Our Toronto Correspondent: “Room for Debate”
Many of Terry Lavender’s friends thought he was crazy to move to Toronto.
How could I trade Vancouver’s temperate climate for Toronto’s cold winters and hot, humid summers? Or the mountains and the ocean for Lake Ontario? Or Gregor Robertson for Rob Ford?
Easy, I replied. Vancouver might be mild, but it’s also wet and gloomy for most of the year, and spring and fall in Toronto can be glorious. Vancouver might have more spectacular scenery, but Toronto’s ravines and parks have their own beauty.
And while Toronto might have Rob Ford, it also has democracy, something that’s lacking in Vancouver politics. Toronto politics is messy, and sometimes nasty, but I’ll take it over Vancouver’s one-party state any day.
Knowing Terry as an opinionated West Ender (is there really any other kind?), I invited him to send along his thoughts periodically. And so, for the first time, he has:
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Earlier this week Toronto City Council voted to raise residential property taxes by 2 percent. The increase was passed after council rejected several other proposals, ranging from 0 percent to 3.1 percent.
Though the final tally was 38-6, the outcome wasn’t certain until the vote and a large number of people in the city followed the debate on Twitter as council members weighed the consequences — fewer shelter beds, unfilled fire fighter positions — of the various options. In order to ensure the budget passed, Mayor Rob Ford compromised on his hard-line against spending, adding $7 million in new initiatives.
Quite a contrast from Vancouver where Vision Vancouver’s council majority and strict caucus discipline means budgets — and most other council decisions — are decided behind closed doors.
Thanks to Vision Vancouver’s domination of council, park board and school board, most decisions are a foregone conclusion. Any serious debate takes place behind the closed doors of the Vision caucus rooms. (Not that it was any better under Sam Sullivan’s NPA, of course — it’s the system, not the party, that’s at fault.)
Members of the public may get a chance to speak on issues and sometimes public discussion goes on for hours, but those speeches have little impact. Once the last person has used up their allotted five minutes, the Vision councillors will vote the way they already decided in caucus. Public input is limited to election time.
Toronto, on the other hand, has no municipal party system. Candidates for mayor and council run independent campaigns and the result is a 45-member council with representatives from all over the political spectrum. Alliances on council are fluid and often based on a particular issue.
Because of this, there’s a wide range of opinions on council. Some councillors can be reliably depended on to vote a certain way most of the time, there’s a large group in the centre who vote depending on the particular issue and who can be swayed, by other councillors, by circumstances and by their constituents.
A good example is last year’s budget debate. Ford proposed a number of cuts in services, including libraries, day care spaces and community grants, but days of passionate presentations by residents led council to vote against most of the cuts. This year’s debate was less passionate, because the city has a healthier financial situation, but there was still an element of uncertainty. Contrast this to the Vancouver City Council budget “debate” where the most interesting development was a computer glitch that prevented budget amendments from appearing on some councillors’ computer screens.
Toronto’s system isn’t perfect, of course. The lack of party discipline leads to some bad and bewildering decisions — for example, council voted last year to rescind an existing 5-cent tax on plastic bags, replaced the tax with an outright ban on bags, then rescinded the ban, but didn’t reinstate the tax.
But on consideration, I’ll take the Toronto model, warts (and Ford) and all. It may be ugly, but it’s democracy.
Let me preface this by saying that I really like Toronto, and I really like Vancouver.
“It may be ugly, but it’s democracy.”
So is Vancouver’s system. There are general elections, where people are free to vote for whomever they want.
“Ford proposed a number of cuts in services, including libraries, day care spaces and community grants, but days of passionate presentations by residents led council to vote against most of the cuts.”
If Vision Vancouver proposed measures along the same line as Ford’s, things would get passionate in Vancouver pretty quickly, too. Luckily Vision (and NPA) are more clever than Rob Ford.
It seems to me like Mr Lavender is actually enjoying the battles as a form of entertainment, rather than considering whether they lead to better government.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy watching the Rob Ford Debacle on TV as well, but let’s not confuse raucous battles in the media with good debate.
Agustin, I would not say that Vision and the NPA are more “clever” than Rob Ford. He knows what he is doing.. making enemies and getting attention.
It is just that Vision and the NPA, being committees, tend to water down the trenchant and ideological positions behind closed caucus doors, where-as independents have the freedom to be more bold. As Terry L said, it may be more partisan in Vancouver, but it also has the (sometimes) advantage of party discipline.
Isn’t the biggest difference that they have wards there and we have an at-large system? Doesn’t much of their debate stem from councillors looking to defend what’s best for their specific wards? And their politics were also changed dramatically by Mega-city… the old city of Toronto wouldn’t have elected Rob Ford either… so it’s hard to make a direct comparison.
Calling Vancouver a “one-party state” seems like an odd choice of words… considering the NPA were leading the city 4 years ago. I get what he means though, with slates vs independents. If only we could have more proportional electoral systems at all levels of government… for me that’s what would feel like democracy.
The two aspects – wards vs no wards, and party politics vs independents – are related. If you have an at-large system in a large city like vancouver, there is a greater tendency for parties to develop, because of the cost of running elections.
You often see that in small towns, there are no parties, and every politician is an independent. As the cities grow larger, the issues become more complex, and also more divisive, parties develop, for two reasons. Birds of an ideological feather flock together (to make policy); and the party system makes it easier for them to battle their foes come election time.
I am skeptical though whether toronto really has no party politics at the local level. Toronto being as big as it is, that is hard to believe. Rob Ford being an independent, I can believe that. What party would have him?
I’m with Terry on this one, and the same is true on larger levels. Funny how many of us, because it exists, understand how representative democracy can function at a municipal level, but get completely baffled by the idea of kicking parties out of the system at the national and provincial level.
Either parties or individual representatives can give you good government or bad government, depending on who you elect. But there’s no doubt that if individual citizens want to be heard on individual issues, then a party system will destroy that. Your only input is on the overall package a party represents, and even then, only every few years.
The detriment of getting rid of the party system is that you quickly get bogged down in bickering and little else gets done.
The system of individual representatives doesn’t scale well.
However, I do believe that our current first-past-the-post systems leans too far towards concentrating power in one political party at a time. I would much rather have a system of proportional representation, which is closer to individual representation but scales much better.
(Note that Vancouver’s municipal elections are not first-past-the-post like our provincial and federal ones are. Vision won the last election with an overwhelming majority on council because Vancouverites chose that.)
It’s not first past the post but it’s not proportional either. If, say, 40,000 West Siders voted and the vote was 100 per cent for the NPA, and 50,000 East Siders voted 50 per cent for COPE and Vision, then guess who gets 100 per cent of the seats on council and the mayor’s table with less than half of the vote.
The vote tallies may be purely hypothetical, but the problem is a major one, and part of why COPE was completely wiped out from council last election despite a reasonable showing.
@ Tessa (I can’t hit reply on your post) – that’s true, it’s a plurality-at-large voting system. It could be better, but I think we get better results than by having a ward system with first-past-the-post.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plurality-at-large_voting
the proportional electoral system is not always that great. They have it in Israel, and in Italy, I believe. it leads to much coalition making and horse trading, and the partisanship is still as strong as ever. and the goverments fall quite often.
It seems to me that when some people disagree wht the party that is power, they say: “kick parties out of the system” or “refrom the electoral process”; but when they agree with the party in power, they say: “the system works fine”. That does not work.
And, the party system does not “destroy the ability for individual citizens want to be heard on individual issues”, but it does tend to flatten these things out. It is just a natural tentency that when lots of individuals are expressing their individual opinions to a lot of individual members of a party, each member is going to hear something different, and react differencly, and apply different political calculus.
It is like throwing all your coloured clothes into the washing machine. they all come out pale green.
Tessa, what you described IS first past the post, isn’t it?
Yeah, I’ll take the municipal party system over first-past-the-post wards any day of the week. Aside from the nonsense that Vancouver is a ‘one-party state’ because Vision is on, shocker-of-shockers, it’s second term, the so-called non-partisan systems simply hands overwhelming power to the incumbents. They have name recognition and access to resources that outsiders trying to break in often can’t overcome.
Despite their supposed non-partisan status, almost all municipal councilors in jurisdictions without political parties or slates still have official or unofficial ties to Federal and Provincial politics, with all of the advantages that confers.
Almost any system can be gamed by political actors to produce haywire results but that’s not a reason to throw out the aspect that effectively grants some sort of responsible government at the municipal level.
Since virtually all Canadian cities use a ‘weak-mayor’ model where the mayor is effectively a premier with just one vote on council, switching to these supposed ‘non-partisan’ elections would diminish the ability of voters to hold their representatives responsible in elections. If people are dissatisfied with the state of municipal politics in Vancouver, they know exactly whom they should be targeting, Vision Vancouver. In Toronto, they’ll be targeting Ford but what about those on council who enabled him? A lot of them will escape electoral accountability because of the huge advantage of their incumbency.
Really, a better answer to the problems Vancouver has politically would be (aside from a new regional governance model) for some sort of proportional representation tied to districts rather than the free for all proportional representation that’s currently present.
I think it’s also worth noting that both left and right wingers in Toronto have been exploring ways of establishing slates of candidates and that there’s also been some talk of establishing political parties or candidate slates in Calgary and Edmonton as part of their negotiations for city charters.