Some Great Idea

by Edward Keenan

  Of course, it was not completely over yet. A stay of the order allowed him to remain on the job pending appeal – until late January at least. That appeal would have to be heard. Legal questions would stretch the last days of Ford’s term out for another month or two – or longer. But already, at the council meeting the next day, his most loyal and loudmouthed henchman, Giorgio Mammoliti, had turned on him again, resigning from the mayor’s executive committee and demanding that Ford step aside pending appeal, claiming it was time for the city to get over the partisanship of the Ford era and move on. Denzil Minnan-Wong and Doug Holyday said unflattering things about Ford and hedged on clarifying their continued support of him. Councillor Shelley Carroll talked about running for mayor in a possible by-election, and the press gallery was handicapping the race to come – what were Adam Vaughan’s chances? Karen Stintz’s? John Tory’s? Olivia Chow’s? Ford might still rise again, but city hall has already moved on to a new fight – over where it will go next.

  Toronto is ready for that discussion. As dominating a presence as Ford has been in the political conversation for two years, his chief legacy has been to paralyze the city. We’ve spent the time since his election refighting the garbage strike of 2009, reversing some of the new revenue tools of 2007 and revisiting the plastic-bag fee and bike-lane debates of 2010. Surveying the landscape at the end of the Ford administration, we find ourselves in many ways back near where we started: the Vehicle Registration Tax was repealed, the quest for new sources of money back on, the new bike lanes removed, the plastic-bag issue driving everyone nuts. And after all the traumatic hand-wringing, the budget – a draft was released the same week the judge’s order was handed down – isn’t much closer to (or further away from) being structurally balanced than it was the day Ford was elected. We are heading for a fight over laying off police and firefighters and ending automated leaf-gathering in Etobicoke.

  There are a few issues Ford supporters will point to as enduring victories: he contracted out garbage collection in part of the city, legislated an end to TTC strikes and negotiated a deal with the city’s other unions that would prevent any strikes for four years.

  And there are even some moves his detractors would agree were uncontested wins for the city, especially on the hiring of senior bureaucrats. Jennifer Keesmaat is a chief city planner after a downtown elitist’s heart, new TTC head Andy Byford is a transit pro by anyone’s estimation, and if Gene Jones could lead a turnaround in the public housing agency in Detroit, he seems well-equipped to help move Toronto Community Housing forward. Some wonder if other candidates might have applied for these jobs if we’d had a less controversial mayor, but I haven’t heard anyone denying that we landed some solid, world-leading public executives nonetheless.

  Still, the issue that best sums up the Ford administration’s effect on Toronto is the biggest: the city’s transit plan was confirmed in a big signing ceremony with the province two days after the judge handed down his decision, and it was the same transit plan we had when Ford arrived in office, except delayed by about two years – stalled by a bitter fight over the mayor’s stubborn indulgence of fantasy and his attempts to exercise power in the service of it.

  On the same course as before, but two years behind – a statement that applies to many things about the city after Ford. But there is one big difference. We now proceed – however delayed – having gone through a thorough, very public debate about transit planning, a debate in which citizen activists campaigned and a city council emboldened by public support awoke to its own authority. A blue-ribbon panel of experts weighed in, and virtually everyone in the city learned something about how population density and cost can inform a decision about transportation technology. As a direct result of that debate, we have now begun to publicly recognize the need for a downtown-relief subway line that transit wonks have spent decades quietly insisting should be added – and we’re trying to figure out how to pay for it.

  Of course, Ford didn’t lead that public debate about transit (his contribution was limited to repeating a mantra of ‘subways, subways, subways’), but he provoked it. Without Ford bringing his outsider grumblers into the conversation, and without the vitriolic opposition he and his supporters inspired, a public debate we dearly needed, one we never had under Miller or Lastman, would never have happened.

  There’s another way in which the case that threw Ford out of office is a perfect symbolic end to his administration. The court case began when a private citizen named Paul Magder found a pro-bono lawyer and filed a complaint about Ford’s behaviour with the courts. A citizen was inspired to activism by the actions of a mayor. And that citizen changed the course of the city. If I were imagining the story, I could not have written a better ending.

  INVENTING THE TORONTO OF TOMORROW

  1

  Almost every problem that every city faces – crime, poverty, inequality, social dysfunction – is what planners, designers and business experts call a ‘wicked’ problem. An old-fashioned ‘tame’ problem is relatively linear. We might have a river we can’t cross. How do we solve it? Build a bridge. Make sure it’s structurally sound. Problem solved: we can now cross the river.

  A wicked problem is complex and difficult to define – it’s often, in fact, a symptom or effect of other problems – and it involves multiple stakeholders who cannot agree on what exactly the problem is. And it’s equally difficult to define or measure what a successful solution would achieve. According to this thinking, one of the key characteristics of a wicked problem is that it does not have a right or wrong answer, only better or worse answers. And the theory holds that the way to deal with wicked problems is not by engineering a perfectly designed solution, but rather to set up a perfectly designed process that allows all the various constituencies – in government terms, the citizens – to make sense of the problem and find multiple ways to deal with it. The consultant (and wicked problem expert) Jeff Conklin told U of T’s Rotman Magazine that ‘dealing with wicked problems is not at all a matter of coming up with the best answer; rather, it’s about engaging stakeholders in a robust and healthy process of making sense of the problem’s dimensions.’ Without such a process, he said, we get fragmentation, ‘a condition in which the stakeholders in a situation see themselves as more separate than united. The fragmented pieces are, in essence, the perspectives, understandings and intentions of the collaborators, all of whom are convinced that their version of the problem is correct … The antidote to fragmentation is shared understanding and shared commitment.’

  The answers, then, are in the process, just as the themes and lessons of any story lie not in its conclusion but in the unfolding of the plot. And, as I’ve argued throughout this book, the big-picture answers to Toronto’s current growing pains – not just for the next mayor and the council he or she leads but for the city as a whole – will be found by turning to those principles that have built Toronto: creating more democracy and infrastructure that harness our diversity and allow it to thrive. In many ways, the success and vibrancy of central Toronto is a function of the gradual, community-level processes that created those neighbourhoods and provided infrastructure that allowed a diverse community to meet its own needs. The problems faced in the less vibrant neighbourhoods of the inner suburbs are a function of a process of central planning that built neighbourhoods according to what some engineer’s plan said a community should want and be happy with.

  People talk about de-amalgamation of the former municipalities that make up Toronto as a solution. But regional issues such as transit and policing would not be better served through de-amalgamation, and the process involved in untangling the various areas from each other looks a lot like trying to put the toothpaste back into the tube. At this stage, a de-amalgamation prompted by downtown residents’ resentment at having Rob Ford foisted on them would amount to little more than the privileged abandoning the poor – a sort of reversal of the ‘white flight’ that hollowed out and depressed American cit
ies in the 1960s and 1970s. It would also be abandoning some of the diversity in Toronto’s population – ethnic, income, lifestyle and otherwise – that has helped make Toronto great. We are in this together, and the solutions to our problems are ones we’ll find together.

  As much as amalgamation has created an identity crisis, our identity as a diverse global city is contained in the whole of the new Toronto, not in parts of it. So the solution to our conflicts doesn’t lie in partitioning off the warring segments. Indeed, on some major infrastructural issues, like transit, it’s becoming clear we need more regional coordination across the GTA. That said, a lot could be accomplished by devolving power over neighbourhood issues ever closer to the neighbourhood level. Many of the complaints we see emerging throughout the amalgamated city’s history – under all three post-amalgamation mayors – emerge from a sense among the citizenry that their voices and concerns are not heard at city hall. Setting up ways for people to more directly influence government at the ultra-local level is important everywhere, but it is especially key in neighbourhoods like Woburn in Scarborough, which are both physically and demographically distant from the levers of power and those who wield them. When you give people authority over their local environment, they feel a sense of ownership over it, and they can often point to better solutions to their challenges than any outsider could.

  The largely ceremonial community councils that today deal with local zoning and speed bumps are made up solely of the local city councillors from the former municipalities the community councils represent. Those councils could be given more authority over local issues, and real power to allocate budgets for development and grants to community groups and agencies, for example. But there are currently only four community councils, and there are 144 distinct neighbourhoods in Toronto. In New York City, there are borough presidents for the large regional areas of the city, as well as fifty-nine different volunteer ‘community boards’ who advise city council. In London, England, thirty-three elected borough or city councils (many composed of more than fifty councillors) are the primary government service providers and decision-makers.

  If we want to engage citizens in Toronto, we could devolve authority even further, beyond the community-council level, and form neighbourhood assemblies that would have actual authority over certain local issues and spending. This is not such a far-fetched idea; after all, we’ve already done something similar in the small-business sector. In the late 1960s, the strip of Bloor Street West near Swansea and Runnymede, just west of High Park, had become depressed. Big regional shopping malls like Yorkdale and Sherway Gardens had opened, and in 1968 the Bloor-Danforth subway line had extended under the street west to Islington. The construction process killed activity on the Bloor West strip, and the newly opened route didn’t help matters, since now people who used to travel through the neighbourhood by streetcar instead travelled past it underground. Local shopkeepers struggled to stay in business.

  Some of these shopkeepers got together and cast a cold eye on the very malls that were threatening their livelihoods. They noticed how fees paid to the mall’s management funded marketing, common area improvements, festivals and advertising. They drafted a scheme to form a similar model for their neighbourhood, and went to the city for approval. If the majority of business and commercial property owners in the area agreed, they asked, would the city tender an additional levy on their property taxes and return it to the group to spend on marketing and improving the neighbourhood?

  The result was the Bloor West Village Business Improvement Area, the first such organization in the world. The scheme successfully revitalized the area’s commercial landscape and inspired neighbourhoods across the city to follow suit. Today there are more than seventy BIAs in Toronto, and the concept has been exported to the rest of Canada and around the world. There are over five hundred BIAs in Canada, more than twelve hundred similarly structured groups across the United States and still more in Europe, Australia and Africa. John Kiru, the executive director of the Toronto Association of Business Improvement Areas told me the concept was ‘Toronto’s best export,’ a way of improving and building the city by giving local business owners a small form of local government responsibility, including what is essentially taxing and spending power.

  What if a similar model was implemented for neighbourhood residents – with an elected volunteer local neighbourhood council that has a budget for local initiatives and improvements and holds public meetings for issues of local concern? Representatives from those neighbourhood councils could form part of the community council, which reports now to city council, creating an accountable and empowered chain of representation for citizens for neighbourhood, area-wide and regional issues.

  But that’s just one suggestion, and there are any number of other existing, well-articulated, no-brainer ideas to make the city’s government more accessible. A presentation by Dave Meslin that was displayed at city hall in 2012 included a proposal to introduce ranked balloting (which would make elections fairer and more open); implement clearer, corporate-style advertising to announce public meetings and hearings; and hold important meetings at more convenient times (i.e., when people are not at work). Such reforms would have the simultaneous effect of emphasizing ‘customer service’ and making citizen involvement easier and more attractive. And that is one of the key hurdles to jump in making Toronto’s democracy even stronger than it has been. One of the inspiring things about following local politics is seeing how effectively small groups of citizens can make a difference once they know how to navigate the system. But one of the most frustrating things is seeing how difficult it is for most people to figure out how that system works. You can fight city hall, but it involves a steep learning curve; as a result, the people who are most successful in influencing the city are those already most inclined to be involved.

  The larger infrastructure projects that require the city’s involvement – transit expansion, the official plan, widespread redevelopment such as in Regent Park or the Port Lands – should be subject to widespread community hearings in the neighbourhoods affected and transparent public debate across the city. One of the great weaknesses of Transit City was that it was never subject to open debate and voting at city council, and consequently was poorly understood by the public. On the other hand, the Port Lands redevelopment process had benefitted from years of careful planning and debate and consultation in the area affected; it was a far quicker task therefore to prevent it from being hijacked by the Fords.

  Chicago’s Ward 49, like some cities in Europe and Latin America, has adopted a system of participatory budgeting that sees the public directly involved in debating and deciding annual spending priorities. The Toronto Community Housing Corporation has introduced a similar process of direct resident involvement in budgeting, and its meetings are packed with people carefully considering alternatives, and standing behind the difficult decisions they have made together. If you give people an opportunity to participate in the process, they seize it.

  Specific proposals aside, we need a council-wide recognition that solutions to Toronto’s problems are going to spring up from the city’s neighbourhoods. Because, as Jane Jacobs reminded Richard Florida, the solutions to problems always lie in the community where the problem exists. And a crowd consensus will almost always produce better answers than even its smartest member will acting alone. While you cannot impose citizen engagement and a sense of community on people, you can build the infrastructure to allow them to form a community and express themselves, and then follow their lead.

  2

  It’s obvious that the next leader of Toronto – or the next group of leaders – will need to find some way to unify the city. It’s imperative that we see ourselves, politically, as one entity, a group of people sharing a city, united in the project of making it better for all of us even as we might disagree on how to get there. A cross-partisan coalition of councillors led by Karen Stintz clearly recognized this when the
y unveiled a surprising, comprehensive, but flawed transit proposal that they called OneCity in the early summer of 2012. OneCity feels like just a footnote now, but its ambition and potential for uniting Toronto in an honest-to-goodness city-building movement – one that had emerged from a city council that suddenly seemed capable of working together – made city hall watchers giddy. But the city couldn’t be unified by a $30 billion infrastructure plan pulled out of the box pre-assembled and presented as a gift to the citizens. While it was temporarily crushing to see it defeated almost as quickly as it was proposed, there was nothing organic about it. It didn’t come from the residents, or suit their needs and wants. It’s not how Toronto has ever done things.

  And yet building or rebuilding infrastructure – transit infrastructure, road infrastructure, social infrastructure such as parks, schools, community centres, affordable family housing and social services – needs to become a top priority. The city’s planners have not kept pace with the continent-leading condo construction we’ve experienced, and even as the city core becomes home to tens of thousands of new residents and a bunch of formerly industrial main streets in North York, Scarborough and Etobicoke are rebuilt as dense high-rise condo neighbourhoods, we are not building the infrastructure to support those neighbourhoods and ensure they are great places to live. Figuring out how to pay for all of this is one challenge, but just acknowledging that the rapidly growing city needs to invest equally rapidly in infrastructure is a necessary first step if we’re to avoid a crisis akin to the one faced by R. C. Harris a century ago.

  While it’s obvious that Toronto needs the provincial and federal governments to help us fund bigger projects like that – if politicians at city hall agree on anything, it’s that a national transit strategy and a national affordable housing strategy are desperately needed – we could do a lot to address some of our inner-suburban problems if we start by thinking a bit smaller, a bit more humbly. Even, or especially, when the task is almost impossibly daunting – such as the challenges of the suburban streetscape – focusing on the ultra-local, small-scale and even the ephemeral might lead to more progress more quickly than any decades-long billion-dollar projects we might draw up at city hall.