Some Great Idea

by Edward Keenan

  The formally non-partisan alignment of city council is what allows councillors to be responsive to the concerns of their residents; it’s what enabled city council to tap into the mood of the residents and overrule Rob Ford on so many occasions. Under the current system, observers – including me – sometimes shorthandedly refer to the left and right of council, and sometimes add a third category, the centre (or ‘mushy middle’). But this ignores that council is formally forty-five separate independent elected officials, and that even in that number there are actually five or six or more voting blocs constantly negotiating with each other.

  I hope that council, for the rest of this term and beyond, remains aware of the power it has, collectively – a power that it demonstrated in standing up to Rob Ford. In a city as diverse as Toronto, and given our proud history of resisting the whims of powerful elites, it’s entirely appropriate that at city hall, final authority rests in the quarrelling, often chaotic, collective – not in the hands of any one person or office.

  But that means, too, that our next mayor must win the confidence, from the beginning and at every stage thereafter, of the councillors who represent the varied and far-flung neighbourhoods of the city. There are many ways to build a working consensus among an ego-driven group like Toronto city council – persuasion, compromise and old-fashioned horse-trading among them – but those routes all lead to the ability to govern, while the alternative leads to frustration. I’d note, though, that the most effective tool is popularity: if a councillor believes the mayor has the support of his or her local constituents, the mayor will almost always have the support of that councillor.

  And so whoever wants to lead the city next will need to be able to communicate with the residents of the various areas of the city – communication works two ways, and it is equally important in both. The next mayor will have to listen to and understand the concerns and priorities of residents from across the entire city, downtown and suburbs, north and south, east and west, and give voice to those concerns and priorities in ways that help people elsewhere in the city understand and appreciate them. And the next mayor must also be able to inspire and persuade voters from every corner of the city with a vision of the next stage of the city’s growth with benefit to all of us, together.

  All of that, I’m sure, sounds like a wish list – and it is. But these are the qualities the city needs now in a mayor, and if we get someone with at least a handful of these abilities, I think they can both win an election and lead the city into a better future. Of course, it’s possible that someone – possibly even Rob Ford – will instead win by cynically pitting one part of the city against another again, playing down our real needs and playing up our differences, trying to turn Toronto’s diversity into a weakness. I hope we’ve moved past that, and the city’s history makes me confident we have. But after the last several years, very little in Toronto politics could surprise me. Even in the event that we do reward another divider, though, the city’s history also makes me confident that our strong city council and capacity for citizen activism will again limit the damage, and eventually turn us toward progress.

  4

  Here’s the great idea on which Toronto is built: diversity. At a time when cities have become the economic and cultural engines of the world, and while Toronto has emerged as a global city, the idea that has served as its organizing principle has been revealed as one of the key organizing principles of any society or organization. It’s not just an organizing principle for cities and neighbourhoods, it’s how ecosystems thrive, it’s how the free market works, it’s the quality that makes the internet the most valuable information resource in history. Provided that there’s infrastructure in place to allow the many different pieces to interact, and a democratic structure in place to allow everyone to participate, then diversity is one of the keys to any successful system.

  But diversity is messy. In a natural ecosystem, animals feed off one another; in the marketplace, businesses fail and whole industries become obsolete, bankrupting shareholders and throwing employees out of work; on the internet, bitter arguments dominate comment sections on every website that still possesses them. And in cities, different populations and ideas and lifestyles intersect and sometimes collide. Throughout our history, that process has always been filled with conflict, as angry and ugly as it is fascinating. And there’s no reason to expect the present and future to be any different – democracy and diversity work through friction. But the heat generated by all that friction can produce light to illuminate the path forward and energy to propel us along that path.

  Diversity is the source of our strength but it has also, since amalgamation, been increasingly the source of our struggles. In some ways, a lack of diversity has led to new challenges. A sorting of the population by wealth, ethnicity and immigration status has led to a situation where differing perspectives and lifestyles are isolated from each other, where the upwardly mobile and those who continue to struggle live in vastly different Torontos.

  And yet through its history, Toronto has been self-correcting through democracy, and our politics – as crazy and dysfunctional as it often is – continues to provide a crude mechanism for ­illuminating the problems we need to address. In the post-­amalgamation era, Mel Lastman represented the old Metro establishment, who thought that the wealthy and powerful could iron out the city’s wrinkles themselves. David Miller’s long-shot victory represented an uprising of the new emerging establishment, the headstrong, upwardly mobile citizens who define the creative class, those who are confidently fluent in urbanism and demand that the government accommodate them. Rob Ford’s surprising election, in turn, represented a cry from those who belonged to neither of those elite groups, and whose first-hand observation of the devolution of their own neighbourhoods made them suspicious of burdensome schemes imposed by politicians they didn’t feel represented them.

  And throughout the process, between these huge course-changing elections, city council itself has kept the extremes of all sides in check. Council uncovered the scandal of the mfp under Lastman even as councillors like Jack Layton made progress toward housing the homeless and installing bike infrastructure. Miller’s careful attempts to build and maintain council consensus and to pay close attention to the needs of suburban areas outside his base moderated the pace of urbanization (enraging some of his allies). When Ford’s extreme dislike and distrust for all but the most basic of government operations showed itself to be more (and less) than voters thought they were asking for, city council responded to those voters by assuming leadership of the city themselves. Democracy has continued to ensure that the diversity of the broader city expresses itself, sometimes clumsily, to keep the city moving forward, even if on an erratic, zig-zag course.

  And under Lastman, Miller and Ford, the city as a whole has continued to grow and succeed. The city is bigger than its mayor, and the city is bigger than its government. Indeed, the ways that much of the city thrived before and during the governments of Lastman, Miller and Ford raise the question of how important a mayor really is. It’s not that nothing changed under those different mayors. And the substantial changes each made will likely, in the long term, alter the course of the city. It’s just that for as much as these mayors have pursued radically different policies from one another, the city’s trajectory is only ever altered a few degrees by any given mayor’s term in office. And city council and the population at large serve to tweak even those incremental changes in direction. The mayor is a symbolically important figure, and can serve as the leader of the council and the city, but the mayor is not a dictator. That’s our system working as it should.

  And now it’s interesting to observe that after Lastman, Miller and Ford have each risen and fallen, one of their primary roles seems to have been bringing their differing constituencies – and their most vocal opponents – into the civic conversation. Even if that engagement often looks like little more than a shouting match, the priorities and needs of all those parts of the Toro
nto electorate are now a regular part of the political story we tell ourselves. One of the key things a mayor can do, especially in our weak-mayor system, is serve as the focal point of the debate the city’s citizens have with themselves about where they are going together.

  As this book is published, our crazy politics have just gotten crazier – Rob Ford ordered out of office by a judge, and city council scrambling to figure out what happens next: appoint an interim mayor? Hold a by-election? Who will run? Will the decision be overturned on appeal? Suddenly, everything is uncertain. Yet even in that uncertainty, Toronto is now in an excellent position to have a real debate about its future – and an emergency decision about who should be mayor, in the wake of all the battles we’ve recently gone through, provides as big a spotlight for that debate as we’re ever likely to see. Whatever the result, that spotlight is likely to continue shining, and the debate to continue unfolding, at least until 2014, when the regularly scheduled election will allow for an opportunity to affirm or revise whatever decisions we make today – and at that point I expect every ward-level city-council race will be somehow a part of that debate, since circumstances have conspired to make every councillor a player in the unfolding drama. There is no script for the situation we’re in at the dawn of 2013, no default options to choose: we have to improvise.

  People always want to weigh in on whether Lastman and Miller and Ford are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ mayors. But the question is beside the point – all of them have been necessary mayors. All gave their supporters’ ideas and concerns a push forward, and all provoked their opponents to mobilize. Today, public passion about city politics is higher than it ever has been in my lifetime. The problems and opportunities the city is facing have crystallized. The messy events of the past two years – indeed, of the past decade and a half – have provided a moment of unusual clarity for Toronto.

  That’s partly what Toronto’s history teaches us about how diversity works in a democracy: forces of action and reaction engage in direct conflict. Mackenzie fought for democracy in reaction to a corrupt colonial system; R. C. Harris built infrastructure in reaction to a level of neglect that had become a crisis; Jane Jacobs helped the city realize its neighbourhood strengths in reaction to the impending bulldozing of many of those strengths. The effects of all these movements were felt for generations, defining the affirmative principles that helped build one of the most livable cities in the world.

  And it is how the current generation of Torontonians, gripped by an identity crisis since amalgamation created a new, sprawling city made up of different kinds of places built at different times and encouraging different ways of living – a more diverse Toronto than has ever existed before, and suddenly in a political crisis created by one of the strangest mayoral stories we’ve ever lived through – will find a way forward. We need to build a larger infrastructure. Foster a more powerful democracy. Harness the unrivalled strength of our city’s diversity. And in the aftermath of a generation of bitter political conflicts, write a new mythology for the new city together, and invent Toronto once again.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Much of the material in this book originally appeared – sometimes in substantially different form, sometimes almost identically – in The Grid and its predecessor, Eye Weekly, as well as Spacing magazine, Yonge Street, Canadian Immigrant and the Coach House Books collection uTOpia: Towards a New Toronto. Those publications gave me the time, the money, the freedom and the excuse to find and tell these stories, and for that I am thankful to all the editors and publishers I have worked with along the way.

  I have benefitted much from the reporting and thinking of other writers, and this book is particularly informed by the writing and reporting of some contemporary Toronto journalists.

  John Lorinc, whose book The New City is wonderful, and whose reporting on Toronto is consistently insightful, was particularly helpful. His writing about the life of R. C. Harris in the Globe and Mail, and particularly in an article entitled ‘The City Builder’ that appeared in Spacing magazine in Winter 2006 and on his Harris-themed blog The R. C. Harris Project (www.thercharrisproject.blogspot.com), as well as a conversation with him, form a crutch that holds up most of the section about Harris.

  I owe my understanding of William Lyon Mackenzie to a much broader range of sources, but I found former Toronto mayor John Sewell’s 2002 biography Mackenzie particularly helpful.

  Among many histories of the fight to stop the Spadina Expressway, I owe a particular debt to a memoir of the battle written by Adam Vaughan for Eye Weekly in June 2006.

  The Toronto writer who may be the heir to Jane Jacobs’s influence on world thinking about cities is Doug Saunders, whose Arrival City tackles the problems of inner suburban immigration hubs around the world head on. My quote from Saunders comparing London to Toronto comes from an interview he gave to Toronto Life in 2010, and a piece he wrote for that magazine in 2006 entitled ‘You Are Here’ offers a great primer on how the central city evolved (and the quote about the city having ‘no symbolic heart’ found on page 37).

  The work of the reporters of the Toronto City Hall press gallery, past and present, is consistently excellent, and without their efforts I could not do the job I do every week as an analyst in The Grid nor could I have written this book – especially (but not only) Jeff Gray, John Barber, Jennifer Lewington and Kelly Grant of the Globe and Mail; Daniel Dale, Donovan Vincent, Robyn Doolittle, David Rider and Royson James of the Toronto Star; Don Peat and (at one time) Rob Granatstein of the Toronto Sun; David Nickle of Toronto Community News; Philip Preville of Toronto Life; Hamutal Dotan of Torontoist; John McGrath of OpenFile; Matt Elliott of Metro; and my Eye Weekly/The Grid colleagues Chris Bilton, who acted as my eyes and ears on the 2010 campaign trail while I was stuck in the office editing, and Dale Duncan, who reported from City Hall for us for a few years and shared her findings and insights with me every day. I learned of Vive Nano’s India strategy from a report in Yonge Street by Piali Roy. My understanding about how the citizen-led political reaction to Doug Ford’s Waterfront proposal formed and mobilized is informed by the reporting of independent journalist David Hains. If you're looking for a history of Scarborough, and how it evolved, the book to get is A History of Scarborough, edited by Robert R. Bonis – I sincerely hope you still can get it at public libraries in Scarborough.

  The Coach House uTOpia series offers a great summary of the Miller years in office, and I drew on a couple essays in its final installment, Local Motion, in particular in writing this book: Catherine Porter’s ‘The Boxer’ for information about Jutta Mason’s work in Dufferin Grove Park, Kelly Grant’s ‘The Budget and You’ for an introduction to participatory budgeting, and Denise Balkissoon’s ‘About Face’ for information about the evolution of patios in Toronto.

  In more general terms, my thinking about Toronto has been influenced by, among many, many others, Amy Lavender Harris’s Imagining Toronto, Robert Fulford’s Accidental City, Christopher Kennedy’s The Evolution of Great World Cities, Shawn Micallef’s Stroll and John Bentley Mays’s Emerald City. And like everyone else, by Jane Jacobs. But you knew that already.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Edward Keenan has been writing about Toronto’s politics and culture for over ten years, most recently as a Senior Editor at The Grid and a columnist at Spacing magazine. He is a nine-time National Magazine Award finalist, and was shortlisted for best blogger at the 2012 Canadian Online Publishing Awards. He serves on the faculty of the Academy of the Impossible and coaches a children’s hockey team. He lives in the Junction with his wife, Rebecca, and their three children. You can find him on Twitter @thekeenanwire.

  This ePUB edition produced at the Coach House on bpNichol Lane.

  Print edition typeset in Goluska and Figgins Sans. Goluska was designed by Canadian type designer Rod McDonald to honour his long-time friend Glenn Goluska, 1947–2011. Goluska was one of Canada’s finest desig
ners, who, while working at Coach House in the 1970s, fell in love with Linotype and the work of the noted American typographer and type designer William Addison Dwiggins. The typeface Goluska is a homage to Dwiggins’s famous typeface, Electra. Although McDonald tried to capture some of the feel of Electra, he avoided making a slavish copy; Goluska is sturdier and the x-height is larger than Electra. Figgins Sans is Canadian Nick Shinn’s OpenType revival of Vincent Figgins’s 1836 design for the Caslon type foundry.

  Printed at the old Coach House on bpNichol Lane in Toronto, Ontario, on Zephyr Antique Laid paper, which was manufactured, acid-free, in Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, from second-growth forests. This book was printed with vegetable-based ink on a 1965 Heidelberg KORD offset litho press. Its pages were folded on a Baumfolder, gathered by hand, bound on a Sulby Auto-Minabinda and trimmed on a Polar single-knife cutter.

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