Last week, municipal-politics news in Toronto was dominated by a series of grandstanding gestures. After his recent success proposing a ban on grocery-store plastic bags, Councillor David Shiner was emboldened to suggest a ban on new building development. Yet another Olympic bid was being bandied about, and Councillor Adam Vaughan was calling for an almost purely symbolic ban on guns.
Councillor Doug Ford also had a curious week: He called the mayor’s wife a “Polack” (and apologized for it), then expressed his desire to abandon City Hall and run for a seat at Queen’s Park. And who can blame him? When everyone in the clamshell is obsessed with this kind of free-associating about quixotic notions, it’s hard to fault the city’s Brother-in-Chief for wanting to escape to the more placid setting of the Legislature.
Of course, this wish to disappear probably has something to do with the fact that Doug’s brother, Mayor Rob Ford, has lost all semblance of control over the city’s agenda. A year ago, the brothers Ford were running a tight, autocratic ship, able to kill bridges, erase bike lanes, and shrink programs and revenues at will. The complaint back then was that Ford was intimidating a slate of councillors into acting as his minions. It’s possible to draw a pretty straight line from that approach to the series of broken relationships and council rebellions that have laid the mayor low. He squeezed the mantle of authority so hard he broke it.
So far this year, Ford hasn’t won a single significant vote at city council: His budget was rewritten, his housing and transit plans overturned, his appointed transit commission turfed. This month, he hit a new low: His attempt to make those plastic bags free backfired, and after the bags were banned altogether, we were treated to the spectacle of Ford being overruled by his own executive committee.
Ford remains the mayor, but he has essentially (if not formally) been relieved by council of the most important element of that job: leading city council and setting the city’s agenda. In his place, an ad hoc committee of councillors coalesces issue-by-issue behind various leaders—a shifting cast takes turns in the spotlight on any given issue.
This was fine, and healthy even, when the big, important issues had been defined by the guy who was supposed to be leading. Ford delivered a bad waterfront plan to council and Jaye Robinson gently guided him towards consensus; Ford was running roughshod over community housing, and Ana Bailão persuaded him to let her study the issue before he rushed into a hostile opposition; Ford brought a needlessly painful budget to council and Josh Colle led a team to edit it; Ford was turning the transit file into a disaster area and Karen Stintz pushed him out of the way.
But we’ve just about run out of the big-ticket items Ford has placed on council’s agenda. Over the past few weeks, the mayor has started laying out a plan—talking about land transfer taxes and an economic strategy—for the next two years. Those nods in the direction of leadership have few details attached to them; they are notions more than proposals and, given the current state of his relationship with council, there’s no reason to think anything he says will necessarily be adopted, embraced, or even seriously considered by them. In the absence of defining issues placed on the agenda by the alleged leader, the floor has been open to any councillor who has a hobbyhorse and a desire for the spotlight.
This is a problem, because the city does have large issues that require focus—the increasing segregation of neighbourhoods by income (and some major safety issues resulting from it), the soundness of our new condo buildings, the need for much more regional transit investment and the quest to find a source of revenue to fund it. Just for starters.
In this leadership vacuum, the challenge for every member of council is to find a way to reach consensus on what the key issues for debate should be, and then to work to find solutions acceptable to a majority of them for each. If the mayor wants to become relevant again, he might start by trying to suggest priorities for discussion among councillors, and asking for their help in finding solutions, rather than seeking a thumbs-up or thumbs-down on some ready-made plan. Someone needs to start playing that role, or the spring silly season we’ve been watching could stretch out for a long, long time.
