Toronto pays when mayor drops snow ball
John Tory broke the cardinal rules of good leadership: He overpromised and underdelivered
First publish in The Toronto Sun on Feb. 1, 2022.
On Friday, Jan. 14, news reports warned a monster snowstorm was going to wallop Toronto Sunday night.
On Saturday, the Weather Network predicted “treacherous” driving conditions for Monday.
Despite ample warning, Toronto still wasn’t ready. The blizzard came and buried city streets under record snowdrifts.
The city’s highways were closed for lack of plowing. Hundreds of buses were stranded on uncleared roads. Over a week later, miles of city sidewalks remain iced-over obstacles to pedestrians.
What went wrong?
Toronto Mayor John Tory broke the cardinal rules of good leadership: He overpromised and underdelivered. He also failed to focus political attention on winter road maintenance, signalling to city staff it wasn’t that important.
In 2010, newly elected Toronto mayor Rob Ford insisted his staff be in the office through the Christmas and New Year’s Eve holidays to answer calls in case of a winter storm. By demanding briefings about storm plans and insisting his own staff be ready, he forced city managers to be ready. There was no storm.
Ford understood city staff tend to do whatever they want to do, and ignore what they don’t want to do unless politicians express keen interest in it. That’s how mayors get things done with no direct power to order the public service to act — they throttle budgets and focus public attention on what’s important. The public service responds.
For years, Toronto held “we’re ready for winter!” news conferences every fall. The mayor and senior city managers reminded reporters they had 600 snowplows, 360 sidewalk plows, 200 salt trucks and 1,500 personnel on 24/7 standby to handle any winter storm. That’s one snowplow for every 9 km of road in the city. You’d think that should be enough.
But the announcements weren’t sexy. Mayors delegated them to councillors who eventually just issued news releases. Then those stopped. Toronto’s last “winter readiness” news release was in November 2019. No doubt city staff saw the lack of political interest and adjusted their own priorities.
Last month, Tory did announce 98% of Toronto sidewalks would be cleared by city snow machines this winter. Walking is important in Tory’s Toronto. His announcement didn’t even mention clearing roads.
If residents heard any talk of winter storm management, they heard lofty promises. No more sidewalk shovelling! Plowing as soon as 2.5 cm of snow falls! So, that’s the yardstick we used and the city didn’t measure up. Tory blamed COVID and the severity of the storm.
But this is our third pandemic winter so COVID’s no excuse.
Toronto actually anticipated rare blizzards back in 2013 and established a service standard specifically for once-a-decade storms that dump more than 25 cm of snow on city streets. This mega-storm standard recognizes the difficulty of working through a storm that keeps storming. It sets standards for road maintenance while the snow is still falling and deadlines for finishing up after it stops.
“Bare pavement” should be maintained on expressways and major roads while snow falls. It wasn’t. But, deadlines to complete plowing after snowfall ends are generous — three hours on expressways, 16 hours on other roads. The city, generally, succeeded there.
Roads with on-street parking and much-ballyhooed sidewalk clearance were complete failures.
Ultimate responsibility for how Toronto managed this blizzard rests on a mayor who failed to make winter storm readiness a priority. He didn’t even issue a news release to focus city staff.
COVID and fun stuff cannot be the mayor’s only priorities. Keeping our roads running may be boring but it’s what we pay taxes for. It must be a higher priority.
Mark Towhey is a trusted advisor to business and political leaders and was chief of staff to Mayor Rob Ford.