Counting the votes: Gloria Lindsay Luby edition

STEVE RUSSELL/ Toronto Star

When Gary Webster was fired last week I spoke to some councillors beforehand and afterwards for a piece on the day's events that I was hoping to sell to a publication. Between one thing and another that didn't happen, but I had a really interesting conversation with Etobicoke councillor Gloria Lindsay Luby. 


I'm reminded of that conversation because chatter on Twitter between Matt Elliott and John McGrath pointed to the March 21 vote on the Sheppard line potentially being close. As McGrath writes at OpenFile, Pasternak will support team Ford on this, but they'll need Lindsay Luby and others to flip too. 


Given how they voted to not excuse her from the special transit vote and the interview below, I say she's not in a sympathetic place when it comes to Team Ford:


How do you feel about this process [of hypothetically firing Gary Webster]?
I think it's disgusting. He's very competent. He's an engineer. I find him- and I've been through two previous managers- to be definitely the best. He listens, he's conciliatory, he wants to help and he's knowledgeable. 


I think they just want to hire someone who is going to kiss the mayor's ring. That's just not the way it works. 


Do you see this as payback for the council vote [to affirm the 2009 LRT MoA]?
I do not understand what goes through their minds, I really don't. I don't even want to try (she laughs). 


There seems to be a governance approach that, for the lack of a better term, has an element of spite to it. 
The vindictiveness is very clear. Whether it is to members of council or to staff. Do as I say. 


Do you feel that personally as well? 
Oh sure. Oh definitely. 


In what ways does that manifest itself? 
Many ways, actually. Whether it's specifically to vote against me on certain things, yeah, I do feel it. 


What advice would you give to the Ford administration to turn this around? 
Learn to work with council. 


So what are the best ways to reach out to council? 
Just because a mayor is elected on a platform doesn't mean all members of council have to follow that platform. We're all elected independently, so I'm going to be following what I think is the right thing not only for my constituents but for the city. We're not a bunch of bimbos that can be led by the nose. We're intelligent people and you have to deal with us intelligently. That's not what I'm seeing happen. 


You were a management consultant for a number of years. If you were doing a report on the management here at City Hall, what would it say? 
Well you have to look at two sides, the elected and staff side. I just can't put it into one word. There would be many, many recommendations. I find the hardest ones to deal with are on the elected side. That comes from an experience I had many years ago in a small municipality in New Brunswick where the elected members didn't get along with the mayor and the mayor basically didn't understand what he was doing. 


So, they had all sorts of issues and they called in the RCMP and it was a very complicated situation. The final analysis is we tried to get them to work together. But their election was coming up. And I said to members of council, if you want to run for mayor, just one of you do it, not all of you. Well you know what they did. None of them got elected. 

The Real Waste at City Hall

Rob Ford and Karen Stintz, as drawn by Charles Schulz Neville Park.

Throughout the mayoral campaign and his first year in office, Rob Ford reminded anyone who would listened that it was all about waste. City Hall was filled with waste, he claimed, and he would be the one to look after it.

This language characterized his KPMG budget too. It was about finding 'efficiencies,' separating the nice-to-haves from the must-haves and making tough choices to move forward.

But the conversation was limited and the politics were small. The scope of Toronto's budget reform focused on how to cut services rather than the larger question of analyzing the structural relationships that give rise to the underlying issues. So while Ford had the public willingness to do a deep-dive in to how Toronto addresses its finances and the underlying issues, it was more Sue-Ann Levy than John Lorinc.

So it is with Toronto's transit plan. Ford was legitimately elected with a platform to re-visit Toronto's transit plan and specifically the poorly communicated Transit City plan. But instead of addressing the underlying flaws of Transit City- a lot of transfers and increased stress on the at-capacity Yonge-University-Spadina line- he decided to plow ahead with his completely unrealistic Sheppard line, accompanied by no funding and no transit experts who would support the idea.

And so The Mayor's office dithered on transit for a year, and Gordon Chong's much anticipated report was delayed multiple times before an optimistic version was released that still argued Sheppard was not feasible unless tolls, new parking charges or congestion taxes were introduced.

Of course, these suggestions were non-starters and Council's opposition fought to preserve the status quo, a vast improvement over the Mayor's crayola-planned underground.

It is rightly a triumph for Council's opposition; they effectively neutralized the uncompromising delusions of the Mayor to avoid a disastrous policy commitment.

But much like the other two big Mayoral defeats of the budget or the Port Lands, there's a bitter aftertaste to this victory. After all, it's all about preservation of existing policy, not progress. In this way, waste once again rears its ugly head, as the theme of this administration has become wasted opportunity.

In the aftermath of campaigning on criticism of the city's budget, planning and transit, Ford had the chance to lead a conversation of what Toronto has to do in order to achieve its goals. Of course, the populist and intellectually disinterested former Ward 2 councillor was never the man for that job.

Now it's up to Council to lead that conversation and assert its primacy beyond playing defense against a harmfully reactionary Mayor. Until then, in the glow of a historic victory, we have City Hall in the same place as the Mayor's disposition, stuck in arrested development.

Save Transit City: The Website

Between reducing service while increasing fares, assuming at least a $65 million charge for canceling Transit City while dismissing the number as 'fictitious', making the TTC an essential service at what might cost another $25 million a year and canceling the Finch LRT to plan a fanciful unicorn subway line along Sheppard, transit is screwed up in Toronto. 

It's something that Matt Elliott writes about in detail over at his blog today, and is a sentiment that has had an increased crescendo in recent weeks as more news comes out on the transit file. 

Following up on this is Joe Drew, a Firefox developer who put together the website savetransitcity.com. I sent Drew some questions by e-mail to further explain his website and where the conversation on transit needs to go:

Why is savetransitcity.com needed, and why now?
Transit City—and LRT in general—is the lowest-cost way of extending real rapid transit to the parts of Toronto that aren't served by the subway or the Scarborough RT. It's clear that Mayor Ford currently doesn't have any interest in reconsidering his cancellation of Transit City, but if there's one thing we can count on, it's that Mr. Ford listens to his constituents. 

We have to spread the word that the province had already paid for three full lines of rapid transit. The people who are left out of Mayor Ford's new plan—like those watching full buses pass them by on Finch West—are the people we need writing to (and calling) Mr. Ford. Spending three transit lines' worth of money on burying a single transit line makes no financial sense. 

And why now? I think the political and populous will is there now. $65 million, the price Mayor Ford imposed on Toronto by cancelling work already under way, is an awfully good motivator. I wish I'd started 
SaveTransitCity.com months ago, but I'm glad I started it now, because I think we can get real change now.

You announced your soft launch last night. What kind of response have you received?People are excited and very supportive. There are a lot of people who wanted to participate in the sort of action that I'm organizing. It takes a first mover to get something started, but once people start seeing flyers and posters around the city, I expect it to snowball.

There's been a lot of great feedback, too, and I'm going to implement most of that before going wider with my campaign. 

Why do you think Transit City failed to gain traction originally and how does this site fill that gap?
Transit City actually did have traction. The province had fully funded the construction of three lines, and in fact City Council voted in favour of Transit City three times, including (then-Councillor) Rob Ford.

I believe the current opposition stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of Transit City as being "just streetcars" and somehow related to the St. Clair West reconstruction project. I hope that Save Transit City clears up both of these misunderstandings as it develops. 

For the average person who won't see transit websites, how can they get connected with this information? 

This is one of the most important parts of Save Transit City. I'm creating (and helping and encouraging others to create) posters and flyers to be distributed around the city. They'll inform and engage; I 
want people waiting in the cold to know that there was going to be a better way before Transit City was cancelled. 

I want those who think Mayor Ford only helps the city's budget to know that he wasted $65 
million without even bringing it to council for a vote.

These posters and flyers, and the awareness they bring, will get the citizens of Toronto to contact their Councillor and Mayor Ford demanding that Transit City be reinstated.

Is the original transit city plan politically viable? Is a compromise plan needed? 

Today's City Council is not fundamentally different from the City Council who voted in favour of Transit City. We have to tell our Councillors that we want solutions soon. 

Everyone wants a subway near 
their home, but it will take billions more dollars and many decades to build subways everywhere, and the first phase of Transit City would have been completed before 2020. (Sheppard East would have opened in 2014!) Subways also require a significantly denser population to justify their increased cost, and outside of Toronto's core, that population density just isn't there.

Rapid transit doesn't just mean subways, and LRT provides great rapid transit at a fraction of the cost of subways. Transit City is the right plan for Toronto, and it's time for Torontonians to start demanding our 
representatives put Transit City back on track.