Thanks to their provocative premier, Doug Ford, they are asking in Toronto something we might ask, too: do we have too many municipal politicians?
No, it’s not a rhetorical question. Yes, there are times it seems one politician is too many. And then again, there are times it seems you couldn’t find one if your well-being depended on it.
Cities across Canada are, no pun intended, all over the map about this question. Calgary has one representative for about every 82,000 people, and Edmonton has one for about every 69,000. Victoria has one per 4,000, and the Niagara Region in Ontario has one for 3,800.
Toronto is hardly overrepresented by Canadian standards: one municipal politician for every 56,000 or so. Ford has proposed, in the thick of Toronto’s local election, that the 44 council members of the amalgamated city be reduced to 25 – a move that would numerically make the city Canada’s least representative for a major centre, one for every 105,000 or so.
Metro Vancouver, by comparison, now has 21 mayors and 94 councillors, or about one municipal politician for about every 16,000 – not counting local First Nations and their chiefs and councillors.
Our seemingly high politicians-to-people total has something to do with the absence of amalgamation in the region. There are strengths and weaknesses to coalescing communities. Unlike several other cities, though, we haven’t discussed it, much less done it. There is no apparent appetite to talk amalgamation in our municipal campaign, even if there are some strong economic arguments.
But if the Metro Vancouver elected-to-electorate numbers seem very intense, taking this math into the City of Vancouver produces very different numbers: one mayor and 10 council members for about 650,000, or about one for every 59,000.
That pol-to-peeps ratio isn’t off the charts for Canada, but there are two major differences from the norm in Vancouver: a political party system at the municipal level and an at-large system that elects representatives for the entire city and not for geographical wards – something our city dispatched in the 1930s.
The system is most effective – meaning, it can push things through at will – when one party holds a majority of council seats. Then again, without ward representation as a balancing factor and in only one party’s hands, a majority at city hall can choose to favour certain districts over others as it governs.
If we were doing this all over again, I wonder if we’d keep the parties and if we’d bring back the wards.
Seattle and several American cities balance at-large electoral systems with Departments of Neighborhoods (they spell it differently there). They’re designed to provide more granular service, and they’re spoken of as a fallback when some districts fall into the cracks of at-large systems. They’re worth examining locally as a way to further apply the relevance of municipal government.
Usually in our history, the party system has meant that a council rides into power in conjunction with the mayor, as has been the case with recent Vision Vancouver, Non-Partisan Association (NPA) and Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE) victories.
What we might rightly wonder about in this municipal campaign, with no party emerging yet in a dominant position in the polls, is whether we are approaching a perfect storm: an at-large system with no district responsibility coupled with a fractured council with no majority party in charge.
It has been ages since we have had a result like that. It offers a recipe for political paralysis and a new role for the mayor, who will wake up every day knowing a majority of council members need to be won over. That wouldn’t be a matter of too many or too few politicians, just a less functional system for the city.
