Notes on the municipal election

1) I have seen tweets this morning regarding waiting for space on trains downtown.  (In particular: a complaint about Chester Station and one about Bloor/Yonge).

Chester is a good example of what a DRL would fix; the DRL as usually planned would cross the Bloor-Danforth Line at Pape, and would draw off at least a portion of the flow downtown (it would also allow a one-station jog against flow to Pape from Chester) relieving stations between Pape and Yonge.

Bloor/Yonge would also obviously benefit from a DRL; but I'm less sympathetic to complaints about waiting 20 minutes for a free train there.  I've sometimes been in a potentially similar position, but if I'm starting from Bloor/Yonge, or even have reached it on a heavy morning, I just choose to walk: I know from experience that it's about 25 minutes from there to Downtown (Downtown being defined as King/Bay).

Now there are lots of people for whom a walk from Bloor to King is unreasonable -- the elderly, the very young, those with mobility problems -- but I'm willing to bet that most rush-hour commuters would both be capable of and would benefit from a 25-minute walk downtown -- at least on a day like this (clear, not cold, not too hot).

2) I hate to be cynical about this but I'm going to be cynical about this: the reason that John Tory continues to have a significantly higher level of support than Chow or Ford despite the manifest problems surrounding SmartTrack (there was an article in Torontoist this morning by Steve Munro taking it apart: torontoist.com/2014/09/john-torys-transit-vision-is-short-sighted/) is that nobody actually believes that Tory would have a snowball's chance in hell of pushing it through in any case.  The rail lines belong to Metrolinx, the financing would have to go through vetting by the city staff (which it wouldn't get), real power resides here with the province (which is pushing ahead with RER in any case, which saves the scheme from being a complete fantasy the way the Ford subway scheme is), and Council will be all over the map.

Transit is by far the highest profile issue in this election (other than the Ford identity itself), but it poses a real challenge for the candidates: just about everything that can be done is either already being done or being studied.  It's been so over-analyzed that the chance of a genuinely new positive contribution is nil. The financial and management power lies, by and large, with the province and Metrolinx, except for smallish TTC improvements (smallish because large TTC-only improvements require money which is not currently there, and nobody to the right of Ari Goldkind -- and that includes Olivia Chow -- wants to talk about large general tax increases) which were pretty well all covered in the report passed by the TTC board in August.  Even Chow's deliberately small-scale bus-oriented plan is impractical as it currently stands, running up against limits in the TTC capacity.

What the candidates needed was plans which would stand in for some general aspects of their campaigns while being stamped with individual character.  Chow occupied the conventional ground (DRL important, improve bus feeder support), pushing Tory into having a different map to wave, which he uses to stress (1) that he doesn't want to raise taxes (whence the rather bizarre dependence on TIF) and (2) that he does care about transit issues but is more "visionary" than Chow. (To be fair, he really could have relied on his exposure with Civic Action for this latter, except that that would have worked only with voters who had paid attention during the gap between elections.)

I'm far from a Tory booster -- my sympathies are more with Ari Goldkind than with any of the front runners -- but I can see why this has not hurt him (to date at least). (While I'm sort-of-defending Tory, I think that the Chow campaign attempt to label the two of Ford and Tory as the same except for personality is dishonest and wide of the mark.  All you have to do is look at the number of 42-2 or 42-1 votes at City hall (the latter being when Doug skipped out on a vote) to see how much the Ford agenda differs from the other suburban conservatives on Council, let alone an urban (Tory lives in a condominium on Bloor Street) conservative like Tory.  (Doug Holyday, now there's a Ford-without-personality-issues politician.)

3) Debates.  If Tuesday is anything to go by, if I were John Tory I'd be refusing to attend any debates with Doug Ford unless there were guarantees of strict controls on the audience.

That being said, I can see the point Tory is making.  At present, ThreeHundredEight.com is showing Tory at 44%, Ford at 29% and Chow at 26%.  Chow and Ford are close to being within the margin of error on any particular poll, but most polls have shown her running third (with the exception of a Mainstreet poll giving her 25% of the vote as opposed to Ford's 23%, which is indistinguishable from a tie given the margin of error -- the Mainstreet polls do not seem to be used by Grenier in his current averages).  Although most commentators don't see much space for Doug to grow (and I would personally guess that his aggressiveness is more likely to hurt him than help him by playing into a narrative of his being difficult to deal with and unlikely to be a good coalition builder) it really is a little problematic to expect ant significant number of debates to be held without the second-place challenger being present, unless those debates were of a much broader sort (say, the top six candidates minus Doug rather than the top three minus Doug) designed to display a range of platforms.

It looks as though, given Doug's treatment of debates as an opportunity to score points against his opponents rather than talk about policy, future debates including him are likely to produce more heat than light.

4) Issues nobody wants to talk about:

Affordable housing and TCHC  It's not quite true that nobody wants to talk about this -- Doug Ford has some standard lines about TCHC echoing Rob's, and Chow is happy to talk about affordable housing generally but not willing to commit much money to it aside from asking for funding from senior levels of government.  Tory's opposition to rent controls brands him (unsurprisingly) as a Conservative in this climate (rent controls were originally legislated in by the Conservatives in the days of the Big Blue Machine, but that was in a very different context) but he's also happy to rely on requesting more funds from the province to support TCHC.

This is actually an enormous problem which the city has little ability to solve, but where the fallout has direct impact on all sorts of civic programs and expenditures.  It hasn't been helped by the past four years of showmanship and poor leadership (n.b. Gene Jones) under Ford, but even under the Miller administration it's hard to argue that the TCHC was even treading water.  And affordable housing as a general issue can be tackled only with regulatory powers the city doesn't have.

It's also the tip of the iceberg.  Some of the same pressures -- increasing costs, lower incomes when adjusted for inflation; changing employment patterns; an overheated real estate market -- which are creating affordable housing crises at the lower levels are contributing to the anger which drives Ford Nation and to the proliferation of tiny condominia which are suited only for DINKs or empty-nesters in the downtown.

The Police Budget. Crime is down, not only in Toronto, but generally.  The police budget continues to grow.  None of the three leading candidates is willing to touch the issue of staffing numbers in the police force. (Soknacki was, but he's out.)

Growth and density outside the downtown core. Many of the factors which make for the urban/suburban divide come down to the simple statement: suburbanites generally want low-density housing, but high-density services, and in a pinch they will choose the housing over the services.

(Sort of.  Actually, as far as I can tell, Scarborough residents want a subway not because it's a high-density service, but because their way of using the system is suburban in nature, treating the subway like a GO line: drive to a large transit parking lot to go to work; otherwise, use a car.  If you look at a map of the Scarborough bus routes on TTC, you can see how sparse the bus coverage actually is: it's awfully hard to use transit in an urban manner when you live in the middle of a massive square of blocks with bus service on only the outer edges. From their perspective, extra stops on an LRT aren't all that attractive -- they're driving to the subway in any case and they care only about stops with lots of parking. (I used to work out in Scarborough and have used both Ellesmere and Midland stations; neither has associated parking and both have minimal use.)  What's more important for them is that once they do get on the TTC it's as quick and seamless a ride downtown as possible.  This actually makes an RER approach at a TTC-like price pretty appealing out there.  To fix this you'd need a massive increase in buses and bus routes serving very low-volume neighborhoods combined with zoning laws and incentives favouring infill to a higher-density streetscape, which is not going to happen short of massive increases in the cost of gas or climate-change-driven regulation.)

Promoting any form of general density growth in the suburbs is kissing the suburban vote goodbye.

The infrastructure deficit. Documents from city staff have highlighted significant funding challenges just maintaining infrastructure in the next few years.  These will require either higher taxes -- not at the level of inflation -- or new forms of taxation (e.g. a local sales tax) or significant funding from senior levels of government or all three.  I sort of expect the Fords to keep their fingers in their ears and la-la-la-gravy-la-la-la but Chow and Tory should know better.  They aren't doing anyone a service by not meeting this issue head-on.  They aren't even doing themselves a favour beyond one term, because the next mayor is going to have to wear whatever decisions get made about this during the next election.