You probably don’t think it is much of a problem, but Toronto City Council seems to feel the most pressing issue of governance facing the city today is ward boundaries.
Who would have thought that lines on a map would make any difference?
But here it is, a 60-page report titled Drawing the Lines that sets out five options for new ward boundaries to be decided on in 2016. The objective is to create wards that are equal in population so all votes are equal. Currently some downtown wards, because of the condo boom, have 25 per cent more residents than suburban wards, and as the condo boom continues the disparity will grow.
Options in the report vary from 60,000 to 75,000 residents per ward, from 38 to 58 wards. Take your pick. I say it hardly matters. All of these numbers produce a city council that is too large to deal well with city business.
Good local government has a council large enough to reflect different opinions and small enough to permit intelligent and intense discussion. That can’t happen with more than about two dozen members in the room.
With too many people there simply isn’t the time for unfettered discussion, which is why the current council (at 45 members) has strict time limits on speeches, always too short to address a serious issue. And if a contentious item is under discussion, so many people speak that no one can remember who said what. This is one reason city council feels dysfunctional.
In large councils it’s really difficult to put together a majority for an innovative policy, but with less than two dozen members, it’s possible for a councillor to talk to everyone to hammer out a deal.
Before the megacity, none of the local councils had more than two dozen members. Metro Council had almost three dozen members, and everyone agreed it didn’t work well. The large size meant that decisions were effectively made by the Metro chair, and most councillors fell in line. In fact, in Canada only Montreal and Toronto have councils of more than two dozen members.
What’s worse, the current city council consists of two factions warring against each other: the mixed-use, medium-density older city with a finely grained grid road pattern and the low-density suburbs where uses are separated from each other and transportation largely depends on the private automobile. These two different kinds of communities have different values about property taxation, public spending, public service and how money should be spent to get people around in the city.
Before the megacity, these different kinds of community had their own municipal councils to speak for them. Now the suburban voice is dominant, and the older city has no independent government to speak for it. No new ward system will address this problem.
More significantly, the city doesn’t have the financial resources it needs. It is again talking of raising transit fares while it happily spends tax dollars (it doesn’t have) keeping the Gardiner Expressway from collapsing. City council refuses to ask for more taxing power and, in fact, won’t even use the big power it has — the property tax levy — as effectively as other municipalities in the GTA. Indeed, Toronto has the lowest tax rate of any municipality in the GTA, which means it is always begging for money.
A better alignment of municipal council boundaries so the two political cultures would not war within the megacity would probably provide intelligent decisions about city revenues.
Asking people to debate the redrawing of the ward boundaries is a lot like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It distracts from the real and serious problem, which is that city council needs to be restructured. As Alan Redway, former mayor of East York has written, the megacity must be rethought.
We live in one of the most progressive and innovative cities in North America. Imagine if our city council was as progressive and innovative as the cultural, medical and private sectors.
Restructuring the city rather than tinkering with the ward boundaries would be the order of the day, a discussion into which we would all be drawn.
