What A Piece Of Work Is This Woman

What I have observed since the Meed Ward administration took office is that communications are very cunningly and adroitly handled. Only news that is beneficial to Council gets reported and even the worst missteps are couched in campaign rhetoric. One cannot leave critical comments, even when respectfully made, on the Mayor’s social media and any attempt to repeatedly challenge the “official message” gets blocked eventually. As a result, there is no ‘positive tension’ in the system; Council is a group of willing, self-interested enablers who bolster a Ford-anointed Strong Mayor Queen. There is no official opposition or chamber of sober second thought, no recall protocol or even term limits to confine the tremendous damage that can be done.

The formal avenues of public complaint and redress are a total farce – the City Integrity Commissioner, the City Auditor and the City Ombudsman. Hired guns all who serve on contract ‘at the pleasure’ of Council. Repeatedly their findings have found the City harmless and often their reviews have seemed to defy common sense and perhaps common law. When it suits, the field of inquiry is as narrow as the fine line between due diligence and complicity. Everything becomes the exact letter of the law or knife edge interpretation while the spirit, the intent, is trampled and lost. Obversely, when it benefits their ‘employer’, colloquial norms and standards are adopted to excuse inappropriate behaviour – “the Mayor didn’t really mean to say that Council was only occasionally trustworthy, it was just a figure of speech”.

In this shielded environment, that has become progressively worse and more insular since 2018, the Mayor’s pronouncements of points of privilege are not only hollow and self-serving, they reflect her observed need to control and shape the narrative. A large part of that narrative is the absolute fiction that delegations to Council have evidenced threatening and disrespectful bahaviour requiring public censure, ejections from the chamber or public protections (verbal and otherwise) of Council and staff. This is a manufactured storyline that shields City Hall from effective, energetic debate and useful confrontation. It is also a practiced, co-ordinated and very deliberate ‘slight of hand’ misdirection that masks the lack of Council’s true engagement with citizens and advocacy groups like BRAG. Appropriate and useful criticism is deflected back on those who criticize; critics become perpetrators of disrespect and politicians become victims.

This tactic has served Meed Ward well in the past – as the lone, beleaguered populist voice saving the downtown from rapacious developer interest, as the Jean d’Arc-like saviour of the waterfront, as the vulnerable subject of harassing false-news stories during the 2018 campaign – to name a prominent few examples. It is her political personna and it has served her exceedingly well. But it poses a fundamental threat to the open, constructive and honest interaction between governors and governed that is necessary to a democratic form of government.

What is unusual, given the higher political aspirations of both Mayor and Councillor Nisan (amongst others), is their sensitivity to direct challenge of the policies and performance of both Council and staff. After over 30 years as witness to the truly magnificent theatrics of one political theatre, I openly wonder how either might react as participants in the proceedings of the Ontario Legislature or the House of Commons. Would they stand on points of privilege when called “Chicken Littles” (thank you Jane) or would they exit the chambers in a huff when told by the Opposition that their economic stewardship was destroying the province? There are no ‘delicate little flowers’ in those venues. I thank God and good fortune for that.