The curious case of vanishing studies at Toronto City Hall

It should have been a simple question.

Stuck with news that it’ll cost a half-billion dollars to repair the crumbling Gardiner Expressway, Toronto city councillors spent some time at a budget meeting last month trying to figure out what happened to a never-completed study that was to look at options for removing part of the highway.

But staff couldn’t say what happened. Instead of answers, we got finger pointing. Maybe it was Waterfront Toronto that killed it, they said. Or maybe it had something to do with the 2010 mayoral election. Councillors were directed to look at footnote references to changing priorities buried dozens of pages deep in old budget notes.

None of it made much sense. All we really know is that, sometime after it was approved on a 30-11 vote in 2008, all work on the planned $7 million study was halted.

No public notice, no vote.

What’s worse is that this isn’t an isolated incident. Disappearing studies and projects have become one of the weird hallmarks of Mayor Rob Ford’s City Hall.

We saw it in 2010 with the light-rail plan known as Transit City. There, all work on an $8 billion project seemingly disappeared after the mayor gave a press conference announcing he didn’t like it. The province even played along.

And then there was the other debacle of the waterfront, in which a duly-approved plan for Toronto’s port lands was halted in the study phase to make way for a Ford-backed alternative vision that included a mall and a really big Ferris wheel.

In both those cases, cooler heads eventually prevailed and council restored both projects. But not before expensive delays.

It’d be easy to simply cast blame on the Ford administration for this kind of messy policy-making, but the problem goes deeper. This confused bureaucracy is symptomatic of a post-amalgamated Toronto in which nobody really knows who’s running the joint.

This city doesn’t have a real strong mayor system — Ford doesn’t get to call the shots without council approval — but staff and the provincial government often operate as if we do. So weird things happen. In all three cases of disappearing studies and halted work, the underlying theme is that they were stopped with an assumption that the mayor would have wanted it that way.

That’s a dangerous way to run a city, and speaks to a growing crisis of governance. Either Toronto adopts a real strong mayor system and makes way for real executive powers and the kind of unilateral decision-making that can kill studies dead, or city staff, the province and other civic partners need to get real and understand that nothing can happen — and nothing can vanish — without a fair

council vote.