Data from the public consultation conducted as part of Toronto’s core services review. While its focus is on the here and next, the first installment of KPMG’s “Core Services Review”–the balance will be released over coming weeks like a syndicated Victorian novel–reads in many ways like an indictment of politics in post-amalgamation Toronto (and not just politics as practiced in the David Miller era). In fact, the sub-sub-text of this report is that amalgamation, though not a complete disaster, has turned out to be a financial millstone. The critics predicted as much back in 1997, during the amalgamation/downloading fight initiated by the Mike Harris Tories. Fourteen years on, KPMG has proven them correct, again. Take the case of windrows, highlighted as a potentially expendable service very early in KPMG’s re-telling of Hard Times. The word “windrow” doesn’t make so much as a cameo appearance in the consultation report. But as anyone who watched megacity politics circa 1999-2000 can attest, North York’s windrow-clearing policy became a significant political headache as Mel Lastman’s council grappled with the newly-merged city’s snow plowing policies, or lack thereof. Lastman’s North York, you see, cleared away those slushicles the plows deposit at the base of driveways, and cleared the sidewalks to boot. (Outside North York, only Scarborough shoveled sidewalks, and then only on arterials.) The bureaucratic logic of amalgamation, according to the Harris government, was streamlined management and therefore lower overhead. But the fight over windrows showed that the unshakeable political logic of amalgamation meant that what one community (read: councillors) had, the others wanted. Lest anyone forget, council at the time was deeply preoccupied with harmonized service levels. To get around the windrow impasse, Lastman and his financial henchman Tom Jakobek triangulated a complicated budget deal to offer sidewalk shoveling elsewhere if practical, and also extend those windrow removal policies to the other suburban municipalities. Cost at the time: $12 to $14 million, annually. Some downtowners, for the record, didn’t approve. Council’s 70 percent diversion policy, also high on the KPMG hit list, is another example of the difficulty of post-amalgamation politics. This tale actually begins in the early 1990s, when Metro Toronto begins seeking a replacement for the Keele Valley landfill. After amalgamation, some Harris cronies advanced a deeply problematic scheme to ship Toronto’s trash to the Adams Mine in northern Ontario. The plan became a cause clbre circa 2001, with Miller and Jack Layton spearheading efforts to expose the flaws in the proposed contract. In response to heightened public concern about Adams Mine, council began talking about sharply increasing diversion rates and introducing new programs, like the green bin. As Adams Mine became increasingly radioactive, the city responded with wildly unrealistic diversion targets (at that point, the city’s stated goal was 100 percent by 2010). With the blessing of eco-skeptics like Doug Holyday, the city tested the green bin in Etobicoke in 2002 after cutting a deal with a Michigan landfill to accept the city’s post-diversion trash. After 2003, Miller accelerated the expansion of the green bin program across the rest of the city and set a diversion target of 70 percent, still hugely optimistic considering that half of Torontonians live in apartments without curbside pickup. A few years on, the city bought a landfill near London to salve the boil of the Michigan shipments, and continued to expand the materials eligible for recycling. Of course, no one can say for sure how waste management or snow removal politics would have played out absent amalgamation. But with six municipalities and Metro, it’s highly unlikely that one-size-fits-all solutions would have emerged. And that’s always been the nub of the problem: amalgamation imposed bureaucratic standardization on a highly varied metropolitan region, with costly results. It’s not about the gravy, and never has been; it’s about the size of the roast. So coming back to diversion, from an environmental point of view, it’s great that every homeowner gets a green bin. From a political perspective, however, did every homeowner want a green bin sufficiently to approve the extra cost? Unlikely. One of the lesser-known criticisms of amalgamation, articulated by University of Victoria political scientist Robert Bish in a 2001 study published by the C.D. Howe Institute, was that it “tends to eliminate the very characteristics of local governments that are critical to the most successful and least costly systems.” The diversity of urban populations, he argued, should be reflected in the diversity of municipal service offerings, so residents can choose between high service areas or low service areas, depending on their inclinations and tax sensitivity. Needless to say, KPMG didn’t set out to deliver a critique of amalgamation with the CSR. Indeed, its carefully hedged recommendations represent an inverse of the harmonized service level fights from Lastman’s tenure. The one-size-fits-all logic apparently works when reducing services, as well (although some–e.g., the bike infrastructure cuts–will surely be felt more keenly downtown than elsewhere). If the city wanted to properly align its revenues with expenditures, which does not appear to be the case, council could opt to consider the lessons of amalgamation and attempt to determine how much service the residents of various regions (i.e., the four community councils) want, need and are prepared to pay for. As it stands, council will cut across the board, because that’s what it does–now. The cuts will remain until the political landscape shifts due to some galvanizing source of external pressure (e.g., a lively economy, a terrible winter, a horrific accident linked to reduced services), at which point the cycle begins again.
