Who’s that sitting on my standing committee?

A lot of attention has been paid to how Rob Ford has filled City Council’s executive committees (see Jonathan Goldsbie’s piece yesterday). But it’s also intriguing to look at how Ford has filled Council’s seven standing committees, which manage and direct the bread-and-butter work of running the city. They are also the committees most likely to deal with issues and initiatives that citizens are involved in, so their composition can have a big impact for active citizens.

The difference from the executive committees is that, with seven standing committees of six members each, almost every councillor, whatever their political stripes, gets to sit on a standing committee (a nicely mixed piece of imagery, that), so the Mayor and his striking committee have to assign them strategically — packing the committees they consider important with their supporters, relegating their opponents to ones they consider less important, and flattering and influencing swing voters to maximum effect.

In the current administration, two committees have clearly been assigned as dumping-grounds for council progressives: Community Development and Recreation, and Economic Development. Each has four recognized progressives and one liberal-ish new councillor along with the Ford-supporting chair. It suggests these are areas where the new Mayor is not planning any significant initiatives; perhaps they are even considered prime candidates for budget cuts. It will be interesting to see how the chairs of these committees, Giorgio Mammoliti and Michael Thompson, deal with their situation.

The powerful Public Works and Infrastructure committee, by contrast, has four  strongly conservative incumbent councillors along with an experienced Miller supporter (Gord Perks, who was on the same committee in the previous term) and the high-profile new progressive Mike Layton. Possibly we can expect a lot of 4-2 votes.

One committee that looks promising is Planning and Growth Management. Planning in general tends not to fall into tidy ideological categories, and the new members of the committee are likewise not easily pigeonholed, which bodes well for their ability to work together. The chair, Peter Milczyn, is a trained architect with a strong interest in planning. Adam Vaughan was on the committee in the previous term and has been doing interesting work with planning within his ward. While he’s been a vocal opponent of Ford so far, he tends to be independent of any particular council grouping. Karen Stintz is one of the most thoughtful members of Council’s conservative wing, and they are joined by two interesting newcomers along with incumbent Frank Di Giorgio. They may be able to do good things, if the already minimal planning budget and staff aren’t gutted even more.

In the Government Management committee, Ford’s chair, Paul Ainslie, will be strongly supported by Doug Ford and Vincent Crisanti, but they will also lean on the support of newcomer Jaye Robinson. The other standing committees lean conservative, as would be expected, but have newcomers and swing voters who may make them less predictable.

photo by Wylie Poon