side. He says it’s been a team-building experience for those who work and play together, and an especially great opportunity for interns and more junior employees to connect with the company’s executives. “You’ve got a lot of different people who do different things inside the company—this weird mix of people get to know each other and bond, go through the playoffs together, travel to games all over the city together.”

“It definitely makes the city a better place for me,” says Doroslovac, who now plays on teams in two different leagues at the same time. “Playing is one of the best parts of my week.”

When Kristi Herold founded the Toronto Sport and Social Club in 1996, the entrepreneurial sports nut was looking to start a business that served her own needs: “intramurals for adults,” she says. In the early-internet era, just getting organized was a struggle. “I called everyone in my address book—people didn’t really have email yet—and I remember saying, Can you fax me your address book, and I’ll call everyone in it? People were faxing me pages and pages of contacts.” She recruited Wilson Sports Equipment as a sponsor, then spent some months trying to find places for teams to play. At the time, she was surprised to find there was no central database of any kind listing venues available to rent from the city or the school board. She and soon-to-be co-founder Rolston Miller took turns piloting a used Dodge Caravan and a bicycle around the city until they found enough fields available for their original 13 teams.

In its first year, the league saw 100 per cent growth, then 50 per cent in the second year, and then 10–20 per cent growth each year for five years after that, all through word of mouth. Sitting in her Yorkdale office today, near the “Can You Imagine Wall” where her 12 full-time and 70 part-time staff suggest goals (“Can you imagine having 5,000 teams in one year,” reads one item that is stamped “DONE”), Herold says the league has 1,800 teams each season made up of 75,000 registrants annually. (There are four seasons played each year.) “We’re the largest sport and social club in North America,” she says.

This has inspired competition, of course, from rival leagues. Sam Selim, founder of the Extreme Toronto Sports Club, says he started the XTSC in 2004 because he was frustrated with some of the elements of the TSSC. At the time the league provided no nets, and all games were self-refereed by the players. He tried switching to another rival league, but found some of the same problems, and after a playoff soccer game ended in a rock-paper-scissors tie-breaker, he broke out on his own. From 16 initial teams, the XTSC has grown to 275—and about 3,000 players—this season.

For Selim and Herold and the other leagues, though, the search for spaces to play remains the biggest obstacle to their growth.

“There are more facilities now than when we started,” says Herold, “and whenever something new comes up, we snap it up,” she says. She also notes that the “pent up demand” for more leagues means that whenever a private facility plans to open, she can confidently guarantee them they will fill the space.

But the city isn’t really building new recreational spaces very quickly—something councillor Norm Kelly, chair of the city’s Parks and Environment Committee, says is directly related to fact that “land is very expensive.” He says the department will soon be reviewing its land acquisition policy but, as his parks committee colleague councillor Sarah Doucette notes, the city is simply running out of large open spaces. “One problem is just finding a new place to put a playing field,” she says.

Two new city sports fields opened up at Cherry Beach in 2008, and some private entities—U of T’s Varsity Centre, BMO Field, Lamport Stadium, and City Sports Centre—have been constructed or opened to rentals, allowing leagues such as the TSSC and XTSC limited access to field space. But it’s still not nearly enough to meet the demand of the adult rec leagues’ hunger for evening and weekend space.

The Toronto District School Board has pioneered one possible solution: At a couple of schools, public-private partnerships have resulted in the construction of all-weather domes that allow the fields to be used through the winter. The schools get use of the space all day until 5 p.m., and leagues like the TSSC rent them out in the evening and play right up until midnight. One such field at Monarch Park Collegiate will have eight simultaneous league games—frisbee, soccer, flag football, and indoor softball—playing at the same time every weeknight. Similar arrangements could open up the use of public parks year-round (through the installation of domes), later into the night (by adding lights), or just making currently unplayable places nicer (through more active maintenance).

There are some obstacles to doing many of those things on a larger scale, though. Kelly says that local residents often object to the domes because “they’re ugly”—and further notes that in most cases, parks planning will prioritize the needs of neighbourhood children over adult leagues. Doucette points out that when you put a dome on a field, whether it’s owned by the city or the school board, you restrict its use so local children can’t just come by for pick-up games at times when the space is vacant.

Similarly, objections from neighbours about noise and light pollution restricts the installation of lights on some city parks that would allow leagues like the TSSC to run late-evening programs as it currently does in the covered domes. Yet these kinds of concerns wouldn’t seem to be a problem at fields in massive parks like Sunnybrook, Riverdale, or High Park.

Both Doucette and Kelly say the city may begin looking more aggressively into those kind of solutions to the space shortage, and is otherwise open to innovative ideas. One change Doucette expects might provide more immediate permit space is that last year the city started charging for permits on parks that used to be free. Children’s leagues and other long-time tenants have been in the habit of “block booking” huge amounts of space they don’t need in order to have it available for practices at their leisure. Putting a price on that time may mean space is now available to serve the growing demand for adult rec league fields.

Regardless of whether the obstacles to growth can be addressed by the city or the private market, it strikes me—and both Doucette and Kelly agreed—that this is the kind of private initiative the city ought to encourage. In addition to the obvious fitness benefits of keeping people active in their adult years, the leagues get people out into the city to meet their fellow citizens, where they have fun and work together towards a common goal. It really is a kind of community building—the sort of civic function that in past years was served by bowling leagues, church groups, and member’s lodges. Only now, if you want to play in a league you’ve got to act fast to even field a team.

And that’s a shame, because playing on a team is an experience that can, as it has for Doroslovac, become a big part of what makes Toronto a great place to live. “That’s the social function for many people,” says Herold. “Just being on a team.”

This week, city council adopted a new Parks and Recreation strategy that Kelly characterized, as seeking to “pro-actively” get as many people using parks as possible. Reaching out to find ways to ensure more people get to participate in recreation leagues would seem to be a good place to start.

Hooking up with a rec league teammate: good or bad idea?

@George Brown College, waterfront campus. Photos: Christie Vuong/The Grid.

Aidan, 25, systems administrator

It’s a good thing. Isn’t that what  people go there for? It’s good to meet people with common interests.

Jessica, 27, salesperson

It’s good because there’s a sense of belonging, which is a part of the Needs Pyramid.

Sean, 26, musician

You’d have a conflict of interest issue. Just like how couples face issues every day. But if the characters can handle it, sure.

Tracy, 38, counsellor

I’m fine with it. Toronto’s a hard place to meet people, and if you meet good people, I say, “Why not?”

Steve, 21, mechanic

It’s a good thing because you get to meet new people. I can’t see why it’s bad.

Coralie, 24, student

It’s not a big deal. Everybody’s free to do what they want whether or not you’re on a team.

Mark, 45, art director

It’s not good for the team. It’s not being a team player. You’re supposed to be a team of 30, not a team of 2.

On his radio show last weekend, Rob Ford took time to freelance as a policy advisor for the Ontario NDP. Ford’s advice to party leader Andrea Horwath: “Just say ‘no’” to the minority Liberal government’s budget. “The taxpayers want an election.”

One such taxpayer was right beside the mayor—his brother Doug, who intends to run as a candidate for the provincial Conservatives. “There is a great team waiting to jump in office and straighten this ship around,” said Doug. Clearly, he was referring to his fellow Tim Hudak–led candidates. So Horwath may want to question whether the Ford brothers really have her best interests in mind.

But Doug’s immediate job prospects aren’t the only reason City Hall is obsessed with a provincial election right now. So much of current city business hinges on provincial legislation that’s either recently been passed or is expected to soon. There’s transit, of course: the LRT lines Metrolinx is getting ready to build; the all-day, two-way GO Train service into the 905 that the province just announced; the upcoming decision on new revenue tools for building more transit. There’s the downtown Toronto casino that the provincial lottery corporation has been pushing hard for, even as Premier Kathleen Wynne has thrown cold water on its more outlandish promises. And there’s everything else—from lowering sky-high car insurance rates to inching up the shamefully tiny amounts we parcel out for welfare.

The mayor disagrees with Wynne on most of those issues, so he’s eager to see Hudak take the reins and, as former Conservative Premier Mike Harris did a generation ago, lay waste to many of Toronto’s city-building works in progress. Naturally, then, he’d urge Horwath to defeat the budget.

Horwath’s own supporters at City Hall aren’t necessarily offering the same advice. Much of the progressive coalition of lefty and centrist councillors—who form the mayor’s main opposition—are convinced that the best chance Toronto has to succeed in the immediate future is to keep Wynne in office. For them, even many NDP members, staying united and consistent on a set of issues—transit building, securing transit funding, and preventing a downtown casino—is the most important job at hand, more so than jockeying for partisan advantage. This is especially true when polls show Hudak could walk away with an election.

It’s an interesting and delicate stage in a cycle that began with Harris and his Common Sense Revolution. Before him, the province contributed generously to funding Toronto’s priorities. Harris eliminated operating funding for transit and slashed provincial money for countless municipal programs. He even went so far as to fill in an under-construction subway line, and forced the amalgamation of the old Metro municipalities into one city, leading to more than a decade of chaos at City Hall.

Toronto has spent most of its time trying to dig itself out of those ruins, and begging the province to once again help fund vital services, especially transit. Finally, in recent years, the province has accepted the challenge, yet the possibility of a return to chaos looms over everything.

But not all of Ford’s opponents seem to see the stakes the same way. Karen Stintz and a band of councillors spent the early part of this week trying to revive the Scarborough subway debate, suggesting an LRT line the province has committed to building should be a subway instead.

Those councillors involved, I think, want to be seen by voters supporting subways in Scarborough, even as they expect their fellow councillors and the Premier to kill the notion dead. Whether intentionally or not, that plays right into Hudak’s hands: Transit building becomes a live issue for voters in Scarborough again just in time for him to campaign on it. And if he won, reopening the Metrolinx master plan to negotiate that subway would give him the opportunity to kill the other LRT projects we’ve already committed to, putting everything up in the air. Again.

At this particular moment, a lot of questions about Toronto’s future hang on the precarious situation at Queen’s Park—and for now Andrea Horwath gets to decide how that situation is resolved. As usual, the solution isn’t as simple as the mayor would have us—and her—believe.

City Hall is heading for a rerun of last year’s greatest hits. Let the sounds of “Call Me Maybe” whisk you back to spring 2012, where an uprising against the mayor over transit was brewing. Next week, TTC chair Karen Stintz is set to lead council in overturning the mayor’s will and, once again, we’re looking at a subway versus LRT battle in Scarborough. This time, of course, it’s Stintz and Scarborough granola cruncher Glenn De Baeremaeker demanding a subway extension to replace the planned LRT in the east end, which is slated to begin construction in 2015.

It’s too bad, really, because there are far more effective discussions we could have if what we want is kick-ass transit. But the flashback is most depressing because it seems that, once again, we’re caught up thinking about transit technology rather than figuring out what we need it to do in order to serve us well.

This actually happens with regularity—and not just during lengthy debates about big-ticket projects. But while we’ve been captivated by past showdowns between Ford and Stintz over future LRT and subway projects, we’ve missed out on how both of them have colluded in making the TTC crappier in the present, not to mention their plans for ongoing crapification.

How have they done that? They’ve reduced the frequency of service on surface bus and streetcar routes—something called “decreasing loading standards.” In practice, it means that if you depend on a bus or streetcar, you spend more time waiting for it at the stop, only to have to board a more crowded vehicle when it arrives. In 2011, Ford and Stintz worked together to scale back service on dozens of routes, and insisted on implementing those cuts even though city council gave the TTC $5 million to try to head them off.

This is among the worst things you could do to customers. In the ridership survey conducted by the TTC and released late last month, customer satisfaction was down from 77 per cent to 72 per cent between April and December of last year. The most common complaints by far were waiting times for buses and streetcars and crowding. “The biggest damage we did was the reduction of our loading standards,” TTC acting chief service office Chris Upfold told the Toronto Star. (During the David Miller years, the ridership growth strategy focused on running surface vehicles more often, and ridership grew by about 100 million trips.)

Yet the TTC intends to do more cutting in the near future. When the new double-sized streetcars we’ve been hearing about for years finally arrive, the plan is to run fewer of them to carry the same amount of people. By the TTC’s warped standards, that’s a win—same ridership served, fewer expensive vehicles (and unionized drivers) needed. But riders, again, will wait longer for a car to come, and it will have more people on it when it arrives.

Similarly, the Scarborough subway Stintz and De Baeremaeker propose would really shortchange the people of Toronto. Not only would it cost $500 million more to build than the LRT we’ve already planned, it would actually be worse. The subway line would be 20 per cent shorter and have half as many stops. The LRT, on the other hand, would offer a stop within walking distance of twice as many people.

Building new transit is important, but we shouldn’t let our awe over big construction projects and passion for debating which toys we want obscure the goal here. To determine the best technology, we need to know what we want it to do—at the top of that list is making transit a great option for as many people as possible. That means it should come frequently, be comfortable to ride, and get passengers where they are going as quickly as possible. Whether we do that with a subway, LRT, streetcar, or bus is a secondary question, even if it’s all we ever seem to talk about. As Rob Ford might put it, we’ve got the whole thing ass-backwards.

Ontario’s new premier, Kathleen Wynne, was doing a bit of a media blitz on transit last week, so I went up to Queen’s Park to chat with her for a few minutes about City Hall’s favourite subject. Her key message, delivered the day before in a talk at the CivicAction Alliance forum and summarized again for me, was like music to a long-suffering bus rider’s ears.

“The priority is helping people to move around the city better, more quickly, and dealing with the issues around lost productivity because of congestion,” she says. “We have not built transit seriously for a generation, probably two, and so we’ve never decided as a society to have an ongoing stream of revenue dedicated to transit. And I think we’ve demonstrated over the past two generations that we’re not going to build transit if we don’t have that revenue stream.” And, yes, she is in favour of such a stream. Amen.

Wynne is trying to help lead a growing parade here. The Toronto Region Board of Trade has come out in favour of big new investments in transit. Toronto City Council will likely continue debating the idea of using new sales taxes, gas taxes, parking fees, and development charges to build it. The provincial agency in charge of regional transit, Metrolinx, will be reporting on its own new proposed revenue sources in June. And federal NDP MP—and possible Toronto mayoral election frontrunner—Olivia Chow published an op-ed this week in the Star on the importance of a new “dedicated” stream of money for transit building.

As heartening as it is to see everyone in agreement, this fixation on a specific new transit-building tax is a little odd. That’s not typically how governments fund things: We have existing income, sales, and property taxes, after all, that provide a big pool of revenue. If the government wants to splurge on transit, they could just do so. And if they need more money for such projects, they can just raise existing taxes.

“New tools” and “a dedicated stream” are merely psychological gimmicks meant to make it look like people are chipping in for something specific. I asked Wynne—who sort of agreed it’s a gimmick (her word is “tactic”) meant to make higher taxes tolerable. “We have to wrap our minds around this,” she says. “[I agree] that the tenor of the times demands that people want to see where their money is going to go. People demand to know that if they’re putting an extra dollar somewhere, that it’s actually going to build [something].”

If there’s a general perception that the government wastes the taxes it collects—and in Ontario, that perception most definitely exists—then we can magically create new kinds of taxes that can’t be wasted (in theory, anyway). It’s an odd message, but its growing popularity suggests it might work. In this case, Wynne insists that people will see that money spent on transit. “We need a much clearer tracker of where the dollars go, of how much is raised through these levies or tolls or whatever it’s going to be, and how that gets applied to the projects that we need.”

The only hitch is that this plan could very quickly become an election issue for Wynne’s minority government. NDP leader Andrea Horwath has different ideas about where money should come from—she suggests corporate taxes for a start—and Conservative leader Tim Hudak wants funding to come from making government more efficient. If they vote against her, we could be back to square one. And of course, Mayor Rob Ford is set to make opposing new taxes for transit a plank in his platform next year. The public will likely get to vote on the question one way or the other soon enough.

So let’s not add ticker tape to the transit parade yet. We’ll be talking about this for some time to come. And if we ever get to the end of that exhausting conversation, we’ll have to start figuring out how to fund the operating expenses of our shiny new transit system. It’s a good thing we’ve decided this is our favourite subject, because all this talk is just the beginning.

There was some time to kill in Ottawa on Sunday, April 14 before the Liberal Leadership results-announcement meeting at the Westin hotel on Sussex Drive, so I took a long wander down the street to check out Justin Trudeau’s childhood home, at number 24. After Justin was born on Christmas Day in 1971, he came home from the hospital to live here. He was the first child to ever live in the place. A stranger happening by can’t get all that close to it, to tell you the truth, what with the iron gates and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police SUV blocking the entrance to the driveway. But it looks like a nice enough place, where a father might teach his son, say, the finer points of sliding down bannisters and cannonballing into pools, or receiving foreign heads of state to discuss trade or gathering provincial first ministers to hammer out a deal to patriate the constitution.

There’s a nice view out over the Ottawa River, although I admit the place seems a bit isolated—I wonder if the neighbours at the French Embassy next door or the South African High Commission across the street would make good playmates, maybe come out for a few hours of road hockey after school. Whatever the case, Justin must have liked growing up there. As I’m sure you know, he’s trying to move back into that old house with his own wife and young children.

Back up at the Westin, there are quite a lot of other people gathering to help him complete that sentimental journey to a place where memories of what was coexist with hopes for what is to come. And as I enter, they convey this enthusiasm through a display of pure noisy exuberance at the top of an escalator. This is a thing, you realize after you go to a few of these types of events. There’s always a series of escalators you need to take to get to where you going and, whenever you step off of one, you’ll find a crowd of people waving signs and chanting as if their candidate was about to begin a late-game touchdown drive. In this case, they are wearing red and black, mostly—shirts and buttons that say “justin TRUDEAU”—and rattling cowbells and shouting, “Just-in Time! Just-in Time.” Though by now all the votes have already been cast and the crowd is assembling purely for the formality of learning the results—the only suspense here is the size of Justin’s margin of victory—there is a whole room just off to one side dedicated to the propagation of this display of loud hype.

A guy in his early twenties named Jason in a plaid shirt is thumping some thundersticks and chanting away. He’s been volunteering for the campaign since November 2012, working the phones and doing whatever else needed doing—in fact, he was at home in Toronto until 8 p.m. the night before, calling likely voters to encourage them to cast their ballots for Justin, then hopped a midnight Greyhound to be here to enjoy the results of his hard work. I ask, why? “I’ve heard him speak in person—he has a positive vision of Canada, much better than the current one. He has a strong environmental message, he’s youthful—these are important things for the future.” I ask him what about Justin makes people believe that these things are possible—that he can deliver on this positive vision, deliver voters to the party, deliver great things for Canada. “That’s a hard question. I don’t know, exactly. When you listen to him speak, there’s just something about him…”

Kelsey Johnson, a third year poli-sci student at McMaster is standing nearby, looking sort of like an old-fashioned cigarette girl with wavy hair with a feather in it, holding a box of Justin buttons in front of her. She thinks she has an answer to the question of his appeal—the reason she’s been motivated to work for the campaign for a couple months. “He’s just so passionate about what he does. He has all the components of a great leader.” And what are those components? “He’s compassionate, he has great leadership ability, he believes everything he says and we stand behind him 100 per cent.”

A few feet away, a red-shirted Ryan Barber from Toronto cottage country—Simcoe North—is presiding over a box of thundersticks and, for my money, diagnosing the cause of Justin Fever a little more clearly than many others. “I got onboard the campaign on day one and ended up being the coordinator for my riding,” he says. A teacher, like Justin, Barber is a relative veteran in this crowd at age 32. “I haven’t seen people this excited about politics in over a decade. Justin has natural charisma, he has substance and good ideas, and he gets people excited and makes you believe.” Barber says he’s been to small towns where it’s hard to draw a dozen people out to meet any kind of candidate—when you bring Trudeau to the local meeting hall, hundreds turn out to meet him. “If Justin walks in, it’s almost electric. It’s a unique gift,” he says. “You’re born with it.”

And there we are again, in this crowd chanting their inane chants and thumping their goddamn thundersticks and clanging those cowbells into the hopeful future, returning to the gifts that accompanied Trudeau’s birth. You cannot escape it. But then the circumstances at the time of his birth are not something most Liberals care to escape. Which is kind of the point.

Trudeau’s biographer John English noted John Ralston Saul’s observation that Canadians all seemed to feel like they had a special bond with Pierre Trudeau, “but ‘much of that myth of knowing has to do with how we see ourselves through the mirror of his long years in power.’” That mirror told Liberals a story they liked.

A National Archives photo of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and Justin Trudeau, as featured in the elder Trudeau’s Memoirs.

It’s not entirely about this father, of course. But his father is a big and inseparable part of the story—as National Post comedian-in-residence Steve Murray pointed out on Twitter, we like stories, and we know how this one starts. And there are too many undeniable comparisons to his father to ignore: Pierre Trudeau represented a generational change for the party and the country (leaving old hands Paul Martin Sr. and Robert Stanfield looking like men stuck in a previous era). Pierre Trudeau ran a purposely vague leadership campaign, based on a few guiding principles, to leave him a lot of room to wiggle when it came to tailoring an electoral platform. Pierre Trudeau was dismissed as a dilettante, an inexperienced lightweight, just a few years in Parliament, who had never had his own home before he moved into 24 Sussex. People thought he was younger than he was, and his youthfulness and good looks were part of his appeal. He was thought then—and remains thought of now—as different from other politicians. Marshall McLuhan thought Pierre Trudeau represented a new kind of politician for a new age of media. And just as Pierre was custom-built for TV, Justin seems todominate the emergent social-media sphere.

There are differences, of course—Lysiane Gangon says he is his mother’s son more than his father’s, and she may be right. Justin doesn’t display the fierce intellect his father did, the possibly arrogant unconcern for the masses, the instinct for the jugular in debates. “Reason over passion” was Pierre’s motto—it was emblazoned on a quilt that hung at 24 Sussex—even if his own appeal was rooted to a large extent in the passions he aroused in people. Justin’s candidacy has seemed rooted in a different kind of unofficial motto: Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît pas. Justin cares for The People, he feels bonded to them by his birth and entire life up to this point, he feels obligated to serve them, and he is willing to turn his platform’s planks over to their deliberations and desires. For all his talk of the principle of placing evidence over ideology, neither of those things makes the case for his candidacy. Here, passion provides its own reason: his ability to inspire people, to make them believe, this “unique gift” he has been “born with”—these are the reasons the Liberal party is willing to turn the keys to the bus over to him. You can hire advisors to build good policy, and to teach it to a leader; you can recruit very experienced candidates to surround a leader. You cannot teach an experienced or intellectually towering leader to have magnetic appeal, as Stephan Dion and Michael Ignatieff vividly demonstrated.

And so far, Justin has demonstrated that the elusive gift is not a matter of pure media speculation. As the party faithful gather in Ottawa, Trudeau’s campaign has raised twice as much money than all the other candidates combined—his campaign will claim to have raised more than $2 million (more than four times what Thomas Mulcair raised in his winning NDP leadership bid last year), from more individual donors. (Trudeau found more than three times as many donors than Michael Ignatieff did.) His campaign claims 12,000 active volunteers, which is more people than will even vote for any of the other candidates. He has over 210,000 Twitter followers. And largely because of his presence in the race, more than 100,000 people will vote to decide who should lead the third party in Parliament. That kind of leadership campaign becomes an argument in itself.

Indeed, when Barack Obama first ran for president, the campaign organization he built to mobilize people, solicit donations, and inspire hope was by far his greatest claim to executive experience and managerial competence. And that was no small claim—running a national organization well, one able to persuade people to support political positions and rally behind them, is actually a pretty good test of many of the skills needed to run a government effectively. Not all of the skills, but some of them.

There’s another parallel, however, that offers a less rosy conclusion. When Stockwell Day cruised to the leadership of the Canadian Alliance in 2000, the race drew even more voters than this contest did (even though the Liberals in Ottawa will claim otherwise from the stage). The provincial cabinet minister with the fresh face inspired thoughts of generational change, did political image-making differently, and ran a very successful campaign juggernaut. And we know how that worked out in the larger electoral scheme of things.

Next page:  The Justin effect and the Obama influence

If you follow City Hall even a little bit, you probably recognize Jennifer Keesmaat by now. Eight months into her job as Toronto’s chief planner, she’s the closest thing the city bureaucracy has to a rock star. Since she started last September, Keesmaat’s blonde, angled bob seems to have appeared in pretty much every publication in the city, from the op-ed page of The Globe and Mail to Corey Mintz’s Star food column to Toronto Life. Her TEDx talk, “Walk to School”—about the importance of experiencing your neighbourhood on foot—has been passed around on social media. This spring, she led a travelling transit-funding consultation road show called “Feeling Congested?” and had to set up an overflow room at City Hall to handle the crowds attending her Chief Planner Roundtable discussion/salon. She blogs, she tweets, she attracts attention. When New York–based website UBM’s Future Cities recently placed urban planning at the top of their list of cool municipal jobs, the accompanying profile was of Keesmaat.

“She’s certainly more outspoken than any other bureaucrat in Toronto on citywide issues,” says councillor Karen Stintz, who represents the area near Yonge and Eglinton and is chair of the TTC.

Keesmaat’s immediate predecessors in the job, Gary Wright and Ted Tyndorf, toiled in relative obscurity, working behind the scenes and preparing reports to city council. Keesmaat, by contrast, almost appears to be campaigning, acting in many ways more like a politician than a staffer. Rather than working anonymously and letting the elected officials debate the ideas, Keesmaat has been taking her vision of the city directly to the public, as if to build political support before her ideas ever land on councillors’ desks.

That approach hasn’t always endeared her to Toronto’s actual politicians, who are used to soaking up the headlines while the planner follows their instructions. “It’s almost as if it’s a branding exercise right now,” says leftist councillor Shelley Carroll. While Keesmaat is on the front page of every newspaper, Carroll observes, the chief planner hasn’t been in councillors’ offices to talk about ward-specific issues. “It’s a departure from the way things were in the past, and council can get pretty cranky about that.”

What’s at stake in Keesmaat’s work is nothing less than the way Toronto will look and function in the future. She heads up the department of urban planners, who are tasked with figuring out how the city should be built. Her purview includes the appropriate height of buildings, the ratio of residences to businesses in neighbourhoods, and transportation—trying to achieve the proper mix of public transit, bike paths, roads, and sidewalks. Keesmaat reports to deputy city manager John Livey, and acts on council’s instructions; through Livey, she gives advice about planning to council. The councillors ultimately have the power to make Toronto’s final planning decisions, but Keesmaat relentlessly focuses on the public, to whom city council itself ultimately reports.

If Keesmaat’s high profile is a surprise in itself, it’s more surprising still because her vision for the city is so often at odds with that of the mayor. Somehow, Rob Ford’s City Hall recruited an outsider to shake up the planning department. She’s the first woman to hold the job, and an unapologetic advocate of Jane Jacobs–style urbanism—pedestrianism, higher taxes, mass transit, and cycling. Keesmaat says she has a few priorities, including overhauling the planning process, which is still based on making decisions on a case-by-case basis in reaction to developers’ applications. She wants to articulate planning visions for the city and for individual neighbourhoods, which would then allow developers to more easily get permits that conform to the vision. Keesmaat also wants to take a close look at how condo neighbourhoods are developing. She isn’t wild about spending more money on car infrastructure, and has suggested that people need to be willing to pay more to build additional transit.

Her opinions haven’t always just put her in opposition to the mayor, though. Keesmaat caused a minor controversy when a tweet she posted during a council-meeting lunch break seemed a tad too honest: “Now that half of council is considering running for mayor, the speeches at council are…insufferable. Did I say that out loud?”

Paul Bedford, a former chief city planner, thinks the waves she’s making are positive. “A fresh perspective, breath of fresh air—all those different analogies can be made. But I think the fact is, she brings a totally different perspective from the outside, and I think that can only be healthy,” he says. “She’s only been in the job eight months and she’s established an ongoing dialogue [with citizens], which is critical. Because the city is ongoing, it’s constantly evolving, it’s exciting.”

On a grey, windy day in April, Keesmaat walks into a café at Bay and Lakeshore in a bright pink top and heels, accessorized by a wrist brace to heal a fracture (a bike accident, of all things, she says). At a glance, she lives up to her billing as the opposite of stodgy bureaucracy. This location is a nexus for many of the city’s planning challenges. Outside the window, you can see the hulking (and deteriorating) concrete columns of the Gardiner Expressway and, beyond them, the multiplying glass condo towers of CityPlace. The Metrolinx office, where regional-transit projects are overseen, is just a block away. There’s the constantly evolving waterfront just to the south, and the massive redevelopment of Union Station—which Keesmaat helped plan while working in the private sector—just to the north.

Sitting in a leather chair and sipping tea, Keesmaat describes the initial questions she looked at when deciding to get into the profession: “Why is it that we know that if we plan a certain way it will result in certain problems, and yet we do it anyway?” That real-life gap between the best theoretical way to build a city and the way it’s actually built through political decisions ultimately led her to focus on the decision-making process in her work—specifically, how planners can establish a two-way relationship with the community and “advocate and advance ideas” in a way that will get politicians to adopt them and residents to embrace them. “While people like to blame planners, we often forget they are immersed in a system where they often have very little power,” she says.

Born in Hamilton, Keesmaat studied philosophy and English at Western University and had originally planned to attend law school. Fresh out of college, newly married, and “young and footloose,” she moved to Vancouver and became interested in urban affairs. She co-founded a charity for at-risk kids called All-A-Board Youth Ventures; her husband ran it for 13 years.

After a friend persuaded her to read Jane Jacobs’s urbanist bible The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she was hooked. She and her husband, Tom Freeman, moved in with his parents in Etobicoke while she studied urban planning at York University in the 1990s. (At the same time she worked for councillor Joe Mihevc.) In 2004, she co-founded her own consulting firm, the Office for Urbanism. She moved her family to Roncesvalles Village, then to Yonge and Eglinton, where the 42-year-old lives now with her husband and two kids. In private practice she remained focused on process—talking with local residents and getting them involved in the planning so that the results both met their needs and received their support.

Keesmaat called her plan for downtown Regina, “Walk to Work.” “In downtown Regina the notion of walking to work is a radical idea,” she says, “because it’s a fundamentally suburban municipality. The only way walking to work is going to work in downtown Regina is if you urbanize and densify it.” At the end of the process, she says, residents were on board with an approved downtown project that will expand parks, change traffic systems to make cycling and walking around easier, and build new residences.

She’s seen similar results in Halifax, Moncton, Fredericton, and Winnipeg, as people and their politicians embrace the principles of good planning and urbanism after a process in which they are involved.

Antonio Gómez-Palacio was one of the co-founders of the Office for Urbanism, and continued to work with Keesmaat after it merged with the architecture and urban-planning firm Dialog. “I’ve seen it happen for 20 years: Everything seems to be stuck, and then, trusting the process and the people you’re engaging, you get unstuck,” he says. “[Keesmaat] definitely has the savvy and the tools to be able to work through things. That’s part of the freshness she brings.”

When Gary Wright retired as Toronto’s chief planner in March 2012, Keesmaat wasn’t looking for a new gig. As the position stayed vacant into May and June, speculation around City Hall suggested it was difficult to find a qualified candidate to take the job.

Keesmaat says when she was contacted, she initially told the recruiter she was the wrong person. “I’m not a bureaucrat, first of all,” she says. Her new salary represented a pay cut of around 40 per cent, and she’d have to leave a private firm that had gained new prominence, handing off an exciting new project in Memphis she describes as a combination of the Brick Works and the Distillery District. But after reflecting on the public-service mission at the root of her profession, and looking at a city that was growing faster than almost any other in the world, the opportunity to help shape Toronto—to plan what could be one of the world’s great cities at a pivotal time—was too attractive to pass up. “I [told the recruiter], ‘I think it’s the role of the chief planner to be very vocal and to facilitate a conversation on urbanism,’ and I said, ‘I’m not sure that’s what the city’s looking for.’ And they called me back and said, ‘Actually, we’re sort of really interested in talking to you.…’ Then my imagination began to run wild, and I got really excited about what might be possible.”

Today in Toronto, we’re used to City Hall bureaucrats being relatively anonymous. But it wasn’t always so. Some of the great city builders of the 20th century were civil servants. The most famous of these was New York City parks commissioner Robert Moses. In Toronto, we had works commissioner R.C. Harris from 1912 until 1945, who built our sidewalks and sewer system, and created the precursor to the TTC. His name is on the palatial water treatment plant in the Beach, a monument to the expansive infrastructure whose construction he oversaw. His most famous triumph was probably the Bloor Viaduct. He oversaw the design of the steel-girder construction and insisted on roughing in a subway corridor underneath it, even though Toronto wouldn’t have a subway until decades after it was finished. Harris faced resistance from the politicians of the day, who often thought his projects were unnecessary and too expensive. But he was a public figure in his own right, attending residents’ meetings and talking regularly to the press. He didn’t depend on mayors and councillors to run with his vision.

I ask Keesmaat about the Harris model of bureaucrat-as-visionary—the civil servant who builds a political base of their own. “It’s about building constituencies for ideas. That’s exactly my planning approach. What’s important about R.C. Harris—who’s a really inspiring figure for me—is everything he achieved. He worked really hard, and there was a lot of fighting, a lot of back and forth,” she says. “We shouldn’t be surprised that we need to have these conversations, and we shouldn’t be surprised that it’s sometimes challenging and we have differences we need to negotiate. We shouldn’t be overwhelmed by that—I think we should embrace that.”

Even with that historical precedent, Karen Stintz says the very public role Keesmaat has embraced is a change from recent City Hall practice. “I do see Jennifer Keesmaat pushing the boundary of a typical bureaucratic role into the areas that have perhaps been more the purview of politicians. But, given that the topics she’s talking about have citywide impact, it’s perfectly appropriate that she would be advancing some of these discussions.”

Former chief planner Paul Bedford agrees. “Planning is political. Don’t ever pretend it isn’t,” he says. “For anything to happen, a chief planner needs to have political support. You have to get a majority vote at council.”

Keesmaat is careful to say that she respects and defers to the role of elected representatives and is not trying to supplant their role—and to point out that she’s learning as she goes along. Councillor Carroll thinks part of the learning might involve balancing her public advocacy and appearances with direct council relations, for the sake of effectiveness if nothing else: “You have to reach out.”

Carroll has been disappointed by the level of personal attention the issues in her North York ward have received from Keesmaat. Still, she sees the upside of the chief planner’s approach. Carroll notes that constituents are now calling her about urban-planning–related articles they’ve read in the paper—not a subject in which they’ve previously shown much interest. “That’s not so bad,” she says. “[Keesmaat's] branding exercise has generated a lot of conversation.”

Keesmaat admits she’s still figuring out how to balance the various demands of the job. (“The learning curve is huge in every regard, and there’s no guidebook.”) Meeting with councillors and working well with them is her top priority. “The extent to which councillors are my colleagues will determine our success, and the success of our city.”

Among the things it was hard to appreciate before she took the job was the sheer magnitude of the city. She’d hoped, in her first months, to go on a tour of each ward with every local councillor, only to find that the number of fixed meetings in a month, plus the number of wards, made this pure fantasy. She’ll soon be hiring a “stakeholder engagement specialist” to work in her office, adding to the more than 20 new staff she’s already added to the department. “The first job of that new person will be to come up with a council engagement strategy.”

I mention that we commemorate city builders by naming things after them—Fred Gardiner has an expressway, R.C. Harris has that big waterworks. If she were to imagine the city 50 years from now, after her contribution is clear, what would she like to see named after her?

She laughs, and tries to dodge the question. She says she doesn’t spend time thinking about how she’ll be memorialized, noting that she’s too focused on keeping up with the demands of the job itself. Still, I press Keesmaat to think about what she’d like named after her. Finally, she takes a stab. “As we continue to evolve, inevitably we’ll have pedestrian-only streets.” She says this will necessarily be a long process. Often, enthusiastic politicians and residents want to pedestrianize a street and she tells them they can’t just do that—the street will be empty if you remove the cars. You need to build the landscape around the street, the residential density, the business mix, the streetscape, so the neighbourhood evolves into a place where walking becomes the best way to get around. “It would be pretty cool to have a street that was transformed like that named after me.”

Next page: City staffers who made their mark on Toronto

At the Westin Hotel in Ottawa on Sunday, twentysomething Torontonian Jason was standing at the top of an escalator, thumping together “Justin Trudeau” thundersticks as part of a glee squad for the Liberal leadership event. He’d been at home in Toronto until 8 p.m. the night before, working the phones to get people to vote for Trudeau, then hopped a midnight Greyhound bus to be here to see the results of his work.

During a break in Jason’s chanting—“Just-in Time! Just-in Time!”—I asked him what it was about Trudeau that excited him. “I’ve heard him speak in person; he has a positive vision for Canada, better than the current one,” he said, along with mentioning Trudeau’s ability to get youth excited and his positivity. But, I asked, what exactly is it about Justin that makes people believe he can accomplish those relatively common political goals? “It’s hard to put your finger on. But when you see him in person….”

Kelsey Johnson, a student from Hamilton who was handing out Trudeau buttons, had a similar reply: “He’s just so passionate about what he does,” she said. “He believes everything he says and we stand behind him 100 per cent.” Ryan Barber, a 32-year-old teacher from Ontario cottage country said he’s never seen a phenomenon like Justin’s “natural charisma” in his 10 years working for the party. “He gets you excited, he makes people believe. When Justin walks into the room, it’s almost electric.”

Justin’s father, long-serving prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, had a motto: “Reason over passion.” But as his son rises to lead the Liberal party, the calculation seems to be that passion will provide its own reasons. For example, despite what observers fairly call a thin political resumé, during the leadership race, the younger Trudeau recruited more than 100,000 supporters, drew more than $1 million in donations from more than 7,000 donors, mobilized 12,000 volunteers, and crushed his opponents by winning 80 per cent support on the first ballot. In politics, a campaign like that becomes a big resumé line in itself.

We all have our guesses at the reasons for his success: nostalgia for his father, the familiarity of having watched him grow up, his relative youth, his hair. But there is no arguing that the success is there. Polls show that 75 per cent of Canadian voters find Justin “likable.” And for all the questions about substance that have trailed his campaign, this is one of the most significant facts about him: Voters like the guy, and many of them identify with him.

That is, in fact, among the most valuable qualities a candidate can have—it provides a lens through which voters process all the substantial policy stuff. There’s a long line of politicians—Jack Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Jack Layton, Barack Obama—for whom success stemmed from a personal connection with voters. The impressiveness of their policy proposals, varied as it may have been, was secondary to the belief and passion voters had for them as people.

You can see it here in Toronto, where 30 per cent of voters appear immovably attached to Rob Ford, no matter what scandal or policy proposal may be up for debate. Those voters decided at some point that they identified with him personally, faults and all—that he was their kind of guy. Every bit of factual debate and reasoned policy analysis is secondary to that connection. And any attack on Ford filters down on a personal level as an attack on the voters’ character judgment.

Those of us who argue about politics a lot care fundamentally about facts, analysis, reason, and logic. They are the things that will determine how policies work, or don’t, in the real world—and Justin Trudeau talks the same game with his oft-repeated devotion to “evidence based policy.” But his success so far points to another fundamental fact of politics: Without the elusive something that makes voters fall in love with a candidate, there is often no way to implement the policies. It’s a great quality to have in a candidate, and a frustrating one to face in an opponent. Those who want to beat Justin in 2015, or those closer to home looking to unseat Rob Ford in 2014, shouldn’t underestimate the substantial impact of that seemingly insubstantial trait.