This summer, David Miller faced his biggest challenge since becoming mayor of Toronto. Those who followed city hall last year know the story well: facing a projected $575 million budget shortfall, Miller tried to bring in two new “revenue tools,” as he called them: a vehicle registration tax and a land transfer tax. Armed with a brand new Executive Committee — a cabinet-like group of councillors he had the power to hand-pick after his November 2006 re-election thanks to the recently approved new City of Toronto Act — Miller thought he had the votes to win approval for the new taxes.
He underestimated his opponents, and that became the defining story of the year at city hall.
In July, 23 of council’s 44 members voted to defer making a decision on the new taxes until October. Though watered-down versions of the two new taxes were ultimately approved, the fight leading up to the big vote Oct. 22 was tooth and nail. For perhaps the first time since he was elected in 2003, Miller’s “unofficial opposition” — led by Karen Stintz and Denzil Minnan-Wong and comprised of a “just say no” crew of Miller opponents including Lastman-era veterans Doug Holyday, Frances Nunziata and Case Ootes, rogues Rob Ford and Michael Walker and others, including Mike Del Grande and David Shiner — proved that it could coalesce around an issue despite its host of colourful, fiercely independent personalities. Is this the beginning of a new, united right wing and, if so, will 2008 be the year that Miller’s fiercest critics start doing more than just saying no to the ideas that the mayor and his allies bring forward?
Not likely, say councillors from across the political spectrum. Of course, the reasoning behind their answers depends on who you talk to. Some say that it’s the way city hall works that prevents councillors who usually oppose the mayor from being effective. Others argue that Miller’s most vocal opponents just don’t know how to work city hall. If a strong opposition is vital for a healthy democracy, neither explanation bodes well for Torontonians. Either we have a dysfunctional government, where avenues for ideas that may not mesh with the mayor’s have been closed off, or a good number of councillors — specifically those who are supposed to be providing alternatives during these financially trying times — simply don’t know how to do their job.
Analyzing the success of the past year and the possibilities for moving forward in 2008, Stintz — one of the newer, younger and, as others in the media have put it, “smarter” voices on the right — is surprisingly pessimistic about her ability to bring forward the kind of change she’d like to see for the city. “When I was first elected, I had the notion that council is a body where consensus is built,” says Stintz, who has represented Ward 16, Eglinton-Lawrence, in 2003. “Now it seems our role is to support the mayor’s mandate.”
Speaking with her usual you-don’t-want-to-cross-me confidence over coffee in her office at city hall, Stintz, whose name is often bandied about for a future run at the mayor’s office (no doubt buoyed by the time she’s shared in the media spotlight with her very vocal, though less approachable, colleague Minnan-Wong), argues that there’s little she can do to get her ideas on the table. Suppose she wanted to bring forward a motion that the City of Toronto rejoin the Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO), which advocates on behalf of cities on matters related to the province. (Toronto withdrew from AMO in 2004 over differences on how the province should fund public transit.) One option would be to find someone on the Executive Committee willing to bring forward the idea at one of their meetings. But even if that happened, she insists, few on the committee would support the proposal.
Another option would be to make a notice of motion at a city council meeting (an option that allows any individual council member to put forward a proposal that hasn’t already been considered at one of its standing committees). In this case, the motion would almost definitely be referred back to the Executive Committee for further consideration, where, as in scenario No. 1, it would be easily defeated.
As far as Stintz is concerned, her hands are tied. Union contracts, one of her biggest beefs, are up for renewal this year. When asked how she plans to address this, given the roadblocks she says she faces, Stintz shrugs. A few weeks before, in an address to the Economic Club of Toronto, the strong-minded councillor argued that the city needed to tackle disproportionate wage and benefit levels and ensure that the “no contracting out” provision be removed. In her office at City Hall, Stintz says there’s little she can actually do.
Councillor Doug Holyday argues that the new Executive Committee has changed the way things operate at city hall. “Virtually everything goes through the Executive Committee, at least major matters, and they treat them the way they want and send them on to council that way,” he says. “It’s quite difficult to upset one of their decisions.”
Part of the challenge for councillors, argues Councillor Brian Ashton (who says he was “almost stunned at the amount of power Miller gathered upon himself” even before the mayor booted him off the Executive Committee for his failure to support the new taxes), is that city staff now seem to take more direction from the mayor’s office. “As a consequence, staff tend to look at the mayor’s office first and council last as issues develop and policies come to the forefront,” he says. This, he argues, is one of the reasons average councillors have found it so difficult to get information, a problem Stintz and others, such as Councillor Michael Walker, say has grown increasingly frustrating.
Others see things differently. Both Budget Chief Shelley Carroll and rookie councillor Gord Perks (who’s also on the budget committee — both are considered Miller loyalists) argue that the councillors who tend to complain the most about roadblocks at city hall don’t take advantage of the opportunities available to them to participate. “We set aside an entire day for councillors to come and ask any questions they had of the capital budget and very, very, very few people availed themselves of that opportunity. When you create an opportunity for any councillor to come and ask questions and very few of them do, you have to wonder how sincere their complaints about lack of access are,” says Perks, adding, “I have no memory of any budget committee meeting where a councillor has asked for a piece of information and staff has refused to give it to them.”
Progressive councillor Adam Vaughan — whose impromptu, no-holds-barred televised war of words with Minnan-Wong after a city press conference garnered the media savvy politician even more media attention — is more blunt in his criticism. “There’s a core group on the hard right who are the obstructionists who do all the complaining. But the reality is that they’re the laziest group of politicians I’ve ever seen, both in terms of their intellectual discipline, but also their work ethic,” he says.
Vaughan is no stranger to the challenge of bringing controversial ideas that aren’t at the top of the mayor’s agenda forward. He offers his proposal to tax clubs in the Entertainment District for the use of city-owned sidewalks as an example. In the beginning, most people were against the idea, he says, including a large group of councillors, the media and the bureaucracy. By the time it made it to the floor of council, Vaughan says he had spent a significant amount of time explaining the idea to councillors, the community and the media. “In the end, they voted for it,” he says. “You build consensus that this is actually a reasonable thing to do even if it sounds like a crazy idea. You do the work.”
The key, Vaughan, Carroll and others say, is taking the time to talk to your colleagues beyond the floor of council. “[Councillor Stintz] constantly says she doesn’t have a voice,” Carroll says, “but never once has she come into my office to say, ‘You know, I have a better way you could do something, what do you think of this? If I move this, where do you stand on it?’”
As far as getting information goes, Vaughan says it’s simply a matter of picking up a phone. “The staff can be jerks; if they disagree with the direction that you’re going, they can throw roadblocks in your way. But in that case, you go to the committee and ask for the report.”
Regardless of who is right, frustration among those who don’t identify with Miller’s mandate is increasing and many say the next logical step will be to make council’s “unofficial opposition” official. In other words, like it or not, a growing number of councillors are pretty sure party politics are due to arrive at city hall. “We need the checks and balances that every government needs,” Stintz says, acknowledging that the creation of political parties would need approval from Queen’s Park.
“The city is spiralling downward,” she says. “Everybody feels it has to change.”
Read an update to this story at Dale Duncan's City Hall Blog.