{"id":14540,"date":"2010-10-04T12:07:29","date_gmt":"2010-10-04T16:07:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacingtoronto.ca\/?p=14540"},"modified":"2013-01-21T13:12:41","modified_gmt":"2013-01-21T18:12:41","slug":"lorinc-the-governance-debate-were-not-having","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2010\/10\/04\/lorinc-the-governance-debate-were-not-having\/","title":{"rendered":"LORINC: The governance debate we\u2019re not having"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

During Rob Ford\u2019s session with the Globe and Mail\u2019s editorial board last week, I asked him when he\u2019d hold a vote on reducing the size of council from 44 to 22 if elected mayor. In a revealing response, Ford said he wouldn\u2019t put the question until the third year of his term, so as to prevent \u201cin-fighting\u201d among the councillors.<\/p>\n

Wishful thinking, that.<\/p>\n

In his third year, Ford may well be in a position to ask a possible premier Tim Hudak for help in delivering this platform promise (although provincial legislation doesn\u2019t require intervention). He\u2019ll need all the support he can get: with that downsizing looming on the electoral horizon, you\u2019ve got to think that Mayor Ford\u2019s council will be a rat\u2019s nest of betrayal, suspicion and stealth attacks as councillors who share federal\/provincial ridings jockey for position in 2014.<\/p>\n

None of the intramural bickering should come as a surprise to Ford, who admits to routinely interfering in other councillors\u2019 ward business. Sure, he couches those interventions as disinterested attempts to help citizens thwarted by an implacable municipal administration. But the telling detail is that Ford carefully filed away all their names and numbers, as his campaign manager revealed<\/a> during the ed-board session. After all, that kind of IOU list is money in the bank for someone whose political ambitions extend beyond the apparently graffiti-free world of Ward 2.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

From a governance perspective, Ford won\u2019t have trouble whipping his vote; the mayor has enough patronage bootie to keep the troops happy. The issue is that for the duration of the first term, he\u2019ll have institutionalized a kind of internecine warfare that will wreak havoc with the way councillors approach ward matters.<\/p>\n

The inverse of Fordist governance, however, isn\u2019t the status quo, although it\u2019s tempting to defend council\u2019s current M.O. in the face of Ford\u2019s muddle-headed ideas about jettisoning politicians and their rented chicken suits.<\/p>\n

With the city\u2019s official plan up for its statutory five-year review, few Torontonians are satisfied with the way the city does planning. There are lots of reasons, but poor governance is certainly one of the biggies. Council\u2019s mandated public consultation process is reactive, confrontational and profoundly inconvenient. The community councils don\u2019t turn anyone\u2019s gears. And instead of community planning, the exercise is almost always about individual applications.<\/p>\n

At a lecture at the Jane Jacobs Prize awards a few weeks back, former chief planner Paul Bedford argued that the looming regime change down at City Hall presents an opportunity to launch a more constructive governance debate; he\u2019s right, as Bedford often is, but I\u2019m not holding my breath.<\/p>\n

His excellent proposal<\/a> [PDF], which is well worth reading, is that Toronto should import New York City\u2019s \u201ccommunity boards\u201d model \u2013 a network of 59 advisory councils comprised of non-elected representatives from a wide range of stakeholder groups. Each board covers an area of about 140,000 residents and plays a crucial brokering role in vetting development applications and broader planning policies.<\/p>\n

These councils, in effect, sit between the city\u2019s planning bureaucracy and the political level, and their stamp of approval carries a great deal of weight at council.<\/p>\n

Bedford argues that the City of Toronto establish 11 to 22 \u201cneighbourhood advisory councils,\u201d modeled on New York\u2019s community boards, whose function would include:
\n\u2022 Enabling proactive, rather than NIMBYist, discussion about local planning matters;
\n\u2022 serving as the first \u201cpoint of contact\u201d for development applications;
\n\u2022 encouraging citizen and non-citizen participation in local government.<\/p>\n

The genius in this model, which is a firmly entrenched feature of New York\u2019s municipal machinery, is that provides a way for local interests and residents to engage in forward-looking discussions about planning in ways that aren\u2019t (i) explicitly political (i.e., council sessions) or (ii) explicitly statutory (i.e., the public consultation sessions provided for in environmental assessments or secondary plan studies). They city-dwellers a chance to talk about the communities they want.<\/p>\n

The question is, how to get the ball rolling?<\/p>\n

Absent a constructive debate about governance reform, there\u2019s no reason why stakeholder groups in a particular part of the city \u2013 e.g., the downtown core — shouldn\u2019t invoke the lofty ideal of self-governance and take it upon themselves to set up such a neighbourhood advisory council. Build the network, name delegates, hang out a shingle, and see if city council and\/or the development industry pay attention.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s precedent if we care to see it: broad coalitions of residents groups formed in the 1970s and then again the late 1990s to confront problematic redevelopment plans. And the late David Pecaut\u2019s vision of the Toronto City Summit Alliance, launched in 2002, has a similar sort of DNA, except on a city-wide level. Why not replicate his model at a more local scale? I can\u2019t think of a reason.<\/p>\n

The point is that Torontonians are not apathetic about their city, but they are justifiably disillusioned with the state of the city\u2019s public engagement architecture. If there\u2019s going to be effective change, however, the impetus must come from below, if only as a salve to the poisonous sort of governance Ford plans to inflict on Toronto\u2019s body politic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During Rob Ford\u2019s session with the Globe and Mail\u2019s editorial board last week, I asked him when he\u2019d hold a vote on reducing the size of council from 44 to 22 if elected mayor. In a revealing response, Ford said he wouldn\u2019t put the question until the third year of his term, so as toContinue reading “LORINC: The governance debate we\u2019re not having”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4051,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[94,309,3879,1404,4685,313,16167,426,16166,7767,16168,469,564,2944,22085,2306,227,314,8893,19,4648],"class_list":["post-14540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-2010-election","tag-bank","tag-campaign-manager","tag-chief-planner","tag-david-pecaut","tag-globe-and-mail","tag-individual-applications","tag-mayor","tag-mayor-fords-council","tag-model","tag-municipal-machinery","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-paul-bedford","tag-politics","tag-premier","tag-rob-ford","tag-the-globe-and-mail","tag-tim-hudak","tag-toronto","tag-toronto-city-summit-alliance"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nLORINC: The governance debate we\u2019re not having - Spacing Toronto<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2010\/10\/04\/lorinc-the-governance-debate-were-not-having\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"LORINC: The governance debate we\u2019re not having - Spacing Toronto\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"During Rob Ford\u2019s session with the Globe and Mail\u2019s editorial board last week, I asked him when he\u2019d hold a vote on reducing the size of council from 44 to 22 if elected mayor. 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