In Conversation with Mayor John Tory
Originally published in COLLECTIONS by Harvey Kalles Real Estate Ltd., Brokerage: Winter 2015
After a tumultuous four years that saw the inner workings of Toronto’s City Hall just as likely to appear on TMZ as in the Toronto Star, a new face has joined the fray with a mandate to restore order to a council in chaos.
As the dust settled following a year-long campaign that featured bizarre twists befitting the previous government, a new mayor emerged victorious, and through it all, he remained calm, composed and on message.
Promising a return to the civility that council chambers have desperately been lacking, coupled with the small C conservative values favoured by the current electorate, Mayor John Tory could be just what this town needs: respect for tax payers, certainly, but also a respect for people and for process.
Though new to municipal government, he knows the issues facing the city and its residents from his time as a popular radio host with CFRB, as an Ontario MPP, and as an experienced
manager having served as President & CEO of Rogers Media, Leader of the Ontario PC Party, Commissioner of the CFL, and Chairman of the Board at CivicAction. Tory brings the well-rounded experience that Toronto can benefit from, and though the next four years are bound to be a lot less exciting than the last, some downtime from late night television will do this city some good.
COLLECTIONS’ Jeremy Finkelstein was joined by the new Mayor of Toronto, shortly before he took office, to discuss T.O.’s three big T’s: Traffic, Taxes and Transit.
COLLECTIONS: The past four years have really highlighted a basic ideological divide between central Toronto and the wards to the east and west. How do you intend to create objectives that get the regions in this city working towards common goals?
John Tory: It begins by focusing people on the things they can agree on. If you look at the need to improve transit services — both improve the existing service and expand it; if you look at the need to address even more aggressively the housing situation —both in terms of the TCHC and the supply of affordable housing; if you look at the need of addressing the priority neighbourhoods. There’s a list of things that people actually agree on. And if the leader of the City Council brings these things forward in a way that is designed to maximize support, as opposed to drive a wedge between people, then I think you can have a lot less controversy and a lot more results.
C: What is the first campaign pledge you’d like to see enacted when you kick off your term?
JT: I have repeatedly said it will be to address traffic, and that’s for two reasons. One, there is no single subject which I heard more about during the election campaign… the frustration, the economic damage and the family damage being caused by levels of traffic that are just nightmarish now. And secondly, I came into office believing — and after my transition period I believe even more firmly — that there are things that can be done in a relatively short period to make a difference.
C: The Chair of the Building Industry and Land Development Association (BILD), Steve Upton, is on your transition team. Certainly there’s opportunity for traffic improvement through better cooperation with developers. Has there been any discussion on how BILD members can better work with the city to improve the flow of traffic in and around their sites?
JT: We’ve talked in a very top level way at the transition meetings about the fact that development and the city have fallen into a habit of behaviour that seems to place drivers, cyclists and pedestrians last in the cause of getting things built conveniently. I’m not finding fault in that, as much as I’m saying that I think I’ve served notice that I want to re-examine all of this. Do we have to close as many lanes? Do they have to stay closed for as long? And so on. I think we have learned that it doesn’t have to be done the way that we’re doing it. So we’ve had very top-level discussions, and I took from those discussions that nobody’s jumping off a bridge because I may re-examine some of these things. And I’m not re-examining them with any specific thought, just so we can see if there’s a better way to do this.
C: Despite being a beneficial revenue tool, the land transfer tax causes a lot of anxiety for homebuyers, particularly those already squeezed by record prices in the 416. What’s your long-term vision for the tax and can Toronto afford to give it up?
JT: Well, the short answer to the question of whether we can afford to give it up is no… not at this point in time. It brings in $350 million plus. I understand the anxiety it causes for people who are buying and selling homes. My own children have come to me in the context of their own home-buying decisions and have pointed out land transfer taxes as a significant factor in their thinking, and with house prices being as high as they are, anything you do to add to the burden is disconcerting. But the monies taken in from the land transfer tax are used to provide transit and daycare and all the things people expect from a city. And so, until we have a chance to re-examine those things and try to find efficiencies that I know exist in lots of areas of city government, I’m not making any commitments to do anything with it. I certainly have no plans to alter it for the worse but I can’t really make any plans to alter it for the better until such time as we get a handle on the city’s finances.
C: You’ve promised SmartTrack will be built in seven years. How have preliminary discussions gone since you’ve been elected and when do you expect we will see parts of the program being implemented?
JT: Discussions have been excellent. We just had a meeting with our transition advisory council, and at one table there was the President & CEO of Metrolinx, the CEO of the TTC, the City Manager, and the Mayor-elect all talking about how we were going to incorporate SmartTrack into existing transportation plans. So the challenge that now rests in front of us in the next short period is to take SmartTrack as a concept and integrate it into the existing provincial and city plans which people seem optimistic can be done. And we really have already embarked on it… there are studies being done at Metrolinx and elsewhere on the things that have to be sorted out in order to move ahead. I think we’re going to see steps being taken in a visible way very soon.
C: What does SmartTrack mean for a downtown relief line?
JT: The downtown relief line is such a long-term project… the lowest number you’ve ever heard talked about in terms of number of years for the downtown relief line was 12, but the more frequent — and I think more realistic — answer was 15. When you have a 15-year project like that, it means work has to begin on a long-term basis on preliminary questions which
haven’t been dealt with at all. What’s the route? Where does it go? What complications are involved, in terms of properties that may need to be expropriated? So I think it means that a lot of that preliminary work, which is year one of a 15-year project, has to proceed. And I always said during the election campaign that that is exactly what would happen. SmartTrack is something that you can do in seven years, and that you should do in order to provide relief on Yonge Street and elsewhere within a shorter time frame. But, you still have to proceed with your long-term projects because the city’s going to grow by millions of people. And that’s part of our problem. In the past, we did one project and then sat back and looked at it for a few years. I think we have to be looking at projects that are continuous in nature now, where one follows the other.
C: As people gravitate to the city centre, the need for complete streets that also support cyclists and pedestrians increase. How do complete streets factor into your vision of Toronto?
JT: What we have to do in the city is make sure we truly build an integrated transportation system and network, which I don’t think we have done. In the past we’ve said, “Here’s the cycling plan, here’s the transit plan, here’s the traffic plan and here’s the pedestrian plan.” We’ve never come together and said, “How does all of this fit together?” For my own part, when it comes to cycling, I want to see us make more progress on separated bike lanes in sensible locations. Those are two qualifiers on bike lanes that I place. Not to the exclusion of all else, but I think the premium should be on separated lanes, because I think they are safer, and sensible locations because you can’t just put them everywhere. So, if you want to have a street that has all of these elements taken into account, it has to be part of an overall plan, and parts of the plan have to be tied together, and the silos have to be broken down. I’m looking forward to the challenge of having those discussions in a holistic way so that you end up with an integrated transportation system that includes pedestrians, bikes, taxis, trucks and cars, and obviously public transportation.
C: What are the first steps to improving TCHC buildings and when do you envision seeing “on the street’”implementation? By that I mean, how do we get out of chambers and backroom discussions, and onto the streets where people realize the benefits?
JT: Two things have to happen. One, we have to get around to the review of structures that I promised in my campaign. I said that a review would be started and finished by July 1st of 2015. The whole purpose of the review is to look at how this thing is structured and run, where people express dissatisfaction, and how we can restructure it so that it can run better in the best interests of not only the tenants, who are the most important, but also in the interests of the owners… the taxpayers. The second thing that I need to do as a means of — as you say, things being visible from the neighbourhood — is get on with the repairs. And the city has put up its money. Job one for me is to go to the other governments and say, “You need to be a part of it. The property taxpayers in the City of Toronto cannot finance all of these repairs on their own and we need you to be a part of this fundamental maintenance.” So job one is to get the review underway, and job 1A is to get these other governments to commit to taking part in the repair of these buildings, which are in a very poor state.
