Ottawa city council’s uncritical budgetary nadir
It’s all just theatre now. But the inevitability of the outcome might be what it takes to start to chip away at a generally-unshakeable Watson coalition.
The reality of the situation—one that many councillors would happily acknowledge exists but otherwise ignore its implications—is that much of the City of Ottawa is crumbling under the weight of itself. Many of the city’s roads, as Marianne Wilkinson pointed out, are abysmal; tennis courts sit in disrepair city-wide; 51 per cent of the infrastructure under the purview of the parks and rec department are listed as being in ‘poor’ to ‘very poor’ condition. Just about everyone on council agrees that the city’s assets are in poor repair, and yet city staff say that we are spending about $70 million less than we need to in order to fix things.
The problem, of course, is that agreeing about that fact doesn’t mean you’ll actually do anything about it. It’s politically just too hard. The 2018 budget is a good case-in-point for this: while everyone on council agreed that it was a problem, the only concerted effort to solve it came in the form of a 0.5% tax levy, introduced only days before the budget vote.
That it was a late-game hail mary pass is, to be fair, one of the motion’s weakest points. As Diane Deans pointed out on Twitter, however, it’s not like they had much choice: procedurally, Ottawa budgeting is set up in such a way that makes it difficult to ask for more money once the draft budget has been tabled. I doubt it was their only choice, but the cleverness of the motion was that it didn’t feel shifty in the slightest.
Little over the last few months or so has done as much to clearly demarcate the battle lines on council as this motion. That left wing has been fairly apparent for a while; on any progressive issue, you can usually count on at least four or five of a left wing comprising councillors Fleury, Nussbaum, McKenney, Leiper, Chernushenko and Deans to vote with one another.
(As an aside: one of the most significant structural points about Ottawa politics is that no more than two or three of these six councillors are on any one committee, effectively kneecapping their strength at the committee level.)
The motion ultimately failed, as just about every observer predicted that it would. Its significance was apparent early on, however. Crucially, in my mind, it laid a bit of a roadmap for council’s left wing to start to build support outside of themselves. You can win exurban councillors like Wilkinson, on issues like road maintenance. You can win budget hawks like Rick Chiarelli who, in his own words, knows when its time to stop digging. (For what it’s worth, with a little bit more time, I think you could have won Mark Taylor, who is highly involved with the Association of Municipalities Ontario [AMO], who spent much of the year putting together a proposal to fix the province-wide infrastructure gap, only to be shot down by provincial politicians.)
“We have to be aware that the day of reckoning is coming,” said Jeff Leiper at council. Every councillor running in 2018 will have to figure out how to explain how they want to fix that infrastructure gap; for anyone running against an incumbent next year, the debate over the infrastructure levy and the rest of Wednesday’s council meeting exposed a patch of flesh that can no longer be explained away as easily as it otherwise might have been.
Undergirding everything that took place at council on Wednesday is the growing appearance that council is now serving largely as a sycophant body for Mayor Watson’s low-tax politics. In September, Eli El-Chantiry expressed dismay to me at the mandated two-per-cent cap (as it related to policing), calling the police board’s budget an election-year effort. But it appeared that he failed to see that as a universal problem: when it was credibly pointed out that the city-wide budget struggles under much of the same pressures that the police budget does—namely, that reserve funds are being raided to pay for stuff now—El-Chantiry remained steadfast in his support for the two-per-cent cap.
The willingness of some members of council to support a low-tax agenda without much question was laid bare during the budget debate. Shortly into Wednesday’s council meeting, it was revealed that the city had received what was, in effect, a $10-million windfall. Despite some questions by Coun. Diane Deans, there was next to no sustained pressure on either Mayor Jim Watson or city treasurer Marian Simulik to explain what they knew, when they knew it and (crucially) who they told about it.
The information, said Simulik, was made available on Friday afternoon. At some point over the weekend and into the early parts of the week, the treasurer’s office had shared it with the mayor and city manager Steve Kanellakos. For the mayor, who had spent much of the past week taking aim on social media at councillors who dared to step out against him, this was a political golden ticket. Certainly, he treated it as such: he admitted during council that he shared it with a select group of councillors to “gauge” (and it’s fair to read that as “undercut”) support for Leiper and Deans’ motion.
Given the bewilderment that was clear among councillors Deans, Leiper, McKenney, and other members of the so-called Group of Eight, it’s fair to say that none of them were told that the city
That point bears repeating: the mayor had information that was politically relevant and had direct bearing on what a number of councillors were working on, and he chose to trot it out at the last minute. Rather than do what Watson often does best—build behind-the-scenes consensus—he took the easy, and cheap, political win on the floor of council. The levy was always going to fail at council, and if there had been precisely $0 extra for infrastructure, Watson would have been fine with that. His comments to reporters last week were fairly clear on that point.
Walking on an extra ten mill at the eleventh hour? That’s cynical showmanship.
That not a single councillor who opposed the levy was willing to ask the tough questions about that money, and the way it came to fall in Ottawa’s lap, should be deeply concerning to Ottawa residents.
The sycophantic relationship that much of council has with the mayor’s tax politics even borders on the bizarre: Alan Hubley called a $100,000 one-time injection of cash for community groups a “secret fund” and refused to support it without a clear roadmap at this point for how it would be used, only moments after supporting the spending of $10 million without just such a roadmap.
There are only two ways to read that, and they aren’t much different from one another: either Hubley has twisted himself into that mental navy knot out of earnest belief that the $100,000 constitutes a secret fund, or because it’s a politically convenient way to score a win over lefty councillors. Neither, I submit, is something anyone in Ottawa should feel good about.
It was never, of course, even close. Nearly five hours after debate began, it ended the way we all expected: 19–5 in favour of the budget, with McKenney, Deans, Chiarelli, Leiper and Nussbaum voting against it. The budget that passed on December 13 looks a hell of a lot like the budget that was first presented on November 8. No surprises there, and no major changes to the budget—something that everyone expected when it was first unveiled. One of the common talking points for opponents of the 0.5% levy was that it wasn’t the right way to do it, but what became obvious was that there aren’t really many mechanisms for councillors to change the draft budget. There’s a solid argument to be made that it was a draft budget in name alone. Everything that really counted was more or less set in stone. Between the way procedure is set up, and the fact that committee make-up has severely curtailed the power of council’s left wing, there wasn’t much anyone could do.
One thing seems clear, about the budget: this is probably the last year that this budget could be passed in this way. Deans put it best when she said, “we’re setting ourselves up for the day of reckoning that comes in 2019.”
(City hall columnists have done a fairly good job of pointing out the budget’s contradictions, with Joanne Chianello at the CBC and David Reevely at the Citizen going further into the numbers than I care to at this moment. Go read them.)
Between the immutability of the budget, the political deference shown to the mayor by most centre- and right-leaning members of council, and the way a $10-million political windfall was accepted essentially without question, the power dynamics of Ottawa city council under Mayor Jim Watson are clear.
But there is, I sense, some change afoot. After the Salvation Army’s proposal was passed by planning committee, Mathieu Fleury took aim at the Mayor’s outspoken support for the project, and accused him, in more words, of whipping the votes against him. I’ve had conversations with councillors who have expressed similar concern for the way politics often happen behind closed doors in Ottawa.
Some councillors are even taking aim at the budget process itself. “The budget should be prepared on the basis of what are the real basic needs of the municipality” asked Marianne Wilkinson, “rather than putting the costs first and the needs afterwards. It causes confusion in the public, and consternation often among the members of council.” She was proposing a non-specific alteration to the way budgeting is done in the city—a sign, perhaps, that the support Watson enjoys for a top-down budgeting style is not infinite.
One thing I used to point out quite often was how rare the type of political theatre that I was used to on Toronto’s city council was in Ottawa. Votes were rarely close. (As Leiper is fond of noting, he often loses planning votes 9–1.) But what was on display on Wednesday, with the final bits of the debate playing out as I write this, was a different kind of theatre—a theatre of preordained outcomes, of treating 2 per cent guidelines as uncrossable lines, and of acknowledging underspending while at the same pretending it doesn’t matter.
While you’re here:
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