A politician should have to serve for a full term unless death or unlawful activity cuts short the career.

If you run for a four-year term, you serve a four-year term, or until the next election is called.  That’s your obligation as a candidate, what you signed on for when you ‘answered the ad.’  Let’s just say it’s in the fine print in your contract with the voter. 

Politicians like former MPP, now PM Justin Trudeau's patronage appointee, Eric Hoskins, who leave mid-term for their own convenience or opportunism, lay open seats to be filled in costly by-elections.

That’s an expensive exit strategy!  The cost of a provincial by-election must be in the quarter million dollar range.  Under my scenario these elected legislators would continue to serve as MPPs until the next general election, or pay the cost of refilling their seats. 

People living in an area represented by an early-quitter are disadvantaged. They have no one speaking and work for or with them for the six months or longer it could take to fill the seat. Their legislative legs just walked out on them and they have no voice in parliament or on council as the case may be.

Suggesting that candidates pay the cost of a by-election is neither new nor is it unprecedented.

I learned as a municipal candidate that it is possible a government will demand payment for the cost of a by-election.  A story too long to repeat  ended with a letter from the City of Toronto Clerk of the day informing me that if I won the contested seat (a vacancy due to a death in office) the city would come after me for the cost of a new by-election.  “For your information the cost of a by-election is  between $165,000 and $200,000,” said the letter from then-top bureaucrat, Novina Wong.

You see, I had a picture of city hall on my sign. At that time there was no clause in the Toronto sign by-law to say a candidate was prohibited from using the logo.
​
Here I was being asked to pay for a by-election for a silly, nonsensical reason, not because I chose to step down and saddle the public with an expensive election exercise to find my replacement.  

The cost of many a by-election could be avoided altogether if politicians stayed put and lived to the terms of their agreement, as many have.

A welcome release of Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne’s mandate letters to her cabinet ministers heralded a new dawn of openness and transparency.

Nothing in the past prevented premiers from making their marching orders to ministers known to the public.  But Wynne has demonstrated a willingness to be open with the directions she as premier gives to the chieftains of her newly minted majority Liberal government.

Unheralded in the flurry of publicity over the mandate letters was any hint of a downside to all this.  But let me tell you, having worked inside the grand legislative palace, it’s not what the mandate letters say, but what they do not say.

The truth for activists and lobbyists is their causes will be ignored if the matters are not part of the minister’s mandated bundle.  I know this too well.  While at Queen’s Park, I saw the former premier Dalton McGuinty and the Liberals drag their heels on introducing legislation that automatically enabled workers’ compensation for fire fighters who developed diseases as a result of fighting fires.  

The issue of “presumptive legislation” had not made it into the Minister of Labour’s mandate letter.  Only after considerable pressure over the course of years did that important legislation come to pass.  And I take great heart in knowing that the final three life-threatening illnesses that the Liberals chose not to include the first time around will, in fact, be part of the mandate going forward.

If an issue found its way into Wynne’s election platform in June, then there will be a directive about it tucked into a ministerial mandate letter somewhere.  

The trouble with mandate letters rests in what they do not include and how a government will use them to justify ignoring other important issues, ideas and points of view.

I nearly leapt from my seat when I saw that the city ethics commission in Los Angeles is pushing the idea of a contest to increase municipal voter turnout.

“Los Angeles considers cash-prize drawing as incentive to vote,” screams the Toronto Star headline above the story.

I have long advocated a voter lottery as a surefire way to raise voter turnout tallies.  A musician, I even wrote a song about it.*  Now before my eyes, validating my belief -  a jurisdiction willing to give it a whirl south of the border.  With a few tweaks the current proposal from L.A. Commissioner Nathan Hochman could muster an odds-on chance of succeeding.  Frustratingly, though, here in the face of dismal numbers – fewer than 5 in 10 voters actually vote – Toronto, Canada has fallen victim to new national laws that make it more difficult to vote. 

In my scenario, the voter registration card doubles as a lucky draw ticket after the election.  Why not a televised draw about one week after Election Day using pre-existing government gaming infrastructure? 

Unlike the LA scenario, which proposes a single incentive - a cash prize in the range of $25,000 to $50,000, my voter lottery spreads the wealth around and corrals a bigger budget by redirecting millions of misspent voter awareness advertising dollars into meaningful prizes.

A year’s mortgage payments made. Your annual hydro or gasoline bill paid. Transit passes, super “staycations”, your rent paid for a year.  The voter lottery would offer a grand prize, but also many smaller rewards that would contribute to an individual’s quality of life and entice people to the polls for a change.  Who wouldn’t vote for that?

In submitting my proposal to Ontario’s select committee on electoral reform back in 2005, I had a hunch no one would take it seriously.  And now, a decade later, someone has.  I must be a futurist.

* The Voter Lottery (Original Song) 
by Sheila White   © 2003

No one cares about elections.
There’s a bad case of voter apathy.
Until they invent a clinic to cure the cynic,
We need a gimmick to get people voting again.
If you take a minute
to examine it,
A lottery can.

Let’s go in a new direction
and do our part to boost democracy
We can offer prizes
And cool surprises
The turnout rises because
Everyone’s playing to win.
If we advertise it,
I’ve analyzed it,
And I say, “We’re in!”

A voter lottery
will push the numbers up
to where they ought to be.  Whoa!
The media will love it.
We’ve already won.
Voter turnout will go up,
But most of all, it will be fun.

We may face the odd objection
To how we solve this electoral ennui
We had to be inventive,
Provide incentive
They’ll be attentive and voting like never before.
This is not expensive
We must attempt it
They’ll come back for more.

A year’s free gasoline,
who wouldn’t vote for that?
A trip to the Caribbean,
Luxury hybrids, tuition fees,
Voter turnout will go up.
Most of all, it will be fun.

With visions of music festivals dancing in his head the Mayor of Toronto twerked his way to the hot sun of Austin, Texas on a civic mission.  He had one great reason for going that he likely missed even though it was right under his perspiring nose.

I’m talking about the Austin music festival’s attention to making people not cause litter. 

Founded in 1985, the iconic Don’t Mess With Texas anti-litter campaign is a culture within the State.  Images of the Mayor at the Austin festival site illustrated what that kind of cultural shift looks like.  The fairgrounds are immaculate.  Bins are prominent red, white and blue, branded with eye-catching slogans, good signage and a palpable stigma about littering.  Litter reduction needs all these elements.

In many jurisdictions the litter-free festival has become part of the planning mandate.  Compare that to Toronto where the litter aftermath from any big event is typically profuse and disgusting.

I appreciate that the mayor’s dream of a Toronto music festival may have been manufactured with the aid of a few pen scratches on a napkin.  Now, if only we could get him in on a plan that focuses on not littering that napkin.

David Soknacki for Mayor?  The earnest former city councillor and one-time Toronto budget chief is readying himself for prime time as a contestant for mayor in the game show-like election that will be Toronto’s in October 2014.

A garden party at Soknacki’s house on Sunday, Sept. 22 drew guests from well-connected Liberal circles, conservatives, such as Councillor Paul Ainslie and, surprisingly, left-winger Adam Giambrone assembling for Toronto mayoral wannabe Soknacki’s toe-in-the-water reception.

Some guests came and went, unsure of why they were there in the first place.
For the remaining fifty this was a building block event for the prospect of Soknacki as the next mayor.

His long-time buddy MP John McKay was there as were provincial Liberal operatives Do they believe this is the man who can unseat Rob Ford?

Boy Scout Businessman v Quasimodo Mayor: one of the many possible mayoral matches in a Toronto election contest that is still more than a year away.

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.  

The strangest thing just happened. I received a phone call to my home from the development company responsible for an illegal rooftop sign that I complained to the City of Toronto about. Aren’t complaints to the city supposed to be anonymous?

That was the case in 1999 when I wanted to know the identity of the person(s) who complained about my election signs as they awaited pick-up at the printer. (See blog 03/12/12) Back then, complainants’ anonymity was closely guarded, guaranteed, and I never was able to confirm with certainty that the source was a rival candidate for the city council seat.

Now I’m off the phone with someone at Tridel, whose illegal rooftop sign has been wedged solidly in my craw since the day of its installation six months ago.

She tells me that the project manager asked her to phone to determine the nature of my complaint.

“How did you get my number?” I ask. No clear answer there. Someone gave it to the project manager.

The Tridel assistant doesn’t think the sign is illegal. I explain to her that I have conversed with Robert, the guy at the city who knows this stuff chapter and verse. His team boasts an impressive 90 per cent compliance rate when it comes to the removal of rooftop signs. The regulations came to be in 2010. They were drafted with developers and city staff working together. Tridel was one of the developers at the table. Surely , in helping to design it and investing employee time in the exercise, Tridel was aware of Toronto’s sign bylaw. The thing’s only three years old!

I suggest to the employee that she speak to Robert. “I shouldn’t be in the middle of this,” I said. “I’m the complainant. You should be dealing with the city.”

She tells me the Metrogate condo project, where people now reside, is “a construction site”.  You still need a permit, but why am I the one telling her this?  That would be the job of the councillor.  Hmmmmm ... 

Here’s what I think happened:
 
Instead of making an easy inquiry on my behalf to city staff about the legality of the vexing sign, the local councillor’s aide made an inquiry to the developer.  After many months I went independently to city staff through the main switchboard, and that’s how I met Robert. I knew through Robert that investigators were to visit the site today.

I was phoned at 4 pm. The project manager, I’m assuming, received his surprise afternoon callers. My Tridel contact, in all likelihood, obtained my phone number and knowledge of my complaint from the councillor’s aide.

I know Robert respects the anonymity of complaints. We talked about that. You can feel completely at ease making reports about illegal rooftop signs, or any other matter, to city departmental staff. I think the problem here is one of a political staffer referring my complaint to a powerful developer who might want to squash me like a bug.

Robert’s department receives one complaint a day, a total of 260 a year.
It tells me I’m not alone. I’m not the only one who feels a skyline should be unfettered by garish displays of commercialism and condo ads yelling from great distances at the neighbourhoods the new buildings surround.

If you have a rooftop sign peering at you or big banner advertising on a bridge disturbing your view, you can report it to 3-1-1 and have it looked into. Unless approved, these signs are in violation. At that point, the offender is expected to remove the sign or apply to make it legal within 14 days.

The developer's rep says she will get back to me next Wednesday. My friend says I should file a report with the city’s integrity commissioner. I’ve written this blog in lieu.

I’m abuzz ‘cuz I just took on the big guys and may have won.

Tridel, deep-pocketed developer, stuck a logo in my face and I’m sticking it right back to them.

As it turns out, the builder of a gigantic condo cluster at Kennedy and Hwy 401 has skirted the laws regulating rooftop signs.  The glaring red Tridel trademark emblazoning the east and west sides of one of the company's tower tops is there illegally and without permission, according to Robert Bader, supervisor with the City of Toronto’s sign department.

A developer must follow an expensive process to apply to Council for a rooftop moniker.  Even if approved, the sign can be in place for one year at most.

Tridel, seasoned as it is at navigating development law and the related maze of regulations, did not seek anyone’s say-so before hoisting its advertising marks to the sky overlooking the highway where no one for miles could miss them.

Who else, but Tridel?  The company slogan virtually screams at me as I view the offending tower from my backyard a mile away, and it waves, like a red flag to a bull. 

Who else indeed? Corporations aren’t allowed to logo-line the rooftops.  Even if they were, exposure like that is worth a lot of money.  Tridel has been reaping the benefit of free advertising from its signs for the past half year.  Now it must pay.

“Heads up, Tridel.  You are about to have a site visit from the city inspectors."  

The signs will have to come down.  The developer may even face violation notices and have to cough up a big chunk of change for fines and lawyers.

That's what should happen when you slam a community right between the eyes with your garishly illegal rooftop logo.

***

Normally a person contacts the city councillor for help in situations like this.  That’s what I did, but in the end I couldn’t let any more time go by.  The councillor and his staff were absolutely useless.  Sent the complaint to Tridel!  It was only when I called Toronto city staff directly today that I received prompt attention, the information and appropriate consideration I had been seeking since early December.

You stay or you pay.

A politician should have to serve for a full term unless death or unlawful activity cuts short the career.

If you run for a four-year term, you serve a four-year term, or until the next election is called.  That’s your obligation as a candidate, what you signed on for when you ‘answered the ad.’  Let’s just say it’s in your contract with the voter.  I won't disagree if you tell me four years is too long.

Politicians who leave mid-term for their own convenience lay open seats to be filled in expensive by-elections.

We have two such examples in the Province of Ontario right now with Dwight Duncan (Windsor) and Chris Bentley (London), both MPPs and cabinet members making quick exits.  They’re flying the Queen’s Park coop: A premature evacuation?

That’s an expensive exit strategy!  The cost of a provincial by-election must be in the quarter million dollar range.  Under my scenario these elected legislators continue to serve as MPPs until the next general election or they pay the cost of refilling their seats. 

People living in an area represented by an early-quitter are disadvantaged for up to six months.  Their legislative legs just walked out on them and they have no voice in parliament. Then all of Ontario joins in to fork over the dough to run forced by-elections.

Suggesting that candidates pay the cost of a by-election is neither new nor is it unprecedented.

I learned as a municipal candidate that it is possible a government will demand payment for the cost of a by-election.  I go back to a letter I received from the City of Toronto Clerk in 1999 informing me that if I won the contested seat (a vacancy due to a death in office) the city would come after me for the cost of a new by-election.  “For your information the cost of a by-election is between $165,000 and $200,000,” said the letter from top bureaucrat, Novina Wong.

Okay, this was over a logo dispute that was tame compared to the one that bubbled up in Surrey BC recently.  The town launched and then withdrew a lawsuit against a local t-shirt maker who parodied Surrey’s logo on apparel. 

Here I still have in my possession a letter suggesting I pay for a by-election for reasons both silly and nonsensical. So what about these guys who step down early from their well-paying, elected posts and saddle the public with an expensive election exercise?  

The cost of many a by-election could be avoided altogether if politicians stayed put and lived to the terms of their agreement, as many have.  I concede this does make it hard for them to jump to other levels of government mid-term.  Jury's still out on whether that's good or bad.