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Mayor John Tory's Toronto

These were local parties, not the NDP or Liberals, but I can understand the hesitation about using that system in Toronto.
 
animatronic said:
I think it’s going to be a necessity as council grows.
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I'm guessing that with 25 federal (and provincial) ridings in Toronto - they will smarten up and reduce the number of Councillors to 1 Ward = 1 Riding. It will then take the rest of the century before it reaches 44 again.
 
BurlOak said:
I'm guessing that with 25 federal (and provincial) ridings in Toronto - they will smarten up and reduce the number of Councillors to 1 Ward = 1 Riding. It will then take the rest of the century before it reaches 44 again.
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You think that more than half of city council will vote for any plan that puts half of them out of work? Not likely, especially given our current municipal electoral system which essentially rewards incumbency with a job for life. I think it will take ranked ballot elections or direct intervention from the province for that to happen.
 
BurlOak said:
I'm guessing that with 25 federal (and provincial) ridings in Toronto - they will smarten up and reduce the number of Councillors to 1 Ward = 1 Riding. It will then take the rest of the century before it reaches 44 again.
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HAHA. I don't see the number getting smaller unless Metro Council were brought back. Chicago, a comparatively-sized city with a comparative "weak mayor" system; they have 50 aldermen and one mayor. New York, with it's borough government (like Metro once was) and a "strong mayor" system, still have 51 councillors. And their councillors have far less legislative and operations obligations and duties.

As it is, most current Toronto councillors—a job considered "part-time", as councillors are allowed to maintain other jobs—are doing 50+ hours a week. Without deputy councillors, or some other very drastic means of distributing the work load, cutting the number of municipal ridings down would be a catastrophic blow to fair representation in this city. If you want to see what a councillor actually working part-time looks like, look no further than Doug Ford's tenure.
 
WislaHD said:
The absolute worse thing we could do at the municipal level is to introduce party politics into the mix.
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If the number of Councillors was drastically cut, I would agree with you. With too many Councillors, there is no way the media can even remotely cover their campaigns. Their re-election would depend solely on name recognition.
Federally and Provincially, few people know what specific stances their representatives have. By running under a party banner, voters have some idea of the views of their candidates, and also have some assurances that the candidates have been vetted by the party.
 
BurlOak said:
If the number of Councillors was drastically cut, I would agree with you. With too many Councillors, there is no way the media can even remotely cover their campaigns. Their re-election would depend solely on name recognition.
Federally and Provincially, few people know what specific stances their representatives have. By running under a party banner, voters have some idea of the views of their candidates, and also have some assurances that the candidates have been vetted by the party.
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Or they could read the material handed out by their local representative. Knowing the politics of someone running in ward 16 is of little use to someone in ward 44 because so much of what’s legislated on is at the micro level. If you’re relying on party affiliation to know what the local candidates are about, you basically want a cheat sheet and disregard any minor amount of work required in learning about your local politicians.

Party politics introduces even more dogmatism and tribalism, and would result in less compromise. And the (already) underrepresented dense areas would get absolutely smashed down by the sparse wards that hold the same voting power—more than they already do.
 
Party politics would only work if the parties were unaligned with provincial and federal parties (which is unlikely to happen).

Introducing the 'Liberals' and 'Conservative' parties to Toronto would be disastrous, as ideologies irrelevant with municipal governance would leak down into municipal politics.
 
jje1000 said:
Party politics would only work if the parties were unaligned with provincial and federal parties (which is unlikely to happen).

Introducing the 'Liberals' and 'Conservative' parties to Toronto would be disastrous, as ideologies irrelevant with municipal governance would leak down into municipal politics.
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That is what they appear to have in Vancouver. They have the Non-Partisan Association and Vision Vancouver.
 
Overall throughout Tory's mayoralship- idolization of the status quo in the underlying system. Nearly all other progressive moves are garnish in the face of this.

However, good for Wallace- in certain cases, our city managers need to summarize and highlight problems, not minimize them like Byford (as good as he is).

What do Torontonians really want their city to be?: Keenan
City Manager Peter Wallace lays it on the line. You have to pay for the city you aspire be, and Toronto has been refusing to do that.
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Our budget process has been a “relentless reinforcement of the status quo,” he said. An untenable one. He said “civic legitimacy” is now at stake.

He showed a bunch of slides showing that the city’s per-capita revenue, adjusted for inflation, has been dropping since 2010. Over the same time, the city’s costs have been rising, because of inflation, yes, but also because of the ambitions of the very same group of politicians who kept voting to shrink those revenues.

Council keeps approving plans: for a grand transit network expansion; for carbon emission cuts through TransformTO; for fighting poverty through TO Prosperity, and so on. Good plans, Wallace said. Really good plans, he is proud of those plans. But he said, a few times, that they are “aspirational.”
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In this specific case, as Wallace was using it, it means: the council who approved these good plans have no money set aside to pay for them. And no plan to raise money to pay for them.

Wallace gave an example: Seaton House, the largest homeless shelter in the city, dealing with the hardest cases of street-level poverty. The conditions there, Wallace said, are “wildly unsuitable … close to inhumane.” The city has developed an excellent plan to rebuild it entirely, “make it safer, and actually put humanity, resolve and capacity into that system.” The city council has approved the plan, he said. But it hasn’t approved any plan to pay for it. He used that word again, “aspirational.”
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Remember this below:
He outlined the decade of squeezing the city’s budgets dry that has taken place. He said it can’t produce much more in the way of efficiencies, in the short term. “I can tell you there is absolutely no justification for saying there’s easy waste to find, because we’ve been looking for it for 10 years, and we have not found it.”
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And then he put up a slide showing the obvious thing: the city could decide to just stick to bare bones municipal services: garbage, sewers, roads, policing. It could do that — Wallace called it option A. And the amount of revenue it brings in today would pay for that. Or the city could keep services where they are today — not just providing the bare bones, but also delivering what might be thought of as some regional services — the status quo is option B, which would require some more money than we take in now. And then option C is “broader city building,” which includes the big plans city council has already approved. This requires a lot more money.
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“Council has consistently leaned towards broader city building,” Wallace said. It’s not just that they reject any cut to any existing service. It’s that they consistently approve new ambitious service and infrastructure plans.

“Council cannot rationally expect me as a public servant to deliver the expense on number C with the revenue box on number A,” he said. “This is something we are frankly going to have to address. From the perspective of responsible government… from the perspective of actual civic legitimacy.”
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https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/20...ians-really-want-their-city-to-be-keenan.html
 
How much more money can we really squeeze out of the property tax?

The problem with our city is constitutional. We do not get the money we pay in taxes to the federal or provincial levels back.

We will never be on the level of a city like Singapore when only 10% of the taxes we pay are invested back into paying our city's upkeep cost, let alone investing in future infrastructure.
 
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