I can still picture Councillor Doug Ford’s bellowing face in the media ordering Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne to “get her own house in order.”  Now Ford’s brother, Mayor Rob, and his council followers, are content to have $1.4- billion bled from the lean provincial treasury and squandered on a subway to serve, not people, but future development.  To pay for a subway, development has to be high-density.

Look at Mimico Lakeshore where residents are fit to be tied over ever sky-reaching condo clusters that are on the map for their area. Tall buildings aren’t being welcomed at the best of times.

The Sheppard subway dooms neighbouring communities to accept towers in places where they don’t really fit. 

Didn’t Karen Stintz launch her political career fighting tall buildings? Now, by backing Rob Ford’s Subway, she plays handmaiden to the very developers who salivate for high density building approvals.

I live on the proposed Sheppard LRT route.  From 1985 to 1995 I was the communications lead on the joint municipal lobby to get the Sheppard Subway built.  Bob Rae’s NDP government was ready to fork over 75% funding for four new subway lines.  At the eleventh hour the province added the sweetener of offering to finance at zero interest the municipal funding share for the first three years of the deal.  An ensuing decade of neo-Conservatism in Ontario shuttered the program.  Transit system growth in Toronto stalled.

That train has left the station. Here we are today – a provincial offer of $1.4 billion on the table that Stintz, as transit commission chair, says is not enough to build the subway.  She fails to appreciate that most people in Scarborough don’t want and won’t be served by the Sheppard Subway plan as drawn.

 The influential mayoral ally Denzil Minnan-Wong has the absolute right take on this.  As a councillor he, too, was active in North York during the original subway debates.  He knows the current Sheppard Subway plan is dastardly. It disadvantages an entire swath of Scarborough commuters whose clean, fast, high-tech, above ground LRT trains would deliver cleaner air and a nicer streetscape at a better cost, not to mention modestly scaled development that is compatible with existing communities.

A Sheppard Subway at this late juncture delivers the least bang for the buck and is fiscally irresponsible.

“Deputy Mayor” is largely a trumped-up title that means very little to anyone.

Therefore, it was amusing to see Toronto’s Mayor Friday night generating a carnival atmosphere in Scarborough as the backdrop for his announcement of Norm Kelly as deputy mayor.  It was peculiar, too, because the current deputy mayor Doug Holyday is still there, on a leave of absence to run in a provincial by-election.  That city councillors can “seat-warm” – vacate an elected post to seek an upper-tier office – is another story.  (Two sitting councillors are vying to be Etobicoke-Lakeshore’s next MPP.)

Ribbon cuttings, flag raisings and community events tend to flow the deputy mayor’s way.  He or she is on the mayor’s rubber chicken dinner circuit, rubbing shoulders, pumping fists, shaking hands, reading out proclamations and prepared texts.

Tiny Township, Havelock, South Stormont, Amherstburg, Georgina, Deseronto, Perth, Melancthon, Adjala and Midland have deputy mayors, along with places such as Toronto.  This is a small number compared to those who don’t.

There’s a difference between a deputy mayor and an Acting Mayor.  Usually a city will have a system of monthly rotation for councillors to serve as Acting Mayor when the real mayor is out-of-town, unwilling, ill, (or in rehab).  This is a fair and responsible way to divide the responsibilities that a mayor cannot do. 

A Deputy Mayor serves for the life of the term of office, or at the mayor’s pleasure. In Toronto, deputy mayoralties need to be questioned.

The chosen councillor becomes pointedly beholden to the mayor. If he wants to hold on to the high-profile perquisite, he must agree with the mayor, vote with the mayor and promote the mayor’s agenda even though a majority of his constituents did not vote for the mayor.

Nothing against Norm Kelly, he’s practically a barnacle on the political bandwagon he’s been around so long. My issue is this business of Toronto having an appointed figurehead, not elected citywide, doing the work a mayor ought to be doing and shutting out other members of council.  That doesn’t breed a collegial environment. You don’t have to live in Toronto to know that the place is politically dysfunctional, if not downright toxic.

As Tom Mills, of Sun Media, points out perceptively in his Sault Star column on this in February. “A deputy mayor allied with the mayor might intensify battles.”

Read Tom’s article, “The Deputy Mayor Question”, here.