Mark Towhey once told Maclean’s magazine an anecdote about how his former boss, the late Toronto mayor Rob Ford, approached the job: “He’d been working as the mayor’s chief for several months,” the 2013 magazine story said, “and was frustrated by his inability to divert Ford’s attention from the dozens of phone messages that pour into the mayor’s office each day. ‘All he wants to know is whether a phone call got returned,’ recalls Towhey, ‘and I’m saying, “Rob, we’ve got more important things.”’ But Towhey had hardly finished his sentence when Ford blew his stack. ‘This is a woman who has no water in her house!’ he shouted. ‘There’s nothing more important! Nothing!’”
It’s a lesson, it seems to me, his big brother, Premier Doug Ford, seems to have forgotten in 2018. Doug’s plan to slash the size of council - hastily implemented in the middle of an election campaign, seemingly with no planning or thought at all - has the effect of ignoring the idea that councillors should personally serve and represent their constituents.
As a city councillor, Rob famously walked his talk on this subject. In 2006, I rode along with him in his minivan while he went from house to apartment to house in his ward, hearing about roach infestations and rents being too high and backyard neighbour fence disputes and complaints about traffic safety or the lack of Urdu books at the local library.
“You see, what I do, I go from house to house. Some people say it’s crazy, but I believe, you know, they’re the bosses,” he told me.
“I love my constituents.”
If our former mayor was famous for taking it to extreme lengths – he sometimes projected the image that he’d come and plunge your toilet or cook you dinner if you asked - he wasn’t wrong that directly serving and representing constituents is a key part of a city councillor’s job.
In our current system, they are by design a main troubleshooting point-of-contact for residents, and the main advocates in the city’s processes.
They request crossing guards or negotiate with developers or mediate requests to cut down trees. It is as big a part of their jobs - or bigger, for many of them - as considering budgets or making transit decisions.
And that seems to be something - something important - that is ignored in all the talk about whether a smaller city council will make more “efficient” decisions or get things done faster. It’s especially important given that many people - including, apparently, Mayor John Tory - seem to agree a smaller council with fewer politicians is a good idea, even if they object to the way the premier is implementing his version of that plan.
There’s no doubt a smaller council could operate more quickly: fewer people means fewer disagreements and fewer speeches. The quickest and most efficient decision-making body would consist of a single person just bellowing orders. But that isn’t how our system is supposed to work, for good reason, and making big decisions quickly and with minimal debate isn’t the only, or even the main job of a city councillor.
I have mentioned it before, and so have our Star fact-checking explainers, but I think it bears repeating that almost every example advocates of a smaller council use to justify the decision point to is actually an example of a much larger elected government than Toronto’s. London, Los Angeles and New York have smaller city councils proportionate to their population, we’re told. But all three of those cities have another entire level of elected government operating under that city council: neighbourhood councils, borough councils, community boards. Whatever they are called, in each case they consist of hundreds or thousands of additional politicians elected to run those cities.
In those places, clearly, the logic is that big citywide decisions about highways and transit and sometimes policing should be made by a manageable-sized group of people led by the mayor. But in those places, there’s also a recognition that small local concerns need to be dealt with in detail by local groups accountable directly to their neighbours.
That may, in fact, be a better system of local government than the one we have, but it is not smaller than ours. It is actually much larger. And it is not what has been proposed in Toronto.
Vancouver, another example, has as many councillors per resident as we have now. But even then, they do not represent wards or local constituents. They run as part of a party, and all local constituent business is handled by bureaucrats.
I get as aggravated as anyone else by the sometimes absurd debates at city council, but it cannot be emphasized enough that they are no more absurd than the barking-seal circus over at Queen’s Park. And maybe it’s more excusable, since city hall debates are all conducted out in public with no party leaders steering the debate from a back room. That’s actual deliberation taking place, which is sometimes messy. And the sillier or more enraging voices reflect, presumably, the sillier or more enraging views of the constituents who sent them down as representatives.
At every council meeting, only a relative few items are debated - and yes, those are debated at length. Hundreds of motions are passed unanimously at once. These are speed bumps and liquor licence applications and neighbour fence disputes. Each of those items has been put forward by a councillor. Each of them represents time and energy invested by that councillor to represent the needs and wants of their constituents. It’s not controversial, it is not a joke, it doesn’t make it into the paper. Because it works.
There may be ways to improve the efficacy and efficiency and responsiveness of local government.
The proposal to slash the size of council, on its own without many other reforms, doesn’t do any of those things.
But it does make the idea of a city councillor serving their constituents in the way Rob Ford thought they should seem impossible.
Edward Keenan is a syndicated columnist.