Some Great Idea

by Edward Keenan

  6

  Even if it would take a generation or two, bringing vitality and prosperity to the inner suburbs was much on David Miller’s mind while he was mayor. In fact, he considered the inner suburbs the forefront of his agenda. Miller’s critics always accused him of harbouring a secret plan to implement road tolls (and his loudest supporters often hoped he did), but he said that it would be unfair to implement road pricing. Many of the city’s most vulnerable people lived in the suburbs, he said, and they depended on cars because public transit did not serve them well. To ask those people to start paying a premium to drive without first giving them the viable option of using the TTC would be an injustice.

  Bringing the TTC to those far corners of the city was behind the Transit City plan Miller introduced at Downsview Station that afternoon on the campaign trail in 2006. Though the plan changed by the time it was given funding by the province in 2007 and became more of a building plan than a campaign platform, the emphasis behind the LRT plan remained bringing rapid transit to the northeastern and northwestern corners of the city. LRT was affordable enough that we could build a lot of it relatively quickly, and a lot of fast transit, as soon as possible, was what the suburbs desperately needed.

  Miller also introduced a strategy that focused on putting both community and specialized police resources into thirteen so-called priority neighbourhoods located in the inner suburbs. Grants for youth programs and anti-poverty programs flowed into these areas. Parks and public facilities were built. Miller always called the program one of his ‘core values.’ The East Scarborough Storefront in the Kingston-Galloway neighbourhood of Scarborough is one example of the policy in action. Housed in a former police station, the space acts as a social-service hub for the area, providing job-search help, immigrant landing services, a boys and girls club, and food programs. It coordinates the services of more than thirty-five non-profit and government agencies, and administers the local Tower Renewal project. That initiative harnesses over four hundred local volunteers in an effort to rebuild the community in a tower block along Lawrence, making tenants partners with their landlords and converting local stretches of asphalt into green space, and challenging local youth to work with professional architects to create ‘spectacular architecture’ to develop the neighbourhood. ‘The idea is that if residents have ideas to improve their neighbourhood,’ Storefront director Anne Gloger told the Toronto Observer in 2012, ‘we work with them. We work with anyone and everyone who wants to improve the economic well-being of the neighbourhood. Our vision is to create a thriving community economically, socially and environmentally.’

  Anyone who spoke regularly to Miller at any point in his term would have heard of his Tower Renewal program. Toronto’s immense building boom in the 1960s generated more than a thousand concrete-slab apartment towers, more than any other city except New York. St. Jamestown, on the edge of Cabbagetown, might be the most visible and prominent, but the majority of these towers were built in the inner suburbs. By the mid-2000s, they were in dire straits: crumbling, energy-inefficient, the alienation of their isolated ‘tower-in-a-park’ construction evident, and increasingly home to concentrations of the city’s poorest citizens. For Miller, the revitalization project tied together several of the core values he was always talking about. Tower Renewal proposed green-energy retrofits of the aging buildings that would both improve their structural soundness and aesthetics and that would finance themselves with conservation savings. The program also included the construction of new infill housing and commercial development in the tower neighbourhoods, alongside redevelopment of local parks and community service amenities, and the introduction of local urban agriculture and improved transportation infrastructure. It was, as Miller said again and again, about making both the towers themselves and the communities they served stronger, about creating both economic and environmental sustainability, and giving the residents the infrastructure they needed to increase the vibrancy of their own neighbourhoods.

  ‘It’s a way that we can make Toronto more livable and prosperous, with opportunity for every single Torontonian,’ Miller said when he launched the program in 2008. The program kicked off with four pilot projects, including St. Jamestown and sites in North York, Scarborough and Etobicoke, with a plan to extend it, over time, to every tower neighbourhood in the city.

  Transit City, Tower Renewal and priority neighbourhood investment – if you asked Miller, these things would stand as his legacy, projects that bound together community strength and economic and environmental sustainability, and sought to spread the prosperity and community vitality so evident downtown to every corner of the city. Fixing the post-amalgamation disarray of the city’s governance defined his first term. Addressing the physical and community infrastructure deficit felt most keenly in the inner suburbs was the overriding project of his second term. He repeatedly said as much to me and to other reporters. But that is not the story now told most frequently about David Miller’s time in office. Instead, we hear about strikes, customer service problems, new taxes and the ‘War on the Car,’ right?

  The TTC experienced steady ridership growth but often seemed, at the front-line level, to forget that the system existed to serve riders. Stories abounded about fare collectors and drivers being rude or dismissive to customers (which was frequently my own experience). The system itself underscored this impression by failing to meet schedules – you’d wait for twenty minutes in the cold and then four buses piggybacking each other would arrive all at once. If one passenger failed to show his student fare card, the entire vehicle, sometimes full of hundreds of people, would be forced to wait at a standstill until police arrived to mediate the dispute. Mounting public outrage coalesced around a few symbolic lapses in customer service, most notably when a rider photographed a subway fare collector asleep on the job.

  Similar frustrations surrounded a protracted garbage strike in 2009, during which the city’s parks were clogged with waste for weeks. Miller, who had long drawn major support from organized labour, ended a sick-day system that allowed workers to save up unused sick leave and take it in the form of cash when they retired. The city’s two largest unions, representing both inside and outside workers, fought bitterly. The result was a public relations disaster for both the unions and for Miller, especially when the resolution, a phasing-out of the system rather than a cancellation of it, appeared to the public like a capitulation on the part of the mayor. Miller saw his astronomical approval numbers fall to 29 per cent, and the public turned even further on unions they already regarded as out of touch and entitled.

  Other moments of bureaucratic bungling and apparent entitlement piled up as quickly as the garbage. A simple pilot project that allowed vendors to serve street food other than hot dogs was fouled up largely because of the micromanagement of Miller’s health commissioner. A major donor to his council speaker Sandra Bussin’s campaign had a contract with the city renewed against the advice of staff, and Miller stood steadfastly beside her as she shrugged off accusations over the affair. Meanwhile, tiny but symbolic spending of tax money on penny-ante expenses – always highlighted by a red-faced rant from Rob Ford – created an impression of entitlement: Bussin charged a bunny costume for an Easter Parade to her office budget, Adam Vaughan bought a $200 espresso maker for his office and, most famously, Kyle Rae used a government-subsidized campaign surplus to throw himself a $12,000 retirement party.

  A more sobering note was struck when the G20 meetings, foisted by the feds on the city in the summer of 2010, turned into a fiasco. First, violent, vandalizing protesters were permitted to run wild across the downtown core, and then hundreds of peaceful protesters were subsequently rounded up and held in small pens for days, some of them needlessly beaten on camera. It was, institutionally, another no-win situation, as some felt the police should be blamed for not preventing the vandalism and others felt the police should be blamed for the brutality and human-rights violations. From any angle, though, it seemed like a deeply troublin
g mismanagement of a major event. Commenters called it an enduring black mark on the city’s permanent record, but Police Chief Bill Blair defended his officers and admitted no wrongdoing. Miller stood by him, leading council to vote to congratulate the police service on a job well done.

  A final example: the St. Clair streetcar right-of-way had been, inadvisably, pitched by Miller as an example of how LRT could transform the city. Again and again, he talked about how we were getting something that would act like a half-capacity subway bought for a tenth the price. But the streetcar was never planned in a way that would allow it to operate as a subway-like LRT; the stops were spaced close together and the vehicles stopped at red lights every half-block. In retrospect, the row brought reliability to the streetcar service and helped revitalize street life in many parts of the strip, but selling it as a new-age LRT and vigorously trying to drown out vocal opposition clouded any good impressions of the high-capacity, high-speed LRT lines in Miller’s Transit City. It also didn’t help that, because of both lawsuits filed by local business owners opposed to the row and tragically bad planning by various overlapping government departments, construction took two years longer than expected (snarling traffic in midtown for years) and cost almost twice as much as budgeted.

  Which leads us to the War on the Car. This phrase, much bandied about by Miller’s opponents and finally embraced on the campaign trail by both Rocco Rossi and Rob Ford, initially used the example of the St. Clair row as evidence that a preference for surface transit punished car and truck drivers, and then applied the same logic to Miller’s much rumoured, never evident fondness for road tolls.

  And then, most dramatically, it was applied to bike lanes. Many cyclists in the city – not to mention many environmentalists, urbanists and transit activists – would have been very happy if Miller had engaged in a War on the Car, but they never saw any evidence of one. When I asked Miller during the 2006 election campaign, why, given all of his rhetoric about the importance of bikes, he had managed to install fewer bike lanes in Toronto during his first term than Mel Lastman had, he explained that the lanes installed under the previous administration, largely at the behest of councillors such as Jack Layton, were the ‘easy wins.’ In areas of the city where there was broad community support for bike lanes and where the roads were wide enough to easily accommodate them without major changes to traffic flow, the lanes were installed because there was virtually no opposition to them. But to build further, to complete a cycling network across the city, both connecting the downtown patchwork of routes to each other and building out into more traditionally car-dependent areas of the city, was hard work. He claimed to be doing that work, carefully and consistently, to build institutional and political support.

  It became clear just how hard that political battle was in 2009, when city council voted to add bike lanes to the downtown route of Jarvis Street. Jarvis was a five-lane road, with an oddball lane in the centre used for southbound traffic in the morning and northbound in the evening. It had long been a major car-traffic artery into the downtown core for the largely affluent residents of midtown and north Toronto. The city and residents groups were concerned that the highway-like design and use of the street had kept it from realizing its potential as a grand avenue – Jarvis was lined by old mansions and surrounded by high residential and commercial density, but the high-speed street traffic was a community killer. (The resulting lack of street life had long made it home to Toronto’s most prominent prostitutes’ stroll.)

  In consultation with local residents and business owners over a period of years, the city came up with a strategy to remove the centre, reversible car lane and broaden the sidewalks to make the area more vibrant for pedestrians, with trees and planter boxes on the newly widened road. Models showed that car trips down the street might lengthen from eight minutes to ten, a small inconvenience for spurring commercial and community vitality on the strip. Then, on its way to council, the plan was tweaked slightly, and some of the space devoted to wider sidewalks was given to cyclists. The move had broad support among local residents, many of whom were cyclists, was made at the request of the local councillor and got the full-throated endorsement of the mayor.

  With the initiative before council, seven and a half hours of debate ensued, during which councillors Karen Stintz, Denzil Minnan-Wong and Mike Del Grande decried the move as a ‘War on the Car.’ And Councillor Ford, on the record as having the opinion that bikes did not belong on the street and that cyclists were responsible for their own deaths because they got in the way, said that bike lanes were a ‘pain in the ass.’ About a hundred helmet-wearing cyclists in the council chamber applauded as the initiative passed by a vote of twenty-eight to sixteen.

  For these activists, heretofore disappointed by Miller’s failure to live up to his promises, it was an important symbolic victory. But the headlines the next day focused only on the War on the Car rhetoric, obscuring the fact that the fifth lane on Jarvis had been slated for removal anyway, and giving prominent voice to the critics’ complaints that suburban drivers would be inconvenienced at the expense of bike-riding downtowners.

  The final front in the imagined War on the Car narrative emerged out of one of Miller’s greatest victories. Ever since amalgamation, the city’s budget had been a mess, plagued by a ‘structural deficit’ that left the city with a massive shortfall in revenue every year compared to its expenses. During Lastman’s term, the technique for balancing the budget and closing that deficit – as the city needed to do each year since it could not by law borrow to fund operating expenses – had been to beg for a bailout from the provincial government and defer infrastructure maintenance.

  Thus began a culture of complaint by voices from all the parties in Ottawa and at Queen’s Park that Toronto needed to grow up and handle its own affairs, or ‘get its fiscal house in order,’ as John Tory put it in his 2003 campaign. As mentioned, Miller did this in various, relentless ways, going so far as to demand that a portion of the gst be given to cities. But he did not simply wait around for the upper levels of government to rain money on the city. He tightened the city’s belt – even as new spending was introduced to increase TTC ridership and build social infrastructure across the city, programs were cut, departments shrunk and a never-ending quest for more efficient ways to run the administration was pursued.

  And then, most dramatically and controversially, Miller and his second-term budget chief, Shelley Carroll, proposed using two of the tools permitted in the new City of Toronto Act to stabilize the city’s finances. A graduated land transfer tax of up to 2 per cent – equivalent to the existing provincial land transfer tax – would draw revenue from the city’s booming real estate market. There was an exemption for first-time homebuyers, and while the tax could be steep in dollar terms, it was mild compared to the total purchase price of a home and should have been theoretically absorbed into the price structure of the continually escalating market. And there was always the consolation that the annual property taxes on a $500,000 house in Toronto were about $3,000 cheaper than those in nearby Ajax, and $1,000 less than in Vaughan, Mississauga, Oakville or Markham. And unlike a property tax increase, it would not force working-class people and senior citizens living in houses they purchased before their neighbourhoods gentrified and property values went up to move because of new tax bills.

  The other new revenue tool Miller proposed, returning to the War on the Car, was a $60 Vehicle Registration Tax. Through the fare box, transit users in Toronto already pay about 80 per cent of that infrastructure’s operating costs. A year’s worth of Metropasses costs more than $1,200. By contrast, an average car driver pays about $600 per year in gas taxes, the vast majority of which goes to the provincial and federal governments. A $60-per-car-per-year fee, it was argued, was a small but significant contribution to funding the city’s infrastructure that, at $5 per month, would not even cripple low-income drivers. It also had a progressive element: those with no car would pay nothing. As war measures go, it w
as a mild one.

  Together, the new taxes were estimated to generate more than $300 million per year in new revenue – and they wound up generating far more than that. Their implementation, however, raised hell among the council opposition led by Stintz et al. The mayor’s opponents managed to win a vote delaying the approval of the new taxes for several months – time, they hoped, to galvanize public opinion. Alongside right-wing tax-cutting organizations and realtors worried the land transfer tax would slow the market, they launched a summer-long public relation campaign. They ramped up the War on the Car rhetoric and characterized the move as an attempt to pick the pockets of car-bound suburban seniors for the benefit of rich downtown cyclists. In fact, the summer of 2007, when the VRT vote was looming, was the first time I saw the headline ‘Toronto’s war on the car,’ in a report by the National Post’s Kelly Patrick, who claimed the Miller administration was ‘looking to essentially punish motorists out of their automobiles.’

  Miller responded angrily, with a scaremongering, cost-cutting proposal that would save $100 million but would require shutting down the entire Sheppard subway line and several suburban bus routes, and the closure of libraries, community centres and recreation facilities. He had the city manager, Shirley Hoy, begin implementing $34 million of these cuts in August without authorization from council. When councillors balked, Miller threatened a massive property tax increase. His obvious gambit: dramatize the budget shortfall by threatening services and gain public support for the new revenue tools. He was confident that, faced with a stark realization of what was at stake, Torontonians would choose to pay more to preserve services rather than allow the proposed cuts to be implemented.