{"id":16252,"date":"2010-12-01T03:35:28","date_gmt":"2010-12-01T07:35:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacingtoronto.ca\/?p=16252"},"modified":"2013-01-21T13:34:15","modified_gmt":"2013-01-21T18:34:15","slug":"a-goodbye-to-david-millers-toronto","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2010\/12\/01\/a-goodbye-to-david-millers-toronto\/","title":{"rendered":"A goodbye to David Miller’s Toronto"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"<\/p>\n

The following is a piece by Ivor Tossell that he posted to his site<\/a> late last night. He’s a freelance writer. He lives in Parkdale. He once wrote a book review for us. Photo by Mandy No Good<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

David Miller did not found Luminato, or Nuit Blanche. He did not spark a \u201ccultural rennaissance\u201d by funding the rebuilding of the ROM and the AGO and OCAD. He did not give Toronto its banks that withstood a global meltdown unscathed. He did not create a condo boom that\u2019s pushed the city into the skies.<\/p>\n

He didn\u2019t rebuild the Distillery, or build the opera house, or plan Dundas Square and fill it with tens of thousands of revellers over and over again. He didn\u2019t even start Spacing Magazine, even though he kept showing up at their parties.<\/p>\n

In fact, the list of things that David Miller didn\u2019t personally do is really very long. (Also: founding Rome; colonizing Australia; writing Dan Brown\u2019s novels.) Yet when one thinks of David Miller\u2019s Toronto, these are the things that come to mind: A city bigger, a city fairer, a city covered in the tokens of prosperity and the evidence of enthusiasm.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve just come through an election campaign that was fought on the premise that Toronto is broken, its leaders on the wrong track, its citizens divided by class. But the fact that Rob Ford won, and won big, doesn\u2019t necessarily make that an immutable truth. Because the contradictory fact remains that, between 2003 and 2010, Toronto flowered.<\/p>\n

Of course, anything would look like a blossom next to the atomic winter of the late Lastman years, when Toronto\u2019s post-amalgamation governance was giving gong shows a good name.\u00a0Mel Lastman was at the height of his weirdness. The police were bouncing from one corruption scandal to the next. Millions of tax dollars had been bilked in a computer-leasing intrigue that unravelled with the saddest-sack love affair ever to have its cell-phone records read in court. The city was littered with the decaying corpses of fiberglass moose.<\/p>\n

It seemed, at the time, that the only power driving the city was its unweildy system itself. The city belonged to neither downtowners or suburbanites back then, but rather to opportunists who had stepped up to take advantage of it.<\/p>\n

This was why the bridge to the island airport, of all the parochial squabbles, became an winning issue for Miller in 2003. The public imagination was not ignited by an airport few cared about, on an island full of uppity cottagers even fewer had much sympathy for. But a candidate willing to halt a bridge being rammed through by an unpleasant agency on behalf of a private company \u2013 well, now you\u2019re cooking with gas.<\/p>\n

So we stepped into the Miller era, an era that abandoned rudderless damage-control in favour of earnest city-building. We know what David Miller did do: Re-equip the TTC and rebuild the waterfront, fix the city\u2019s waste fiasco and preside over bold new plans to revitalize the city\u2019s low-income, high-risk neighborhoods. He installed a police board and chief that \u2013 until the heartbreak of 2010 \u2013 restored public trust in the force.<\/p>\n

He set up a 311 service to provide better (yes) customer service to Torontonians. He won us the Pan-Am games. He rewrote the City of Toronto act, and used his new powers to plug the city\u2019s budget gap with taxes that \u2013 surprise! \u2013 turned out to be less than crowd-pleasers.<\/p>\n

He established an integrity commissioner, and ran his office with integrity. Million-dollar scandals became a thing of the past. By 2010, Kyle Rae\u2019s $12,000 cash bar seemed a ripe target (and fair enough). It is not too much to say that David Miller cleaned up City Hall. But this laundry list \u2013 obscured as it often was by Miller\u2019s oftentimes furrowed, droning performance as a communicator \u2013 doesn\u2019t capture the essence of the 2000\u2019s as we lived them.<\/p>\n

David Miller was as much a product of his era as he was responsible for it. He presided over a time of intense interest in Toronto, by the people who live in it and who love it. Toronto in the 2000\u2019s was as a place not just to be inhabited, but celebrated; a place not just to be managed, but an immense public work, a never-ending project of commerce and community.<\/p>\n

A city that had survived decades of architectural self-immolation followed by political self-destruction had emerged into an era of celebrating itself. David Miller\u2019s Toronto was a place where millions thronged the streets on a regular schedule of public festivals through the year. A place where people who wanted to work for progressive ideals weren\u2019t tacking into the wind.\u00a0A place where people who write about cities and think about cities and talk about cities flourish at small presses and business schools alike. Say what you will about Richard Florida; he\u2019s here.<\/p>\n

These are high-falutin\u2019 ideas. They might not have had much resonance with those who just wanted to get to work and back with a minumum of traffic, taxes, and waste-management complications. But these citizens came out winners too, from their property values to the thriving city at their children\u2019s feet.<\/p>\n

There will always be a large and reasonable swath of the population for whom the municipality is a service-delivery organization, no matter how it fancies itself. And Miller\u2019s administration, in asking Torontonians to adapt in the name of progress, managed to bungle the execution of its plans enough to overstep those bounds.<\/p>\n

Does the 2010 election amount to a rejection of what came before? Rob Ford won his election fair and square. But he didn\u2019t run against David Miller; he ran against two uninspired and inchoate politicians. He blew the horn for populists and small-c conservatives, he blew it exceedingly well, and his people followed him to the polls. (His opponents only managed a few forlorn blarts.)<\/p>\n

You can fairly grouse that the garbage bin outside is one size too small; you might complain that the bike lanes are in shambles, which they most certainly are. You might have been hit with a tax on your car, a tax on your house. You might reasonably observe that St. Clair endured unending misery, and that the Bloor St. redo has turned into, if you\u2019ll excuse me, a monsterous clusterfuck.<\/p>\n

But that is to lose perspective. Toronto is a safe, prosperous, growing, and profoundly beautiful city. Since 2003, it has become more so. The past seven years have been in Toronto\u2019s best tradition, not its worst. I cannot speak for 2.5 million people, but I know I speak for more than myself. Life in David Miller\u2019s Toronto was good.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The following is a piece by Ivor Tossell that he posted to his site late last night. He’s a freelance writer. He lives in Parkdale. He once wrote a book review for us. Photo by Mandy No Good. David Miller did not found Luminato, or Nuit Blanche. He did not spark a \u201ccultural rennaissance\u201d byContinue reading “A goodbye to David Miller’s Toronto”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4010,"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":[24,2],"tags":[1220,14098,425,154,31,16603,10940,3915,2576,1277,551,16604,1807,22085,2712,227,1730,19,391],"class_list":["post-16252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-politics","tag-australia","tag-dan-brown","tag-david-miller","tag-dundas-square","tag-election","tag-fiberglass-moose","tag-freelance-writer","tag-integrity-commissioner","tag-ivor-tossell","tag-kyle-rae","tag-mel-lastman","tag-millers-administration","tag-parkdale","tag-politics","tag-richard-florida","tag-rob-ford","tag-rome","tag-toronto","tag-usd"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA goodbye to David Miller's Toronto - 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\/12\/01\/a-goodbye-to-david-millers-toronto\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A goodbye to David Miller's Toronto - Spacing Toronto\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The following is a piece by Ivor Tossell that he posted to his site late last night. 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