New laws no help for housing woes

So tell us, Steve Clark, why is it that Mayor John Tory deserves undemocratic powers to pass legislation at Toronto city hall with the support of just one-third of city councillors?

“John Tory won a citywide mandate with over 342,000 votes — 36,000 more votes than every city councillor combined,” the Minister of Municipal Affairs said in the legislature Thursday. It’s simple math! The people have spoken — democracy in action!

Well. Funny thing about that. By my own math, Tory also got about 64,000 more votes in Toronto in 2022 than the entire provincial Conservative slate of candidates — winners and losers alike — did. If Tory has a Toronto mandate that trumps the rest of city council’s, he also seems to have one to pretty much double-trump the provincial conservatives here.

And yet, strangely enough, the Bill 39 super-stronger-mayor bill does not allow Tory to veto or proactively overrule the provincial government on issues of local priority. In fact, the legislation specifically makes Tory’s new powers subservient to the province, saying it applies only to areas of “provincial priority.” Democracy by strongman minority rule for thee, continued subjugation to me.

You could begin wondering how understanding Tory’s mandate as a one-man cheat code allowing him to win any boss battle with Queen’s Park would translate into realword results — according to what Tory told the Star just over one month ago, it would mean tolls on the Gardiner and the Don Valley Parkway, just for a start.

But an example was more readily at hand already, because on Thursday, during Toronto city council’s first meeting of its new mandate, even as Tory was accepting and defending the forthcoming strongman powers, he was also decrying another new law Ford’s government is forcing on Ontario. Echoing a staff report on the agenda, and with the unanimous support of city council, Tory was leading a fullthroated charge against the Tories’ latest housing bill. “It’s just wrong in principle,” the mayor said about the province taking cash from the city to give it to developers. In its entirety, he said, this so-called housing bill would destroy the city’s ability to build affordable housing. “All of our programs — all of them — will be gutted,” he said.

Tory, a famously rambling purveyor of on-the-one-hand-all-thingsconsidered-I-think-its-fair-to-saywith-respect-to-the-questionthere’s-another-hand-you-couldrespectfully-take-note-of polyclausal prevarication, doesn’t get much blunter than that. The province’s housing law will gut the city’s ability to get housing built.

That’s something a lot of municipalities across the province are saying in plainer and plainer language. The province’s blizzard of new laws relating to housing — justified by what the province says somewhat accurately is a crisis of housing affordability — will do a lot of things (disembowelling local democracy, torpedoing environmental goals, enriching developers friendly with Ford’s government), but actually increasing the supply of affordable housing doesn’t seem to be among those things. And in fact, the sum of what the provincial government is doing (if you can even keep track of all the things it is doing at once in order to add them up) may be worse than doing nothing.

Even beyond housing and municipal governance at the moment, you see the same thing. The province, facing an overwhelmed hospital system full of exhausted staff, has not only been looking to cut healthcare costs further but has now taken a page out of Elon Musk’s demands for “hardcore,” “intense” performance of Twitter employees by asking family health-care workers and nurse practitioners to work at “full capacity” and take on evening and weekend shifts to address the crisis.

Meanwhile, many experts think a new law that will force patients into long-term-care facilities will only worsen the existing hospital bed shortage, according to a report in the Globe and Mail. Ford recently tried — before backtracking — to deal with a crisis in lost school days by stripping low-paid education workers of their charter rights. And so on.

What we see here is the continuation of a key trait in Ford I identified early in his first term, but that I think bears repeating: he repeatedly causes crises, then holds himself up as the solution to them. The government is broken, he says. Then he smashes it. Then, having fresh evidence it is broken, he raises his hammer again as a proposed repair. In some cases, where a legitimate crisis exists, the fact that a sledgehammer is the only tool in his belt means his proposed solutions always look a lot more like demolition than restoration.

At Toronto city hall this week, as so often before, virtually every minute is now consumed tracking, coping with, or trying to head off Ford’s helpful hammering crisis intervention: adapting to new rules from Bill 3 (which mean no council law is now considered passed until the mayor indicates he won’t veto it, and which means the budget committee will no longer report to council); trying to object to Bill 23 in its many and varied attacks on municipalities; trying to figure out when and if they can debate or do anything (or should do anything) about Bill 39 and its formalization of minority rule powers.

Meanwhile, it’s getting cold and there’s no room in the shelters, the bills are coming due and there’s no money in the budget, people are just trying to get around and there’s no room on the roads. There are genuine existing crises here that those with a mandate from Toronto voters need to confront.

Our mayor and many on council have said these challenges are hard to imagine meeting without provincial help. But with the kind of help they’ve been subject to recently, it appears all the harder still.