Among those scrambling was Ford’s Minister of Municipal Affairs, Steve Clark, who may have felt rather like Trump’s cabinet ministers in search of an explanation for the unexplainable. The sudden cancellation of direct election of the regional chairs was nothing but a petulant Ford targeting former Liberal cabinet minister Steven Del Duca, running for chair of York Region, and ousted Conservative Party leader Patrick Brown, running for chair in Peel – and extending the direct election cancellation to Niagara and Muskoka did nothing to hide that reality. Nor did Steve Clark’s explanation help much. He was reduced to offering that the province was “taking a pause” with respect to the governing arrangements in York, Peel, Niagara, and Muskoka, but that “the more mature (emphasis added] regional governments that were in place in Durham, Halton, and Waterloo” would not be affected by this change. Since York, Niagara, and Muskoka were established before Durham, Halton, and Waterloo, one wonders why they failed to mature and on what basis this has been determined. Even more mysterious is what happened in the side-by-side regional governments of Peel and Halton (both created January 1, 1974) that caused Halton to mature while Peel did not.
Ford is not much more persuasive in justifying his decimation of Toronto City Council. His primary rationale appeared to be the substantial savings that would result – some $25 million over four years. The promised savings are miniscule, representing 0.6% of Toronto’s annual budget of over $11 billion. To put this in perspective, someone making $100,000 would have $60 in savings. But the savings will not materialize anyway. Toronto councillors will find themselves trying to represent twice as many citizens (on average) and will require more support staff to keep up with their workload, especially in handling queries and concerns from their constituents.
While Ford’s radical and ill-considered initiative will not save money it will erode municipal democracy. To that extent he is following in the footsteps of former Conservative Premier Mike Harris, who oversaw the forced amalgamation of hundreds of Ontario municipalities, announcing each one with a press release which proclaimed how many fewer municipal councillors there would be as a result – as if this reduction was a self-evident boon to mankind. It was also Harris who created the situation which necessitates the large municipal council on which Ford is waging war. He did so by forcing the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto and its six lower tier municipalities to combine in the megacity of Toronto 20 years ago.
There was fierce opposition to the Harris amalgamation, in part because a number of studies, including a Greater Toronto Area Task Force led by Anne Golden and a Who Does What panel chaired by David Crombie, had documented the need for a new governing body covering the broader Greater Toronto area to address the increasing overspill of population beyond the boundaries of Toronto. In a foolish move, Harris instead forced the creation of a single municipality of Toronto that was both too big and too small. It was too big to represent the almost 2.4 million population within its borders and also too small to address the broader issues affecting the Greater Toronto area. The new city began with a council of 57 members elected by ward, subsequently reduced to 44, and then about to expand to 47 to serve an increasingly diverse population now over 2.7 million – until the sudden announcement from Ford.
A Replay of the Anti-Downtown Bias
One explanation for the amalgamation of 1998 was that Harris Government expected that merging the old City of Toronto into a larger municipality where its elected representatives would be outnumbered by members from the suburbs would curtail what the Conservatives saw as the free spending ways of the old city. That ideological motivation appears again to be at work, with the surprise announcement by Ford seen as a way of shifting the balance of power to the suburbs. Had Toronto’s council expanded to 47, as planned, the additional seats would have been downtown and designed to correct its under-representation on council. Once again, the motivation appears to be putting the downtown in its place.
Protecting the Political Role of Municipal Government
I am always amazed and saddened when a reduction in the number of politicians is touted as a positive gain for society. Even those very critical of the way in which Ford is making this change tend to assume that a smaller council would be more efficient. With that line of reasoning a council of one would be ideal, removing all bickering and division. But municipal councils don’t exist only to provide services and programs efficiently. They also have a political role; they provide local citizens with the opportunity to choose representatives who will make decisions which reflect, or at least respond to, the views and concerns of those local citizens.
If Toronto City Council is too large that is because a previous Conservative Premier created too large a municipality for it to govern. That municipality has grown increasingly large and ethnically diverse, requiring more politicians – not fewer – to provide adequate representation. I would be the first to agree that Toronto city council members have often seemed to bumble and stumble, avoiding or reversing decisions, and I have been especially critical of their unwillingness to raise the property tax (the lowest throughout the GTA) to fund needed services instead of crying for financial help from the province and the federal level. But over the decades I have also seen small councils also fail to address issues in a concerted fashion; fewer politicians is no guarantee of wiser decision making. We need to remember that however disappointing and annoying they may be, elected politicians are all that we have in a democracy “a poor thing, but our own.”