Analogy Day: Taking Gravy Far Too Seriously

A tourist visits Toronto

In a way, I never really got the gravy metaphor. I mean, gravy is delicious. Sure, it’s something to have in moderation, but it’s also something to look forward to.

OK, I get it, the idea was to use gravy as a stand-in for the waste within City Hall and focus on the core material. But let’s step back for a moment and see if this analogy is actually a good thing. No, seriously.

2 tablespoons pan drippings

2 tablespoons flour

1 cup milk

1 cup water

Salt and pepper to taste

Gravy is a sauce made from the juices that naturally run from meat or vegetables during cooking. That’s it, not too evil. In fact, it’s a good thing. Making gravy involves taking the secondary runoff from the core material and using it to complement the meal. As opposed to, say, completely wasting that secondary material. Looked at that way, gravy is actually efficient. We take it for granted, but it uses innovative thinking to maximize the materials at hand, precisely what Rob Ford promised he would do.

I can acknowledge that gravy-as-metaphor means something else, that it’s something which is superfluous or unnecessary. Looking at it from that angle too, the gravy metaphor is limited.

When people travel and come back saying they loved a certain place, they’re not going to tell you they loved the fact that chipmunk suits weren’t expensed or a local politician didn’t throw a lavish party. Of course, these things should not be tolerated. But what people really admire in a city are the intangible bonuses. They’ll talk about how the great architecture adds to the mood and character of the city. Or they’ll talk about how pedestrian shopping provides a unique and  more meaningful way to experience the nuances of the city. Or maybe they’ll talk about a great festival or cultural event that was unique and significant to the area. These things are gravy in one sense: they add flavour to the city by using creative thinking to build on the existing structure.

That’s not waste, that’s adding value. So even the most core metaphor of the Rob Ford campaign has problems when you pick it apart. Sure, cancel your council snacks and trim expenses where possible, but the ability to distinguish between waste and value-added reuse and investment is what makes for good management. Failing that is wasting opportunities.     

Analogy Day: City Hall as a Business

National Geographic

So today is analogy day here at the Clamshell, something Cityslikr has addressed recently. 

Analogies are powerful and useful rhetorical tools as they can transfer the properties of an argument into a parallel that is more relatable and understandable. Unfortunately, analogies can be used to misrepresent or hide the flaws in poor arguments.

But today we’ll go through some Fordian analogies and see how they hold up.

First up:

We need to run government like a business

Recently Team Ford has also trotted out the ‘we need to budget like families do,’ a canard that has been debunked. So too has this ‘government like a business’ nonsense; government exists to take care of things that the private sector and its profit-seeking motive is ill-equipped to.

But just for a minute, let’s play this game. Let’s grant the analogy that government should be run like a business in order to look at the quality of the management.

It’s really hard to quantify what makes a great executive, but let’s use the definition that they deliver value through measured risk and meeting target deliverables, set a positive tone for the company with their leadership and sell others on why their particular company is a worthwhile enterprise.

Delivering Value and Meeting Targets

Delivering value as an executive requires a blend of skills, from using analytical thinking to measuring the tradeoffs in various choices to meeting the targets you set out to achieve. Let’s look at the biggest projects of the mayor’s team to evaluate progress in this area.

Recently there’s been a lot of talk about the mayor’s “Transportation City” plan, which involved cancelling Transit City, building a Sheppard extension and burying the Eglinton LRT line.

I’ve previously written about the lack of value on theSheppard line, and it seems the invisible hand of the free market is giving a thumbs down to it as well. Initially Ford promised $4 billion of the $4.6 billion would be funded by the private sector, but it turns out unicorns do not exist.  

He also asked the province for an advance on completing the Eglinton LRT line on-budget even though his plan has lacked the analytical foresight  common sense to deal with the Don Valley.  The Sheppard line was promised to be completed for the Pan Am games, but now that promise has been reduced to completing one station.  These are not the project management planning characteristics of a skilled executive.

Likewise, Team Ford’s Quixotic gravy crusade is going poorly. Thus far, around $30 million worth of ‘waste’ has been cut, but these include things like the Christmas Bureau for needy children and the Hardship Fund for low-income seniors—hardly what voters had in mind. Despite these cuts, the Ford Team will fall dramatically short of their promise to find $525 million inwaste for 2011. 

Transportation City and the KPMG project failed to measure real value and tradeoffs, analyze problems in implementation or get anywhere close to achieving what the Ford Team promised. If these results were announced at an annual shareholder meeting, the stock would immediately plummet and the demands for management’s resignations would be instantaneous.

Setting a Positive Tone

The CEO is seen as the leader of the organization, the person that sets the tone and direction of the workplace.

In the past week I’ve spoken with a number of City Hall bureaucrats for various reasons, and have added the question to each of them to characterize staff morale. Universally, they say that it is either terrible or the worst it is ever been. One staffer thought it was just her department for a while but then when she asked around discovered that was not the case. Many staffers offered unprompted comparisons to the Mel Lastman years, saying that times were tough then but no one doubted his passion for the city.

This was the common theme of comments from city staff, that they are led by an administration opposed to the very idea of government, and thus them.

This is a problem. You want to change how the city works? Great. That involves motivating a great team- 45,000 employees, in fact- to buy into and implement your ideas. Sometimes workplace culture needs changing, but you don’t go about demonizing people and then hope they adopt your ideas.

A winning CEO has a winning personality to motivate those around him or her, and that is not the case here.

Promoting the City

Lastman, for all of his shortcomings, also had no problem promoting Toronto. He understood that a mayor or CEO is chiefly a cheerleader for their organization and they can grow through more recognition and investment.

Rob Ford, for his purported business acumen, has not used this approach. Instead, he has said whenever he can that Toronto is close to broke and doesn’t have any choice but to cut beloved programs, including libraries and childcare.

This is not a culture that attracts investment or respect. Granted, pointed and realistic conversations about the city’s finances are important and should be encouraged. But that’s not what we have here. Instead, we have an administration that’s focused solely on one ideological angle- cutting- at the expense of growing what they have.

It’s short-sighted management. To continue the business analogy, I didn’t buy an iPad Wednesday because Apple has a good balance sheet. I bought an iPad because Apple provides a good product. Their balance sheet is due to the products and services they provide, just like a city prospers based on its liveability.

Executive Summary

So if we really are treating the city like a business, our management sucks. It hasn’t delivered the value they promised, it hasn’t treated its employees or investors (citizens!) with respect and it hasn’t improved the city’s image.

Since it’s Analogy Day, there is a certain kind of executive that the Ford management style is reminiscent of.  It’s a corporate raider style. It’s an outsider coming in, not caring about respecting other stakeholders or underlying value and stripping assets for short-term gain before bailing. It’s not a great growth strategy and it’s not something one should want to be compared to.

NEXT UP: Re-thinking the gravy analogy

Defending the Toronto Youth Cabinet

Two days ago, Councillor Shelley Carroll led a discussion at City Hall about the role of social media in engaging citizens. Yesterday at OCAD the city’s economic development department held a forum about getting citizens to engage in events and their city through unconventional ways. But in a twist of fate, today the Toronto Youth Cabinet (TYC) will have to justify their existence to the city’s Budget Committee.

The TYC, like the Toronto Seniors Forum which will also be debated today, is one of many potential cuts in the city’s measures to balance its operating budget. According to its website, the TYC is a youth driven advocacy organization which strives to improve the quality of life for Toronto’s youth. Among other things, the cabinet has:

• ·         Developed strategies to liaise with squeegee kids in the Mel Lastman years
• ·         Independently conducted a review of graffiti in the David Miller-Rob Ford years
• ·         Provided financial literacy workshops for youth
• ·         Taught hundreds of individuals of how to use City Hall avenues to have their voices heard, like giving deputations.

In fact, they’re goals that Rob Ford largely campaigned on. Speaking about youth engagement at the Scarborough Mayor’s debate in March 2010, Ford said, 

“[We need to] go across the city to talk to principals, to talk to youth, to see what they want...if it gets them an education, if it gets kids out of the gangs, off the street, off the drugs and puts them on a positive pursuit [it’s good].” 

Despite this, there are three main challenges that the ~300 member Youth Cabinet faces in justifying themselves to the Budget Committee.

Value

Currently the Youth Cabinet has an annual budget of just under $27,000. Executive Cabinet members have indicated a willingness to decline their stipends or to seek private funding if it means keeping the Cabinet. In fact, a 2007 study by planner Rachelle Ricotta suggested that one of the principal obstacles in the cabinet’s effort to expand outreach was a lack of funding and permanent staff, not poor management or wasteful spending.

It’s difficult in defining the real value the city derives from the Youth Cabinet, whose positive outcomes are mostly intangibles. After all, what’s the value of an engaged citizen? But another 2007 report, this one by Brenda O’Neill for the Canadian Policy Research Networks, sheds some light on that. 

O’Neill points to the abysmally low voter turnout (federally) among 18-24 year-olds in 2000 and 2004 (25 and 37%, respectively). At the same time, this same age-group has relatively high participation in other direct-action political activities, like petitions, boycotts, protests and volunteering. This suggests that there’s a gap between embracing politics and working within institutions.

It’s one that was a chief discussion point at the ICE economic development conference at OCAD yesterday. The room full of city bureaucrats, most of whom want to incorporate innovative techniques to involve more youth, is juxtaposed by the Budget Committee today, showing that dissonance isn’t limited to 18-24 year-olds.  

Purpose

A criticism of the youth cabinet that goes beyond the value argument asks, ‘why have a youth cabinet in the first place? Why can’t they work within the same means as any other citizen?’

It’s a fair question; what makes youth (and seniors) special in their need for representation? For one, the sociological research indicates that youth are disaffected by and disconnected from traditional institutions. In turn, they require a bridge to connect them to these institutions and to realize their value.

It’s a challenge that Ange Kinnear, Adam Vaughan’s Executive Assistant, knows from her first-hand involvement with the Metro version of the youth cabinet. “With the Youth Cabinet you’ll have people who join when they’re 17 or join when they’re 21, and check out when they go to university or turn 24. People’s life situation at that stage changes drastically and sometimes they have time to give and sometimes they don’t.” 

Kinnear adds that youth are often in the process of finding their voice in this period and their priorities change over time. These various challenges highlight the importance of a stable liaison like the TYC for individuals to come back and re-connect with.

Cutting it would make it more difficult for the city to achieve its aims of connecting youth to its representation and getting them involved. That’s not a small constituency either; youth (13-24) are 300,000 of the least represented people in Toronto.

Politics

But there’s another argument against the Youth Cabinet, one that is more insidious. It’s an accusation nicely represented by a September Sue-Ann Levy column in which she says that, “...the TYC- a pet project of NDPer Olivia Chow initiated in 2001- is nothing more than a breeding ground for left-wing activists who hang around City Hall like Adam Chaleff-Freudenthaler.” (Note: It was re-introduced by Chow in 1998, not 2001 and a metro version had existed) 

This argument states that the Youth Cabinet is too political and that it’s essentially a recruiting grounds for the NDP. Executive member Keegan Henry-Mathieu and Claire McWatt reject this outright, “If any councillor, no matter their political background, asks us for advice, we’re not going to say no...we serve at the pleasure of council.” Adds Mathieu-Henry, “It’s unfair to paint the youth cabinet with one brush when so many people pass through it.”

While it’s true that there has been left-wing representation from people like Kinnear or Kristyn Wong-Tam, there have also been many conservatives who have come through the cabinet, including a Cesar Palacio staffer, a number of people who have since run for the Conservative party, and various conservative bankers and lawyers.

Kinnear agrees that Levy’s criticism of the Youth Cabinet being manipulated is misplaced. She shares a story of going into a Youth Cabinet meeting just after becoming too old to participate and being shooed away by Chaleff-Freudenthaler, who feared the meeting would be controlled by non-members, “I’ve never met a youth cabinet who was willing to say yes to outsiders. They’ve always been very independent and committed to telling their own story.” Kinnear goes on to explain that it’s one of the strengths of the Cabinet, that their combination of independence and proximity to Council allows for the complementary growth of the participants and valuable advice for Councillors.

Meaning

Two days from now, the Youth Cabinet connects with other institutions in their annual celebration The Cause. It’s their biggest event of the year, with workshops on advocacy, a chance to meet councillors and learn about art. But moreso than that for Henry-Mathieu, working on things like The Cause for the TYC has taught him larger lessons about identifying values and learning to fight for them, “For me, the Youth Cabinet has instilled a sense of service. That sense that if I really have an issue with the way the city is being run then I actually have to make the time to do something about it.”

McWatt has had a similar experience. She went from someone who was apathetic and withdrawn in high school to a fully engaged and informed citizen due to the Youth Cabinet, the kind politicians want more of. But the challenges and frustration of defending a tool that offers institutional access to that very institution has caused some disappointment, “The TYC is a good thing, it’s a teaching tool. And degrading it just seems ignorant.”  

So the questions for the budget committee today become, ‘what connections can we make between the questions city staff try to solve and the solutions the Youth Cabinet offers,’ ‘is the Youth Cabinet a cause worth fighting for,’ ‘What price and value do we put on youth engagement,’ and, most importantly, ‘what kind of institution is City Hall?’      

A sad day for cyclists and non-cyclists alike

This ghost bike on Bayview was a memorial for Alan Tamane. 

A cyclist died today. More specifically, a woman in her 40s was hit by a truck driver making a turn as she was going south on Sterling at Dundas. It’s been described as a preventable collision, which makes it all the more sad. It seems one vehicle just lost sight of the other, and in these incidents the cyclist doesn’t win.

On Twitter, many people brought up Rob Ford’s unfortunate 2007 quotation that cyclists earn the consequences of biking on the road with cars: 

“my heart bleeds when someone gets killed, but it’s [cyclists’] own fault at the end ofthe day.”

It’s an unfortunate quote and one that Ford probably regrets in some respect. The thing is, I believe Ford when he says his heart bleeds in these incidents. He strikes me as a genuinely empathetic guy at times, like when he speaks emotionally about Jack Layton’s passing or talks about how he was motivated to turnaround the lives of young people through founding a football team.

It’s the latter that John Lorinc uses as a departure point to discuss Ford’s character and how that informs his policies. Lorinc writes that Ford should rightly be lauded for his efforts, particularly in taking hardscrabble youth, (half of whom live in public housing), and providing a positive space for them to grow. But Lorinc points out that here’s where the Fordian gulf exists: despite being motivated to help these individuals, he fails to make the connection between youth and social programs and their welfare.

The same is true for cyclists. I’m sure Ford is genuinely saddened at what happened today on Sterling St. To be clear, this death was not just the result of one person’s view or one particular policy or the lack of bike lanes in the area. Preventable cycling deaths are the result of a lack of collective action to connect the empathy we feel on days like today to meaningful policies and cultural shifts.

In doing so, we create the conditions for lasting change that addresses the underlying concerns. Hopefully then we don't lose sight of each other, our hearts can bleed a lot less, and incidents like the one today are more infrequent. 


UPDATE: Her name was Jenna Morrison. A yoga teacher, she was married and had a three-year-old child and was expecting another. 

The Two Solitudes

The Public Works and Infrastructure Committee might be the most spiteful and rancorous at City Hall. Chaired by Denzil Minnan-Wong, the committee has so far featured surprise motions on the Fort York Bridge, Jarvis Bike Lanes and Yonge-Dundas pedestrian scramble. 

The disputes between the left-wing councillors, Gord Perks and Mike Layton, and the Ford allies, Minnan-Wong, David Shiner, John Parker and Mark Grimes, have been strong and frequent.

Thursday was shaping up to be different. With four major items on the agenda, it looked like consensus might be found on each of them. But when it got down to details, problems arose:

·         On a motion to put in separated bike lanes on Richmond and Adelaide, Adam Vaughan requested research to be done on making the streets two-way so as to avoid congestion from constantly circling the block. He was concerned that with the number of developments and parking garages he was familiar with in the corridor, feasibility and implementation needed further study. Vaughan’s request did not pass.

·         Shiner introduced a motion forbidding dwelling on a sidewalk or street, ostensibly a downtown issue. Perks amended it (which Shiner supported) to incorporate this with the Streets to Homes program. In effect, the bylaw had no change whatsoever, as the existing law forbade obstructing sidewalks or streets and transitioned individuals to Streets to Homes. Now, rather than proving 'obstruction' police will have to prove 'dwelling' in order to move homeless people. More on this at Inside Toronto.

·         Shiner introduced a motion to ban ‘things’ from being locked to post and ring locks, streetlights, bus shelters and other street furniture for more than 24 hours. Layton objected to this, pointing out that it would make it a crime for bicycles to be locked to anything but post and ring locks and those only account for 5% of bike parking. Shiner was not amenable to Layton’s amendment to exclude bikes, reasoning that they should not be allowed to lock onto bus shelters. More on this at Torontoist. 

·         On the Fort York Bridge item, Shiner and Layton had worked closely to bring it to committee. At the last minute, Minnan-Wong introduced a motion that would send it to the executive committee, stipulate that the bridge use ‘as little debt as possible’ and look at selling 53 Strachan Ave. to pay for the bridge, which includes a community garden and shelter. The amendment failed and the bridge passed. More on this at Ford For Toronto.

Each of these items has a common theme, and it’s a failure to communicate. During the campaign a refrain heard often was that downtown just doesn’t understand the suburbs. To an extent, it’s true. There are very different needs and ways of living downtown and in the inner suburbs and the two probably don’t appreciate the differences as much as they should.

It would be nice if that would change easily, but people have lives to live and jobs to work. 

But for city councillors, this kind of understanding is their job. It’s their job to extend empathy and intellectual understanding to what makes various communities work and identify how exceptions should be carved out to ensure needs are taken into account. Just like downtown councillors can’t impose one-size-fits-all solutions on the inner suburbs, the inner suburbs should not do that to the downtown area.

So when a law comes up that completely ignores the impact it will have on bicycles, that’s a failure to understand that bikes are a common mode of transportation downtown and finding appropriate parking can be tough (Only 5-10% of bikes are parked using post and ring locks).  

It’s a failure that extends to the other issues. 

When Minnan-Wong suggested selling 53 Strachan to help pay for the bridge in addition to using Section 37 money, he didn’t know what the local consequences were. Layton picked up on this and asked , ‘what’s on this property?’ To which the Chair responsded, ‘some buildings and land.’ This vague non-answer highlights the lack of connection Minnan-Wong has to the area, including the community garden and successful shelter that are on it. He eventually withdrew the 53 Strachan portion of the motion, leaving it to be sent to the executive committee that has no connection to downtown.

For the bike lanes on Richmond and Adelaide, they’re likely a genuine effort by Minnan-Wong to improve cycling infrastructure. However, he also genuinely lacks the knowledge of the area to appreciate the complications that come with his plan. When Vaughan offered to slow down the process to study the option of making Richmond and Adelaide two-way streets, Minnan-Wong dismissed it out of hand. Vaughan offered a detailed development map, knowledge gleaned from campaigning in the area twice and working there for years, but this did not matter. Minnan-Wong has a plan to foist on the downtown core, and things like consultation won’t stop him.

This is how we have Toronto’s two solitudes, through a failure to communicate and a lack of understanding of the needs and desires of local constituencies. It’s a failure that was cited as an indictment of the Miller administration by the current mayor’s inner circle, but it’s one that continues to this day. And it’s a big problem. Successful governance isn’t based on spite; it’s a two-way street.  

Weekend Fluff: #MatlowMurderMystery

So yesterday Councillor Josh Matlow (Ward 22, St. Paul's) innocuously tweeted a patented innocuous tweet that he would be going to a friend's house for a murder mystery dinner party. 


Of course, murder mysteries are never as they seem. Jonathan Goldsbie, King of the #topoli Twitterverse, turned the tweet upside down on the King of the Mushy, suggesting that people participate in a #matlowmurdermystery hashtag.


Consensus was quickly reached that this was a Good Idea, and the skewering of Matlow's style and politics began in earnest. Here are some of my favourites:


The councillor, normally loquacious in chambers and on Twitter, decided to opt out of this particular thread. 


In case you're keeping track, it joins #starwarscouncil, #councildrinks and #princessbridecouncil as some of the most unusual but fun hashtags to be generated in the absurd past year. 

Better Know a Ward: Sarah Doucette

So I'm doing a series for the good people at OpenFile to get to know councillors and their wards better. This is a repost of it. 

Welcome to Better Know a Ward. Taking a cue from Stephen T. Colbert, we’re taking a look at City Councillors and how they connect to the wards they represent.

We’re fortunate to kick this off with Sarah Doucette, (Ward 13, Parkdale-High Park) one of Toronto’s newbie councillors. Born in Winchester, England and raised on the Isle of Wight, Doucette moved to the Swansea area of her ward 15 years ago. Since then she’s been engaged in building playgrounds, volunteering to protect school pools and local libraries and promoting various environmental programs.

We spoke with her by phone last week.

What’s unique about your ward?

Where do I start? My ward has a diverse selection of people living in it. We have the Swansea area, we have the Bloor West area, we have High Park, we have the Junction, we’ve got Baby Point and we’ve got an area in the middle which we need to find a name for.

We’re all kind of slightly different, slightly unique, but we all kind of blend together so beautifully. One of the things I do love about my ward is its determination; they’re so dedicated—to not necessarily preserve their neighbourhood—but to keep an eye on the neighbourhood so that if it is changing, it’s changing for the better.

What are the challenges that come with that diversity?

Certain areas of our ward are quite capable of doing private sports, other areas of our ward go to community centres and other areas of our ward need subsidies for the community centre. So you have different areas of the ward that need different things from the City and for their family lives... So the diversity in the area is also financial but we try not to let that make a difference as to what children and families can do and participate with.

Your mom and grandfather also showed leadership in their communities [as mayors in England of the Isle of Wight and Winchester, respectively]. What did you learn from them?

Well my mother is my main inspiration. My mother brought my brother and myself up. My parents did separate when we were quite young. Still had a great relationship with my father but we lived with my mother.

And she always put other people first. Just an example, she started a group called the Gingerbread Group. It was for one-parent families. So Sunday afternoon everyone would get together somewhere, normally it was a park or somewhere that didn’t cost any money. And we would all just do a picnic or go for a walk in the woods or take someone’s dog for a walk. She brought people together, and I learned so much from her. She was absolutely dedicated to her community.

We were asked as incoming city councillors to bring something to City Hall that represents how we want to be seen as a councillor. I brought my mother’s wedding ring, which actually, I still wear. Because it’s a circle, to me it means that everyone is included, no one is left out, no one can hide in a corner.

One thing you spoke about in your campaign platform was trying to prioritize youth engagement. What kinds of avenues have you explored to promote this?

Well, to be completely honest, during the campaign I was under the impression I would have a constituency office. Not having a constituency office does change things a bit because you’re not actually there every day to bring youth in, to get to know the youth.

My idea was to bring the youth in to get to know the seniors to get them to work with each other. It’s a bit harder when you’re not in the ward, but we are trying to work with the schools to get them to help seniors. Seniors will contact us and say, “They’re brilliant at shovelling the sidewalk but they don’t do the pathway from the sidewalk to the front door,” so that’s where I want to get the youth involved.

Now in connection to that, your ward, for instance, has High Park—and you’ve done a flash mob before. What role can public space play in building community?

In our ward we’re quite fortunate. Up in the Junction, we have what’s called the Train Station. It’s a property where the owner has not developed it yet, and they built a platform there. And he’s very good at letting the community use it. So [yesterday] we used it for pumpkin carving, we used it during Earth Hour, we used it for Farm Fest, to show the sustainability of vegetables. It’s a place where the community can gather and do events; we show movies there...
So I think community space is vital. We have the Baby Point Gate BIA, brand new just this year, and they don’t actually have a space like that, so you have to work in different ways.

Speaking of youth engagement and public space and pumpkin carving, your family loves Halloween, doesn’t it?

Ah, yes... Well actually, it’s my husband’s love of Halloween. We were the first house in the neighbourhood to have a smoke machine. Because I’m in a valley, and we would fill up the valley with smoke, we were called "The Smoke House".

Swansea Public School takes the children up on a walk at Halloween in their costumes, 600 to 700 kids walking around the neighbourhood, to see the decorated houses so I would always make sure we were decorated. We do a graveyard... We have lights, we have music. We had a metal monster, we had a recyclable robot made out of produce. And we had a microphone and speaker in him at one point so my son would be sitting on the front porch and he knew the kids’s names from school and so he would freak them out completely.

Thank you, councillor, you have a very happy Halloween.

Oh thank you, and you too.