It felt like a victory. As the sun came up over City Hall the unprecedented all-night meeting of Rob Ford’s executive council wrapped up, and Torontonians had delivered their message to the mayor: hands off our city services.
“This was the most important day in the history of the new city of Toronto,” said Councillor Gord Perks. “Toronto came out and spoke with a unified voice over a 24-hour meeting about what kind of city we want to have … I’ve never experienced anything like it in 25 years of following politics in this city.”
The meeting began at 9:30 am Thursday morning and over 340 members of the public signed up to weigh in on the controversial KPMG report that suggests cutting a wide range of city services to meet a projected $774-million budget shortfall. Services KPMG deemed expendable include libraries, arts funding, community grants, the TTC’s late night bus service and many others. In the end, all but three speakers urged Ford not to make deep cuts to important services.
It took until 8 am Friday to hear all the speakers, even though nearly half of those listed didn’t show up, presumably so they could get some sleep and go to work.
If political movements are forged out of shared experiences, we may look back on this epic meeting as a tipping point in the struggle to stop Ford from gutting public services in Toronto. By turns grueling and entertaining, the atmosphere at the meeting was mostly upbeat, with like-minded citizens sharing late-night coffee and donuts. Some even showed up in pajamas.
Despite growing exhaustion, deputants found creative ways to voice their displeasure with the mayor. As councillors chugged Red Bull at 3 am, Desmond Cole performed a puppet show. Another speaker, Brian Cauley, delivered a spoken word piece. Others read children’s books or Margaret Atwood quotes.
“We are not for sale,” said Thom Vernon, one of the 168 deputants who ended up speaking. “The KPMG report is a work plan to transfer public wealth to the private sector.”
At one point a petition of 39,000 signatures was delivered to the mayor urging him not to reduce library services. It took seven people to carry it in.
But at the end of the meeting the executive committee, which is stacked with Ford’s allies, wasn’t swayed. Councillors voted unanimously to send the KPMG report to the city manager and consider it again at their next meeting on September 19, meaning all the cuts are still “on the table,” as the mayor is fond of saying.
And while Perks was adamant that the meeting heard “the voice of Toronto,” Ford’s right-hand man and York West councillor Giorgio Mammoliti said only downtown dwellers showed up. “We certainly heard the voice of the former city of Toronto,” he told reporters. “The majority of the people who came down … were from the downtown core. I understand their arguments but we represent a whole city here.”
Ah, le plus ce change … Mammoliti and other Fordists have been suggesting for weeks that the only people who bother giving input at City Hall are liberal downtowners who don’t represent the city at large. That’s the script they’re sticking to.
So the citizens who slogged through the longest meeting in the city’s history may have gone to bed this morning feeling like they’d overwhelmed the mayor with arguments against service cuts, but it doesn’t appear like his team is inclined to listen.
The truth lies in between the two camps. The deputants over the course of the day and night were certainly not union stooges or activist plants, as Mammoliti has suggested. A highlight of the meeting was when 14-year-old Anika Tabovaradan took to the microphone at 2 am and began to sob about potential cuts to library services. “I hate public speaking,” she said. “But I feel so strongly about this.” Her plea was obviously genuine.
Activist Dave Meslin suggested that the absence of the mayor’s supporters was evidence that Ford Nation has crumbled. “If they can’t take the time to be here, why should their viewpoint be respected?” he asked. But it’s been less than a year since the mayor won the election by a ten-per-cent margin, and it would be naïve to think that support has completely dried up.
In the election Ford received 47 per cent of the vote. By rough count, only three of the 168 deputants Thursday and Friday backed the mayor’s budget process. It’s clear that the members of the 21-hour “citizen’s filibuster” mostly represented the portion of the electorate that didn’t vote for Ford.
Toronto’s progressives have shown once again that they can dominate a meeting a City Hall, but it’s yet to be seen if they can win a vote. Ford and the councillors allied with him still hold sway on council, meaning they can push through cuts come budget time unless the more centrist councillors who usually vote with Ford are convinced not to.
Perhaps the biggest tangible outcome of the whole process is that it will be much less easy for Ford to dismiss opposition to cuts. If Torontonians have enough stamina and passion to pull an epic all-nighter at City Hall, the mayor knows some of us are going to fight him tooth and nail. He likely doesn’t care, but some of the centrists may be getting nervous.
“Today is the beginning,” declared Councillor Joe Mihevc, another progressive who observed the meeting. “You have to talk to friends, to neighbours, to people you don’t talk to, to keep building that vision.”
The executive committee meets again to discuss the KPMG report on September 19.
