Political parties at the municipal level aren’t officially recognized in Toronto or any other city in Ontario, something many Torontonians will point out with pride. The line is that our politicians, regardless of their political leanings, focus on issues, not ideology.
But our city is evolving, some say. Amalgamation, for example, turned Toronto into Canada’s sixth largest government, led to fewer councillors representing larger wards and paved the way for the new City of Toronto Act, which gave the mayor greater power. Now, more people are starting to wonder if bringing political parties to T.O. is the next logical step.
Councillor Karen Stintz, who believes parties would hold councillors more accountable and give those in opposition a stronger voice, foresees the city moving toward some sort of party system as early as the next municipal election in 2010. Councillor Michael Walker, who decries party politics at city hall, says it may be coming whether we like it or not. “It’s terrible, but I think it’s inevitable,” he said back in December. This phenomenon is something John Barber of The Globe and Mail has discussed in his column and Philip Preville wrote about in Toronto Life recently. The idea has some buzz, at least in the press gallery.
Such thoughts are brewing outside of city hall, too. Take the October 2006 launch of The Toronto Party, which hopes to run candidates in each of the city’s 44 wards in the next election, regardless of whether or not Queen’s Park, which holds the power to change the rules, tweaks legislation.
So would we be better off if it brought party politics to city hall? Toronto will have the opportunity to push for electoral reforms with a two-year review of the City of Toronto Act next year. But a move towards party politics isn’t as simple as merely convincing the province to allow parties to exist. Digging into the pros and cons of the role that official parties could play means delving into a seemingly never-ending set of possibilities for the different ways a party system could work
And a good number of them will say parties already exist in Toronto politics. “It’s a party of one, the NDP,” those that lean to the right side of the political spectrum often say. If you don’t lean to the right yourself, this line is easy to dismiss as the natural sourness of a largely ineffective conservative minority. But while the amount of real power the New Democrat Party itself wields in ongoing operations at city hall may be up for debate, the fact is that it and other parties (be they other established federal and provincial parties or organizations that play party-like roles) do exist to some degree in Toronto municipal politics.
“The debate shouldn’t be framed as ‘should we have parties or not.’ The debate should be ‘what role should parties play at city hall, and do we want to create a new structure to replace the way parties are happening now,’” argues political activist Dave Meslin, who started the website Who Runs This Town? (www.whorunsthistown.to) and ran City Idol, a cross-Toronto competition that encouraged people from all walks of life to compete in front of a live audience for campaign support in the run for a seat on council during the 2006 election.
As the rules stand now, the most common way provincial and federal parties can get involved in municipal elections is by publicly endorsing candidates. Riding associations working on behalf of a provincial or federal party often share lists, names and contact information of their supporters, which can be mined for financial support and volunteers. But because funds can only be raised once a candidate has officially signed up to run (which can only happen after Jan. 1 in the year the election is being held), and because donations must be made directly to each candidate, a party endorsing a number of people cannot fundraise on behalf of the entire group.
The Toronto Party, a self-proclaimed non-partisan (albeit noticeably right-wing) group, wants to take what the NDP and other provincial and federal parties have been known to do one step further. “What we’ve done,” says The Toronto Party’s co-founder Stephen Thiele, “is essentially said, ‘You know it happens; let’s bring it out in the open — let’s have formal civic parties.’ It’s not an unusual concept throughout the world, and it’s not an unusual concept in Canada.”
Though they can’t issue tax receipts for donations or promote candidates before January of the election year (rules they’ve been lobbying the province to change), The Toronto Party has been busy developing policies on everything from transit to law enforcement to infrastructure. Right now they have just over 100 members, but by 2010, they plan to equip candidates who run on their behalf with a policy book, matching election signs and as much media attention as they can muster. Voters, Thiele argues, will have a clearer picture of where their candidates stand.
Of course, one of the main benefits of changing the funding rules to allow political parties to operate more openly and easily during elections is the added support candidates will receive, which could in turn encourage more people to run. A big criticism of our municipal electoral system as it currently stands is the huge head start enjoyed by councillors up for re-election. “You’re fighting against name recognition and people who have been a councillor for a long time who use their office budget to promote themselves,” says Thiele.
Changing the rules around elections is one thing. Figuring out how parties would operate once their candidates get elected is another — and here’s where things get confusing. Would we need to change the way council currently operates? Would we want to instigate an official opposition complete with a party leader and critics of various files? Would the election of the mayor depend on the number of candidates from his or her party that are elected?
Meslin likes playing with the idea of a decentralized party process, where elected officials aren’t expected to fall in line with a party leader. “Bringing parties to city elections would change the way city council works, but we could put mechanisms in place to minimize that influence and avoid a situation where councillors are voting as blocks and stifling open debate,” he says.
Thiele, on the other hand, likes the added sense of order a more formal party system could bring. “Right now you have individual councillors proposing things that are never really discussed during their election campaign, that just come out of the blue,” he says. Under a party system, he and others have said, councillors could be held more accountable to the platform they ran on, which would outline where they stand on city-wide issues.
Councillor Adam Vaughan, who took the city by surprise when he beat Helen Kennedy and the NDP machine that backed her to win his Trinity-Spadina seat in 2006, says that under a party system, constituents would lose out. “If you become part of a political machine that has caucus power and committee power at city hall, you can advocate behind closed doors for your constituents, but at the end of the day, on the floor of city council, you cannot undermine your party because if you do, they’ll de-nominate you and toss you out the door for the next election,” he says. “Take user fees for rec centres. If your party was advocating for this, suddenly you’d be held prisoner to that ideology.”
Vaughan says some of the current problems with our electoral system, such as the incumbency factor, could be dealt with through different reforms. “If we had more politicians and smaller wards, we’d be even more vulnerable to local concerns,” he says. “We couldn’t ignore a third of the ward and get elected by two-thirds or the ward. Those days would be over.”
Meslin agrees. If we’re looking to party politics to bring about needed change to our electoral system and otherwise, he argues, these ideas should be balanced against others, such as term limits, our voting system and extending voting rights to non-citizens, to name a few.
So can we expect change by 2010? Peter John Sidebottom, Ontario’s manager of local government policy, says this deadline seems artificial. “Electoral reform? We could have that in place,” he says. “Whether people would take advantage of it is another
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