Patrick Smyth
New Member
It's a farce!
JOHN BARBER
jbarber@globeandmail.com
December 4, 2008
I feel bad about the powerful feeling of condescension that swept over me when Councillors Cliff Jenkins and Cesar Palacio threw a little party last month to celebrate the failure of their initiative to ban strikes at the Toronto Transit Commission. The real losers, I cruelly supposed, are the ones who think they're winning.
Since then, after having audited a bizarre debate this week that exposed the full inanity of most opposition thinking in city hall, I have come to recognize those happy losers as humble heroes.
At least they tried. They played the game straight, mobilizing opinion and studiously courting votes, and they almost won. More than anything, they demonstrated the surprising vulnerability of a mayor routinely derided as an autocrat "clinging" to power by means of devious manipulations.
Their opposition teammates, by contrast, continue to crowd the sidelines, refusing to play until the captain of the winning team lets them come in for a free kick, complaining all the while about his intolerable partisanship.
Print Edition - Section Front
Those are the real losers - the leaders of the most ineffective municipal opposition in living memory.
This week it was Councillor Karen Stintz who championed their cause, making a motion to fiddle established voting procedure in order to loosen the mayor's alleged ironclad grip on appointments to the powerful executive committee.
Ms. Stintz, an implacable opponent of the mayor, expressed indignation that his striking committee had not appointed her to help run the government. We deserve to be heard, she said.
But it was impossible to understand how the proposed fiddle would obtain a result that straight voting failed to deliver.
Four times Councillor Adam Vaughan asked Councillor Stintz the same question: "What barriers prevent this council from overruling the recommendations of the striking committee?"
If you want to be on executive, in other words, why don't you campaign for it? How could your new process deliver the votes you can't be bothered to court in the normal way?
Four times Ms. Stintz evaded, refusing to explain the difference between her new process and the dreary old business of one person, one vote - the inadequate procedure that, in her view, has produced such an "undemocratic" government at city hall.
"If you think you have a better slate, put it forward," Mr. Vaughan said. But that has never happened since Mayor Miller came to power.
"You think it's the mayor's job to build opposition in this circle, "Mr. Vaughan charged. "You think it's the mayor's job to make that opposition effective. And then you think it's the mayor's job to submit to it."
Ms. Stintz and her colleagues eulogize a pre-Miller past in which council was more consensual - proving that they never experienced it. All I could think, listening to that whine, was how cunning Tom Jakobek installed his own executive committee behind the back of Mayor Barbara Hall, just elected, more than a dozen years ago.
She thought she had the committee well stacked and all sewn up. She took a little holiday while her bitterest enemy wheeled and dealed behind the scenes. Later she sat stunned at the head of the committee that approved Mr. Jakobek's appointees one by one.
Who could have imagined feeling nostalgia for such a player? Mercifully, neither Mr. Jenkins nor Mr. Palacio are in that league. But at least they're in the game, playing by the rules - and almost winning.
JOHN BARBER
jbarber@globeandmail.com
December 4, 2008
I feel bad about the powerful feeling of condescension that swept over me when Councillors Cliff Jenkins and Cesar Palacio threw a little party last month to celebrate the failure of their initiative to ban strikes at the Toronto Transit Commission. The real losers, I cruelly supposed, are the ones who think they're winning.
Since then, after having audited a bizarre debate this week that exposed the full inanity of most opposition thinking in city hall, I have come to recognize those happy losers as humble heroes.
At least they tried. They played the game straight, mobilizing opinion and studiously courting votes, and they almost won. More than anything, they demonstrated the surprising vulnerability of a mayor routinely derided as an autocrat "clinging" to power by means of devious manipulations.
Their opposition teammates, by contrast, continue to crowd the sidelines, refusing to play until the captain of the winning team lets them come in for a free kick, complaining all the while about his intolerable partisanship.
Print Edition - Section Front
Those are the real losers - the leaders of the most ineffective municipal opposition in living memory.
This week it was Councillor Karen Stintz who championed their cause, making a motion to fiddle established voting procedure in order to loosen the mayor's alleged ironclad grip on appointments to the powerful executive committee.
Ms. Stintz, an implacable opponent of the mayor, expressed indignation that his striking committee had not appointed her to help run the government. We deserve to be heard, she said.
But it was impossible to understand how the proposed fiddle would obtain a result that straight voting failed to deliver.
Four times Councillor Adam Vaughan asked Councillor Stintz the same question: "What barriers prevent this council from overruling the recommendations of the striking committee?"
If you want to be on executive, in other words, why don't you campaign for it? How could your new process deliver the votes you can't be bothered to court in the normal way?
Four times Ms. Stintz evaded, refusing to explain the difference between her new process and the dreary old business of one person, one vote - the inadequate procedure that, in her view, has produced such an "undemocratic" government at city hall.
"If you think you have a better slate, put it forward," Mr. Vaughan said. But that has never happened since Mayor Miller came to power.
"You think it's the mayor's job to build opposition in this circle, "Mr. Vaughan charged. "You think it's the mayor's job to make that opposition effective. And then you think it's the mayor's job to submit to it."
Ms. Stintz and her colleagues eulogize a pre-Miller past in which council was more consensual - proving that they never experienced it. All I could think, listening to that whine, was how cunning Tom Jakobek installed his own executive committee behind the back of Mayor Barbara Hall, just elected, more than a dozen years ago.
She thought she had the committee well stacked and all sewn up. She took a little holiday while her bitterest enemy wheeled and dealed behind the scenes. Later she sat stunned at the head of the committee that approved Mr. Jakobek's appointees one by one.
Who could have imagined feeling nostalgia for such a player? Mercifully, neither Mr. Jenkins nor Mr. Palacio are in that league. But at least they're in the game, playing by the rules - and almost winning.