Marcus Gee smacks down Rob Ford's dumb ideas

From the Globe and Mail:

Go to any Rob Ford event, and you can count on the Etobicoke councillor to tout his favourite election promise. If he were elected mayor, he would cut the number of city councillors in half, from 44 to 22. In a campaign platform that is short on detail and thick with anger, it is one of the few solid planks. But does it make sense?

To people fed up with city politics, the pledge has a superficial appeal. If councillors are all clowns and wastrels – and goodness knows some of them fit the bill – the city would be better off with fewer of them. “Why do we need 44 councillors?” Mr. Ford asks. With half as many, “you’re going to get better councillors, save millions of dollars.”

Mr. Ford likes to point out that Toronto gets by just fine with 22 federal MPs, 22 provincial MPPs and 22 school trustees. But people don’t call their member of parliament about the garbage truck that comes late or the noisy bar on the corner. City councillors field those calls. With half as many it would be twice as hard to reach them for help.

How does that fit with Mr. Ford’s quest to make city hall deliver better “customer service” to residents? How could councillors pay more attention to individual constituents if instead of representing more than 50,000 of them, they represented over 100,000? The millions in savings forecast by Mr. Ford by halving the council would surely be offset by the extra staff each councillor would need to handle the higher demand.

Mr. Ford always boasts that he goes the extra mile for his own constituents, returning their calls of complaint, visiting their homes and helping them cut through city hall red tape. With half as many councillors, being a hands-on, in-touch Rob Ford would get much harder. Instead of complaining to councillors, people would have to go to bureaucrats for help – not exactly the result Mr. Ford is seeking.

Whether city hall can even function with 22 councillors is doubtful. Apart from attending city council and committee meetings, the average councillor sits on various agencies and community groups. Some of these, like the Art Gallery of Ontario, are required by statute to have a councillor on their board. With 22 of them instead of 44, how do you keep those committees and boards working?

To give an idea of how booked up the more active councillors are, the commitments of Trinity-Spadina Councillor Adam Vaughan include (among others) sitting on the police services board, the planning and growth management committee, the affordable housing committee, the civic appointments committee, Toronto Artscape and the AGO board, not to mention nine business improvement areas and one arena board.

At 44 councillors, Toronto already has considerably fewer civic politicians than it once did. Under the old Metropolitan Toronto system, the city had 107. That fell to 57 when the provincial government amalgamated six Metro municipalities to create the new City of Toronto in 1998, then fell again to 44 for the 2000 election.

Deputy mayor Joe Pantalone, Mr. Ford’s rival in the mayoral race, notes that the 905 region around Toronto has 208 municipal politicians, with a population about the same as the city’s. Montreal, with fewer voters than Toronto, has 64 members on its city council.

Mr. Ford, a populist through and through, is playing to a sense that city government is fat and lazy. Everyone wants a leaner, more responsive administration. But slashing the number of politicians whom voters elect to represent their interests at city hall is the wrong way to do it.