Prior to getting this freelance assignment from globeandmail.com — the latest stop on a seven-year tour of duty through the catacombs of online journalism — I’d been to exactly one City of Toronto mayoral debate, back in 1994. The event was held in a half-full OISE Auditorium on Bloor St. W. — and I was lured along by a colleague who was reluctantly going. This was the municipal election where 69-year-old June Rowlands was dethroned by younger-but-grayer Barbara Hall, with one of those charismatic millionaire types named Gerry Meinzer acting as spoiler, plus eight other registered hopefuls — most of whom took their place at the table, including one who was campaigning on the information superhighway. Perennial candidate Ben Kerr closed the show by strumming a tune about cayenne pepper, and everyone seemed to leave the event satisfied that Hall’s affection for the city was a better choice to replace the harsher Rowlands. Who knew that, a dozen years later, a recurring theme on the campaign trail was nostalgia for how personable the pre-amalgamation system used to be? This fall, I hiked out to 10 such mayoral candidate meetings for this site — including one debate on the topic of trash that Mayor David Miller didn’t show up for — along with five face-offs in downtown wards, and have been left even more confused about what constitutes a successful message. Who can be blamed for this? Well, the reluctant creation of the Megacity was accompanied by the emergence of a computer for every pothole, transforming how local issues get addressed. Now you’ve got public space advocates, transit fetishists, crime statisticians, waste management specialists and message board mudslingers, plus ratepayer associations, BIAs and heritage advocates — all of whom are making their own new media, which feeds the old media, which forces the candidates to become magnified into larger-than-life caricatures to project the image of power that the aforementioned groups keep reminding them that they don’t actually have. And that’s how you end up with a mayor who is constantly being decried by pundits as a disappointment sweeping back into power, a challenger who never quite got around to communicating that she actually likes living here, and a blustery third “frontrunner” who seized this opportunity to heckle city hall from its own stage.
The experience of trailing David Miller on a 15-minute perp walk from Bay and Bloor to the subway at Yonge, in the middle of a nondescript Sunday afternoon — where Coke Blak sample hucksters were a more disruptive presence than the panhandlers, even if this account suggests otherwise — was surreal enough, just because his campaign-closing 44 wards in 44 hours stunt was catering to the stalkerazzi media culture that has trained Torontonians to find it newsworthy that a familiar face is standing on their street. A pack of reporters stroll astride the mayor, with cameras trying to keep the pace in front of the pack, and everyone is hoping for that serendipitous moment which can’t possibly occur with all of these media wretches in the way. More often, at least along this strip, Miller has to compel passers-by to succumb to his shadow — rewarding them with a tiny button as a keepsake of their encounter. Generally, the mayor looks ready to get back to his day job, where he’ll have four years to show if he remembers anything from this forgettable campaign.
Plenty of municipal topics were given their time in the spotlight over the past five weeks, though. The words Section 37 of the Planning Act came up repeatedly in all-candidates meetings, as the often arbitrary nature of vertical downtown building was complained about — even though the concept of developers seasoning their high-density applications with funding for city initiatives, and how that money warrants being spent, rarely comes up in the coverage. (A primer by John Lorinc in The Globe and Mail a couple months ago noted Section 37’s nickname as “the crack cocaine of planning”.) And while residents were left to feel satisfied they were doing their part for reducing the number of garbage bags at the curb with the advent of the Green Bin, the purchase of the Green Lane landfill became one of Jane Pitfield’s main crusades against David Miller — even though she voted for the deal a couple weeks before deciding that the mayor’s stance against incineration was just another “hidden agenda”. Stephen LeDrew was hung up on “secret deals” — particularly the decision to splurge on new subway cars from Bombardier without openly tendering the contract –- although the lobbyist tactics rebuked in the report following the computer leasing inquiry were precisely what intimidated power brokers from the Mel Lastman era from fielding their own candidate against Miller. The remnants of protests against the dedicated streetcar right-of-way on St. Clair Ave. W. never really galvanized people not directly disgruntled by having their main drag torn apart in favour of concrete barriers, and a couple years of loud grumbling must yield to the reality that Pitfield’s suggestion that a subway line be built beneath every congested street is fairly unfeasible. And have you heard the news? People with money don’t like paying taxes, something which Miller is now seeking to mollify with a pledge to skim a percentage off the decreasing GST rate, or increasing the PST, or whatever else can be done to affirm the importance of Toronto to the future of Canada, especially given how a world-class contrivance like Expo 2015 won’t be doing the trick anymore.
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