This week’s news that Premier Doug Ford and Toronto mayor Olivia Chow have come to an agreement that’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars for the city and will allow the premier’s plans for Ontario Place to proceed with minimal municipal interference is a bit of a Rorschach test: different observers see different results, and how you view the relative merits of the deal depends in large measure on your assessment of what the alternative was.
People who supported Chow’s mayoral run earlier this year in part because of her staunch opposition to Ford’s Ontario Place spa scheme are understandably disappointed that Chow is all but waving the white flag on this file. In theory, the City of Toronto had a number of procedural levers it could have pulled to try to delay — but not fundamentally alter — the government’s redevelopment of the provincially owned lands on the waterfront. Without municipal support, activists seeking to preserve Ontario Place as a public space will have a much tougher hill to climb.
As if to emphasize Toronto’s relative powerlessness here, the government’s legislation accompanying Ford and Chow’s press conference makes it all but certain the premier’s plans will move forward. Bill 154, the New Deal for Toronto Act, is an extremely odd piece of legislation. The first schedule of the bill is written almost aspirationally, describing the kinds of negotiations that Ontario and Toronto will undertake in coming months. But Schedule 1 has no clear objectives to implement and nothing that compels specific provincial action.
Schedule 2 is another legislative animal entirely: it exempts the redevelopment of Ontario Place from any number of laws, including those involving provincial heritage, environmental, and planning rules. (The minister of infrastructure has been granted the power to rezone Ontario Place lands by fiat.) Bill 154 will also, if passed by MPPs, immunize the government from private lawsuits for numerous challenges including “misfeasance,” something that set off alarm bells for the NDP at Queen’s Park.
“I think the government knows perfectly well that what they’re doing is going to break a whole lot of laws, so they’re going to protect themselves,” said NDP leader Marit Stiles on Wednesday. “They’re literally changing the laws to allow them to build this luxury private spa at Ontario Place, which seems to be the premier’s number one priority and obsession.”
But the broad scope of Bill 154 re-emphasizes something about this political battle that’s been obvious from the beginning: when local push comes to provincial shove, the powers of the Ford government and its legislative majority were always — always — going to carry the day.
Chow’s critics could rightly ask, however: If Ford was going to get his way anyway, why is he writing big cheques to the city and uploading major highways? What does he get out of this deal?
The answer is that he’s getting what he wanted at Ontario Place with (he hopes) much lower political cost. The premier is effectively gambling that, without vocal opposition from the mayor, the remaining opposition will be more easily overcome. He might be wrong about that — activists for Toronto’s waterfront bested him once before when he was a city councillor — but that’s what the province is hoping to buy with Chow’s acquiescence.
Sometimes politics is a clear story of something happening or not: a government either does or doesn’t keep an election promise; it either responds or doesn’t respond decisively to a public problem. But just as often, the actual outcome isn’t in doubt. Rather, the interesting political question is what the costs will be before the story ends and who will end up paying them.
With that context, Chow’s win this week is certainly no less impressive. Chow might not have been able to stop the redevelopment of Ontario Place, but she might have been able to engage in some performative proceduralism that could have dragged out the fight with the province. There was unquestionably pressure on her to do just that. Instead, she traded away something that was ultimately of little value for a structural improvement in the city’s finances that will help forestall a financial disaster.
The deal, as announced, will meaningfully improve the real lives of people in the city Chow is responsible for: improved transit service (including, yes, an investment in transit security), more shelter and housing funding, and provincial lands for housing. Meanwhile, the demands on Toronto outside the Ontario Place issue are almost trivial: the city is expected to meet or exceed its provincial housing target — something it should have no trouble doing, since the province’s own tracker currently credits the provincial capital with meeting 138 per cent of its target.
In other words, Chow traded away relatively little and has come away with a lot, in particular a lot of new money to address some of the city’s most urgent priorities. About the only way to minimize this accomplishment is to spin an interesting counterfactual: Perhaps the Ford government was always going to have to bail Toronto out of its current (very dire) financial situation. If that’s true, perhaps Chow hasn’t won as much as claimed, and Ontario Place has been surrendered for nothing.
There’s a plausible argument there — Ford is a Toronto MPP, after all, as are 11 other MPPs in his caucus — but it doesn’t change the fact that Chow was never going to be able to alter the outcome at Ontario Place anyway, nor does it explain how Toronto walked away from this negotiation with minimal promises to the province. If Ford had wanted to impose much, much harsher terms on Toronto, he could have; if the province tried to do that in the backrooms, it was successfully fought off by the city.
There nevertheless might be an alternative universe where Chow stuck to her guns on Ontario Place and dared the premier to let Toronto go under. For some people, that image is undoubtedly romantic, but it’d also undeniably involve gambling with the future of the city and its 3 million residents. While the job of Toronto’s mayor inevitably means doing a dozen different things before breakfast, it should be uncontroversial to say that she shouldn’t be gambling with people’s lives.
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