TheBulletin.ca Journal of Downtown Toronto
Frank Touby –
There is only one way to get Toronto back on its game and that’s to de-amalgamate. Like many of you, I remember when Toronto-the-Good became Toronto-the-Great during its heyday under mayors like David Crombie and John Sewell.
It was that era when actor Peter Ustinov equated Toronto with “New York run by the Swiss.” We were cooking. We were so cool. We had recreation centres and swimming pools the city provided where you only had to be a city resident to use them. If you were a suburbanite working in the city you could pay a fee and also swim and use the workout equipment.
We had a Parks Department superintendent, Tommy Thompson, whose signs on city lawns read, “Please walk on the grass.” And the grass was gorgeous. The city was so well maintained. After his retirement that tradition continued until the disaster came upon us.
We had CityHome where residents paying market rent or subsidized rent lived side-by-side in well-run buildings where caretakers lived on the premises. Until the disaster befell Toronto.
But many more of you can only remember dingbats like well-intentioned silly professor David Miller and crackhead Rob Ford as the city turned against us all.
That was a result of a successful takeover of Ontario government by a corporate-sponsored neoconservative pack featuring a malleable golf instructor who would do whatever his masters asked.
And what they asked wasn’t conservative at all. Conservatives favour small government as opposed to big governments. But then-new Premier Mike Harris was quite busy with his love life in the wake of a marriage breakup.
He had campaigned on promises of a Common-Sense Revolution which was uncommonly stupid if you’re a true conservative.
He stripped Toronto of its glories by diluting it in a tainted merger of Toronto with the suburbs and erecting a dysfunctional government body of a weak mayor and 44 often-warring councillors, mostly from the hinterlands.
It has always been a disaster. It always will be due to the corrupting influence of big corporations and their lobbyists whom ex-Mayor David Miller institutionalized with a $1 million (and growing) lobbyists registry.
That enables corporate bullshit artists to bribe and cajole politicians and city staff alike on behalf of their clients who have something to sell.
Instead relegating the time of staff and councillors to seeking bids for projects council desires and authorizes, city staff and councillors must wade through these licenced lobbyist characters who promote ideas to spend tax money on their corporate clients’ desires.
It’s sales-push instead of client-pull transactions that Toronto taxpayers expect and deserve. Naturally it ends up in wasteful purchases and dysfunctional acquisitions, often involving complicated digital programming that soaks up budget excesses.
The reinvention of already solved software problems using things like commercially available spreadsheets, databases and transit-ticketing regimens runs up costs and too often fails to work as well as the generic items.
The massive size of the un-government at city hall generated zero savings and has been even more costly. That’s not even debated among the handlers of Mike Harris, most of whom admit it was wrong-headed. Amalgamation raised costs and reduced “customer satisfaction,” in the terms of (thankfully ex-Mayor) Rob Ford who didn’t even recognize us as “citizens.”
Toronto is in worse shape than ever. Our public lawns are largely untended, the original CityHome has been brought to its knees and disgraced by amalgamation with dysfunctional public-housing schemes operated under Metropolitan Toronto Housing Corp. and Ontario Housing Corp.
All this needs to be brought down and simplified. Let’s re-occupy those abandoned suburban city halls with local pols and staff. Let’s be real conservatives, not lunatic neocons like Mike Harris and his deranged handlers.
Mayor John Tory is a decent man and truly wants to do what’s best for the city. He can’t. Nobody can. It’s not workable. It’s too damned big and too disparate.
The Rule of 10s applies to committees and we have a committee of 44 city councillors trying to decide what’s good for all of us. That’s about to grow even larger in size.
But the Rule of 10s takes effect whenever a deliberative body’s membership exceeds 10 persons. It states that such a group becomes collectively half as smart as the dumbest member.
So is it Rob Ford’s IQ, or perhaps Georgio Mammoliti’s IQ, that slashes the aggregate average brainpower of Toronto City Council? Or maybe some other low-watt bulb yet to be seated?
Small municipal government is better than regional government because it’s closest to the citizens.
The more functioning municipal governments we have in this zoo the Harris Tories twisted from the ‘burbs surrounding Toronto, the better off we are.
Let’s start with the revamping of those abandoned suburban city halls and moving their local municipal staffs and departments back in.
It’s not a simple fix and will be costly. But it’s more costly to keep this mess as it is, and less productive for citizens. And while we’re at it, let’s get rid of lobbyists altogether.
There’s nothing useful for the city in such a scheme as a Registry of Bullshit Artists. Lobbyists have no business being in city hall.
But mainly: De-amalgamate Toronto! Are you listening, Kathleen?
