Messy, complex, risky: Toronto council deals with fallout from Ford's big cut

After the pomp and ceremony of their first day of meetings, it's customary following municipal elections for new Toronto councils to get right to work.

In 2010, after the election of Mayor Rob Ford, councillors immediately got busy fulfilling a bunch of his campaign promises. They removed the city's tax on vehicle registration. They designated the TTC an essential service. They eliminated catering at council meetings, marking a sad end for city hall snacks.

In 2014, after John Tory took the mayor's office, council's first order of business was figuring out how to transform SmartTrack from an appealing campaign promise to an actual transit plan. They quickly voted to commission a study on how exactly to do that.

But things look different in 2018. Following yesterday's speeches and ceremonies, Toronto's new council will reconvene today but not to debate issues like taxes or transit.

Instead, they're set to hold a debate about themselves.

Their main task? Considering a 24-page report that lays out a series of initial recommendations for how council should reconstitute itself following Ontario Premier Doug Ford's move to cut the number of councillors this past summer.

It's a messy, complex and potentially risky job and one that won't be completed in a single meeting. And until it gets done, a lot of the real work of city government — the kind of stuff previous councils tackled right away — may just have to wait.

New, smaller council will be slower out of the gate to tackle city issues

When the premier announced his government would introduce legislation to the cut size of council from a planned 48 members to 26 members (including the mayor), the justification was simple: a smaller, more "streamlined" council would mean more stuff gets done.

But as the report going before council today lays out, this council's ability to initially get stuff done is limited by the changes pushed through by the province. The report suggests the status quo governance structure at city hall "would be challenged to remain effective and sustainable with 26 members."

That's an understatement. By the numbers, if councillors didn't adopt any governance reforms, they would need to figure out how 26 elected officials could fill 485 seats on the various committees and boards that oversee the day-to-day functioning of the city. That would require each member of council to sit on about 19 different governing bodies.

Unless city council has inside information on some human cloning technology, that's not going to work.

And so not only will councillors vote today on whether to approve a new interim structure for these committees and boards, they will also vote on a staff recommendation to create a special committee — yes, another committee — that will work over the next few months to create a final set of recommendations for governance reform.

Until that committee's work is done, the shape of Toronto's new government will remain unknown.

More power for appointees, less power for elected officials

There is no obvious way for council to speed through this business of governance reform. The move to cut the size of council came suddenly and with no advance analysis. There's no template to follow — no binder titled "A Guide To Dealing With Sudden Cuts To the Size of Your Elected Government."

And with no handy guide, there are lots of reason for councillors to tread carefully.

With fewer elected officials, for example, staff at city hall are recommending council restructure many city boards and committees to include fewer councillors and more appointed public members.

These moves could have serious ramifications. Under the recommended plan, for example, the board responsible for the TTC will shift from a structure where seven of eleven board members are elected officials to a structure where just five of nine are elected.

Similar shifts are planned with the Toronto Library Board and CreateTO — the organization responsible for making decisions about whether to sell city-owned land — and several others, with elected officials making up a smaller percentage of board composition.

These appointees are often well-vetted members of the public with lots of relevant experience, but — and here's the risk — they don't have to answer to voters every four years.

City hall didn't ask for this.

Of the 22 politicians returned to city hall in the October election, just four, Coun. Michael Ford, Coun. Jim Karygiannis, Coun. Stephen Holyday and Coun. Michael Thompson, voted against every motion to condemn or challenge the premier's move to cut the size of council. The type of governance reform forced by Queen's Park was not on the mayor's or most councillors' to-do lists and few seem to relish this as an opportunity.

But council has no choice.

Queen's Park may consider the job of shrinking Toronto council done, but at city hall the daunting work of dealing with the fallout begins today.