Mayor John Tory's Toronto

[Midtown Urbanist]

That's with a popular vote of course, across the entire city. If we had a ward-orial vote (like the U.S. electoral vote, which Trump won [290 vs. 232] against Clinton's wining the popular vote [61,201,031 vs. 62,523,126]), there might be a different result.

You want downtown to be even more screwed over than with amalgamation?

 

[Midtown Urbanist]

The reliability of polls is not what it used to be though. They just got Trumped big time in the US.

Different circumstances. Polls operate with assumptions. The variables changed in the USA and the assumptions did not alter to reflect that.

There is no reason to think the fundamentals have changed here north of the border, or that the polls would be wrong. (Though they did fail to predict how large of a margin Trudeau would end up winning by...)

 

[steveintoronto]

Different circumstances. Polls operate with assumptions. The variables changed in the USA and the assumptions did not alter to reflect that.

There is no reason to think the fundamentals have changed here north of the border, or that the polls would be wrong. (Though they did fail to predict how large of a margin Trudeau would end up winning by...)

The polls are in trouble in any developed nation, including here.

Some reflection that the writing was on the poll wall even before Trump:

What’s the Matter With Polling?
New York Times
By CLIFF ZUKINJUNE 20, 2015

OVER the past two years, election polling has had some spectacular disasters. Several organizations tracking the 2014 midterm elections did not catch the Republican wave that led to strong majorities in both houses; polls in Israel badly underestimated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s strength, and pollsters in Britain predicted a close election only to see the Conservatives win easily. What’s going on here? How much can we trust the polls as we head toward the 2016 elections? [...]

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/opinion/sunday/whats-the-matter-with-polling.html?_r=0

As for Canada:

How polls work and why they're often so wrong | Toronto Star
https://www.thestar.com › News › Canada
May 8, 2015 - How polls work and why they're often so wrong ... You can do a poll of 500 people across Canada and it will give you an idea of what party ...
Pollsters scramble to explain how polls could be so wrong in three ...
www.macleans.ca/.../pollsters-scramble-to-explain-how-polls-could-be-so-wrong-in-t...
May 16, 2013 - OTTAWA - Canada's pollsters have struck out and are now scrambling to explain how their predictions in three consecutive provincial elections ...
Angus Reid: What went wrong with the polls in British Columbia ...
www.macleans.ca/.../canada/angus-reid-what-went-wrong-with-the-polls-in-british-col...
Jul 8, 2013 - What does it say about the state of polling in Canada? What steps can be taken to prevent a reoccurrence of this type of episode? What is the ...
Where Canada's Election Polls Can't Afford To Be Wrong (ANALYSIS)
www.huffingtonpost.ca/.../canada-election-polls-ontario-liberals-conservatives_n_829...
Oct 14, 2015 - Fortunately for us, we do account for the possibility of polls' being wrong, including mistakes as big as what happened in Alberta in 2012 or ...
No wonder the polls have been wrong: The polling industry is in a ...
www.theglobeandmail.com › Opinion
May 21, 2013 - What is going wrong with the polls? ... The Conservative Party of Canada uses CIMS, while others are using Obama's platform of choice, ...
Survey says: The future of polling is hard to predict - The Globe and Mail
www.theglobeandmail.com › News › Politics
Sep 10, 2015 - That election left Canada's polling industry shaken. ... such as the 2013 B.C. vote, which his colleagues in the industry got spectacularly wrong.
[...]

I agree with your view on an electoral college being a disaster for electing a mayor. It's anathema to the whole idea of a mayoral election, otherwise we'd have what the regional model has: Elected representatives voting for a Regional Chair.

 

[Midtown Urbanist]

I agree with your view on an electoral college being a disaster for electing a mayor. It's anathema to the whole idea of a mayoral election, otherwise we'd have what the regional model has: Elected representatives voting for a Regional Chair.

In an era where impossible political results are being made possible... I wonder if maybe the idea of the Golden Horseshoe seceding from Ontario and forming its own province is so preposterous.

It is what I think would need to happen in order for the region to not just 'catch-up' to where we need to be, but also get ahead of the massive population boom coming to the region in the next 30 years. Primarily when it comes to revenue tools, because it is clear no Torontonian politician currently has the spine to levy taxes or demand more revenue tools from Queen's Park under the current political system.

(and in fairness, Torontonians/GTHA are already taxed heavily, our money just goes to Ontario and Ottawa)

 

[W. K. Lis]

You want downtown to be even more screwed over than with amalgamation?

Actually, with 47 wards instead of the current 44 (3 in the downtown), John Tory should be more inclined.

 

[steveintoronto]

I wonder if maybe the idea of the Golden Horseshoe seceding from Ontario and forming its own province is so preposterous.

I think the other direction is more apt for Toronto. City of Toronto become distinct again from the suburbs, there's so little in common politically and societally. And then a larger Regional Government that includes the suburbs, perhaps merging with already established regional governments, could be established. And then they could build subways to Timbuktu.

The City of Toronto Act may have some complications to that happening, but the Municipal Act, with which I'm more familiar, allows adoption on a *piece-meal basis* of shared services, as long as they are "adjacent"...a term the Act doesn't define, and in legal terms, doesn't require shared boundaries. I'd be very surprised if the Toronto Act doesn't allow that too, since the Toronto Act is derived from the Muni Act with added sections for raising revenue and a few other clauses.

If de-Amalgamation were to be put on the table, Tory's chances of being mayor would be drastically cut. And Ford's would continue to be even less.

An example of this is a case I studied closely: Guelph at least partially merging with the Region of Waterloo. Guelph is geographically located within Wellington County, but has virtually no direct dealings with the county. (Housing is one of the few, and Health, albeit the province threw the book at Guelph on the latter).

Here's an example of how a city that thinks so much of itself is so incredibly inept in delivering services at a reasonable cost: (and these are *critically needed services*!)

Guelph Mercury
By Doug Hallett


The 2017 city operating budget proposed by city hall staff doesn’t include a restoration of 20-minute peak-period bus frequency during four months next spring and summer, and some city councillors aren’t happy about it.

“I think it was generally seen as a bad decision, a failure,” Coun. Mike Salisbury said about council’s decision last December to save money by eliminating 20-minute bus frequency during peak weekday travel periods from early May to early September of 2016.

The change meant buses ran every 30 minutes all day long. But in June, council authorized extra spending to add extra buses on some routes starting July 4, in order to help quell a chorus of complaints about the service cuts that started in May once U of G students left the city.

Running these “helper buses” for a couple of months cost the city $75,000, and this amount of money is included in the 2017 budget for the same purpose, said Colleen Clack, the city’s deputy CAO of public services.

However, other than this, the cuts to Guelph Transit service included in the city’s 2016 operating budget will remain in the 2017 budget, she told a Nov. 10 council meeting on the city’s 2017 operating budget. It would cost $1.3 million to reverse the bus service cuts made in the 2016 budget, which would push up 2017 property taxes, she said.

The helper buses “alleviated much of the concern” about the service reductions that started in May, by allowing people to make their connections at a 30-minute bus frequency, Clack said.

Coun. Christine Billings pointed out that the $75,000 for helper buses covered only a couple of months, and she asked how this sum would be enough to cover four months in 2017. Clack replied that city officials think they can accommodate four months of operating helper buses next spring and summer within the operating budget.

Clack fielded all of council’s questions about the Guelph Transit budget because Phil Meagher was fired as transit’s general manager in October after a little more than three years in the job.

Salisbury said staff’s plan amounted to “institutionalizing the Band-Aid solution” provided by the helper buses for two months this summer. He asked for staff to give council a breakdown of options for moving towards improving spring and summer bus service next year, and Clack said this information will be provided.

Coun. James Gordon also expressed dissatisfaction with staff’s proposal for 2017 bus service, saying it seemed to him to be “counter-intuitive” given the housing-density pressures the city is facing and a resulting need for better transit service.

The draft 2017 operating budget proposed by staff, amounting to $221.9 million, calls for a net increase of 1.98 per cent in the tax levy over 2016. This would increase the city’s portion of property tax bills by $65 during 2017 for the average residential property valued at $315,764, the city says.

The 2017 budget is proposed to increase by $1,014,678, or 0.47 per cent, for “controllable” budget adjustments by city departments, a city staff report says. “Departments were given a target of 0.75 per cent of controllable expenses and delivered at 0.47 per cent,” it says.

The budget is also proposed to go up by 0.89 per cent for “uncontrollable” adjustments, 1.03 per cent to pay for “prior council decisions,” 0.58 per cent to bring the 2017 budget in line with previous “actual” spending levels, and 0.45 per cent for higher spending by local boards and shared services.

However, assessment growth will reduce the 2017 budget increase by 1.44 per cent, the report says.

The 1.98 per cent hike in property taxes in 2017 comes by adding or subtracting all these numbers.

City staff are recommending several hirings as budget expansions in 2017, which would add an additional 0.6 per cent increase to the tax levy above the 1.98 per cent level, council was told.

Staff aren’t recommending further service reductions to bring down the tax levy in 2017, said city CAO Derrick Thomson. In light of the new process at city hall for thoroughly reviewing city services, “we believe the prudent thing to do would be to have that take its course,” he said.

Public delegations giving opinions on the city’s 2017 budgeting will be heard by council at a Nov. 30 meeting starting at 6 p.m. Council is to finalize the budget on Dec. 7.

http://www.guelphmercury.com/news-s...ing-hears-grumbling-about-guelph-bus-service/

The answer for Guelph since a stand-alone city of 130,000 is unable to deliver essential services for a reasonable cost to the ratepayer? Join Waterloo Region either in whole or in part. Or Halton Region, but Waterloo is far more apt. A working relationship of Guelph Transit and GRT has been mentioned in at least two Guelph City Hall reports already.

Grand River Transit (Waterloo Region) serves three cities and a number of towns, as does their library service. And GRT is an excellent bus service with few exceptions. One fare to ride from Elmira down to the south of Cambridge.

But Guelphites like to bitch about costs, meantime being penny wise and pound foolish, but refuse to do anything on a regional basis to reduce those costs.

Toronto can: It can de-amalgamate, and retain some services at a regional level, but take control over transit, road tolls, congestion charge, and many other local issues now swamped in a Council that mixes polar opposites, and satisfies no-one save for the car and sprawl interests.

And utterly ridiculous subway schemes.

 

[Midtown Urbanist]

I think the other direction is more apt for Toronto. City of Toronto become distinct again from the suburbs, there's so little in common politically and societally. And then a larger Regional Government that includes the suburbs, perhaps merging with already established regional governments, could be established. And then they could build subways to Timbuktu.

Totally a worthwhile suggestion, even in a "Province of the Golden Horseshoe" scenario.

Etobicoke* and Scarborough can form it's own municipalities in the larger Regional Government. (North York, York, and East York likely can stay with Toronto) (* - if Etobicoke wants, probably should be put into referendum)

 

[Midtown Urbanist]

Toronto can: It can de-amalgamate, and retain some services at a regional level, but take control over transit, road tolls, congestion charge, and many other local issues now swamped in a Council that mixes polar opposites, and satisfies no-one save for the car and sprawl interests.

There is a third option too.

Local services can be downloaded into empowered boroughs within the amalgamated city of Toronto. This can allow for a more flexible distribution of local services, rather than a one-size-fits-all for the entire city (on the basis of (false) equity). For instance, downtown can have snow removal for it's roads and bike paths and trails, while Etobicoke can decide it only needs to provide this service for major arteries.

 

[steveintoronto]

There is a third option too.

Local services can be downloaded into empowered boroughs within the amalgamated city of Toronto. This can allow for a more flexible distribution of local services, rather than a one-size-fits-all for the entire city (on the basis of (false) equity). For instance, downtown can have snow removal for it's roads and bike paths and trails, while Etobicoke can decide it only needs to provide this service for major arteries.

Yes! My posting was a bit awkward in wording, but that's exactly the gist, meantime the Horseshoe (and adjacent) becoming a super region. The province would never cede jurisdiction, plus at the federal level, it would complicate in geometric ways, but immediately, GO Transit, for instance, could be administered by this 'super region'. There are many services best delivered at the local level, others at a regional one, if not super-regional.

Wisla: I started into another paragraph on optimal city-size and efficiency of deliverance of governing, and erased it, thought I'd best get some reference first. The UK had done some studies decades back, and I can't remember whether the figure for optimal is 100,000 or a million, I'll continue digging for that. Bear in mind the UK governs cities directly from the Parliamentary level with aspects at the county level, but still, there might be universal factors that apply to most any modern city.

Here's a couple of links to reference my point, more detail later:
What's the perfect size for a city?
The world’s cities are sprawling over their boundaries, fragmenting into smaller parts run by competing regional governments. But amalgamating them brings other problems ...
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/apr/23/sane-way-run-megalopolis-urban-governance

Optimal Urban Population Size: National vs Local Economic Efficiency
https://dspace.mit.edu/openaccess-disseminate/1721.1/86416

More later on this...

 

[Videodrome]

Tory would beat Doug Ford by wide margin: Poll

From The Toronto Sun, at this link:



That's with a popular vote of course, across the entire city. If we had a ward-orial vote (like the U.S. electoral vote, which Trump won [290 vs. 232] against Clinton's wining the popular vote [61,201,031 vs. 62,523,126]), there might be a different result.

I would like to see a poll without Doug as an option. It isn't surprising that Tory would destroy him.

 

[steveintoronto]

Totally a worthwhile suggestion, even in a "Province of the Golden Horseshoe" scenario.

Etobicoke* and Scarborough can form it's own municipalities in the larger Regional Government. (North York, York, and East York likely can stay with Toronto) (* - if Etobicoke wants, probably should be put into referendum)

This is where it gets interesting, and this string of discussion is hardly radical, it's been simmering ever since forced amalgamation.

Who's in, and who's out? Agreed on East York, and York Township. Swansea might feel better off in Etobicoke, but you never know until a referendum. The sense of 'village' can swing both ways, and with the almost total gentrification, they might feel more at home with City conveniences.

To be continued...

 

[steveintoronto]

Just reading the Guardian link I posted two submissions back: (This is more apt than I first imagined, Toronto being a prime case):

[...]
A few year earlier, in 2010 and 800 miles to the north-east, Toronto elected the suburban politician Rob Ford from Etobicoke as mayor. Ford swept into office pledging to “stop the gravy train” and cut spending, cancelling bike infrastructure and streetcars. His sensibilities appalled urban Torontonians. The urban studies theorist Richard Florida called him “the worst and most anti-urban mayor in the history of any major city”. His mayoralty ultimately collapsed in a wave of scandals, including when he got caught on video smoking crack.

One of the factors blamed for the Rob Ford phenomenon? Amalgamation, or the consolidation of the city of Toronto with several formerly independent municipalities, including Etobicoke. It is amalgamation that allowed suburbanites to take control of governance over the inner city by electing one of their own as mayor.

Welcome to the wonderful world of governing urban regions, where between fragmentation and amalgamation no one actually knows what the right-sized box for local government is or how to change it – but everyone can see the problems of most of the existing governance models.

Municipal fragmentation has been criticised for decades. In Cities Without Suburbs, his influential 1993 book, former Albuquerque mayor David Rusk argued that Rust Belt cities in the US failed to succeed in part because they were unable to expand, and found themselves hemmed in by a jigsaw puzzle of independent suburbs.
But with cities having become central to national governance in the 21st century, institutions like the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank are weighing in, too. Both recently sounded the alarm about the risks of urban fragmentation on a global level, for the developed and the developing world.

“Often, administrative boundaries between municipalities are based on centuries-old borders that do not correspond to contemporary patterns of human settlement and economic activity,” the OECD observed in a recent report. The thinktank argued that governance structures failed to reflect modern realities of metropolitan life into account.

Behind the report’s dry prose lies a real problem. Fragmentation affects a whole range of things, including the economy. The OECD estimates that for regions of equal population, doubling the number of governments reduces productivity by 6%. It recommends reducing this effect with a regional coordinating body, which can also reduce sprawl, increase public transport satisfaction (by 14 percentage points, apparently) and improve air quality.

The World Bank, meanwhile, is worried about the way rapid growth in developing cities has created fragmentation there, too. Metropolises often sprawl well beyond government boundaries: Jakarta, for example, has spread into three separate provinces. The World Bank calls fragmentation “a significant challenge in the East Asia region”.

“It’s quite a surprise how much fragmentation there is,” says Judy Baker, one of the authors of the World Bank’s recent report titled East Asia’s Changing Urban Landscape. “It’s a challenge for almost every city.”
Among the surprising findings of the report is that 135 of the nearly 350 urban regions they surveyed in East Asia had no dominant local jurisdiction. The glaring example here is of course the largest urban area in the world, the Pearl River Delta region in China, a megapolitan region that includes many major cities, including Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and others. In Manila in the Philippines, no less than 85 municipalities are involved in the megacity’s governance.

Planners love efficiency, but even on a piece of paper it can be hard to know what size box to draw. As the OECD put it: “Even if policymakers try to reorganise local governments according to functional relations within urban agglomerations, it is often difficult to identify boundaries between functionally integrated areas.” In plain English: nobody really knows where to draw the lines.

And as the Toronto example shows, amalgamation – bringing fragmented government regions together – comes with downsides of its own. Of course, you can put people in the same governmental box, but that won’t necessarily create common ground – instead, it can create a zero-sum, winner-takes-all dynamic.

People in living in cities and those in their suburbs often have different values, priorities and even a different culture. They can be, as was famously said of English and French Canada, “two solitudes”. Urbanites who support regional governance frequently assume that means more power, money and resources for the central city. But as Rob Ford so richly illustrated, that’s not always the case.
[...]

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/apr/23/sane-way-run-megalopolis-urban-governance

 

[W. K. Lis]

Did I miss Mary Walsh's character, Marg Delahunty, trying to "interview" John Tory? Waiting...

 

[DSC]

There is a third option too.

Local services can be downloaded into empowered boroughs within the amalgamated city of Toronto. This can allow for a more flexible distribution of local services, rather than a one-size-fits-all for the entire city (on the basis of (false) equity). For instance, downtown can have snow removal for it's roads and bike paths and trails, while Etobicoke can decide it only needs to provide this service for major arteries.

Many things are already able to be finally decided by one of the four 'community councils' - Council should set up a committee to see what other decisions can be made by them. The needs and expectations of 'downtown' residents are not always the same as those of suburban ones.

 

[salsa]

Today mayor Tory is making a case for council pushing staff to lay groundwork for more garbage outsourcing, before a staff report on the merits of that has been completed. Recall that a previous staff report found that it would actually cost the city to contract out, much to the displeasure of Tory and his allies, so they ordered a new report.

“It’s becoming a hallmark of this administration that they want their own facts — on transit, on public finance and now on garbage,” said Councillor Gord Perks. “If they don’t like the facts they’re presented with, they ask the staff to go generate a different set of facts. It’s a bad way to govern.”

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/20...ation-debate-likely-to-be-deferred-again.html