It paid off. At a meeting in September 2007, after eight hours of acrimonious shouting before a full public gallery in the council chamber, council voted to approve both taxes. But before patting Miller on the back too hard for his political savvy, we should note that the move backfired in some respects, too: it divided council, began ramping up the suburban-car-driver versus downtown-elitist rhetoric and, ironically, underscored the public impression that Toronto was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. To engage the willingness to save transit and libraries, the impression that those things were one council vote away from being shuttered was hammered home.
That’s ironic because, alongside the other measures Miller had worked so strenuously on over the years, the new revenue tools lifted the city to within sight of long-term fiscal stability. When the city closed the books on its 2008 spending, it showed a small surplus. When 2009’s spending was complete, the surplus was up to $181 million. Miller’s final budget, tallied after he’d been out of office for several months, showed a surplus of more than $350 million. Although the projected budgets each year still started with a structural shortfall that sometimes looked staggering, the actual spending – and in particular the revenue generated by the land transfer tax – had pretty much closed the gap. The city’s capital debt was orders of magnitude lower, on a per-capita basis, than that of other major cities in the world, and lower than that of Montreal or Vancouver. Our property taxes remained the lowest in the region and lower than in cities like New York, Chicago and Montreal. And the operating budget was now showing healthy surpluses even as services were expanded, year after year.
From the any rational viewpoint, the city’s fiscal house was finally in order. And with so much infrastructural decay addressed, there was an opportunity to at last begin talking about more aggressive city building. Or so one might have thought.
THE TAXPAYER REVOLUTION AND THE CITIZEN COUNTER-REVOLUTION
1
On October 25, 2010, Rob Ford was elected to the highest office in Canada’s largest city and, to the downtown urbanists who’d functioned as the city’s ruling class for most of its post-millennial history, the moment was apocalyptic. He had won in a landslide. His worship, Rob Ford, mayor of Toronto: it was difficult to even fathom.
Yet there he stood on election night, clutching the podium and reading, in halting, stumbling phrases, his address to those he’d been elected to lead. ‘Tonight,’ he said, ‘the people of Toronto are not divided. We are united. We are united, all of us.’ Rivers of sweat streamed from the peninsula of his thin, spiky hair, down through the narrows between his sun-bleached eyebrows. He grinned at the whistles and cheers of the thousands standing before him at the Toronto Congress Centre, some twenty-eight kilometres west of city hall in deep Etobicoke and just a few minutes’ drive from the border of the city of Mississauga.
It was a venue in an industrial park in an offstage area of Toronto far from the walkable neighbourhoods and landmark buildings that together add up to the psychological entity of Toronto, its key virtue being access to the highways leading to and from the outer suburbs and the jets above that carry people to other cities around the world. The Toronto Congress Centre is virtually impossible to get to by public transit, and it’s in a land where bikes are no more than children’s toys. It is no accident that it was here, in the uncelebrated suburban fringe of Toronto, that Ford kicked off his campaign for mayor, and here that he celebrated his victory, under the Uncle Sam–style red, white and blue banners of his campaign, in a room filled with drunken, shouting supporters chanting his name.
One of those supporters interrupted his speech to drape a garish lei around his neck, a floral garland that made it look as though he was embarking on a tropical vacation. Ford continued, enumerating the slogans that had defined his campaign and have since become iron-cast clichés. He was going to ‘Stop the Gravy Train’ and ‘End the War on the Car.’ He would slash the office expense accounts of city councillors and take a hard line with the civil-service unions. He would bring ‘Respect for Taxpayers’ to city hall and eliminate both the vehicle registration and land transfer taxes.
To the so-called ‘downtown elites’ who opposed Ford, his campaign slogans didn’t even cohere into a rational argument. As anyone who followed city hall at all could tell you, the billions of dollars of waste he claimed he could cut simply did not exist. And the combination of massive tax cuts and slashed government spending appeared nonsensical when considered in combination with his insistence – his ‘guarantee,’ actually – that no city services would be cut, that customer service would be enhanced and that new subways would be built in sparsely populated suburban areas. When you combined these actual platform planks with his off-the-cuff remarks about ripping out streetcars, closing the city’s borders to new immigrants and supporting the ‘traditional definition’ of marriage, and then when you combined those statements with his record of being unable to get along with anyone on city council, his tendency toward outbursts of childish, rage-induced ranting in the council chambers and his record of personal problems – when you added all of that up, the election of Rob Ford to the mayor’s office looked to a lot of his opponents like a kamikaze vote from people who hated the city.
But to the crowd gathered in the Toronto Congress Centre – and the 47 per cent of voters they represented in the election results – his election was a victory for the underdog. The outright disdain of the political establishment toward Ford represented only an elite who had grown disdainful for what Councillor Mike Del Grande called the ‘average Joe,’ a composite citizen we can assume suffers from some of the same personal problems Ford does, who’s as prone to expressing anger and frustration as he is, who has as little understanding of the nuances of the municipal bureaucracy as he does and, above all, who shares his conviction that no matter how much you want to fancy talk around it, the money of taxpayers is virtually being flushed down the toilet. Retiring councillor Kyle Rae had tried to explain his $12,000 farewell party by talking about the technicalities of campaign surpluses. Ford turned that event into a resonant symbol; it was typical of the city government’s wasteful attitude toward taxpayer dollars, and it was disrespectful.
That disrespect was to end. Ford beamed at the people chanting his name. ‘This victory is a clear call from taxpayers,’ he said. ‘Enough is enough, and I want respect.’ The assembled masses cheered louder. ‘If you voted for me, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. You voted for change and you can trust me to live up to your expectations, guaranteed. Four years from tonight you’ll look back and say, “Rob Ford did exactly what he said he was going to do.”’ At that moment, I was standing at a much different victory party (in Kensington Market, of course), where the prospect of Ford doing exactly what he said he was going to do was considered a nightmare. Adam Vaughan had been returned to council with a huge mandate, more than doubling the number of votes he’d gotten in the previous election, yet his assembled campaign volunteers and supporters at the Supermarket nightclub were grim. Rob Ford’s election as mayor had been declared by the television networks almost as soon as the polls closed, while there were still only three people in the room at Vaughan’s party. His volunteers arrived back from a day of pulling the vote to the certain knowledge that though they had won the local battle, and won it convincingly, their side had lost the city-wide war.
Vaughan, a former television broadcaster and second-generation progressive city councillor, had been widely touted as a promising candidate for mayor and was among Ford’s fiercest, most articulate critics. At one point Ford demanded that Vaughan ‘be a man’ and run for the top job; Vaughan demurred, insisting that his constituents in the downtown Ward 20 were his primary concern and that his young children needed his attention. But in many ways Vaughan appeared to be the anti-Ford, slim and silver-haired in his forties, clad in tailored suits and designer glasses, well-spoken and combative and always ready to deliver a long-winded, literate lecture on city-planning theory. He’d
been raised at the foot of Jane Jacobs, a family friend and political ally of his father’s, and invoked her name at every opportunity. Moreover, he was a champion of smart high-rise development that would allow large families and low-income residents to remain in Toronto’s gentrifying downtown, and an advocate of bike lanes and pedestrianism who did not get his driver’s licence until he was over forty.
Vaughan’s ward represents, in many ways, the neighbourhoods that are central to Toronto: Jacobs’ home in the Annex; the city’s brain at the University of Toronto; its institutional centre in the hospital corridor on University at the very edge of the financial district; the cultural hub of Queen West; the boho paradise of Kensington Market; the theatre district on King; the breakneck condo-community growth of the waterfront. His ward is home to both the cn Tower and Rogers Centre, seven streetcar routes and two subway lines, as well as the CBC headquarters, the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Royal Ontario Museum. On election night, the residents of this most iconic of Toronto districts returned the anti-Ford to city hall with a 75 per cent supermajority, and voted against Ford on the mayoral ballot by almost the same margin.
And yet here we were at Supermarket, on other nights a venue for book launches and indie-rock dance parties, and the newly elected mayor was on TV talking about how we were united. Onstage with his wife and children, Vaughan said the electorate had sent a message of humility to the city’s politicians, urging them to get back to basics, and he said it was incumbent on council to hear that message. But he noted, too, to the delight of the crowd in attendance, that he would not be a yes-man for the new mayor, that the city needed to move forward, to say ‘yes’ to building the city as well as saying ‘no’ to things.
After his speech, Vaughan nonetheless told reporters he’d attempt to find common ground with his political rival. The Supermarket crowd was less optimistic about the prospects of harmony. ‘These people hate the city,’ someone said, gesturing at the TV. ‘I can’t believe that idiot is our mayor. He’s going to destroy Toronto.’
2
Rob Ford was a long shot when he declared his candidacy for mayor – as much so as David Miller had been. Five left-leaning councillors made a thousand-dollar bet with Ford, wagering that, for all his bluster, he wouldn’t actually run. Two of the councillors involved told me slightly different versions of the same line: ‘It’s worth my money to never have to deal with him again on council.’ If he ran for mayor and lost, he would no longer be at city hall ranting about penny-ante expenses. But the thought that he might actually win was beyond the realm of imagination. He was a loner on council, an outcast even to the city’s established right-wing politicians, with no support from any of the power brokers who help run successful political campaigns.
George Smitherman, the provincial Liberal (and veteran of the Barbara Hall collapse), was a prohibitive favourite. It was thought that the only thing that could keep Smitherman from winning was if John Tory decided to enter the race, but Tory had announced he was staying out and, anyhow, it’s not clear their platforms would have differed much. Smitherman positioned himself to run against the Miller administration, painting a picture of fiscal incompetence and waste and promising a form of tough-love management that would bring the unions to heel and be ruthless in making government efficient. Smitherman had attracted the support of the Liberal establishment and the old Lastman-era crony Conservatives alike. In the run-up to the election campaign, someone close to David Miller’s office told me privately over drinks that Smitherman’s emerging coronation was a message from the backroom boys. ‘This is the Family Compact saying, “You’ve had your fun, but we’ll be taking our city back now.” Smitherman’s not as ideal for them as John Tory would be, but he’s made it clear that they can work with him. And so they’ve turned him into their guy.’
Meanwhile, Karen Stintz, the councillor thought most likely to hold up the right-wing banner in the election, finally announced she wouldn’t run, because the fundraisers and organizers she would depend on were waiting around to see if Tory would call on them.
After Miller’s surprise announcement that he would not run for a third term, the machinery of his electoral and political success passed over expected candidate Shelley Carroll – Miller’s suburban budget chief – and settled first on young, ambitious TTC chair Adam Giambrone. (Late in the campaign, at a barbecue in a Don Mills backyard, Carroll reflected in a conversation with me about how both she and Stintz – two strong women – had been forced from the race because they couldn’t draw support from the backroom boys. ‘Imagine the debates we could have had,’ she said.) After Giambrone flamed out within weeks in a blaze of personal controversy over extramarital – or extra-premarital, since he was not officially married to his partner – sexual shenanigans that apparently extended to the couch in his city hall office, campaign manager John Laschinger and the Miller team moved on to support Joe Pantalone, a council lifer best known as an advocate of the Front Street Extension road expansion. Pantalone’s candidacy inspired exactly no one – the press speculated that running was a symbolic retirement gesture from him – but he was left to wave the Miller flag in the face of the oncoming Smitherman juggernaut. Two other no-hope ‘front-runners,’ Liberal fixer Rocco Rossi and small-time magazine publisher Sarah Thompson, entered the race running to Smitherman’s right. (Giorgio Mammoliti was also among the candidates early on – running what appeared to be a kamikaze anti–Rob Ford campaign – until he withdrew in favour of aligning himself with the front-runner and returning to his old council seat.)
When Ford entered the race, in fact, he was heralded only by the talk-radio hosts who had relied on him for easy theatrics and bombast. (‘He was the bull in the china shop,’ AM640 host John Oakley replied when asked by the National Post why he’d made Ford a regular guest. ‘The information and the takeaway is just kind of a by-product … You want to build the biggest audience you can, so your salespeople can take it out to prospective clients, and that’s where you create the transaction that makes everybody happy and sustains your living.’) But Ford had a simple, strident message that took what the variously conservative candidates running against him – George Smitherman, Rocco Rossi and Sarah Thompson – had defined as the key issue of the campaign (spendthrifts at city hall are out of touch with their constituents and fiscally irresponsible) – and distilled it into an extreme, easy-to-understand message. ‘Stop the Gravy Train’ meant ending fat union contracts and nickel-and-dime self-dealing through office expenditures. Ford’s numbers were very specific: he promised to cut $525,682,075 in waste in his first year in office alone, and $3,018,549,221 over the course of his four-year term. And he guaranteed, as he said repeatedly, that he would not cut services.
His other slogans were equally blunt instruments. ‘Respect for Taxpayers’ was, above all else, about delivering excellent customer service while slashing tax rates and repealing new taxes that had been imposed by Miller. ‘End the War on the Car’ was a simple assertion that gridlock was being caused not by suburban sprawl but by bike lanes and streetcars, and a promise to ensure those driving into the city core from the suburbs would find the roads accommodating.
Taken together, these slogans tapped into the alienation of those who felt government was a constant, pernicious imposition on – and certainly no help to – their lives. It helped Ford that he had spent most of his time as councillor acting as a glorified constituency assistant. When Ford’s campaign told the press he had banker’s boxes containing tens of thousands of phone numbers for voters he’d personally tried to help over the course of his career, reporters thought he was exaggerating. But I had seen with my own eyes how he visited more than a dozen constituents a day. An astounding number of people in Toronto – many of whom had never actually turned out to vote before – felt a connection to Ford that had been forged through personal contact with him.ter And that kind of contact is powerful. Late in the campaign, Shelley Carroll told me she wasn’t sure Ford
’s lead in the polls at the time would hold up. When she was knocking on doors, the people who told her they were voting for Ford were people she knew hadn’t voted in a municipal election in years. On election day, Ford beat Smitherman in Carroll’s ward by more than 20 per cent of the vote.
And then there was the matter of Ford’s personal behaviour. During the campaign, we could see those lapses were not behind him: on one occasion, Ford commiserated on the phone with an ill man unable to get pain medication – Ford asked the man if he’d tried to ‘score it on the street’ and then offered to try to buy him some meds on the black market. It turned out the call was being taped and it soon landed in the newspapers. Another lowlight was when a Toronto Sun reporter dug up a record of Ford’s decade-old arrest in Florida on charges of drunk driving and marijuana possession; Ford denied, then recanted the denial. But such foibles never hurt him, before, during or after the campaign (they continued virtually uninterrupted after his election). As embarrassing and inappropriate as many of Ford’s critics believe his behaviour to be, it was not seen as a problem by those who voted for him. Indeed, it might have actually been an asset.
Nick Kouvalis, the campaign strategist who ran Ford’s election campaign and later served as his chief of staff, bragged to Maclean’s magazine that Ford was the first candidate to ever see his poll numbers rise immediately after having his mugshot appear on the front page of the paper. His personal failings enhanced his credibility. A guy that apparently guileless, unhinged and fallible didn’t seem capable of the inauthenticity most politicians seem to possess. Analyst Trish Hennessy of the Centre for Policy Alternatives wrote on her blog about a focus group of Ford voters conducted by Environics Research Group, and arrived at this astonishing conclusion: ‘When they talked about Rob Ford, they often spoke in appreciative, glowing terms – in the same way they spoke about another well-loved politician, Jack Layton … They saw little ideological divide between Jack Layton and Rob Ford. Rather, they felt the two men had in common a sincere drive to take on the struggle of the people despite great odds.’
Some Great Idea Page 12
