With events at City Hall regularly making the front pages these days, and the antics of our colourful mayor frequent fodder small talk at parties and office cubicles, you could be forgiven for thinking that Torontonians are more engaged in city politics than ever.
But that type of engagement, usually focused on the day’s hot topic or Rob Ford’s latest misstep, is not what Dave Meslin’s after. On Monday the veteran community activist and City Hall watcher brings his Fourth Wall exhibit to the seat of Toronto’s government. Its goal is to break down the barriers between politicians and citizens, and get ordinary residents involved on the ground level of the decision-making process.
“Politics in Toronto is kind of an insider’s game. It’s a very small group of people talking to each other,” says Meslin, as he and a volunteer sit at a table in the City Hall rotunda preparing the exhibit. “The general idea is really crowd-sourcing innovation. I think we’ll end up with better decision making if we can tap into the 2.5 million people that live in Toronto and are most impacted by the choices we make here in this building.”
The exhibit, which first opened in Toronto last October and has since been to Vancouver, Calgary, and London, proposes 36 ways that city government could be more transparent and accountable. They range from the ambitious – like switching to an instant runoff voting system – to the quaint – like abandoning the practice of calling the mayor “your worship.”
But all of the suggestions are practical, and for the most part non-partisan, and Meslin says they represent best practice models that have already been implemented in other cities.
He points out instant run-off ballots, which allow voters to rank several candidates at a time, are used by organizations as diverse as American municipalities, federal political parties, and the Oscars.
A recommendation for the city to provide material support to residents’ groups was inspired by Los Angeles, which boasts a Department of Neighborhood Empowerment.
Another suggestion, to improve civics education, cites the success of Calgary’s City Hall School, where students spend a week every year learning about city politics in a special classroom at city hall.
These real-world examples, along with the simplicity of the ideas, have the effect of making the better city that Meslin envisions seem so easily within reach.
Already the exhibit has garnered results. Several of its ideas, including increasing the number of community consultations, holding elections on weekends to improve turnout, and redrawing ward boundaries to better reflect population growth, have been put forward at a city committee by Councillor Paul Ainslie. Staff reports on the proposals are expected at the government management committee in October.
Ainslie, who did not immediately return a request for comment on this story, was one of many councillors across the political spectrum who visited the exhibit at its first Toronto run and found ideas they could support.
Councillor Mary Margaret McMahon, a rookie councillor who has noticed problems with Toronto’s community consultation process since taking office, also saw the Fourth Wall when it first opened.
“It was funny, when I went down there, they had you put stickers on [ideas] that you agreed with, and I was putting stickers on them all,” she laughs. “[Meslin] was mad, he was saying you can’t do that!”
The Fourth Wall has also received attention from outside of Toronto. Last month the small town of Pemberton, BC took a page out of Meslin’s playbook and redesigned its public notices to be more eye-catching and readable. Meslin flew out to Pemberton and gave the city a “Dazzling Notice Award.”
He’s hoping that he’ll soon have reason to give Toronto a similar honour. So far only one of the Fourth Wall’s recommendations – to provide free WiFi at City Hall – has been implemented. He’s keeping track of the others with an online scorecard that marks green the ones that have been implemented.
“One of them is green [now],” Meslin says. “We’re hoping that a year from now, half of them are green.”
The Fourth Wall opens Monday at 6:30 pm in the City Hall rotunda and runs until Friday.
