Why the person Toronto elects is just as important as their platform

I’ve written about this before, but I sometimes think back to former mayor David Miller announcing his “Transit City” plan on the campaign trail in 2006: it included busways on Kingston Road and Yonge Street, an LRT line on Jane, and a Sheppard East subway extension in Scarborough. His plan to pay for it was to ask upper levels of government to step up.

It changed a lot when the province did step up to pay for it, and then changed a lot more when Rob Ford was elected mayor and paused or scrapped parts of it. If we’re lucky, sometime this decade, the Eglinton Crosstown line and the Finch West LRT will open, and we’ll see the payoff for that promise, close to 20 years later.

I bring it up now as a note about the value — and the limits — of mayoral campaign platform plans and promises. Miller’s plan was good, and inspiring, and based on a reasonable understanding of what was needed and possibly affordable. But it was not something that was ever likely — even if Ford hadn’t mucked with it — going to turn into a construction blueprint that then turned into reality in short order. That was even more true of the Ford brothers’ 2010 promise of free private-sector subways built before 2015 and, as we know, of John Tory’s 2014 SmartTrack plan.

We talk a lot about mayoral platforms, nitpicking the details, questioning the assumptions, judging what the vision behind them tells us about a candidate — and we should. But the truth is that the reality of governing, and dealing with the unexpected, of evaluating real-world studies of ideas as they’re examined, and of managing funding that changes based on provincial and federal whims … all of that means the platform ideas are necessarily going to change a lot before anything like them is implemented.

In another way, the point is more dramatically illustrated looking at U.S. presidential history: George W. Bush didn’t campaign on being the anti-terrorism, war-starting president. But Sept. 11, 2001 happened on his watch and changed everything about his plans. Similarly, John Tory had perhaps his best stretch as mayor when the pandemic came along and derailed all of his (and everyone else’s) plans, forcing him to manage an emergency.

As Mike Tyson famously said: everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. And so in evaluating our own votes for mayor, we need to not just consider the plans, but how we might expect the person putting them forward to react when they get punched in the face. Metaphorically, that is: when they run up against the messy reality of governing and the unexpected events of city life.

Which is why I noted during a question at the recent debate hosted by the Toronto Star and the United Way that we don’t elect a platform, we elect a leader.

The new mayor is going to be the CEO of an organization with thousands of employees and a $16-billion operating budget, one whose operations can have life-and-death consequences for people in Toronto. That person is also going to need to lead a legislative body of 25 councillors who do not formally report to them, and where there’s no party system to apply discipline — each of those councillors elected with their own mandate and owing no allegiance or even favours to the new mayor. And the new mayor will serve for at least three years as the voice of the city in external dealings, the personification of the city in news reports, the mirror in which our problems and our struggles to deal with them are reflected back to us in speeches and actions and reactions.

So a question we might ask of the candidates, beyond what ideas they have, is what qualifies them for that management and political task. And what qualities will they bring to perform it.

That’s why, starting on Saturday, the Star is running extended “360” profiles of seven of the leading candidates for mayor, where we talk to the people they’ve worked for, the people who have worked for them and those they’ve worked with in order to give voters a look at who these people are, what experience they have, what they are like and how they think.

Each of them has made claims through the campaign about why they think they’re up for the job: Olivia Chow’s long experience and well-known public record; Mark Saunders’s executive experience leading the police force; Mitzie Hunter’s administrative and nonprofit resume and her experience as a provincial cabinet minister; Josh Matlow’s current council record and dedication to evidencebased policy and upfront honesty about costs; Ana Bailão’s record of getting along with mayors and her assembled endorsements from councillors and other elected officials serving as a recommendation for her ability to work with others; Brad Bradford’s expertise as a city planner and stated commitment to cutting through bureaucracy to speed things up; Anthony Furey’s outsider fed-up-with-it-ness.

There are different ways to look at the question, for sure. And different qualities that voters might think are appropriate for the job. But the personal qualities they bring to city hall are equally important — maybe more important — than the plans they pack in their briefcases.

Which isn’t to say platforms are not essential information. They are. But they are especially useful in determining how seriously a candidate understands a problem, how they think about approaching it and how realistically they see the city’s situation. You can tell all of that from looking at their plans. What you can’t tell is how the future will reshape those plans.

So you need to also try to understand how well a candidate will improvise on the job to meet the needs of real life. If you elected a candidate with no clear plan, you’d be inviting a world of trouble. But if you elected a candidate who’d panic when things didn’t go according to plan, you might find yourself in more trouble still.

A platform is necessary. But it is used as something for a leader to stand on. In picking a mayor, that’s something to keep in mind.