Frank Touby: David, please be as good as you look

With our recycled more powerful mayor and genuine new decision-making powers for council, we have every reason to expect city hall to turn around this new year. There are a number of things that haven’t been addressed by council in any effective way and with a decided majority of councilors supporting him, Mayor David Miller can effect some needed changes.

First, however, he’s got to dispense with the notion that he has a mandate for his agenda, whatever that is aside from being reelected. He plainly doesn’t. Miller got reelected only because nobody credible was running against him. Further, some pretty ugly power brokers were influential in his campaign. Miller’s first term was not very successful, painful as that is for him to acknowledge, and his broom-wielding campaign stance became an ironic joke since he kept the same old Mel Lastman bunch in the civil service and continues to permit lobbyists at city hall.

So here are what Miller’s real priorities should be for the next four years. David, if you have anything remotely like a mandate it would be to get this city under control.

1. Control lobbyists. It’s a disreputable craft that should be abolished because lobbyists wander through city hall pitching for their clients to politicians and city staff. It’s improper by its very nature and rarely benefits the city. (Dash Domi was a lobbyist and we know what that cost us.) Ensure that they act to the city’s benefit by removing their ability to take such initiatives. Register them and make it an offence for unregistered lobbyists to communicate with the city on behalf of clients. Don’t allow lobbyists to contact any politician or civil servant unless specifically invited to do so and keep a mandatory complete and publicly accessible log of who made such requests and to whom, the purposes of the requests, etc.

2. Control staff. The bureaucratic empires known as “silos” are still in operation, needlessly duplicating some functions, restricting or expanding others with little regard to efficiency. This makes for a good sop to the minority right wing on council: Form them as a committee to investigate departments for duplications of functions and to recommend restructuring. As so-called fiscal conservatives, they should be able to come up with many useful recommendations and should leap at the opportunity to serve in such a way. And don’t get caught up in the confusion that somehow staff are your employees. They’re not. They’re our employees and you must hold them answerable to us. Many city staff are competent and honourable in their jobs. Some aren’t. Most, in all likelihood, are like employees everywhere, doing what it takes to get paid and stay out of trouble.

3. Control vandalism. Poster vandals like the Stink in Thpanish bunch or 2 Guys Plastering or bands performing at The Dorks or The Guvernnut make the city look trashy and damage the surfaces where they glue things. It’s not a free speech issue. Why should those businesses get free ads on public and private property? Strict enforcement with prohibitive fines that apply both to those doing the gluing and those benefiting from the illicit advertising (like venues where advertised bands are playing) would fix that problem. Club owners would quickly ensure that anyone playing their venues not attract fines against the establishment by using illicit postering.

4. Control the streets. That means taking the initiative to end the outrage of people defecating and urinating in public places. Street people are often mentally disturbed and need long-term shelter and treatment. Those who aren’t in need of treatment should be provided with housing and prevented from returning to the street. Again, the “fiscal conservatives” should find this something they can chew on and the mayor should give them a shot.

5. Nurture small businesses, the engines of job creation. Or at least don’t join with big business to compete against them. Control bureaucrats’ urges to get into business, nearly always with large companies, including foreign-based companies. Sure, it plumps up their empires when they figure out some way to sell (mainly) advertising on every visible public surface. Often the trade out is for a pittance to the city because some bureaucrats are happy to get any outside money into their silos. But it also junks up the city and puts city government in direct competition with small businesses that sell advertising and can’t compete with taxpayer-funded monopoly combos of big business with big-city government.

6. Resist the temptation for your own empire. When the hate-filled Tories under Mike Harris made this mess with their ruinous amalgamation of Toronto, their idea was likely to make it a playground for developers by diluting local democracy. As a result, the once effective Ontario Municipal Board started approving too many bad developments. When Developer McGuinty took power little changed. The OMB still exists, destructive as ever. But the new powers he endowed you with can enable you to reverse much of the harm amalgamation causes. Think in terms of restoring the better aspects of the previous Metro government where you take the place of the former unelected chair, Paul Godfrey. Your executive could form the council. Let the former municipalities, with the possible exception of York, re-form themselves as boroughs, with their own city halls and elections. It couldn’t be clearer, after all, that there are no savings to be gained in this ungovernable amalgamated city. You can save us and still be the chief of Toronto.

7. Give us the St. Lawrence Market Complex. The bureaucrats keep finding ways to insert their bottoms in our treasures. There are several bureaucratic silos operating at the Market and it’s past due that the complex be formed as an independent city agency with its own board of directors similar to how the Hummingbird Centre is successfully operated. Re-elected Councilor Pam McConnell is strongly in favour of that move. So let’s get on with it forthwith! And let’s dedicate the Market to focus on food. For over two centuries, the Market has been Toronto’s food central. It shouldn’t be split into non-food sections. But the city Culture silo is planted on the east mezzanine with a minimalist, infrequently changing photo display that doesn’t belong there. If any place, it belongs in historic St. Lawrence Hall. To further justify its unworthy existence at the Market, the “Market Gallery” now intrudes into the east mezzanine with a lunch program for school children on day trips. Now that the Market merchants have taken that space for cooking and food-related demonstrations in The Kitchen on the west mezzanine, Culture must let go.

8. Give us St. Lawrence Hall. Something really stupefying happened there. City bureaucrats took over the entire second floor of the historic treasure and converted it into a modern mess they call a “learning centre” on one side and an employee assistance program on the other. The public aren’t allowed in. They dropped the ceilings and installed fluorescent lights. They plopped a modern design floor covering into the mix. Totally unsuitable and a waste of money. Much of what they do there can be done by renting occasional meeting space in local hotels and the like, teaching workers how to fill out forms and holding meetings. As for dealing with troubled city workers, that must be done elsewhere. If city Culture has a place for a gallery in the St. Lawrence Neighbourhood, that’s the logical spot for it.

9. Give us back The Esplanade strip of retail fronts now occupied by the licencing department. That just caps the more than a decade-long ineptitude of city staff to lease out that space to real businesses the neighbourhood needs. That monstrous waste of vital retail space must be made available to new stores. Otherwise it continues as a dead zone. The only good thing the licencing staff occupancy has done is provide some leasehold improvements that retail tenants can use when Licencing is relocated. City staff from many years back failed to do that, making the spaces too expensive for small businesses to improve and keeping them unoccupied until the licensing bunch moved in. Let’s get them out of there soon.

10. Give us some bacon. Where there’s pork, the public should be able to enjoy a slice. You have new taxing powers. You could tax theatre tickets, but that would be retrograde. Why not tax air travel in and out of the city? Pearson International Airport does that. We could tax the Island airport flights and passengers. And since you have the power to slap toll gates on the Gardiner, you also can erect them on Lower Bathurst Street to tax traffic to the Island airport. That’s a way for city taxpayers to fry up a slice from that Grit-Tory pork barrel that has cost us so much money.

11. Give us information. When the city fired its honest and diligent freedom-of-information chief for rightly disclosing (to be kind) staff blunders on the Union Station scandal, her job was replaced by a non-disclosure regime where department heads can have final say on what the public has a right to know. This is absolutely unacceptable. We know you hate being criticized, but we hope you’re big enough now with four years ahead of you as mayor to let the public obtain city information citizens have a right to know. If she’s still available, you should seriously consider restoring the former Corporate Access and Privacy director to her job, but with commissioner rank to be immune from bureaucratic meddling and censorship.