I’m not going to lie: that display copy up top is just about as sensationalist as I get these days, and it’s making me uncomfortable. Maybe I’ll change my mind later, but, wow, for now. City Hall should be boring, right? A four-year council administration shouldn’t have dramatic twists in its final moments, right? Right?
Well, what if I told you this group of council members is so dysfunctional that it struggled to pass a procedural motion just to take a committee into private session? This was a routine vote and they disagreed, debated, argued. It passed 8-6 and I bet they kept arguing behind closed doors. Incredible.
Picture it: a meeting of the Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee, with almost all of council present, because it’s the important, whole-of-council committee setting policy ahead of Full Council next week. Mayor Josh Morgan is stickhandling his flagship housing incentive announcement from the State of the City Address. At the same meeting, Deputy Mayor Shawn Lewis is pushing through free bus travel for east London kids, starting just a few weeks before the next council is chosen. This is it. The big moment, with lame duck status1 incoming and an election following soon after.
And, ouch, that was hard to watch. The five-and-a-half-hour meeting (direct link to agenda here; see items 2.3 and 2.4) was an uncomfortably bumpy ride for both proposals; note my earlier reference to a procedural motion. Some in the group seemed ready to object to their own birthday because the funny hats were the wrong colour. Some started new conversations about slightly-related issues. And everybody had a view to express.
For much of the meeting, it wasn’t clear if anything would pass at all, as councillor after councillor used their allotted five minutes of talky-talk time - available for each and every motion, amendment, and amended amendment, oh the humanity - to object to, well, everything, and ask staff a couple or three questions, relevant and otherwise, and discuss procedure and make rulings and so on. The London City Council classic “Should we refer this back to staff for more study?” came up repeatedly, but of course that would take another month and tick tock tick tock. After a while I was mostly just watching faces change colour.
If you want actual details
Here’s the outcome, from the paid reporters:
Mayor Morgan’s homebuyers incentive
This was subject to major scrutiny and some skepticism, but it did pass. Here’s coverage from Daryl Newcombe at CTV, who provides the comments of four councillors who were less than enthusiastic, for various reasons. Over behind the Postmedia paywall, Jack Moulton reports that councillors David Ferreira, Anna Hopkins, Susan Stevenson, Elizabeth Peloza, Skylar Franke and Sam Trosow all voted against the program, with Steve Hillier absent. It was that 8-6 vote again, but it didn’t look like a dead cert at any point. At least two of the eight seemed to make their decision in the meeting, to my eyes.
Opinion alert: I am also skeptical. This is a cashback program for people who would already qualify for mortgages, so, like Councillor Susan Stevenson, I don’t see how it helps them get into homes. Meanwhile, it will affect a total of 260, maximum, which doesn’t sound a lot. And would someone please help me understand Scrödinger’s Housing Market? It looks like we simultaneously have a glut of unsold homes and a whole bunch of folks on the streets. That can’t be right, surely? And what happened to trusting the market? I hear house prices are up.
Deputy Mayor Lewis’s free school transit program for students
This one also had a spotlight shone in its eyes while somebody suspended it by the thumbs. Councillor Peter Cuddy put forward the $1.04 million pilot program to give Grade 9s and 10s at Clarke Road free bus travel, starting this September. Jack at the Free Press provides this excellent report of the fray, which ended with a successful Councillor Corinne Rahman compromise removing the summer months and taking the cost down to just $840,000-or-so.
Opinion alert: Am I the only person losing his mind that this proposal from east end councillors Cuddy and Lewis specifically benefits many families in east London and will show in their spending a matter of weeks before the election? I mean, it’s all being done democratically and nobody’s actually done anything wrong but isn’t it all a bit… unsubtle?
Again, wow. I love municipal politics.
Next stop: Full Council
Both of those measures, and all the other bits on the agenda, such as confirming five councillors to be LTC Commissioners, go to Full Council on Tuesday - that’s February 10, at 1 p.m. That’s routine, although usually there is some indication of what may happen that day and this one still has some moving parts - not least the ongoing wordsmithing of motions, which is often a reason for a politician’s mind to change suddenly.
With several 8-6 and even 7-7 votes at committees this week, it is disturbingly clear that there is no consensus in this group of up-to-15. It is also clear that minds are on re-election, or at least legacies, and everybody’s watching the calendar. There is no clear direction - hence the sensationalism about wheels, above - and I’m honestly unsure if either of these pace-setting programs will go through on Tuesday. It’s not unusual for councils to get a bit frayed, almost four years in, but this one’s fully in tatters. It’s hard to tell if anybody’s in charge.
What a time indeed. Keep watching and maybe I’ll keep writing. Please keep reading. There are 99 of you now.
P.S.: the Magnum P.I. of London City Council
Just a quick aside: Councillor Trosow has a great moustache.
Lame duck status is the fascinating way that Ontario controls outgoing council members. I’ll likely return to this at some point, but the basic idea is: if less than 75% of a council is trying to come back, the rump of the administration isn’t allowed to spend more than $50,000 at a time. In London, this means council will have lame duck status unless (I think) at least 12 of its current members register to run before the deadline of August 21. That’s going to be a busy day at City Hall, by the way. Enbuckle yourselves, my friends.
Solid reporting on the dysfunction here. That bit about councillors burning through five minutes of talky-talk time on every motion really captures how procedure can become a weapon when there's no consensus. I've watched local councils gridlock like this before, and it usually means underlying power shifts nobody's admitting to yet. Those 8-6 splits arent random noise.
Love your reporting here Mike! Informative and entertaining - great combo.