Ontario 5, Toronto 4, at the Supremely Useless Court.
Was anything really gained or lost there? What is the real problem with Toronto government? What is the solution?
I have closely watched this perpetual fight between Toronto and the Province since I came east, just before the Mike Harris amalgamation. I have watched the latest nonsense about Ford arbitrarily redrawing the rules by fiat. I am not too surprised at the supreme court ruling last Friday.
The thing is, these fights are between different elites in the city, linked with their allies in higher governments. Most of the city’s population see it that way, and are not much interested. Yet they mostly do not vote conservative provincially or federally, they dislike the Ford family, and so you would think they would have been up in arms about the original Ford action.
The Courts
The Supreme Court, like most institutions in permanently colonial Canada, is obsolete. It is locked into this “common law” or “adversarial” mode and can only deal with what gets presented to it. This makes it almost useless for its supposed function, to act as a check on government actions which violate fundamental laws and legal principles.
It cannot even determine what those fundamentals are. As with all countries where the court systems have been messed up with the “common law” nonsense from Henry the Eighth, it has an incestuous relationship with falsity. It works on “precedent.”
A corrupt or stupid judge somewhere puts something through, and all courts are bound by it for the rest of time. Bad judges cannot be removed and their decisions voided, and the true fundamentals of an issue examined. A good example of this is the doctrine of “corporate personhood”; corporations having the rights of people, which is nonsense out of nowhere but has become unchallengeable.
Similar to that seems to be this Canadian doctrine of the provinces being “creatures of the province.” The Constitution of Canada says so.
No, the constitution of 1867 says no such thing. It assigns local governments to the provinces. It is silent about what powers the provinces have over them.
At the time this constitution was drawn up there were no large cities in Canada. It was a rural country. The present case where we live mostly in large cities was barely thought of back then.
Those who drafted this constitution never would have expected the present situation where provinces parasite off the big cities within them, strangling the geese that lay their golden eggs. They would have expected that the relation between cities and provinces would evolve in a more logical manner. Why it did not is unclear, but would have had much to do with the long term prevalence of a certain type of capitalism in the provinces.
The development of large cities with elements of actual democracy in their governance are always a big threat to that certain type of capitalism and the type of oligarchy that grows around it. However, these oligarchies get to decide who the judges are in our backward legal system, thus what the law is. This “creatures of the province” doctrine seems to have been developed by being repeated endlessly in endless cases, and eventually in the education system; the “big lie” method applied to developing the country’s laws.
No legislature ever passed anything saying provincial governments can do whatever they want with cities. There has never been any referendum on it. Something like that could never be passed anywhere. It is ‘judge made law’.
Judge made law is totally antidemocratic. It is the oligarchy using the courts to pre-empt democracy. This is why they like the ‘common law’ system so much, and why the judges are willing to keep running courts that way despite in being really unworkable.
Toronto Politics
Cities in Canada are suppressed but Toronto seems to be especially suppressed. Local government is spectacularly dysfunctional. It is not surprising that voter turnout in municipal elections is so low. It is amazing that anyone bothers with it.
To ask why that is, is to run into a maze of circular arguments. Each faction of the local elite has its own version of it, which they try to load into everyone else’s head. However, behind it all is a very antidemocratic attitude, with a contempt for the public, on the part of all these elites.
With all the mountains of writing done about government in Toronto, it is amazing how little of it looks at the role of these conflicts between elite factions in shaping public policy and political culture in Toronto. The local oligarchy seems to resolve into three basic factions.
The dominant one is the liberals. That is fitting for a big financial hub. Liberalism is associated with financial capitalism, which is associated with globalism; the drive for one world government. These prefer coopting the public voice, rather than suppressing it.
Toronto is also the world headquarters of the mining industry. That is serious conservatism. They have little electoral power inside Toronto but a lot in the “905” belt around it. They can often get control of provincial government and trump the liberal elite in Toronto. They have no patience for democracy and want the public suppressed.
The third big faction in the local elite is “The Left”. They generally align with the NDParty but these days are reluctant to be to identified with that hapless organization. They are based on the unions, the universities, and the brain industries which have presence, and influence, in Toronto.
Ford’s wrecking of electoral boundaries just before the municipal election was about making it harder for “left” people to get elected, and nothing more than that. The legal challenge to this action came mostly from the ‘left’ but the ‘urban planner’ faction of the local liberals were also involved. This is why the focus of the action was on the interference with people’s right to express themselves by voting, which is silly.
For all the fierce squabbling between these elites they clearly have a rule that the actual population of the city are not to be stirred up or involved in political activity except in the most peripheral way. Anyone trying to launch any political initiative in Toronto is under great pressure to align with one of these partisan factions or be shut down. Any information or insight about the city’s government problem and the real solutions for it just does not seem to get around.
What to fix, how to fix it.
Various goofy ideas are going around about recreating Toronto as a ‘charter city’. This would require the consent of the provincial and federal government. There is no chance it will get provincial cooperation.
The real reason why the province suppresses Toronto so severely is that if Toronto ever gained the powers it should have, Ontario as it is would cease to exist. This would remove about a third of its population and most of its revenue base. This actually would be a good thing because Ontario does need to be broken up into more manageable units.
There is a need for restructuring of government but it is not about a few concessions to cities which can be removed at the stroke of a pen. The lopsided nature of Ontario and the failure to develop institutions in a logical way suggest what really needs to happen. We need a written constitution for Ontario which creates a more logical basis for subordinate governments, a better framework for police and courts, and much else.
This will not happen through any kind of legal or electoral process. The existing governmental system cannot reform itself. It must be driven from outside the system by citizen initiative from below. The attitude of ruling elites in Canada means this will have to be driven by serious, organized, sustained civil disobedience and disruption.
For those who get into a big snit at any suggestion of such unCanadian behaviour all I could say is, they are not going to be happy with the next decade or so. We are in for a global shakeup as old empires fall away. Canada has not been seriously shaken up since colonial times and is long overdue.
The best people in Canada are getting a clear idea of what a post shakeup country would look like. There is great effort to prevent these ideas from getting around. This includes ideas of what a post shakeup Toronto would look like.
I am not going to re-engineer Toronto in this essay but a few things are obvious. A reorganized Toronto would inevitably include the whole Greater Toronto and Hamilton area in a federated system. It would take over the tax powers currently held by Queen’s Park. The QP government would shrink and restrict itself to dealing with matters that really do require coordination across regional and metropolitan governments.
There are some principles which have become obvious to political reformers elsewhere but Canadians generally have yet to wrap their heads around. One is subsidiarity; that powers devolve to the lowest level of government which can effectively deal with it. Another is participating democracy; that the public controls government directly, not through representatives.
Another is sometimes called active constitutionalism. That is, there is a permanent mechanism for making changes to basic laws, political boundaries, and so on, that sits outside the regular political process. There is also a way of checking the constitutionality of government actions which is active; which does not just sit and wait for a complaint.
So what was the case about?
The first thing wrong with this case was that it was about trying to use a legal process to solve a political problem. The issue was not someone getting their campaign for office cut off. What should have been focused on was the totally ad hoc and arbitrary nature of Doug the Thug’s actions.
Perhaps you can subscribe to this “province can do what it wants” doctrine. But it is something else again to claim that a government official should be able to act in this abrupt and overhanded way. There was no process.
Courts in Canada in recent times have come to be concerned about “evidence based decision making.” They want to see legislation come out of open processes of research, consultation, and policy formation. A case made in those terms would have had a much greater chance of succeeding.
The people behind this case seemed not to want to go there. It just might be because they also like doing things in an overhanded way. The case may also have been a way of diverting opponents of the intervention away from the political action which would have been a better response.
The decision changed little. The dumb thugs in Queen’s park had already got their way, as they usually do. The best way to have stopped it would have been to take up the federal government’s offer to intervene in the city’s favour.
It will be interesting to see when next we have a liberal government in Queen’s park, if the disruption of the city council is reversed. Past experience suggests that there will be no effort to change it until things become so painfully dysfunctional that there is no choice. Then next time there is a conservative government it will throw yet another bomb into the city government.
This is a great way to run things. It will continue, and the public will continue to be totally disengaged, until serious change becomes available.