[URBAN NOTE] "Ford Doesn't Scale"

[rfmcdonald]

James Bow's post makes an unfortunate play on Mayor Rob Ford's excessive weight in the title of his post, but he's otherwise quite right. Rob Ford is a man whose skills were those of the city councillor, of the man responding to the particular concerns of his cluster of neighbourhoods in a personal way. Managing a vaster city is beyond his ken.

Early in Ford’s term, I read a column from a columnist (I forget his name) who suggested that Rob Ford ran for the wrong job. Let’s pause a moment as the more left-leaning of my readers shout at their screen, “well, duh!!” But this is not what I meant. The columnist suggested that Ford’s strengths as a public figure, and his goals in pursuing public life tailored him for a job that had little to do with the day-to-day activities of the mayor’s office. As a councillor, Ford was a gadfly, but he was adept at connecting to people in his ward (people who agreed with him, anyway), and championing their causes, cutting through the bureaucratic red tape to fix a pot-hole that city workers seemed to ignore, dealing with noise complaints — small scale issues which nevertheless affect ordinary people where it matters the most: in their homes.

This assessment was reinforced by this article wherein Ford cordially told Star columnist “the Fixer” that Ford’s self-imposed ban on talking with the Toronto Star (for a controversial story that attacked the Ford family) did not extend to the Fixer himself. And, if you think about it, this is not a surprise. The Fixer’s modus operandi is to find these annoying and persistent problems in the city, find the people responsible for fixing these problems and getting the problems fixed. It’s everything that Ford loved doing while he was a councillor. And it’s what he loves doing now that he’s mayor.

But as a job, a mayor has an entirely different set of responsibilities than a simple councillor. It’s hard enough touring your ward, asking 56,000 constituents if their fridge is working or their sidewalks are in good condition. Imagine doing that for a city of 2.5 million. Also, as councillor, Ford was responsible to no one but himself. He was under no obligation to work with other councillors, and the people who were under him worked for him in a clearly defined employer-employee relationship. This does not carry over to the mayor’s office. Ford has said that he’s not a politician, he’s a businessman, but that’s not an accurate assessment of his problems here. A good mayor needs to negotiate and needs to delegate, and while a business the size of Ford’s Deco Labels & Tags (employing 250 people) may be successfully run by an energetic, tight-knit family, Ford may find that if Deco Labels & Tags increases in size substantially his inability to delegate may become more of a hinderance than a help.

Ford passed up an opportunity today to show real leadership on the subway vs light rail debate. If he had come forward with a credible plan to pay for new subways in exchange for using some of the province’s $8.4 Billion to extend the Sheppard subway to Victoria Park, many centrists (myself included) would have stood with him. Instead, he would only promise to “look at” revenue sources once “shovels were in the ground”. By that logic, Ford would go looking for a trampoline after he stepped off a cliff. Ford’s problem is that he appears to believe that true leadership is “giving the people what they want”. Unfortunately, that’s not what real leaders do, it’s what entertainers do. Ford has promised on the campaign trail that he could build the Sheppard subway and extend the Bloor-Danforth to the Scarborough Town Centre, have both lines opened by 2015, and not raise taxes in order to do it. He has stuck to variations on this plan because, as he says, “people want subways” and, as his brother says, “taxes are evil”.

[. . .]

For the past fifteen months, Ford has struggled mightily to come up with a workable funding plan for his subways, but he refuses to commit to anything that results in higher taxes. His lack of leadership on this issue has caused several Scarborough councillors to break ranks, and advocate for new subway development with new revenue tools (taxes). They’re the ones showing some real leadership on this issue. But such understanding appears to be a blindspot for Ford.

So, yes, Ford is in the wrong job, and I think that most individuals can see that this is the case. It doesn’t bode well for his political future, in spite of the bluster of his allies, either on council, or at the Toronto Sun. But the real losers are the people of Toronto who, regardless of who they voted for mayor, probably still voted for some real leadership on council. In the vacuum that the mayor’s office has established, council has little choice but to step forward to fill it, but it’s not a perfect fit. Council meetings will likely be more interesting than they should be for the next thirty months, until some sense of normalcy is restored to City Hall following the 2014 vote.