Toronto is a well-run city, former mayor Robert Saunders once said, “Though often badly governed.” And so it is today. Saunders’ double-sided accolade has become a favourite of his best-known successor, David Crombie, who recently employed it to warn incumbent mayor David Miller against radically altering the magic formula — lest Toronto should become as badly run as it is governed.

The fear in high places — justified by scandal piled on scandal — is that the city has already achieved that notorious accomplishment. Thus, the governance reforms, which have been approved in principle by city council, are designed to impress senior governments and business groups that Toronto is reasserting a strong grip on its oftentimes irregular affairs. But to Crombie, a popular former mayor, cabinet minister in two federal Progressive Conservative governments and head of the Royal Commission on the Future of the Toronto Waterfront, they are another example of the same sad mismanagement that has done so much damage to the local government’s reputation since the amalgamation of Metropolitan Toronto in 1997.

The reforms are designed to create a more strongly leader-led, results-oriented type of government than the ultra-democratic free-for-all that currently prevails at City Hall. They would allow the mayor to appoint his own city manager and hand-pick a powerful executive committee to run the city, thus subordinating the role of the 44-member council, charitably described as “colourful,” that dominates all city business today.

Miller defends the new structure as an appropriate balance between local traditions and the more dictatorial “strong mayor” systems favoured in the U.S. The new structure also enjoys the support of leading newspapers and business groups, including the Toronto Board of Trade. And it is also supported by the provincial legislation introduced Dec. 14, 2005, that was designed to give the city broader powers and responsibilities.

For his part, Crombie warns that the changes would be “the nail in the coffin” of the city’s independent public service, politicizing it beyond repair, noting that they would usher party politics into City Hall, with its attendant patronage and secrecy. Crombie has had little luck warning leading opinion against the “unintended consequences” of adopting the new system. Echoing the current mayor’s frequent boast that his is “the sixth-largest government in the country,” most argue that Toronto needs a new government structure befitting its status.

At the same time, Crombie’s active participation in the former Mike Harris government’s forced amalgamation of the six municipalities that made up Metropolitan Toronto — his endorsement proved crucial to the project’s acceptance — clearly undermines his credibility as a saviour of local traditions. Justified on a similar basis as the new reforms, the amalgamation now is widely conceded to have been an expensive and traumatic disaster for the city.

But it is that very track record — persistent setbacks in the name of reform — that justifies current calls for caution. If Toronto is indeed ungovernable, as the reformers insist, it would seem imprudent to place such faith in City Hall’s latest recipe for change.

Crombie is not the only one who has flopped in the never-ending discussion on how to fix Toronto. Before Premier Dalton McGuinty announced that he would not grant the city the new powers it was seeking until it adopted a new system of government, Miller himself was a staunch defender of local traditions and the admirable “transparency” of city politics. He didn’t need new powers to be a strong mayor, he contended, and the votes backed him up: like Mel Lastman before him, he has never lost an important vote in council despite his official “weak mayor” status.

Nevertheless, the drumbeat for reform has proven irresistible; Miller has managed to reconcile himself to a new arrangement that will increase his own power and lengthen his term of office.

The reforms are also strongly supported by Miller’s fellow New Democrats on council, lending substance to Crombie’s warnings about the ascension of party politics and patronage.

Regardless, everybody seems to agree that it’s time for Toronto’s government to grow up, with its oafish adolescence as a so-called “megacity” only heightening the call. IE