Watch above: Top ways to reform city hall according to politicians, pundits and professors. Alan Carter reports.
TORONTO – Most Torontonians think politics get in the way of anything getting done at city hall, according to a new Ipsos Reid poll done exclusively for Global News.
The poll found 87 per cent of the 1,252 Torontonians surveyed think politics stops elected representatives from achieving much of anything while in office.
The discontent is felt pretty much evenly across the city with numbers only varying slightly from a low of 85 per cent in downtown Toronto to a high of 89 per cent in North York.
That feeling was echoed by a range of other numbers speaking to the distrust and displeasure for city hall: 86 per cent want recall legislation, half think they get good value for tax dollars, 43 per cent say their area is neglected and only 31 per cent say the city has good political leadership.
So is city hall broken? Ryerson politics professor Myer Siemiatycki doesn’t think so. In fact, he says city council worked as it should – collaboratively – over the last four years to ward off “what could have been far worse missteps and calamity.”
“We had the mayor go off track and off rails for an extended period of time and it was actually the council, the rest of the 44 members, who cooperated, collaborated, and decided it was in the city of Toronto’s interest not to have Rob Ford continue exercising significant authority,” he said.
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But if there is one thing that could fix city hall, it would be greater public interest.
“I think we need a Toronto public that’s more engaged in issues, that’s more connected with issues, I certainly hope that in this upcoming elections we have a higher voter turnout than we usually do,” he said.
Others, however, have different views.
Stephen D’Agostino, a municipal affairs lawyer, suggested greater transparency could bolster public engagement.
“You know standing on the outside looking in, quite often the public doesn’t understand how a decision was arrived at, they don’t have the tools available to them to come to that decision, there seems to be favouritism going on,” he said. “So people understand why the decision was made, how it was made and in fact what the balance is.”
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And Councillor Mary-Margaret McMahon think public office shouldn’t be a career choice – she wants to see term limits placed on councillors.
“So you get in, do a good job and pass the torch on to someone else,” she said. “We could engage more youth, more women and with term limits, it’s something like ranked ballots that allows for a better turnover.”
McMahon did bring forward a motion to implement term limits to executive committee earlier this term but was roundly opposed. She said if she is re-elected, she will bring forward the motion again.
– With files from Alan Carter
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