In the hall-of-mirrors that is the current mayoral election, as my colleagues John McGrath and Matt Elliott noted, we had the following weirdness last week: Premier Doug Ford, in an aside at a presser, sort of endorsed Mayor Olivia Chow. The amplifier of this plug was none other than soon-to-be-former councillor Brad Bradford, who took to social media to accuse his rival of excessive chumminess with the provincial anti-Christ, or words to that effect.
Ford quickly walked back whatever it is that he meant, claiming he’ll work with anyone.
Our premier — whose appetite for political, um, dominance rivals that of a certain somebody stateside — is or should be the elephant in the room of this election. However, I’m not totally certain he’ll emerge as the ballot question on October 26, although Gord knows he should, given his seemingly insatiable appetite for meddling in the city’s business.
No one should deceive themselves into believing that a Mayor Bradford, who has already surrounded himself with Conservatives and right-of-centre Liberals, would govern as anything other than a willing supplicant to Ford’s high-handed decrees.
But Chow hasn’t exactly manned the barricades to fight Ford’s repeated incursions into the city’s jurisdiction. Her approach reminds me of John Tory’s, in that they both believe(d) that the most productive strategy for taking on Premier Shrek is to take the conversation off-line.
Strangely enough, Chow and Tory share a temperamental distaste for rhetorical bomb-lobbing and shouty populism. Having taken a measure of the city’s weak positionality viz Queen’s Park, both opted to cut whatever deal they could, and then move on to the next thing.
The degree to which this city’s form and function are being determined by the personalities at either end of University Ave. is a deeply dysfunctional dynamic that must be addressed, somehow.
I don’t want to argue that the big personalities of urban politicians don’t or shouldn’t matter. Montreal’s Jean Drapeau had mighty ambitions that he succeeded in selling to Quebec City legislators. In the depths of the Depression New York’s Fiorello LaGuardia’s epic clashes with governors and presidents left their mark on the city. The men and women who aspire to the office of mayor are not ego-free, nor, needless to add, are those who become premier.
That said, the relationship between Queen’s Park and Toronto and/or Ontario’s largest cities (Ottawa, Mississauga, Brampton, Hamilton, Waterloo) can’t only be determined by the political calculations and tactics of the executive branches of either level of government.
I’d argue, in fact, that because our 159-year-old constitution relegated municipal government to second (or third) class status, these inter-governmental relationships are over-indexed to the political personas of whomever is in charge.
Since amalgamation, Toronto’s only had a handful of such shotgun weddings, each with its own relational character. Mel Lastman and Mike Harris went from marriage of convenience to shouting and back again. David Miller and Dalton McGuinty, both cerebral and wonkish, got along well — until they didn’t. Rob Ford scared the bejesus out of McGuinty. Kathleen Wynne and John Tory gestured at one another politely, but that was about the extent of it. The famous cricket-bat photo of Doug Ford and Tory told us everything we needed to know about those two. And while Ford and Chow haven’t quite achieved that degree of submission, no one is especially mystified about who’s calling the shots and why.
In all cases, the inter-personal leader dynamic is out-sized and demonstrably harmful.
As countless pundits before me have observed, the constitutional division of labour may have made sense back when municipalities issued licenses, inspected abattoirs and ran the local gaol. But the 1867 status quo is totally inadequate for the needs of the modern metropolis, with its deep well of responsibilities, and even allowing for the fact that provincial governments must enact certain laws and policies to maintain some level of rational local governance.
Only once in almost 30 years has Toronto managed to make a case for somewhat more regulatory and financial autonomy, but this brief moment has been vastly overshadowed by the instances of the loss of power, which began at the dawn of amalgamation and continues to this day, through decisions such as Ford’s unilateral cuts to council, his move to strip the city of its ability to build rapid transit, and, most recently, the Tories’ idiotic bike lane demolition derby.
In this space two weeks ago, local governance scholars Nick Vlahos, Patricia Wood and Gabriel Eidelman argued for an urgent re-think of what municipal autonomy consists of, pointing out that meaningful reform begins with a constitutionally protected charter — an idea that percolates to the surface regularly. But, they caution, “[g]iving City Hall more power is not, by itself, the same thing as strengthening democracy, and making it more representative, participatory and accountable.”
My own view is that city charters are less effective than proponents make out, especially in a system in which the higher order government has so much more regulatory power. As we’ve learned in recent years, the City of Toronto Act, which is not quite a charter, did little to halt the tide of Fordism that has spewed out of Queen’s Park since 2018.
In the past year, however, I’ve become more interested in the workings of the Council of the Federation — the committee of the prime minister and the premiers. Its members are not politically or constitutionally beholden to one another, but they all have the ability to squeeze until it hurts.
For years, and through successive governments, Ottawa has practiced some version of “asynchronous federalism,” which involves the feds promoting national policies and then cutting bespoke political deals with different provincial premiers.
There’s no shortage of personalities and hierarchy in this mode of governing, but the capital-P political dynamics are blunted by the institution of the council, which is mirrored by similar ministerial-level councils geared at cross-cutting policy domains, like healthcare. The pragmatism and ritual baked in to this mode of inter-governmental negotiation seems to blunt the most egregious or high-handed power plays, i.e., the type of thing we see in the heavy-weight-to-welter-weight cage matches between City Hall and Queen’s Park.
What does a Council of the Federation look like at the provincial/municipal level in Ontario? It might consist of a limited membership that includes the premier and the mayors of four or five of the largest municipal or regional governments, with a rotating chair, a secretariat, and a regular schedule of meetings to work through the sorts of issues that come up only in big cities, and in which the provincial government has a stake.
With the federal government’s powers, Prime Minister Mark Carney could, if he wished, unilaterally impose export taxes on Alberta’s oil or Saskatchewan’s potash to hit back at the Trump administration’s tariffs. But the enforced negotiation entrenched in the council means he has to be more collaborative.
I’m not expecting Doug Ford to propose anything like this, of course. But if future premiers want to take the utterly counter-productive friction out of provincial/municipal relations, some kind collaborative body of might be a way to bring about a politics that is less chronically confrontational, less wasteful, less partisan, and, most importantly, less harmful to the people who actually live in Ontario’s big cities.
