Toronto seeking to eliminate citizens’ committees?

I have survived my first term of grad school, and most of my second. I feel like I can breathe again. Just in time to see that Toronto’s city manager is recommending that the city scrap all but two of the citizen committees that advise council on a huge range of issues, apparently with the backing of the Mayor’s office.

I spent a good bit of the past month wrestling with an essay about citizen participation in municipal government decisions in Toronto. In that essay, I criticized those committees, which, to be fair, are not necessarily representative and which have only limited power. Nonetheless, I’m not a fan of getting rid of them: I want to see them expanded, not disbanded. In a piece posted on Spacing Wire, Dylan Reid wrote briefly about the kinds of work the pedestrian committee does: for example, providing city staff with ongoing input from the people who use our public spaces every day to help them constantly improve service. The committees’ individual actions may be small in scale, but together they add up and they help to make Toronto a better place to live.

The citizens who sit on these committees are volunteers. The committees are only funded in the sense that municipal staff may act as clerks and they can use city-owned meeting space. Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday’s claim that the committees are too expensive is thus difficult to credit – particularly given that the city manager himself reported that there would be no financial impact from eliminating them.

I’ve emailed both my councillor, Ana Bailao, and Mayor Rob Ford; Bailao responded with a form letter, but I’ve heard nothing from Ford, despite his reputation as a councillor for personally responding to anything that anyone cared to bring to his attention. Perhaps that’s not surprising: his office is certainly becoming notorious for its refusal to speak to the media.

And me, I’m only a citizen, and Our Ford is making it clear with this move that citizen’s voices don’t count.

Filed under toronto | Comment (0)