Dear Voter: It Doesn't Stop After the Election

Vancouver City Hall. Photo by Foxtongue from Flickr

Elections have always given me a rush. I remember the first time I got to vote, standing in a long line outside of an elementary school, waiting to mark an X on a piece of paper that somehow, amazingly, was going to contribute to determining the future of my community. It's like doing a giant puzzle with a whole bunch of strangers, except you don't know what the final image will be.

City politics may not always consist of grand, fiery debates over health care reform or foreign policy or that ever-elusive beast the economy. But each decision at council, be it a rezoning, a development approval, a new by-law, a decision to spend money on this instead of that, affects your day-to-day life as an urbanite greatly. That sidewalk you walk on, that road you drive on, that bus you take, that water you drink, that poop you flush--all of it belongs to the realm of your city government. And you should pay attention to what they do in between elections.

You can attend meetings and council sessions. You can even watch online in your own home with no pants on if that's your thing (it's often my thing). Some of it may be mind-numbingly boring. I won't lie. You may not understand everything at first. And no one will fault you for zoning out for a minute to play Angry Birds on your phone.

You can write emails to your councillors. You can even tweet at some of them or be their friend on Facebook. Sometimes they even write back. The good ones, anyway. You're their boss, after all. Why give them a performance evaluation only once every few years? Tell them what you think of what they're doing. Give them suggestions. Help them do a better job.

Only 34% of people in Vancouver managed to get out and vote in the November 19th election. And that pitiful number is actual an increase over the 2008 election when it was 31%. That means that 66% of people in Vancouver decided they didn't really care about who ran their city for the next three years.

You may not think you care, but you do. If you care about your roads, transit, water, sewage, electricity, arts, libraries, parks, recreation, police, bikes, street festivals, affordable housing, and homelessness, then you care what your councillors are doing in between those election dates. If we didn't have a city government we would all be floating in a void, like in The Matrix before they program stuff in.

If you want to keep up to date on Vancouver City Council, watch meetings online and read agendas, click here.

If you're in Toronto (or like me and have a toe in both cities) and want to do the same for Toronto City Council then check out the calendar which has links to meetings and agendas. You can also watch council sessions online at RogersTV.

The Executive Committee's Game

(this post originally appeared on Torontoist. July 30, 2011)

Remember back in elementary school, when a group of kids would invite you to come play a game with them, explain all the rules, but then, as the game went on, continuously change the rules so the outcome would inevitably be that they won? It was an exercise in frustration and futility. No matter what you did or how much you tried to play by their rules, the outcome was always the same.

This was what came to mind yesterday, watching the Executive Committee as they held their marathon meeting that lasted almost 24 hours as Mayor Ford & Co. heard from, according to the Toronto Star’s count, 169 out of the 344 citizens who had signed up to speak about the core service review done by KPMG. The narrative that Ford & Co. attempted to construct—that the people coming to speak were all from labour and special interest groups—was refuted time and time again as people from all backgrounds and wards came to speak (including the now famous yelly granny from North York).

That the meeting lasted continuously until there were no more people left to speak was no accident, nor was it necessary. The meeting could have been capped at a certain time of night and then reconvened again Friday morning. This would have allowed more people, many of whom were probably unable to spend their wee hours of the night sitting and waiting to be called upon, to participate. This was an intentional move to limit the amount of engagement and discourage those wanting to speak from actually doing so.

There was also the motion Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti (Ward 7, York West) put forward to limit speaking times from the usual five minutes down to three minutes. This motion passed easily, with Ford voting in favour, even though he had earlier said that everyone would get five minutes to speak. Hours later, a motion to cut speaking time for councillors from two minutes to one minute failed in a tie, but then Councillor David Shiner (Ward 24, Willowdale), who had been absent during the vote, walked back in and was allowed to vote late, thus allowing the motion to pass. Presto, change-o.

Then there was the one-minute chant of “save our libraries” during head of library workers' union Maureen O’Reilly's deputation, after which Mammoliti exclaimed that if this happened again he would move a motion to end the meeting and hear no more deputations. Ford agreed, saying: "If a councillor moves a motion to end this meeting, it's over. I am being very democratic. I'm being more than fair." You expected him afterwards to look around the table at all the committee members, saying: Anyone? Anyone want to move that motion? No? Damn.

Or there was Ford, pressing the button to start a speaker's time before they got to the table, or moving down the list so quickly that speakers who were seated in overflow rooms couldn’t get there fast enough.

This kind of dirty game–playing behavior is not limited, however, to just this one Executive Committee meeting — it has permeated Ford & Co.'s entire term so far. (Think the behind-the-back motion to kill the Jarvis bike lanes that sprung out of nowhere and without consultation with the councillor in whose ward that bike lane is located.)

But let’s just remember for a moment why it was that those kids we knew, way back when, changed all the rules during the game. The reason was to give themselves an advantage. And the reason that someone would want to give themselves an advantage was because they were afraid of losing.

What usually happens with children who continuously change the rules to allow themselves to win in a game is that, eventually, no one wants to play with them anymore. Or, in more political terms, they’re voted out of office.

Toronto City Council Channels Harry Potter, Graffiti Blitz, Tree House Cities, and Facebookville

In a long, torturous special meeting of council scheduled to decide whether to fire the rest of the Toronto Community Housing Corporations board members, it was ruled that speaking of the auditor general's report that had caused this whole snafu was out of order. This led to what can only be described as the Harry Potterfication of council as The-Document-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named became the preferred way of alluding to the forbidden report. Not allowing council to reference a report that was being used to fire board members is almost as ridiculous as not allowing them to talk about 2012 impacts of the 2011 budget at the 2011 budget meeting. If this keeps up, by the end of the year council will only be able to communicate in a combination of increasingly vague hand gestures and blinking.

Steve Kupferman over at OpenFileTO has done some investimagating and found out the incredible numbers of graffiti violations that have been issued under Rob Ford's reign. In fact, in a little over three months there have been almost the same number of violations issued as in the previous twenty months under David Miller, leading some to wonder about the clean-up costs associated with this for small businesses. But Shawn Micallef, over at Spacing, has found some graffiti that even Rob Ford may not want to scrub off.

Have you ever found yourself wandering the streets with a pen and notebook and way too much time on your hands? At least two people in New York City have, and they've decided to do something about it dammit. One is drawing every building in NYC while the other is drawing every person in NYC. Too bad by the time they finish, pen and paper will be a thing of the past and they'll have to complete their project by digitally downloading their drawings into their iPad 58 through Apple's new-fangled mind-reading app.

A Vancouver architecture firm is experimenting with the idea of wooden skyscrapers as the way to a sustainable future, sparking a furious debate over the gender equality of a future city possibly overtaken by No Girls Allowed boy's clubs.

Facebook as Urban Planning? A bunch of architecture students are rounded up to try to make Facebook's new digs feel more like a neighbourhood, with one student saying that they wanted to make the "edge of the campus more permeable and remove the line between public and private land". No word yet on how much control Facebook employees would have over these privacy settings.

And, the non-sequitur: a Chilean man who has 82 tattoos of Julia Roberts on his body, proving that, yes, you can have too much of a good thing.

When 0.155% is Deemed Too Big a Tax Increase

(Feb 25, 2011 edit: portions of this post appear in altered form in my article on the Torontoist)

This morning something unexpected happened to me. I began to watch the live stream of Toronto city council debating budgetary matters and was suddenly hooked. I don't know if it was Speaker Nunziata's saucy schoolmaster attitude or the overly sensitive councillors offended by such things as pointing and smiling, but I almost missed an appointment for a haircut.

Of course, I wouldn't have been so riveted if the debate hadn't been about something that seemed kind of important--like, oh I don't know, the money the city needs to operate.

Councillor Gord Perks (Ward 14 - Parkdale/High Park) introduced a motion to raise the property tax rate by 0.155%. As Perks pointed out this would raise enough money to avoid the proposed service cuts to TTC bus routes, save the urban affairs library from closing, with a chunk of change left over that could be used for other things. He also pointed out that this would be an incredibly small tax increase, costing taxpayers between $4 and $9 for the entire year.

Sounds reasonable, no?

27 councillors didn't think so, as the motion was defeated 18-27, causing sane people all around the city to grab a fistful of their hair and rip it out.

But there were some good points raised in the debate about the motion (by debate I mean of course that everyone got to speak and no one listened to each other). Josh Matlow (Ward 22 - St. Pauls) made the observation that service cuts are all relative: while Rob Ford may deem some service cuts to be minor, the citizens affected by such cuts may deem them major.

Karen Stintz spoke about how she believed that it would be better to let the citizen's of Toronto figure out how to spend their $4 to $9 since the City has proven unable to do so in the past. I guess some of those people could pool their $4 to $9 together, invest it, and maybe in a hundred years they'd have enough money to buy their own bus. That's reasonable.

What was really on the table though was blind ideology against common sense city budgeting. Rob Ford was bent on freezing the property tax no matter what, so they were going to freeze the property tax no matter what. How else could councillors really justify cutting services as opposed to approving a tax increase so small that most citizens wouldn't even notice if no one told them? I mean, really, most people probably lose that much change in their couch each year.

Budget talks continue. Tune in.

Rob Ford the Strong Mayor?

A few days ago, the quote that zoomed around the internet was Doug Ford opining the relatively little power his brother Rob Ford has in Toronto’s weak mayor system, prompting the blogo- and Twitter-sphere into a foamy frenzy. “I believe in a strong mayor system, like they have in the States,” Doug Ford said. “The mayor should have veto power ... so he has enough power to stop council.”

Just to recap: in Toronto’s weak mayor system the mayor has one vote, just like every other councilor. Rob Ford cannot let loose with the gavel and cancel projects willy-nilly. He must first garner the majority support of councilors, which can be pretty annoying and difficult and laborious, but, you know, that’s democracy.

In an electoral system where the mayor had won a clear majority of the votes, the idea of a strong mayor system begins to look a little less undemocratic. For example, a strong majority from voters could mean they have confidence in the mayor's own personal vision for the city. But one has to wonder if allowing a mayor veto power when he was elected with less than a majority (Ford was elected with 47%) makes for a democratic system. Perhaps before we look to overhaul the powers of our mayoral system, we should look at the system that elects the mayor in the first place to make sure that it provides the most fair and democratic manner of election.

In the current system, first-past-the-post, a mayor, or any councilor for that matter, can easily be elected with well under majority support. James Pasternak in Ward 10 York Centre, for example, was elected with a paltry 19% of the vote this past election, meaning that over 80% of voters didn’t want him to be their councilor. Organizations like Fair Vote Toronto, Better Ballots, and the advocacy group Ranked Ballot Initiative (RaBIT) have all proposed solutions and started dialogues on the matter of refining Toronto's municipal electoral system.

It’s not surprising, however, that Rob Ford would want to govern with a weightier hand, given his propensity for proclaiming various city projects dead (coughTransitCitycough) without first discussing the matter with the other 44 councilors. His campaign was focused, hard-lined, and unbending, so why should we expect his mayoral reign to be any different? Of course Ford would want veto power because then he wouldn’t have to work with all those pesky left-wing councilors and their kooks of a constituency.

In the current weak mayor system, the mayor must forge relationships with a diverse group of councilors (and with Toronto’s 44 councilors plus a mayor you are going to get a lot of diverse opinions to contend with). How much of a mayor’s vision gets implemented during his or her term is a reflection of how much support he or she garnered on council. The mayor cannot rely on party support because there are no parties in the Toronto system. Contrast this with the Vancouver system, which introduces parties into municipal politics. While still a weak mayor system, Mayor Gregor Robertson of the party Vision Vancouver can usually rely on the support from other councilors within the same party—and with 7 out of 10 current councilors affiliated with Vision Vancouver he usually has the support he needs.

But Toronto’s system is different. Without parties, there are no givens in terms of what councilor is going to support what or who is aligned with who. While Rob Ford certainly has clear alliances on council, there is nothing officially tying any councilor to vote with the mayor. The mayor must work with councilors to gain the support needed, which works then in theory to keep the mayor from becoming a lone wolf figure. The weak mayor system acts a check-and-balance against power, preventing the mayor from simply over-riding council decisions and implementing his or her own civic vision--for better or worse. The downside to a weak mayor system is that things could move a lot slower as the mayor works to gain support. Of course, this can be an upside too, depending on the agenda.

Before we even think about giving our mayor the power to veto decisions by council, we should make sure that he or she is elected in a truly democratic system.