This commentary was first published in thestar.com on Sept. 18, 2011.
Toronto’s city council is about to weigh in on Mayor Rob Ford’s intervention into the Port Lands development, and the Mississauga inquiry is about to report on Mayor Hazel McCallion’s intervention in the city centre development. Already one can see a shared question mark linking the two GTA controversies: when it comes to a city’s prominent lands, what checks and balances does the rule of law impose on mayoral power?
To be sure, there are important political and legal differences between the two episodes. The Mississauga proceedings are focused on allegations of conflict of interest and the relationship between the mayor’s office and plans endorsed by her developer son. The Toronto debate is focused on contentions about circumvention of the consultation/approval process and the relationship between the mayor’s office and plans endorsed by his councillor brother.
But while the differences are clear on the surface of the two controversies, similar policy issues lurk just underneath.
The Toronto debate has pitted a much studied, mixed use community-oriented plan for the Port Lands against a tourism-oriented plan championed in a top-down process by the mayor’s office. The Mississauga inquiry has featured a hotel development championed by the mayor’s office with allegations of conflict of interest against more process-oriented planning for the suburban city’s centre. At the heart of both stories, of course, are issues of municipal governance and the land use approval process.
Furthermore, both controversies raise the vexing question of how municipalities are to deal with proposals for new uses of highly prominent locations. While local community input in the ordinary course may give the few an effective veto power over development that impacts on, and is for the benefit of, the many, hierarchical authority exerted by the mayor’s office may give certain concentrated economic interests priority over the community most immediately impacted by the development. From a land use and democratic theory point of view, the question of waterfront or city centre development poses a difficult choice between local and centralized decision-making and design.
Lying at the threshold of all urban development is an appropriately functioning system of governance. Indeed, governance issues provide the key to efficiently implementing development and other public undertakings on behalf of the municipality’s constituency, and for ensuring that local authorities adhere to the nation’s rule of law norms. There are, generally speaking, four pillars of governance on which Canadian cities are propped, all of which must be kept in mind as Toronto and Mississauga debate their respective flare-ups of the moment.
Our municipal officials and policies are both elected. The Toronto Port Lands raise the question of whether those councillors most prominent in the proposals gave voters the opportunity to express themselves on the plans. Moreover, in both the Toronto and the Mississauga controversies, there is a question of whether power has been delegated to unelected persons or to persons elected in wards not related to the proposals under review.
We have public debate on issues of public importance. This is particularly acute where planning issues are at play for geographically central lands. Both the Toronto port lands and Mississauga city centre issues have raised questions of behind-the-scenes negotiations, beyond the purview of the usual municipal consultation and development review. Public, grass roots input, in other words, has potentially been displaced by a hierarchical command structure imposed by a mayor’s office. While centralized authority may be efficient and attractive to those at the very centre of authority, local government in Canada is premised not on displacing but on accommodating local democracy.
We must manage the tension between neighbourhood and city-wide issues. The Toronto port lands and the Mississauga city centre are examples of development projects that are important to the neighbourhood in which they are situated and to the respective cities at large. Local councillors and ratepayers have complained of being eliminated from the consultation process in favor of interests that are remote from the actual locale of the developments, while the mayors and their supporters contend that centralized authority is necessary for large scale plans that impact on, and benefit, the entire municipality. This centre vs. periphery tension is endemic to planning for geographically prominent lands, and needs to be resolved in order for large scale building to proceed. We can’t do without a city’s head, but can’t undermine a city’s body politic.
Our system requires accountability for decision-making. Both GTA controversies suggest opaque approval processes, and therefore both raise the spectre of preferential treatment that undermines the rule of law. The Toronto port lands debate has centred not so much on the competing proposals for the lands, but on the comparative openness and closure of the consultation procedures. The Mississauga city centre controversy has centred no so much on the merits of one hotel and mixed-use proposal over another, but on the allegation of conflict of interest and the prospect of backroom deal-making replacing public consultation and approvals.
These four governance criteria are, in a sense cumulative. Ultimately, the values built into Canada’s constitutional system represent an umbrella under which all other governance issues shelter. As Torontonians and Mississaugans consider the promise and controversies of their centerpiece developments, the rule of law in municipal governance needs to be kept in view from the waterfront and the city centre.