City Hall

… what process?

For a mayor and council that prides itself on consultation and openness, the Miller compact does seem to do its best work in the back room. I have to say I’m trying to work up umbrage over the lightning-quick, closed-door decision to buy a big old landfill outside of London. If the pre-MFP crew had done something like this – make a nine-figure financial decision with huge policy implications over the course of a short council session with no consultation – the sky’d be falling.

But maybe that is the way to do it – all secretive and slick. Those of you old enough to remember may recall how things went back in 2000, when the old crew on council had a long, very public debate over whether to send garbage to the Adams Mine. Talk went on for days at council; the then-minority left on council ran circles around the right-of-centre Lastman compact like the Marx Brothers doing a number on Margaret Dumont (if you’re old enough to remember the Adams Mine, you might also be old enough to get that reference); in the end, the deal was choked with enough amendments that the Adams Mine landfill folks just walked, and Toronto wound up in the not-awfully-sustainable position of trucking trash to Michigan not a year before the border-tightening events of 9/11.

Flash forward to 2006. On Sept. 18, councillors and the media and everyone else hears that there’s going to be an emergency council meeting the next day. On Sept. 20, just over a week before nominations close, and David Miller is telling the press that Torontonians have become “masters of our own destiny.”

He ain’t kidding. Here’s hoping it’s a good destiny and not one of those scary Greek ones…

-David Nickle

Welcome to the City Hall blog!

If you’re here, you probably well know how this whole blog thing works. But for those of you who just clicked the wrong link from the Automotive section or are coming out of one Google search too many, here’s the lowdown.

We here at Toronto Community News’ City Hall Bureau (that’s David Nickle and Susan O’Neill) find ourselves in charge of this…well… blog.

That’s dot-com speak for weblog, which is kind of the online version of a daily diary… if that diary were stolen by our stupid brother and tacked up page-by-page in the high school cafeteria every day for everyone to read.

There is of course a key difference between that and this. Instead of writing about which boys/girls we like and how much we hate our stupid diary-stealing brother, we’re going to be weighing in with our inner-most thoughts on something almost as twisty as angst-ridden adolescence: Toronto municipal politics.

We think there’ll be plenty to write about; particularly with an election coming up this November, in which voters will select 44 councillors and one mayor to rule over the city for not three but four years. There’s an honest-to-gosh mayor’s race (more on that below) a growing number of council races without incumbents, and for the next few weeks at least, we’re faced with a full slate of committees and subcommittees and council itself to amaze and astound us.

For all the serious business that goes on on the city beat, we invite you to read our hopefully well-researched and balanced articles in your local Toronto Community News paper, or on our website insidetoronto.com. For all the rest - and there’ll be plenty, believe us - stop in here. We’ll tell you everything. Except which boys/girls we like.

Because that’s, like, private.

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David Nickle writes:

Now that introductions are out of the way: may I offer an only-slightly-subdued shout-out to Jane Pitfield, the City Councillor from Ward 26 (Don Valley West) who’s so far the only one who’s dared to take on first-term Mayor David Miller for the city’s top job. It hasn’t been easy for her. Since she let her intentions be known a year ago, Pitfield has had just an awful time getting traction; initially, perhaps, because supporters of a centre-right alternative for mayor spent much time shuffling their feet waiting for someone more to their taste to step forward, but ultimately because of what seemed to be turning into a fatal lack of focus and discipline. On Thursday, she started to turn that around what her team billed as her first major policy announcement. She was talking fiscal for the most part and laid out some unsurprising but important policy cornerstones. First, the 9 per cent pay hike council voted itself is kaput. The city will be subjected to an external - and possibly forensic - audit. Tax increases will be kept to the real rate of inflation and budgets will be formulated much more stringently. There will be a hiring freeze.

Pitfield was not perfect on this. When the Globe and Mail’s Jeff Gray asked her if her hiring freeze included TTC drivers for the 100 new buses that the commission would take delivery of, she was silent for an almost uncomfortably long time trying to figure out how to get out of that apparently unforseen corner. But she didn’t, as she has in the past, fly off on a tangential, on-the-fly policy reversal. She’s apparently learning the hard lesson that press conferences may seem like brain storming sessions with her friends in the media, but they are something far more treacherous for people who want to be mayor in Toronto.

If she keeps this up, she may soon be in a position to raise some serious questions about the way that Mayor David Miller has run this town over the past three years. And if she can press those questions and make some of them stick - who knows? Those supporters who ignored her in the beginning and are still very thin on the ground may have themselves a new mayor to finally start being nice to this November.

At the very least, we here at Toronto Community News will have a more interesting election to cover, and the public will benefit from hearing Miller and Pitfield articulate two visions for the city, rather than just one.