Toronto needs term limits for politicians

People don’t trust politicians. It’s easy to see why. They have a tendency to say one thing and do another. 

Some spend our tax money as if there’s an endless supply. All of them are quick to take political discourse to a personal level and never go above playing petty politics.

And then there’s always a handful of them that have managed to be in politics for decades and we wonder how that’s possible. 

We all know politicians past and present like this. They don’t really contribute anything and just seem to go through the motions. Their passion for the job long gone.

I think it’s time to permanently retire some of these “dinosaurs” on city council and introduce term limits and new blood into the political process. 

A few years back the province decided, wrongly in my opinion, to extend the time in office for municipal politicians to four years from three as it was previously. 

Instead of being able to hold our politicians accountable more frequently, this extension further entrenches these types of councillors in city politics. They are holding the city back. They treat their wards as personal fiefdoms. 

They sit on important committees and have influence over things like the police service, the TTC and the city budget, but most never bring the needed experience to do these jobs.

They are no longer senior or wise. They set a bad example when making comments such as: “If Mayor Ford is elected, city council will have a caucus meeting and (will) choose their own mayor.” 

Whether you agree with the statement or not, it’s in bad taste and completely unprofessional and inappropriate to say. 

If I was a constituent of this outgoing councillor, I’d be very upset that my elected representative would choose to circumvent the political process and not attempt to work with someone different.

This is exactly why we need term limits in the city. Politicians like this, who have been around for decades, feel entitled to make these comments as though they speak for an entire city. At some point, the longer they sit on council, politicians go from serving us to dictating to us.

More importantly, they impede others from running for political office. As we all know incumbents have a greater chance to win re-election strictly because of name recognition and an office budget that allows them to shamelessly self-promote. Instead of letting their work do the talking, it’s all about being seen and heard.

Public office should be a noble office to attain. Serving one’s community should be one of the most important things someone can do in their lives.  

Here’s how I would implement term limits in Toronto: 

• I would bring back three-year terms. Residents can hold their elected officials accountable with greater frequency.
• Councillors and the Mayor would have a limit of running for three terms. This would total nine years which is long enough to implement an agenda but not become too stale.
• It wouldn’t matter if this was done consecutively or over a number of years with breaks. It also wouldn’t matter if a candidate, for example, ran for council one term and then decided to run for Mayor for the last two.
• Once a politician has served three terms their commitment and time in office comes to an end.

In this scenario Rob Ford and Joe Pantalone couldn’t run for office any more and David Miller couldn’t run again as mayor for a third term. Many current city councillors wouldn’t be eligible to run for office either under this scenario. 

Perhaps if we had term limits this would encourage better candidates to run for office. Maybe more work would get done because of the limited amount of time to enact an agenda.

Politicians cannot further entrench themselves in the political process. To do so would be a disservice to everyone in their ward and the city. More people need to be given the opportunity to run for office and represent their constituents. 

This can only help strengthen our political process by including people who are passionate about the job and want to make Toronto a better place to live.

At some point, I'm sure, these politicians were passionate about the city and making it a great place to live. However, time has caught up to them, the job has worn them down, and they need to recognize the need to step aside and let others take this city to a different place. 

If these senior politicians cannot recognize the need to step aside, term limits would serve as a notice for them to step aside and leave public life.

About Robert Kirsic

Wish List for the Mayor

In my work with ArtReach Toronto, we provide free monthly workshops on different topics of interest to young people. Recently, we held a workshop on civic engagement. Various youth and adult facilitators (as well as one city councillor) brought different perspectives on this broad concept.

Throughout the workshop, voting was addressed by all of our speakers as one basic form of civic engagement. One set of presenters (Salon Camden Centre for Urban Dialogue, www.urbandialogue.ca) showed a short film interviewing people on the streets of Toronto about their wish list for the mayor, asking what were the issues that most needed to be addressed. Check out the film at http://vimeo.com/14284578.

All the young people in attendance at the workshop were asked to identify the issues they felt most passionate about, and record their own wish lists for the mayor. Taking into consideration that youth are not a homogenous population – every young person comes from a different social location and has had different experiences -- this is just an attempt to share what 50 young people shared with us.

Their wish lists included: increasing funding for the arts and community events; improving public transit; preventing cuts to community program funding; improving education; increasing support for harm reduction; adding more bike lanes; having cleaner streets; reducing police violence; and increasing accountability for politicians spending public dollars (i.e. - G20, a steadily rising police budget).

Some of the most common answers included increased resources and core funding for grassroots youth organizations/initiatives, as well as supports for young people to become more civically engaged. 

What I found to be truly profound from our audience was how much they wanted our future mayor to focus on dealing with systemic issues, like poverty and adequately supporting the most vulnerable, not just creating measures that make it easier to get re-elected, like budget cuts.

It made me ask myself, how do we get our civic leadership to not just focus on voters' needs for the next four years but the needs of Torontonians on a whole? The Torontonians who are too young, the ones who contribute to our economy but don’t yet have official citizenship, and the ones so marginalized that they aren’t truly aware of the power they hold as voters. They often face the toughest time adjusting to the economic changes we’re all affected by, yet their issues are often bypassed for those deemed more politically expedient and appealing as “voters.”

In order to truly make change in our communities and in Toronto as a whole, we need to ensure that all levels of society can benefit in the longer term, instead of pitting ourselves against each other in the short term without addressing the root causes of these issues.

After the workshop, I sat down to make my wish list for the mayor and then compared it with the platforms of the leading mayoral candidates. I’m disappointed to say that there isn’t a good fit with any of them. I am frustrated with increasing taxes and public transportation issues, but I also care about poverty, systemic racism, homelessness, community and youth programs, education, the arts and culture, police brutality and so much more… issues that don’t seem to be priorities for any of the high-profile mayoral candidates.

When Mayor Miller ran for office, I was among many “swept” up by his clean up Toronto campaign. This time around, I don’t have an affinity for any of the leading candidates. Rob Ford’s recent comments and continued lead in the polls have really reinforced this for me. I’m a bit lost. I don’t find my priorities fitting into any of their platforms, nor do I trust that they have an overarching vision that has the welfare of Toronto’s vulnerable people and communities in the forefront. Without including all of us in a vision of a beautiful, world class city, how does real change happen? I think I’ll add two more wishes to my wish list: courage and humanity.

About Shahina Sayani

Can the TTC create a culture of customer service?

The long awaited report from the TTC Customer Service Advisory Panel was recently released and as could have been predicted, the general public sentiment appears to be that the report doesn’t go far enough in addressing the serious nature of the problem -- "poor customer service."

The report, available on line http://ttcpanel.ca/report/, is organized in eight sections with a series of 78 observations and corresponding recommendations. The volunteer Advisory Panel, TTC staff and others that supported the effort to research and prepare the report should be commended, and their work is an excellent beginning to what could be a long journey for the TTC in their quest to deliver superior customer service.

The first and presumably most important section entitled, "A renewed focus on customer service" seems misleading given it implies that at some point in the not too distant past the TTC did focus on customer service. The challenge is that public transit operators like the TTC don’t view and treat customers in the same way that a service industry such as a hotel or retail enterprise does since public transit operators face little or no competition.

Transit administrators refer to the people that use their services as passengers or riders, and given that the majority of their clients don’t have a choice in how they commute to work or travel around their communities these so-called customers are essentially held captive by an industry that in most cases isn’t compelled to practise superior customer service because of the monopoly they hold.

Nonetheless the report does highlight some important changes that once implemented should improve the overall experience for TTC employees and their passengers. Section six of the report "Fare media and payment systems" once resolved with ubiquitous smart card technology will overnight relieve TTC operators from the least desirable aspect of their jobs – policing the fare box.

My uncle drove a TTC bus for close to 30 years and in my youth I remember how he would lament about the people who refused to pay the fare and how this caused him and his fellow drivers’ considerable angst and aggravation. Most large-city transit systems solved this problem a while ago and as a consequence their operators can better concentrate on the most important aspect of their work – operating vehicles safely.

Other benefits of an automated fare payment system include faster board times since drivers don’t have to scrutinize transit passes and the fare box, transfers would no longer be required and who knows once this annoying duty is eliminated by the introduction of smart cards or a similar system, TTC operators might even have time to give customers directions or a smile.

The other recommendation worth mentioning is a need to focus on the youth market, and it’s important that the TTC does recognize how vital students are to their business, since on some routes they comprise most of the riders, and as these youth become adults it’s important to keep them as transit customers. The panel recommends the formation of a student advisory committee and an excellent example worth exploring is the Youth Onboard or YO program for short that York Region Transit (YRT) started a few years ago. In York Region each high school has a number of transit ambassadors that are recruited to help communicate to their classmates’ route changes or simply promote the use of transit to get to school. The YRT program seems to be working well and could be a model for the TTC to follow.

What remains to be seen is how the recommendations are received by the mayoral candidates and in what manner they might weave the panel’s findings into their own campaign platforms concerning transit. The quick hit ideas like improved communication through signs and display boards are tempting but a deep culture transformation is required if the TTC is to become truly customer service oriented.

As a start it might be useful if all elected officials and TTC brass were required to travel by transit at peak hours at least once a week, then they might begin to cultivate the empathy needed to understand their patrons concerns and in response create the "Culture of Customer Service" the panel recommends.

About Lorenzo Mele

Summer round-up

Back in the city and getting into my city groove after spending some weeks in the dead quiet of the Kalahari, contemplating the African sky, the role of the dung beetle, the strange habits of the aardvark. Ah, back to the hustle and bustle of Toronto and the excitement of the race for leader of our fair city.

Now, it’s true that I didn’t have a lot of internet access deep in the Kalahari (well, maybe I wasn’t trying very hard), so here I find myself wading through weeks of news trying to make sense of things.

I was looking forward to the building excitement, the new ideas, the race of champions…

Here’s my understanding of what I missed, for those of you who are also emerging from the haze of summer whether spent in the city or somewhere else:

• Renowned election-spoiler (ahem) John Tory said he would consider running again, given his disappointment in the current line-up.
• Rob Ford said something offensive. Some people thought that made him a better candidate for the job.
• John Tory changed his mind.
• Rob Ford made serious allegations of corruption, with nothing to back it up. Some people thought that made him a better candidate for the job.
• George Smitherman was furious.
• Joe Pantalone talked about the Arts.
• John Tory thought maybe he’d run again.
• Rob Ford said something offensive and/or “deliberately misleading”. Again. Even more people thought that made him a better candidate for the job.
• George released a chicken.
• Joe talked about seniors.
• Sarah talked about taxis.
• Joe talked about food.
• No one cared what Rocco said.
• John Tory changed his mind.
• Rob …well, here we go again.

But seriously, folks... There’s clearly a vein of popular anger that Rob Ford is carefully cultivating.

With Labour Day creeping up and more focus on the upcoming municipal election, I guess we can only hope that voters will start considering the actual choices facing Toronto and the proactive proposals the mayoral candidates are willing to support.

About Marit Stiles

Revisiting debate on licensing cyclists

My most recent article about licensing cyclists created a ton of debate and reaction. I can’t believe something I wrote generated such healthy debate among Torontonians. 

Because of space and time there really is only so much I can put into an article. So I wanted to take this opportunity to address a few things related to my article and the reaction it generated.

My premise is still very sound: have a licensing system for cyclists with the intent of creating a cohesive city-wide bike network, educating everyone on bike safety (motorists included) and eventually create a better transportation network in the city. 

People were too fixated on the price of a licence and the re-testing period. I can appreciate and understand why. The reason I picked the numbers I picked were two-fold:

1. This is not a cash-grab as some have portrayed. Money collected would be used to help expand bike infrastructure by making more lanes, paths, lockers, and other bike-friendly initiatives, including education, and spread the network out into the furthest reaches of the city. 
2. The time in between re-testing was unreasonable on my part but this isn’t set in stone and was just an idea. If it was spread out to every five or 10 years I’d be okay with this too.

Critics will claim that if this idea was worth implementing the city would have done this years ago. 

I think this is the best time to rethink the idea of licensing because of the growth in understanding that transit needs to be expanded and new options to get around need to be found. 

The downtown core cannot handle any more cars and new ways to get around must be found. But the city must also not implement changes unilaterally without consultation from all groups.

Having said all of this, people go looking for conspiracies where there isn’t one. People in this city are quick to shoot first and ask questions second.

In my opinion, debate is a good thing and makes for better conversation. This is what the Your City, My City section is all about. I offer an opinion on the issues I think are important to the city. I stand by what I’ve written. 

I enjoy writing for the Toronto Star and will continue to do so until my commitment ends. 

We’re never going to agree on everything and that’s a good thing.

About Robert Kirsic

Do we really need more hockey rinks?

I’ve been following the story of the all-glass, four-level hockey rink being built out in the east-end. 

The one question that comes to my mind when I read this is: Do we really need more hockey rinks? 

I guess this is a very un-Canadian thing of me to say. I happen to think there’s more to being Canadian than worshipping hockey, lining up at Tim Horton’s for a double-double and every other stereotypical Canadian thing, but that’s a debate for another day. 

The City of Toronto boasts it has a multicultural mosaic and welcomes people from all corners of the world to live, work and play here. 

I’m willing to bet a large majority of newcomers and residents not born here have never grown up with snow, know what hockey is or care for it. 

They’ll most likely never use these facilities so why are we building them? I’m sure the proposed price tag of $88 million could go a long way to fixing and upgrading existing facilities.

If it has to be built why not add something to the design everyone can use? How about adding a recreation centre to the existing plan?

Cricket is exploding across the GTA, why not build more cricket fields? Baseball diamonds are starting to disappear, why not build one more? Or soccer pitches.

I’d like the City to take a step back and re-think this hockey rink complex. If they want more rinks maybe they should call MLSE and their corporate sponsors and get them to build rinks for people to use, if, as MLSE claims, it’s so important to reach out to newcomers and visible minorities and get them into hockey.

There’s a fantastic state-of-the-art practice facility near Lake Shore Blvd. and Kipling built by MLSE a few years ago. I’m sure they can spare a dollar or two to build a few facilities to meet the demand. 

For the longest time Maple Leaf Gardens sat empty on purpose because of MLSE’s stubbornness until Ryerson and Loblaws stepped in with a great design for the entire community. 

Put something in the neighbourhood that all residents can use. Don’t put something in that only a small percentage of people will use. 

The City’s focus should be on growing sports like soccer and basketball and others so Canada won’t be, for example, embarrassed internationally when the soccer team is ranked 101st in the world or when the basketball team can’t qualify for the Olympics even with the best point guard in the world in Steve Nash.

There’s more to life in Toronto and Canada than hockey. Hopefully the City will wake up to this realization and build other recreational facilities for residents before it’s too late.

About Robert Kirsic

Toronto: Crazy, Sexy, Cool?

Recently, the American blogger Laurie Lyons wrote in the Huffington Post that “Toronto is the hot new destination for all things crazy, sexy, cool”.

Yes, really.

In her article, she highlights Toronto’s accessible art (from Luminato to Nuit Blanche), our fusion and fresh restaurants and the fact that Toronto, a city of just five million and over 200 ethnic groups and 130 languages, is also one of the most diverse cities in North America.

And growing.

Each year, the city absorbs another 50,000 new immigrants.

While smugness is never attractive, Toronto has something else to be proud of. Global cities around the world look to Toronto to understand and learn from our ongoing experiment with diversity.

For instance, in 2008 the Toronto District School Board was held up as a global model for successful social integration and equal opportunities for schools when it was awarded the prestigious international Carl Bertelsmann prize. The City of Toronto is one of the few international cities of migration that provides information to city residents in 180 languages on services such as recycling, garbage and municipal elections. The Toronto Public Library has successfully turned itself into an institution that not only lends books, but also provides settlement services to its many immigrant visitors.

However, lest we start feeling totally virtuous, we need to remember that Toronto has still a long way to go before claiming success. To do so, it must be open to learning from other cities.

For instance, here in Toronto, there are more than 200,000 permanent non-citizen residents who cannot vote for their mayor, their city councillor or school trustee – even though they live, work, own property and pay taxes in the city. Meanwhile, non-citizen residents in Dublin, Stockholm and Caracas can all vote in municipal elections. In the city of Chicago, non-citizen residents can vote in school site elections.

Similarly, while bike lanes are a hot issue in our current mayoralty race, the city of Copenhagen is successfully using cycling as a way to integrate newcomers into the fabric and streets of the city.

So while we have much to offer to global cities, we also have much to learn from them.

Globally, there is an increasing interest in cities learning from cities. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg points to New York’s new urban plan that drew on the experiences and ideas for “traffic reduction from London, Stockholm, Singapore, for transit-orientated development policies from Amsterdam and Tokyo, and so on.”

City-to-city learning can travel fast because it is local and grounded in the business of daily living. It is almost always practical and is therefore more readily transportable.

For the past 18 months through the Cities of Migration project, we’ve been working with international partners in the UK, New Zealand, the US, Germany and Spain to help cities better connect around their shared issues of urbanization and migration.

Cities can hear about and share good ideas in integration. For the first time, there is an organized way for London to learn from Toronto, and for Toronto to learn from Zurich. Through webinars and the Cities of Migration website the interest in learning from and transporting successful ideas from one place to another has grown with remarkable speed.

In October, Toronto will go to The Hague to learn from practitioners from far-flung cities like Malmo, Madrid and Moscow. We will listen to and talk with leaders drawn from urban planning, local governments, media, employers and academics. And we will bring back ideas that have been tested in other cities – from deploying the police force in teaching English to refugees (and simultaneously building community trust) to training immigrants in the provision of culturally appropriate health care.

To learn more about the upcoming Cities of Migration conference, visit the conference website.

About Ratna Omidvar

Inner Ford

Tuesday night's mayoralty debate on CP24 was an improvement, more substance, less emphasis on cutaways.  The candidates let each other complete sentences and thoughts, and mercifully there were fewer interruptions from the painfully young reporter with the big microphone. The moderator is getting better at his job, and the audience was engaged and vocal. Still, not a lot of excitement generated about the election.

John Tory wrapped it up this way, and I think he's right. None of the candidates is giving us a vision of what our city would look like  if we vote for him or her.  George Smitherman talks about a safe city that gets you home quickly.  Not an inspiring vision, nothing to brand a T-shirt with. Rob Ford is all about cut, slash, abolish, and, after Tuesday night, it would seem a Toronto under Ford would have a great big wall erected around it to keep out those troublesome foreigners. 

Ford is his own caricature.

Smitherman needs to show us what his Toronto would look like, in all its aspects.  How business would do, how the arts would fare, how the poor would find a way into the mainstream from the margins, how social justice would play out.  He is an intelligent, well-rounded, interesting man, he has courage and ideas, he looks and feels like a competent and charismatic politician.

One of the reasons I like him is that when he was health minister, he reached out to the psychiatric survivor community, he didn't need to be supportive of us, but he was, and that meant a great deal.

Toronto would move forward under Smitherman, and maybe even onto the world stage, and he is the only candidate ready for that kind of profile. He has depth and smarts, he can be both  a street fighter when required  and a powerful debater, he has -and its just starting to show- a passion for the job.

Smitherman also has his drawbacks: he can be a bully, and I hope he's working to eliminate that side of himself. But he's someone Toronto needs, someone council needs, imperfect, yes, a work in progress, yes, but also someone Toronto can take pride and reassurance in.

About Pat Capponi

Can the TTC adopt a customer-service approach?

In March of this year the TTC formed a Customer Service Advisory Panel in response to increasing friction between the paying public and a transit commission that appeared at best indifferent to their customers needs. Not exactly a big surprise when you consider the TTC is a monopoly that serves a market referred to in industry parlance as "no choice riders."

The panel had a daunting task and was encouraged to review current plans and processes related to customer service, and front line (operator) employee hiring and training (initial and re-certification), including the possible introduction of a customer Bill of Rights that would address employee as well as customer expectations.

The panel consulted with the public as well as TTC employees, including meetings and focus groups. The result of this effort will be a public report (scheduled to be released sometime in 2010) that is intended to provide recommendations concerning expertise and resources needed to achieve success, which I hope means "happy customers."

The report may outline organizational changes that could include members of the Commission and management, as well as private citizens to address specific areas of interest. The findings and final recommendations of the panels’ review are sure to provide fodder for the mayoral candidates as they debate the intricacies of public transportation policy in the city.

It’s important that TTC management and their political masters recognized the urgency of the situation and struck the "blue ribbon" panel earlier this year. The chair of the panel works in the hospitality industry and seems a natural fit for the challenge at hand.

What remains to be seen is how well the initiatives and tactics used in a true customer service oriented industry will be received by TTC management used to customers held captive in a transportation market that offers little choice and increasingly less service.

About Lorenzo Mele

When living and dying are beyond your means

The headline in the Star declared that funeral directors can no longer afford to bury the poor on what the city gives them.  They will have to cut back on some of the extras, if they are not given sufficient funds.  Not even death releases people from poverty and cutbacks and indignities, large and small. 

Poverty is not high on the agenda in this campaign, but the future and ambitions of those marginalized men and women, the ones who form dispirited and straggly lines outside food banks, the ones lined up again for a space in overnight shelters, the ones living in concrete towers that sap the life out of them, their fate hinges on who leads the city after the election.

Though Rob Ford would likely not be aware of this, limited as he is to fiscal restraint and voting no as often as a Republican congressman, there has been great movement toward re-vamping the way the city delivers social assistance, a move away from the Harris years where interrogation and humiliation defined the experience of asking for help, to active engagement with clients, positive interventions and  real assistance with work searches or re-training. 

Morale is up among the staff, there is a renewed effort to listen to the voices of lived experience, to improve that fundamental relationship with the caseworker so that clients feel empowered, heard, and helped instead of policed and slammed for their need. There is no doubt that time spent with the worker can make or break a person, a person who desperately wants to be seen as an individual, as worthy of the investment the city makes in him or her.

Last year, I spoke to 1,800 caseworkers about that relationship with their clients, as a former recipient, as an activist, and was heartened by their response, which was overwhelmingly positive.  No one gets up in the morning rubbing their hands with glee over yet another opportunity to stomp on someone's soul.  We all prefer to find job satisfaction in helping, not hurting. Under the mean-spirited OW rules, under the regime of Harris and a mayor who had real difficulty seeing homeless people, never mind helping them, good people became bad cops. With David Miller, people breathed again, felt freer to be themselves, to do right by those in front of them.

All these advances can so easily be lost, reversed, tanked. The man at the helm sets the tone, people fearful of losing their own jobs, of finding themselves on the other side of the desk, will line up to do his bidding.

Lines around shelters and food banks will lengthen, more people will bed down on pavement, even more will lose hope that life will ever get better. And when they die, earlier and earlier as poverty diets and chronic illnesses increase their toll, we will begrudgingly bury them. 

Or we can continue our progressive march to ensure we waste no human potential, we abandon no one to the streets, we elevate our fellow citizens rather than excoriate them.

A lot depends on how you cast your vote.  

About Pat Capponi