Mayor David Miller

100 Queen Street West
2nd floor
Toronto M5H 2N2
416.397.2489 phone
416.338.7115fax

David Miller was reelected mayor by an overwhelming number of votes in the November 2006 election. He won a majority in almost every ward of the city and swept the suburbs as well as the old City of Toronto. Miller can now legitimately call himself the mayor that represents all citizens, but what sort of mayor will he become in his second mandate?

One thing is now clear. The mayor has far more power, and ability to shape events then in his first mandate. In June 2006, just before the onset of the last municipal election, the province passed the City of Toronto Act which gave the city much more autonomy, authority and accountability. There are two important parts of this legislation. It gave the City of Toronto the right to raise special taxes in areas within municipal jurisdiction, and it gave legislative support for the “strong mayor system.”

In the past the mayor was considered “first among equals.” Mayors were elected across the city, but they had only one vote on council like any other councillor. The City of Toronto Act gives the mayor the right to appoint the thirteen members of the Executive Committee and the Chair of the TTC.

Those fourteen votes plus his own allows Miller to go into every council meeting knowing that he can count on fifteen votes on all issues because the mayor can remove any member who vote against him. That enhances his power tremendously and that is why it is called the “strong mayor system.”

These are the members of the Executive Committee, as of November 2008, and the committees they chair.

Mayor David Miller, Chair
Joe Pantelone, Deputy Mayor
Shelley Carroll, Budget Committee, Chair
Janet Davis, Community Development and Recreation Committee, Chair
Glenn De Baeremaeker, Public Works and Infrastructure Committee, Chair
Paula Fletcher, Parks and Environment Committee, Chair
Norm Kelly, Planning and Growth Management Committee, Chair
Gloria Lindsay Luby, Government Management Committee, Chair
Giorgio Mammoliti, Affordable Housing Committee, Chair
Pam McConnell, Parks and Environment Committee, Chair
Joe Mihevc, (was recently removed as the chair of the Community Development and Recreation Committee but he remains on the Executive Committee.)
Howard Moscoe, Licensing and Standards Committee, Chair
Kyle Rae, Economic Development Committee, Chair

Adam Giambrone was appointed by Miller to be the chair of the TTC. Provincial legislation excludes the TTC Chair from sitting on the Executive Committee.

Miller has claimed that he cannot take any vote of council for granted and has to build a coalition on every issue, but this self depreciating comment ignores the new reality of Toronto City Council. Miller knows he can count on fifteen votes in council, and he also knows he can count on the votes of a number of other councillors outside the Executive Committee that are his natural allies. These are councillors such as Adam Vaughan, A.A. Heaps and Gord Perks. In total he can count on at least twenty votes on every issue. A majority on the forty-five member council is twenty-three votes so he has to count on attracting another three or four votes from the so called “mushy middle,” the unaligned councillors.

There is another group on council called the “right wing,” who will oppose the mayor on every opportunity. They are a disparate lot who lack discipline and organization. Their leaders are Denzil Minnan-Wong, Karen Stintz and Case Ootes, but there are no more than ten who can be counted on to support the right wing group and vote as a block. This group has been marginalized by Miller. Not only do they have no power or influence but they lack the information and ability to mount an effective opposition.

The mayor controls the agenda of council, and he is too smart and too cautious to bring forward items that he fears he cannot get adopted. The one exception to this rule was the vote on the Land Transfer Tax in July 2007. What happened in this case illustrates how the system works.

The Land Transfer Tax was the first Miller initiative to use the new taxing powers given by the province under the City of Toronto Act. The proposal was to charge a levy whenever property changed ownership in the city. It was expected that this new tax would raise $300 million a year in new revenue. Not surprisingly members of the real estate industry were outraged and mounted a major lobby against the new tax, targeting the “mushy middle” councillors. The pressure was substantial.

Miller thought he had enough votes lined up to pass the motion but when it was put to the test at council it failed by one vote. A member of the Executive Committee, Brian Ashton, voted against the motion. Miller acted immediately. Ashton was removed from the Executive Committee, a new member who agreed to be loyal to the mayor was appointed in Ashton’s place, the motion was refashioned and reintroduced to council and the Land Transfer Tax was passed.

The members of the Executive Committee reflect other aspects of way that Miller wields his power. Virtually all of the members of the committee are either New Democrats or Liberals. Miller was a New Democrat but he recently announced that he had withdrawn from the party and would be an independent as long as he was mayor. This was a signal that he intended to appeal across the political spectrum from the centre left to the left, and membership in the NDP was baggage that hindered his ability to make this broad left coalition.

The Executive Committee also reflects the domination of the inner city over the suburbs. Only one member is from Etobicoke, Lindsay Luby, one from Scarborough, Kelly, and there are two from North York, Mammoliti and Carroll. The rest are from the old City of Toronto.

The shape of this city council is clear. It is dominated by Miller. Its agenda is strong, interventionist government that focuses on the crisis of the inner city. The mayor is now in the position that he can get virtually any motion adopted by council, but he has one significant problem; he does not have sufficient funds to support his agenda and this is the reason why he has focused his efforts on the federal and provincial governments.

Miller’s greatest failure to date is that he gets no support from Ottawa. This is not surprising. The Conservative Harper government is made up almost exclusively from members who come from small towns and rural areas across Canada. The three largest cities in the country, Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto, did not elect one Conservative Member of Parliament in the recent 2008 election.

Miller claims that if municipalities were given one cent out of the GST, it would give cities the funds they need to bring in essential programs, but the federal government has refused. Harper’s priority is to reduce taxes not fund cities. The federal government has even refused to support another Miller priority, the ban on handguns. The Harper Conservatives are not going to support cities because the cities do not support them. It is that simple.

Miller has turned to the provincial government for help and there he has received a better reception. The City of Toronto Act was passed by the province to deal with the governance problems of the city. An even bigger delivery by the province is the major plan now unfolding for public transit improvements in an area stretching from Hamilton in the west to Oshawa in the east and as far north as Newmarket.

By nature Miller is a cautious politician who believes that building a livable city is a work in progress governed by the resources that are available. The biggest criticism of his leadership in that he is too cautious. He can point to progress on the Waterfront and the new plans for Union Station as indications of success, but much is still needed to be done and he lacks the funds to achieve them.

The priorities are clear: transit, reducing traffic, affordable housing, the Waterfront, homelessness, reducing air pollution, reforming the planning process, cleaning up the city and preventative programs to meet the crisis of youth crime, mental illness and addictions. It is a long agenda and the mayor will have a difficult time achieving it unless he finds a way to gain more money.