Toronto's mayor needs stronger powers
Leaked report says Ontario premier plans to give new powers to some mayors.
Ontario premier Doug Ford is set to grant “U.S.-style powers” to the mayors of Ottawa and Toronto according to an exclusive Toronto Star story by Robert Benzie. Sources told Benzie the government is considering introducing a stronger mayor system in the province’s two largest cities, but the details have not yet been finalized — and the proposal has not yet been seen by Ford’s cabinet.
It remains to be seen what additional powers the provincial government will grant to big city mayors. But, speaking as someone who orchestrated a mayor’s office in Toronto, I can suggest what the changes should look like.
Why change is needed
Council has no mandate on major policy issues.
Every four years, Toronto residents elect a mayor and a local councillor. The mayor’s race in Toronto is one of the most complex political campaigns in Canada. It’s – effectively almost a year long – than any provincial or federal election campaign which typically take less than 36 days.
To win the mayor’s office in Toronto requires winning around 400,000 votes from nearly every corner of the city. To do this, candidates prepare and communicate detailed policies and proposals explaining how they will govern, what projects they will launch, retain, accelerate or terminate. By election day, engaged voters are well-informed about what their next mayor plans to do. The same cannot be said about their choices for councillor.
Local council races are typically focused entirely on local issues: Will you put speed bumps on my street? Can you put a bench in this park? Will you add a bus stop here? Will you ban basketball in this courtyard? Candidates for council are rarely asked about their approach to city taxation or rapid transit expansion on the other side of the city. Yet, they will ultimately hold the power over these broader issues.
Because council candidates never have to lay out a comprehensive plan on issues outside their local wards, they never have to explain what they will do about major city-wide policy issues. Therefore, they have no mandate from voters and can do whatever they want once elected.
Citizens have no ability to shape public policy.
Toronto’s mayor, elected based on a comprehensive city-wide plan for the next four years, has just one vote on council. The 25 local councillors, who have no mandate on city-wide issues, each have the same. Together, they hold 25 votes and can simply ignore the mayor’s campaign platform, strategic plan and broad public mandate.
In practice, councillors quickly learn to parlay their votes on city-wide issue in order to extort leverage for local issues. A councillor may promise to vote for or against a subway plan in exchange for support from the mayor or other councillors on their pet project to impose speed bumps on a local road.
Today, it doesn’t matter what the mayor promised voters he/she would do. It doesn’t matter that most Toronto voters may have supported the mayor’s city-wide platform. Ultimately, it’s 25 local councillors, who were never asked where they stand on the matter, who decide what gets done.
This leaves Toronto voters without a say in city-wide public policy.
In a provincial or federal election, voters can elect local representatives of a party that puts forward a platform they prefer. They have an ability to indicate what direction they want the subsequent government to go. Not so in Toronto.
Toronto residents have no way to know what they’re getting when they elect a council, leaving them with no ability to influence public policy at the ballot box. It’s a crap shoot.
The real power in Toronto is held by an unelected, unaccountable civil service
Although the City of Toronto Act establishes the mayor as the city’s Chief Executive Officer, it doesn’t empower the mayor with any of the traditional powers of a CEO. In fact, the most powerful person in the city is not the mayor. It’s the City Manager – an unelected, unaccountable, career civil servant who often doesn’t even live in the city.
The City Manager of Toronto has the executive authority to simply instruct city staff to do just about anything. The mayor and council do not have this power. They must go to council, debate and pass motions to instruct (usually “request”) city staff to do something.
Having worked in the mayor’s office, I learned the best way to get something done was to convince the City Manager it was worth doing. If the City Manager agreed, nine times out of 10, he’d just get it done. If he didn’t like the idea, he’d insist it needed to “go to council.” Ultimately, the City Manager was the final arbiter of what had to go to council. He held all the power. With absolutely zero accountability to residents.
According to the City of Toronto Act, the City Manager works directly for council – not the mayor as CEO. Whether you’re talking about a government or a corporation, the truth is, if you have 26 bosses – you have no boss. It’s easy to play one off the others and, in the end, do whatever you want. Witness how often city councillors move motions that have already been moved a dozen times in the past – each demanding staff action, each being forgotten or ignored by staff.
Citizens of Toronto deserve better. Nobody elected the City Manager or city staff. Elected officials should hold the power.
Council members regularly hijack the legislative process.
There is too much political red tape involved in getting things done. In principal, new policies and initiatives are brought by city staff or members of council first to a standing committee that has oversight of that area of governance. Planning issues or initiatives, for example, go first to the Planning and Housing Committee.
The standing committee hears public deputations on the matter, receives detailed briefings from staff, allows any councillor to ask questions of staff and participate in debate. The committee then debates, amends, kills or forwards the initiative to council.
Council then debates, amends, kills or approves the initiative. All of this takes time. More often than not, councillors move substantive off-the-cuff motions on the floor of council that may change the intent of the proposed bylaw. This, in effect, turns the entire legislative process on its ear, sometimes producing a bylaw that is 180º opposite of what was proposed and debated by the public and committee.
Because of council’s procedural bylaw, these off-the-cuff motions from the floor come after councillors have an opportunity to ask questions of staff to seek guidance on whether the motion is even legal. I have seen councillors outright lie when arguing their motions – making up fictions to justify the need for their amendment. There was no opportunity for councillors who knew better to ask staff to clarify the facts, resulting in council members casting votes based in part on fictions.
As a result, these off-the-cuff council decisions are often idiotic and sometimes illegal. Past councils have routinely had to reopen “approved” matters at later meetings to fix bylaws.
What should change
Make the Mayor a real CEO – with oversight of all city staff
All Toronto city staff report to the City Manager. The City Manager should report to the mayor – not council. This would give the mayor the ability to formally access expertise and analysis that is only available from civil servants, instead of having to rely on a small cadre of political staff who may or may not be up to the task of creating policy for Canada’s sixth largest government.
Much of what the mayor wants to get done can be done by executive directive from the City Manager. Instead of spending months bartering for votes on City Council to approve simple executive actions, they could just be done.
The electoral process would would hold the mayor accountable for his or her executive decisions. These decisions are already being made – but currently they’re being made by an unelected, unaccountable civil servant. Making the City Manager accountable to the mayor doesn’t add executive power, it just makes it transparent and accountable to the public.
Other changes I recommend below would further strengthen the “guard rails” to prevent a “rogue mayor” from running amok.
Disallow amendments from the floor of Council
Council members should not be allowed to move amending motions from the floor of council. Under the current procedures bylaw, this is supposed to be a rare exception. In fact, it has become the normal course of business. It bypasses the routine legislative process that ensures full and due consideration and produces bad policy.
Once matters come before council, councillors should have just three choices available to them: approve the item, kill the item, or send it back to committee for further review and amendment. No amendments should be allowed at council. That’s what committees are for.
Only two ways to put business before council
Currently, items can be placed before Council four ways: through the committee process (which is supposed to be the routine), directly from the mayor, directly from the City Manager or from any member as a Member Motion.
The member’s motions are routinely abused and never useful. If the City Manager reports to the Mayor, then there will be no further need for the City Manager to put items before council. Those items would come from the mayor. The committee process is supposed to be the principal means of putting business before council and it should continue. Public consultations, staff advice and rigorous public debate are supposed to happen at committee. Too often, this process has been thwarted by mischievous councillors and the committees have lost value as a result.
Toronto’s procedures bylaw should be amended to provide for only two ways to put business before council:
From the Mayor. The mayor as head of council should be able to put business directly before council. This allows the mayor to advance his/her political mandate as approved by electors. Individual members of council who believe a matter is so urgent it must bypass the committee process can petition the mayor to put their matter directly to council. In theory, this is how member’s motions are supposed to work now, but the process has been perverted over the years to the point that council now routinely considers every member motion, even those that are spurious.
From a Standing Committee. Standing Committees should be able to put matters before council with or without approval of the mayor. Standing committees have the time and the wherewithal to hear from the public, hear from staff, hear expert advice, rigorously debate, consider and amend proposals before sending them on to council for approval – or directly to the dustbin if they don’t pass muster.
Budgets should be the province of the mayor
The Toronto budget process is a mess. The budget starts with city staff who put together a proposal with the unofficial involvement of the mayor’s office and “budget chief” (currently an elected councillor appointed to the role by the mayor.) But, the mayor’s office has limited staff to oversee the myriad details of a $15 Billion budget. The budget chief gets no staff to do his/her job. When the mayor and City Manager are on good terms, the process starts smoothly. When they aren’t, it’s a disaster.
Once the “staff-supported budget” is published, it goes to the Budget Committee (a sub-committee of the the Executive Committee) for endless public hearings at which members of the public can make presentations and councillors can ask for detailed staff reports called “budget notes” and move amendments to the plan. Some amendments are accepted, others aren’t. Eventually, the Budget Committee passes its version of the budget and submits it to the Executive Committee.
At the Executive Committee, the entire process begins again. More public hearings. More staff reports. More debate. More amendments. Councillors who proposed losing amendments at the Budget Committee regularly resubmit them to the Executive Committee. This takes time. When the Executive Committee is finally happy with the budget, it is submitted to Council.
At Council, the entire process begins yet again. Although no public deputations are heard at Council, the same process of questions to staff, proposed amendments from councillors – including those same proposals that failed twice at Budget and Executive Committees – are considered and voted on. In the end, a City Council shaped budget is eventually approved.
All of this takes months. The public process to approve the 2022 City of Toronto budget began November 3, 2021 and concluded February 17, 2022. Meantime, the city was spending money without an approved budget from January 1, 2022.
Only the mayor is elected with a mandate to run the entire city. The mayor should drive the budget process – in order to deliver on the city-wide mandate he/she received from voters. The first public iteration of the budget should be the mayor’s budget, formally shaped by the mayor’s mandate, with all the analysis and advice of city staff incorporated within it.
The mayor should present her/his budget to the Executive Committee which can have its Budget Sub-Committee consider public deputations. The Budget Committee should not vote on or amend the budget. It’s just a sub-committee. The Executive Committee can then consider and adopt or amend the mayor’s budget before forwarding it to Council.
City Council should not be able to amend the budget. Its options should be limited to adopting or rejecting the budget – ideally requiring a 2/3 majority.
Reform the Executive Committee
The Executive Committee should be reformed to ensure regional participation through the addition of four new deputy mayors who would chair the four existing Community Councils that consider local issues within four sections of Toronto.
This would ensure there is a representative from each region of the city on the Executive Committee – something that doesn’t always exist (e.g. it did not under Mayor Rob Ford.) It also establishes a governance link between the Community Councils and the Executive Committee.
Community Councils should be sub-committees of and report through the Executive Committee – not directly to council. This would prevent Community Councils being used to end-run the legislative process.
The balance of the Executive Committee should include the mayor, and the chairs of the four standing committees (currently the Economic and Community Development Committee, General Government and Licensing Committee, Infrastructure and Environment Committee, and Planning and Housing Committee.) These standing committee chairs should be appointed (as they are now) directly by the mayor. This would give the mayor the majority of the votes on Executive Committee and the ability to advance his/her mandate even if the Deputy Mayors disagree – as long as he retains the confidence of the chairs.
Deputy Mayors should be directly elected by the people
The four deputy mayors, who would chair the four Community Councils and sit on the mayor’s Executive Committee, should be directly elected by the people. This change would accomplish a number of things:
Regional representation. It would allow residents in the four city regions to have a direct say on who sits with the mayor on the key Executive Committee with direct input on the budget and city-wide issues. If there are major regional differences in what people want, this would give people in those regions a share of the power.
Greater turnover on council. It would entice councillors to leave their council seats to run for a more powerful political office. This would create more vacancies on council for newcomers who currently have little or no chance to beat incumbents - resulting in greater turnover on city council.
More influence for voters on big issues. It would force politicians who want to be elected as deputy mayors to appeal to residents in more than one ward. They’d have to develop a campaign platform that is more policy-oriented and strategic – and less focused on picayune local issues.
Greater competition for the mayor’s office. Deputy Mayors would develop broader, city-wide public profiles, and better position them as challengers to the mayor in the next election. This would force incumbent mayors to earn their re-election and not just “glide” from term to term.
Power and acceleration, coupled with emergency brakes
These changes, taken together, would provide the mayor of Toronto with significant tools to accelerate delivery of the mandate she/he was elected to deliver – while still incorporating the brakes required to prevent a “rogue mayor” from running amok.
This system would allow Toronto to better and more effectively tackle major issues and make critical the changes required to address housing issues, to improve transit and transportation and build infrastructure. Even more important, it would provide Toronto voters with the opportunity to influence the direction of Toronto’s government – something they do not currently enjoy.
Finally, it would increase turnover on council and in the mayor’s chair. New blood and fresh ideas would do the city good.
What do you say? Would you support these changes in Toronto – or your city?