At Toronto’s Medieval Times dinner theatre, you can watch 11th-century Spanish knights joust for their monarch. As you savour roast chicken and a tankard of 7Up, you will quickly perceive that the falls are choreographed and the lances designed to break.
Toronto’s budget debate on Tuesday felt oddly the same. There were thrusts and pratfalls; some people wound up looking silly; the outcome was predetermined. Yet $18.8-billion and the quality of life for millions of people were, in theory, at stake.
In truth, Mayor Olivia Chow’s budget faced no serious interrogation. It included a 6.9 per cent property tax increase and significant new funds for the police and the TTC, as well as libraries and student nutrition programs. Ms. Chow has defined Toronto once again as a city that cares. Council’s right wing blustered, waved their wooden swords and fell on their behinds. Cue the applause.
The relative peace of the day signalled a strong political consensus. It also suggested a lack of seriousness in how the country’s biggest and fastest-growing city is governed.
Ms. Chow and her allies, through weeks of lead-up meetings, had made it clear that a significant tax hike would be required for the second year in a row. After almost 15 years of conservative mayors, they argued, Toronto is in rough fiscal shape, and it is time to address a massive backlog of infrastructure spending as well as modestly expanding social services.
“No one is happy when we ask people to pay more,” Ms. Chow said Tuesday. “But at this point we have to fix the city, because we’ve had many years of not investing.”
That’s true, and it is refreshing to hear. For nearly 15 years Toronto was ruled by conservative mayors who promised to hold the line on property taxes while watching things crumble. We have seen the results: broken buses, decrepit parks, a City Hall building that is visibly falling apart.
And yet money is not the only thing missing. So is a robust management of city resources. Take the parks, forestry and recreation division, whose operating budget will be almost $600-million. Two recent reports from the city Auditor-General found some roving parks maintenance staff wasted a shocking amount of time on the job. (Nobody, apparently, was fired.) Forestry staff say that 75 per cent of street trees are in good or excellent condition. (Not a chance.) The city’s 311 customer-service system is not yet directly connected to parks maintenance. Why not?
Such questions require painstaking research. Meanwhile at council on Tuesday, the debate was a contest between the blue knights and the orange knights. Spend more! Spend less! Brad Bradford, the cyclist and former city planner who’s donned a blue costume, pushed a showy motion to fight U.S. President Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs with property-tax relief for industrial businesses. It failed. Councillor Stephen Holyday called for TTC fare increases, and questioned the need for the city to feed low-income children at day camp. “I’ve packed hundreds of those lunches,” said Mr. Holyday, a second-generation politician whose salary this year will be $133,776.24. Why, he implied, doesn’t everyone simply do that?
Such villainy is a bit broad even for dinner theatre. At other moments the debate delivered some laughs. Councillor Vincent Crisanti proposed a cut to “efficiencies” before being forced to acknowledge he had no idea where to find the money. Councillor Gord Perks, the battle-tested knight in orange, disembowelled him with relish.
This was entertaining, but also silly. The budget process allowed far too little room for substantive debate on how exactly money is being spent. Each of the 25 city councillors now has more than 100,000 constituents to deal with. In the absence of a party system, none of them has the resources to get into the weeds.
The direction is clear enough: The city is keeping its fiscal house in order, improving its credit rating and showing some compassion for hungry children. There’s no time for robust discussion; the show must go on.