Rob Ford casts deciding votes at committee, seemingly to avoid fights on council floor
Megan O'Toole | 13/09/16 6:41 PM ET
Presaging a bitter 2014 budget battle, Mayor Rob Ford has appeared twice in the past week at city hall committees to tip the balance on spending votes, scuttling the efforts of rival councillors.
Because he is technically a member of all standing committees, the mayor is entitled to sit in on any meeting and vote, although he very rarely exercises that power. The fact that he has done it twice in a week — breaking tie votes to send spending recommendations to the Ford-friendly budget committee, rather than directly to council — appears a strategic effort to gain an early measure of control over the 2014 budget process.
“It seems to me that he is trying to avoid an increasingly unpredictable and hostile council in order to either send a message or lock in what he wants to achieve,†said University of Toronto urban politics professor Zack Taylor.
On Monday, the parks and environment committee voted 4-3 (with Mr. Ford as the tiebreaker) to ship to the budget committee several spending motions, including one that would have asked the city to boost park staffing levels and resume funding the High Park Zoo and Riverdale Farm. Left-leaning councillors had wanted the motions to go straight to council for possible inclusion in the 2014 draft budget.
Councillors can still revive any of the items during budget discussions, although without advance preparation, staff may not have the necessary numbers at hand to inform the debate. With two-thirds support, councillors can also add items to the next council agenda.
Speaking outside Monday’s meeting, Mr. Ford dismissed his colleagues’ motions as “reckless†spending attempts.
“We have fine services in our parks right now, there’s not a problem,†Mayor Ford said, in between watching clips from “Summer of Ford,†his newly minted self-promotional video that was playing on a large screen at city hall.
“We just can’t have these lefties spending like drunken sailors, and that’s what they’re doing… They have no respect for the taxpayers whatsoever,†Mr. Ford said. “They never have, they never will. But their day of reckoning is coming soon.â€
One week earlier, Mr. Ford appeared at the city’s government management committee for a similar purpose; the committee was considering a review of service levels, with some councillors raising concerns about the high number of callers who hung up before anyone answered their tax-assessment questions. Councillor Pam McConnell wanted the 2014 draft budget to include resources to improve that number, but the Ford-supported majority referred the item to the budget committee.
According to city data, the mayor’s recent committee forays are indeed unusual.
“In the history of the amalgamated city and its predecessors, it would be very rare, but not unheard of, for a mayor to exercise this right,†said John Elvidge, secretariat director with the city clerk’s office.
Besides the recent two, the only other standing committee meeting Mr. Ford attended and voted in this term was a June public works session on the plastic-bag fee. The city could not immediately provide data on previous mayors’ attendance records.
Parks committee member Gord Perks called the mayor’s tactic “disappointing†and emblematic of “bad governance.†Mr. Perks, who had been aiming to increase the frequency of playground equipment replacement, said it would be much more difficult to pass that motion during budget talks, because councillors would not necessarily have up-to-date financial information.
“We just want the information from staff to be here when we debate the budget, saying to fix playgrounds is going to cost you this much. The mayor doesn’t even want us to have that information in our draft budget,†Mr. Perks said.
But Councillor Paul Ainslie, who chairs the parks committee and moved Monday’s referral motion, maintained the budget committee was the appropriate place for such matters.
“Some of these are very emotional items for a lot of people, [but] we have to have a process in place,†he said.
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