Columnists
The Shark Week surprise
Just when you thought it was safe to venture back into the chilly waters of municipal politics without having to think about the size of council, along comes a shark in the form of Premier Doug Ford and his plan to shrink Toronto’s council effective this fall. Appropriately, he announced it during Shark Week.
Many Torontonians are outraged. They say a decision to change the size of council is best put to local voters to decide by plebiscite. They are suspicious of Mr. Ford’s motives. (He claims it will save $25 million over four years; but Toronto has an annual operating budget of over $11 billion—meaning the savings barely registers on the Richter scale).
And they worry about how effectively voters can be represented. As proposed, a cut from 47 councillors to 25, serving a population of three million, means that there will be about 120,000 constituents per councillor, as opposed to about 66,000. A councillor representing 120,000 people could easily be occupied full time dealing with ‘fix it now’ issues like potholes, garbage collection, backed up sewers or snow removal; and have no time left for attending meetings or making policy. Mind you, it’s no doubt difficult to balance those tasks when you already represent 66,000 people. But doubling the volume will inevitably add to the burden.
Conspiracy theorists will argue that this is all part of a plot to consolidate power. Leave the policy making to the big dogs at Queen’s Park while those 25 hapless souls on Toronto council have their hands full with day to day issues.
But that’s Toronto, about which I know next to nothing. What about the County, about which I also know next to nothing, but about which I feel freer to opine? Since last November, we’ve been living with an Ontario Municipal Board decision that upholds council’s rejig of ward boundaries and the number of seats at the council table. We will have a mayor and 13 councillors for this election; previously, we had a mayor and 16 councillors.
Are Mr. Ford and his crew next going to tinker with the size of our council? Toronto is not the only target: the announcement also imposes new electoral structures on York, Peel, Niagara and Muskoka. But maybe they just haven’t gotten around to us yet. Targeting the County is not unprecedented—as we have just seen in the very recent passage of the White Pines Wind Project Termination Act.
Are we vulnerable? Will Mr. Ford follow through and make cuts to our council in the same proportions as he is making in Toronto and reduce us to seven councillors? Or will he look at councillor to population ratios? if the ‘one councillor per 120,000 constituents’ rule is good enough for Toronto, will that mean that with just 25,000 people to take care of, we are at risk of being cut back to one councillor for the whole County? It’s a far cry from the ‘one councillor for every 2,500 residents’ figure that was touted at the time of County amalgamation, but hey, times change.
Indeed, compared to Toronto, our ratios are so low that you could argue we should just have a mayor and forget about councillors completely. That would obviate the need for a council chamber, and silly taxpayer-funded items like agendas, reports, meetings, motions, minutes and sandwich lunches. It would require our mayor to spend a lot more time out and about responding to complaints, which would get him off his duff and be good for his health. So maybe her office could be closed and she could make do with compensation for mileage on her truck and a good cellphone plan, along with a per diem for meals and a Tims card for coffee breaks.
Putting the mayor alone in charge would certainly speed up decision-making. And if Mr. Ford didn’t like the mayor’s decisions, he could always legislate them away.
Mr, Ford may well have a valid point that having 47 councillors in Toronto is a recipe for inefficient decisionmaking. However, if he thinks that taking Toronto down to 25 councillors will be the solution, he should visit the County to marvel at the brisk efficiency and laser-like focus of our current 16 councillor crew, all of whom enable this by preparing thoroughly for meetings, having pored over their agendas and background documents.
The next meeting is on August 14. My advice to Mr. Ford is to bring along a good book—perhaps one about sharks. Or a sedative.
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