Waste and Traffic and It's Importance to Leadership

City Hall this week is dealing with two often career defining issues for local politicians. The types of issues no one envisions becoming their legacy, but mishandling of the file has serious repercussions for one's ability to build the type of City they envisioned when coming into office. Waste collection and traffic management are the must-haves of any local government and failing to properly administer these services will effect one's ability to deliver on their agenda.

When Rob Ford 'Rode the Gravy Train' into City Hall, he did so on the back of a messy contract negotiation between the Miller administration and CUPE 79/416 resulting in a disruption to many municipal services, and most importantly piles of garbage in many of our public spaces. The lack of garbage collection (for only 5 days) resulted in most of Toronto smelling like garbage, and created a lot of anger toward the local government. Rob Ford capitalized on this anger and promptly moved to outsource a significant portion of waste collection in the City once elected Mayor. The effort did not attempt to outsource more likely due to some push back from staff and Councillors alike, but it set in wheels the now-regular discussion about who and how is waste collected in Toronto, as we saw this week in the news and at Infrastructure and Environment Committee. Council, despite instruction to review the potential to bring collection back in house with ballooning private costs, awarded another extension for private collection. If there is a transition, it will be long-term planned, not done in any way that will disrupt services.

The truth was, and likely still is, people are more concerned about seeing their services delivered without interruption, and very few understand the costs to deliver those services. The Miller administration could have capitulated to the union, and certainly you would have your opposition yell about how you gave in, but as a progressive administration people generally accepted that you might be favourable toward labour. Further, those indictments shouted by your opposition would have been temporary, and people likely wouldn't have cared, or at least not to the level they cared about their garbage not being collected and disruption to their lives.

This was a paradigm shifting moment in Toronto politics and one (as a very young City Hall staffer, and to a greater extent now as a seasoned veteran) I never understood from Mayor Miller's perspective. And I think it is a lesson many local politicians have learned. It is more important to guarantee continuity of services, than it is to pick extended fights with labour. From the right wing perspective, you will not be criticized by the left for providing favourable terms, you will just be recognized as getting the job done. From the left's perspective, the ghost of the 2009 garbage strike lingers on.

When the TTC was threatening to strike early in 2024 (after the courts ruled that they are not an essential service and therefore stripping their constitutional right to collective bargaining illegal) many asked me what I thought would happen when new reports seemed to point to a guaranteed disruption. Most businesses sent out notices asking workers to telecommute given the substantial traffic impacts that were expected from a TTC strike. I quite confidently felt that a labour disruption would be an impossibility. Mayor Chow needed to maintain their high level of popular support, the TTC is struggling with poor public relations given concerns about service availability and safety (whether or not that last assumption is fair), and the service becoming unreliable would have been disastrous for both. Sure enough, come the deadline (and an extension for dramatic effect) a settlement was reached. This was a big win, and I would have spiked the football a bit harder, but the outcome was clear: everyone was just happy to continue with their lives, and few know what the deal includes.

John Tory on the other hand rode 'SmartTrack' into City Hall as a way to help solve the City's congestion issues. A decade on, we can expect a few extra GO Stations to be operational by 2029. However, this should not take away from the understanding about what people in Toronto cared about at the time: traffic and being able to get to and from your destination as efficiently as possible. However, this will likely not be his legacy, the most impactful traffic congestion measures taken by his administration (even if it seemed he was dragged into supporting it) was the massive expansion of cycling infrastructure during his tenure.

This week both cycling infrastructure and congestion management were in the news, and both in ways that are counter-productive to solving congestion issues. On the one hand, you had a leak from the province about looking to create conditions for building bike lanes, or making it more difficult for municipalities to build them. Less safe roads, means less cyclists, means more strain on the TTC, means more strain on the road network. While this is likely super unpopular in Toronto, it might be more popular to other voters who drive into Toronto and misunderstand that the presence of a bike lane is having an impact on their commute time. The truth is no matter how many lanes there are available to cars, it has to narrow eventually and everyone who has driven in traffic on the highway will attest, our commute is made longer by those filling a lane that is ending to get ahead by a car length, or two.

On the other hand, the City introduced a traffic management plan which did not consider congestion pricing, a tool used in other municipalities to aim to discourage people from driving into the core. Setting aside the tough sell on cost-of-living increases, congestion pricing can be a difference maker for the City of Toronto in multiple ways: funding to direct to public transit, reducing private vehicles on the busiest streets, encourage more people to take active/alternative forms of transportation which have much less impact on the City's infrastructure and state-of-good-repair budget. Instead, the plan involves more Traffic Agents directing traffic, more levies for construction companies using the right-of-way for staging (which tries to address the narrowing of lanes as described above), and high fines for dangerous/illegal traffic movements. None of these measures tackle the true solution to congestion management: reducing the number of private cars on the road.

It seems there are likely two issues at play in preventing congestion pricing. First is the provincial approval required for tolls and other revenue collection tools. Second is the progressive position that road pricing negatively impacts labour. Tory was the first Mayor in Toronto to request the ability to toll the Gardiner Expressway in 2016, and denied by the provincial government at the time in 2017. With the current provincial government making it a point to not increase cost of living for Ontarians, any new revenue collection efforts would be swiftly denied. Further, there is a feeling among those on the left that congestion pricing would only hurt those who are living on strained budgets. That you might reduce congestion, but it would come at much too steep a political cost, and in the middle of your first term, this is not a risk worth taking.

Mayor Chow's approach to continue to steer a steady ship continues to be the correct position, especially given the need to manage another difficult budget debate coming in 2025, and her office may be given a pass to mould the government at the fringes while she can continue to beat the issues she inherited from the Tory administration. However, being unable to deliver approaches that solve congestion will have long-term consequences on popularity, and create an opening for a challenger if they can provide a road map that the public buys into (even if its not grounded in reality).