Mayor John Tory was proud of himself.
Toronto Ombudsman Fiona Crean had wanted six new staff for her office to keep up with the increased workload involved in fulfilling her legal mandate to independently investigate actions or omissions by the city’s public service. But some councillors, still bruised from her damning 2012 investigation into the Ford administration’s handling of citizen appointments to various agencies and boards, believed her office deserved no additions at all.
Tory, ever the statesman, successfully moved a motion during recent budget deliberations to get her one new position, and cited this “compromise” as a prime example of the kind of thinking that he, as a relative newcomer, was able to bring to City Hall.
“It was good that I hadn’t been around here, because I actually came unburdened by any particular views about that,” Tory said in a March 13 interview two days after getting council to pass the motion as part of the 2015 operating budget. “And there’s many other things like that: you can put a fresh set of eyes on these things, and that can be a very good thing.”
Ten days later, Crean announced she is quitting. She won’t seek a renewal of her term beyond its mid-November expiration.
“The one additional position approved in the budget of 2015 does not alleviate the pressures on our office,” her statement says, “and certainly does not respond to the systemic challenges we face.”
In addition to responding to residents’ complaints, Crean’s office conducts investigations into broader structural problems concerning policies and processes carried out by city staff. In May of last year, council actually expanded her mandate to include all city-controlled corporations but gave her no new resources to handle them.
“The promise of equity and fairness from an independent ombudsman is enshrined in the City Of Toronto Act,” her statement continues. “But the reality of this commitment is now in question. I deeply regret this, but council has made its decision.”
When asked at press conference about Crean’s “harsh words” for his one-staffer resolution, the mayor appeared to be caught off guard.
“You say she had some hard words for me about that?”
He echoed what he’d said when introducing the motion – that one new position “was the best I could do in the circumstances, because otherwise if I tried for anything other than that the answer might have been zero, which I didn’t find acceptable.”
Needing to choose the highest number without going over, Tory was that Price Is Right contestant who settles for bidding just $1.
“I thought if you’re looking for compromise and consensus,” quipped Councillor Shelley Carroll, a member of Tory’s Budget Committee who opposed his motion, “the number between zero and six is not one.”
So what led the mayor to believe he couldn’t convince council to go any higher?
“I talked to a number of the councillors about it,” he said, “and I could see that the level of emotion about that office and about the occupant of that office, and a whole bunch of sort of complicated history that I wasn’t a part of, was basically going to make it more likely that the zero positions in the office would prevail at council, as opposed to any number above zero.”
With integral precision worthy of the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, the mayor explained that he convinced councillors “who said they would not vote for six or some higher number than one to vote for one on the basis [that] it would provide a little bit of additional resource.”
He emphasized that he’d agreed to arrange for an objective, third-party study of the ombudsman’s staffing needs. Though there was no formal motion to that effect at council, he made a verbal commitment to Deputy Mayor Pam McConnell.
There are a few possible interpretations of all this:
1) The mayor honestly believed Crean’s office could get by with just one extra person and thought she’d be grateful that he’d managed to work that out
2) The mayor knew she wouldn’t be happy but didn’t deem her a worthy cause on which to spend political capital, preferring to throw her under the bus to avoid a fight
3) The mayor would like to have done more for Crean but didn’t yet understand council well enough to know what spending political capital would even involve
Each is concerning for a different reason.
Back in January 2011, newly elected mayor Rob Ford targeted the ombudsman’s office in his own inaugural budget, denying her the two new staff positions she had requested.
Tory, then the host of Newstalk 1010’s The Live Drive, vocally disagreed, telling his radio audience that “the ombudsman, through her work, will do more to advance Mayor Rob Ford’s customer service agenda than any other money you could spend. She is the one who will smoke out the paper-pushing bureaucrats who would rather meet and analyze forms than solve a problem. She will pay back that money in her budget a hundred times over and give the mayor some happy taxpayers.”
Of course, it’s easy to praise an ombudsman when you’re outside government. It’s rather harder when you’re running the government that she holds to account, with political lieutenants who’ve felt vilified by her work.
In his introduction to a January 2010 interview with Crean, Tory pointed out that when he was the opposition leader at Queen’s Park, he adored Ontario Ombudsman André Marin. But he also warned Marin that if he became premier “I would probably grow to dislike him immensely, because he is the worst nightmare of any government on a bad day.”
There’s something to be said for that cynical candour. But as mayor, Tory should aspire to be better than that and to govern in a way that would make his former self – an outsider calling for robust accountability – feel proud.
jonathang@nowtoronto.com | @goldsbie
