David Miller, the former mayor of Toronto, is not a taxpayer.
He doesn’t just pay taxes, so he doesn’t want to be called a taxpayer. He pays his share to the man, of course, but his interaction with the Toronto city government doesn’t end there.
A taxpayer is someone who enters into a financial transaction with the city. Miller is a citizen, like the rest of us, and so he’s building the city, not just giving it his money.
That was probably the most salient point in the former mayor’s speech at Toronto’s independently organized TEDx conference on Friday.
His subject was redefining the role of city government, which fit into the larger theme of the day-long event, redefinition.
We need to redefine how we interact with our municipal government, he said, and ditching the notion that Toronto is a city of taxpayers is instrumental in that.
The reason the words “citizen” and “taxpayer” were intentionally mixed up in the first place, Miller said, was to scale back the role of government.
Calling people “taxpayers” automatically lessens engagement with government. A taxpayer doesn’t work together with government she simply pays it money to keep the roads paved and the snow shoveled.
This kind of language worked for Ronald Reagan in the U.S., Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., who reduced government in unprecedented ways, and, obviously, current mayor Rob Ford, who’s service cutting seemed to be the source of the whole idea. (Though his name never surfaced, Ford was the butt of a few jokes, to the crowd’s great amusement.)
Miller was on a roll until he started talking about Transit City, his now-lobotomized plan to connect the city with light rail transit. He said parts of the network were delayed and canceled because we did not commit to it. It takes commitment, he stressed. If only he practiced this stick-with-itness, he would’ve run for mayor again instead of leaving the office door open for Ford.
Regardless, Miller was among the strongest speeches of the day, and he earned a stand ovation.
It was not the strongest, though. That distinction goes to Dr. Brian Goldman, host of CBC’s White Coat, Black Art and an emergency doctor at Mount Sinai hospital, who is trying to change the culture of medicine.
He gave several stunning examples of mistakes he’d made on the job – one resulting in death – and spoke about what needed to happen after the fact to make sure those mistakes don’t happen again.
This wasn’t through some technological fix, or advanced training, or anything remotely complicated. Goldman simply wants doctors to openly admit their mistakes – the only way to learn. Everyone else makes mistakes, so of course doctors do too. Time to talk about it.
In the climate of malpractice suits and shaming doctors for making errors, Goldman’s frankness and simplicity was astonishing.
Ironically, both Miller and Goldman were so successful at TEDx – which caters heavily to the technology crowd, the T in TED – in part because their ideas were so low fidelity.
On a day which the crowd saw a man with a camera in his eye (filmmaker Rob Spence, aka Eyeborg) and a woman with a brain wave monitor hooked up to her head (Ariel Garten, a neuroscience expert and “brain guru”), the very simple ideas to use different words and admit mistakes seemed refreshingly accessible.
Read an interview with Miller about his TEDxToronto talk here.
