![mayors.jpg](\"http:\/\/blog.jackjia.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/10\/mayors.jpg\")
\nO\u2019Brien, Ottawa; McCallion, Mississauga; Robertson, Vancouver; Sean Kilpatrick\/CP\/ Vince Talotta\/Toronto Star\/ Jonathan Hayward\/CP<\/p>\n
\nO\u2019Brien, Ottawa; McCallion, Mississauga; Robertson, Vancouver; Sean Kilpatrick\/CP\/ Vince Talotta\/Toronto Star\/ Jonathan Hayward\/CP<\/p>\n
Canada\u2019s lousy mayors<\/strong><\/p>\n When municipal politics matter more than ever, why do so many cities end up with bad mayors?<\/p>\n by Nancy Macdonald on Thursday, October 14, 2010 1:20pm <\/p>\n In a sign of the season, in Ottawa this week, incumbent Mayor Larry O\u2019Brien apologized for his first two years in office\u2014a \u201ccomplete disaster,\u201d the mayor bluntly admitted. \u201cI probably made every single major political mistake that was possible\u2014I even made quite a few mistakes that, quite frankly, were impossible to replicate,\u201d he continued. O\u2019Brien couldn\u2019t say whether he was Ottawa\u2019s worst-ever mayor because, as he explained, he doesn\u2019t know all of them. But the gaffe-prone mayor did want Ottawans to know how \u201csincerely sorry\u201d he was for the way he\u2019d run city hall.<\/p>\n What was remarkable was that this was not an exit speech, but a campaign speech. A year ago, the pugnacious ex-businessman was unsure voters would ever forgive him his bribery and influence-peddling charges. O\u2019Brien was found not guilty, but the legal sideshow nevertheless garnered embarrassing headlines all over the country. Now, here he was again, having launched a re-election bid last month, complete with a recycled promise not to increase taxes. This notwithstanding the fact that taxes have jumped fully 14 per cent since he took office on a \u201czero-means-zero\u201d tax increase pledge in 2006.<\/p>\n O\u2019Brien does have competition. A record 20 Ottawans have paid $200 to run for mayor on Oct. 25, including O\u2019Brien\u2019s main contender: ex-MPP Jim Watson. But Watson, a former Ottawa mayor himself, has failed to excite Ottawans; although he\u2019s leading in the polls, the race is such a dog\u2019s breakfast that a disgraced mayor no one thought would show his face now stands a fighting chance come Oct. 25.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a similarly uninspiring race in Calgary, where the city heads to the polls on Oct. 18. The mysterious businessman who fled Kenya to avoid corruption charges has dropped out, true, as has the urban chicken advocate. That leaves 15 candidates, including Ric McIver, the front-runner, and a fiscal hawk and self-described \u201ceconomic refugee\u201d from David Peterson\u2019s Ontario in the \u201980s. Those who know McIver know he has his own eccentricities: dubbed \u201cCalgary\u2019s Rob Ford,\u201d he once refused to support a motion to open a line of credit, putting the city close to bankruptcy; outgoing Mayor Dave Bronconnier called him \u201cDr. No.\u201d In suburban Mississauga, Ont., meanwhile, \u201cHurricane\u201d Hazel McCallion, who last month announced her intention to seek a 12th term as mayor on Oct. 25, while calling for \u201cchange,\u201d has stared down her own share of controversy this year, with allegations of conflict of interest stemming from a development deal involving her son Peter. McCallion, who turns 90 next year and once complained her local ER was \u201cloaded with people in their native costumes,\u201d has again refused to run a campaign: no platform, no literature, no signs, no apparent road map for what promises to be a challenging term in office. After 30 years of hurtling growth, Mississauga\u2019s vaunted debt-free status could be ended by 2012, when the city expects to tip into the red. There is little available land left to turn into a mall or a new housing development, and much of the city\u2019s infrastructure is in need of repair. \u201cWe\u2019ve asked Hazel for a debate, but she\u2019s refused,\u201d says mayoral hopeful Ram Selvarajah.<\/p>\n Municipal politics in Canada, comedian Rick Mercer one said, is a \u201cdepository for the truly mad.\u201d Silly season, it seems, is upon us once again, as a stable of irascible populists, blowhards and eccentrics vie this month for the keys to some of Canada\u2019s biggest cities. Voters, meanwhile, swamped with candidate lists, unsure of who stands for what\u2014let alone the ins and outs of every candidate\u2019s stance on the issues\u2014too often simply choose to tune out. Just 39 per cent of eligible voters cast a ballot in Toronto in 2006; in 2004, only 19.8 per cent of Calgarians bothered.<\/p>\n And who can blame voters? In London, Ont., incumbent Anne Marie DeCicco-Best\u2014who once attempted to brand her city \u201cAll mixed up,\u201d a slogan designed to showcase its cultural diversity\u2014is again leading former MP Joe Fontana. After losing badly in the last election, Fontana said: \u201cThere is a benefit in not winning and that is because I am going to cancel my subscription to the London Free Press. I debated the Free Press more than the mayor.\u201d<\/p>\n Or consider Amherstburg, Ont.\u2019s mayor, Wayne Hurst. His re-election platform includes a pledge for a downtown public marina, but he refuses to divulge how it will be financed. \u201cI don\u2019t need to tell you how I\u2019m going to pay for it,\u201d says Hurst, who\u2019s seeking a fourth term. \u201cIt\u2019s my vision. I have a vision and I see it taking place in downtown Amherstburg.\u201d A nice vision it may be, but it\u2019s an odd one, considering Amherstburg couldn\u2019t afford the marina it owned: months ago, it closed on the sale of the municipally owned Ranta Marina for $584,000, following years of controversy.<\/p>\n Against this backdrop of candidates\u2014whose fitness for office you \u201creally have scratch your head and wonder about,\u201d says Myer Siemiatycki, an expert on municipal politics at Ryerson University\u2014experts have begun quietly pushing for the introduction of political parties in Canada\u2019s municipal arena, as in Vancouver. The deceptively simple reform could help voters determine who and what they are voting for; it would also go a long way to sidelining the inept, and injecting professionalism and organization into the unruly field. \u201cThe bottom line is parties are active gatekeepers in terms of who\u2019s going to be able to get a nomination,\u201d says Siemiatycki. Otherwise, the municipal arena has a tendency to turn into a free-for-all.<\/p>\n Rather than encouraging mature conversations and debates, crowded mayoral fields force candidates to out-shout their opponents, says Siemiatycki, noting Toronto mayoral candidate Rocco Rossi\u2019s Mafia-themed campaign posters, designed to grab attention, he says, and little else. \u201cWhen people walk into the ballot box they see nothing but a long list of names,\u201d says Kennedy Stewart, a professor at Simon Fraser University\u2019s school of public policy. Voters, he says, need help sorting through the \u201clists and lists and lists.\u201d The party is a shorthand for the ideas and policies a candidate represents.<\/p>\n The problem is twofold, says Siemiatycki: \u201cBecause elections aren\u2019t voter-friendly, we have very low voter turnout.\u201d And even once the election is over, the system hardly encourages an effective or efficient council. It\u2019s tricky to work out consistent alliances to push policies through council. Rather, says SFU municipal expert Patrick Smith, you have a \u201cwhole bunch of loose fish wandering around\u201d cobbling together coalitions\u2014or not. With a party system, mayors can whip their caucus into line, weakening narrow turf wars. Without it, that \u201chow-does-this-affect-my-ward?\u201d mindset, says Winnipeg councillor Jenny Gerbasi, can make it next to impossible to get mega-projects off the ground. \u201cCouncil,\u201d she says, \u201ccan lose sight of the bigger picture.\u201d<\/p>\n Canada\u2019s cities inherited the non-partisan civic tradition from 1890s America. The U.S. was then trying to eradicate corruption from local government. By the 1960s, many U.S. municipalities had abandoned the no-party model. Tokyo, Stockholm, Rome, Berlin and London, too, have parties. Canada, though, never bothered to revert back. The exceptions are Montreal and Vancouver. Both have party systems. In Vancouver\u2019s last election in 2008, two bike-friendly local businessmen\u2014one representing the Non-Partisan Association, the party on the centre-right, the other representing Vision Vancouver, the city\u2019s centre-left choice\u2014faced off. There were no cartoonish ad campaigns, no talk of strategic voting. Vancouver has no problem with entrenched incumbency: the city\u2019s longest-serving councillor was first elected to the 10-person body eight years ago. Of Toronto\u2019s 44 councillors, 14 have been there for 20 or more years. In Calgary, 86 per cent of incumbents were returned to office in the 2004 election, and 71 per cent in 2007.<\/p>\n Parties encourage accountability. If voters don\u2019t think they\u2019re going in the right direction, they can throw the bums out\u2014as Vancouver voters did in 2008, returning an almost entirely fresh slate: Mayor Gregor Robertson\u2019s Vision team. On the nuts-and-bolts level, parties also provide organizational structure: maintaining membership lists, identifying the vote, canvassing, and getting out the vote on election day.<\/p>\n Siemiatycki says cities have grown \u201cway too big,\u201d and the issues \u201cfar too significant,\u201d to be left to the vagaries of individual candidates running on their own reputation and name recognition. Canada is among the world\u2019s most \u201chyper-urbanized\u201d countries, he adds: some 80 per cent of us live in cities, and one in three live in the urban areas of Toronto-Montreal-Vancouver\u2014well above the concentration of big cities in the U.S., China or Britain. The sheer concentration of people translates to huge sums of money. Ottawa\u2019s operating budget is $2.5 billion. Toronto\u2019s tips $9 billion. Some voters, says Smith, may want to cut it to $8 billion, and lower their taxes; others may want to increase it to $10 billion. These, he says, are \u201cordinary, mature debates that should go on in a democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n Ottawa\u2019s O\u2019Brien has admitted to Maclean\u2019s he should \u201cprobably have had five years\u2019 experience in municipal government before running for mayor.\u201d But O\u2019Brien\u2019s mistake wasn\u2019t his alone. Supports available to federal and provincial politicians\u2014party research staff, the organization of government, with allies lined up behind their leader\u2014are unavailable to municipal politicians, putting neophytes like O\u2019Brien at a real disadvantage. While we all enjoy the spectacle of Rosie the Clown taking the stage on election night\u2014or \u201cBubbles,\u201d the cat-loving candidate with Coke-bottle glasses and an iPod full of Rush tunes, who is currently running for mayor of Orillia, Ont.\u2014in this global age of cities, and in this hyper-urban country, the joke\u2019s on us.<\/p>\n http:\/\/www2.macleans.ca\/2010\/10\/14\/a-depository-for-the-truly-mad\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" O\u2019Brien, Ottawa; McCallion, Mississauga; Robertson, Vancouver; Sean Kilpatrick\/CP\/ Vince Talotta\/Toronto Star\/ Jonathan Hayward\/CP Canada\u2019s lousy mayo…
\nThe real Rob Ford, of course, gunning for the mayorship of Toronto on Oct. 25, has dominated the conversation in that city\u2019s campaign: his decade-old DUI, his views on same-sex marriage and \u201cOrientals,\u201d a dismissed domestic-assault charge, an ejection from a Leafs\u2019 game for public drunkenness: the list goes on, eclipsing serious debate on the future direction of the city, which is deeply in deficit.<\/p>\n
Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14,10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jackjia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17377"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jackjia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jackjia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jackjia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jackjia.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17377"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jackjia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17377\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jackjia.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jackjia.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jackjia.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}