John Tory, Toronto and the Failure of Leadership
Toronto is by most accounts one of the safest, most attractive and livable cities in the world. By nearly any reasonable measure, Toronto may be considered to be a successful place: the population increases year over year, the economy is robust and widely-diversified, the parks are green, the streets are clean. Our city is replete with all manner of different neighbourhoods, from the loud and raucous to the manicured and genteel. We contain multitudes and live in something approaching harmony – something we may take for granted. Of those challenges which the city does face, most can be said to be shared widely across many other jurisdictions around the world: the evolution of the workforce, high asset values and attendant housing shortages, the painfully slow process of grappling with institutional prejudice and racism, erratic weather, etc. But Toronto also wrestles constantly with a set of interrelated and entirely self-imposed burdens: corrosive thrift and low self-esteem. The construction and demolition of a small set of wooden stairs in a city park in Etobicoke has captured the collective imagination late this week and provided an opportunity for Mayor John Tory to gently stroke our collective penny-pinching and lack of civic confidence. The Mayor’s press release today, which called the estimated cost to build a staircase in Tom Riley park ‘absolutely ridiculous’ and ‘outrageous’ is a classic example of the acute lack of leadership on behalf of our elected officials which helps to keep Toronto in thrall to those dual yokes of unnecessary thrift and unjustified low self-esteem which have bedevilled it for so long, even as it has grown from a mid-sized provincial capital into a runaway success. It is a cynical sort of political cowardice to, at every opportunity, fail to defend public expenditure and fail to explain that Toronto can and should invest in itself and in its future. It is precisely this ongoing absence of any sort of public defense of the civil service and of any sense that Toronto can both afford to build and ought to build good things for its citizens that enables and amplifies the pessimistic notions that all public money is wasted and that government is a problem, never a solution, to continue to hold firm in the public consciousness. Toronto’s failure to move beyond the hidebound thriftiness of our abstemious founders must be unambiguously laid at the feet of the timid, self-hating cowards so routinely elected to public office. Thankfully, the possibilities for Toronto’s future remain enviously bright. Nevertheless, as long as our leadership continues to espouse the know-nothing creed to cast uninformed doubt on all expertise and persists in kicking mud on the very organization they lead, deriding it as wasteful and burdensome, rather than challenging their constituents’ assumptions and making an effort to enunciate a vision for the city that embraces and fosters our successes while addressing our difficulties, those possibilities will remain regrettably and needlessly constrained. One final irony: the same Mayor who considers the cost of a short set of stairs to be ‘out of whack with reality’ has presided over two of the most expensive and least justifiable capital projects in the city’s history, setting us on a path to rebuild an elevated highway ramp with dwindling traffic in an era that has seen expressways of the 1950s and 60s torn down all over the globe, and a subway extension virtually guaranteed to restrict the municipal coffers for generations to come for an exceptionally poor return by any standard. We deserve better, though we don’t seem to know it.