Toronto election: It's time to sweat the small stuff

When I tell people I write about Toronto City Hall, they invariably want to talk to me about city hall. And, of course, complain about city hall.

What’s interesting, though, is that the angriest complaints I hear from Torontonians aren’t about the big-ticket issues that get the spotlight. Sure, people like to gripe about transit or taxes or, sure, Mayor Rob Ford, but more commonly, people are frustrated with more localized issues that don’t receive much coverage.

They’re sweating the small stuff.

Take, for example, the problem of utility work coordination, which it seems virtually everyone can relate to. It starts like this: a crew shows up and starts digging up your road or sidewalk. They could be with the gas company or the cable company, but it hardly matters to you because the result is the same: there’s an annoying hole in the street.

Eventually the hole gets patched up, but then, a short time later, another truck appears, and — surprise! — starts digging the same hole all over again.

Behind the scenes, there are all sorts of reasons why something like this might happen. There’s at least a half-dozen companies doing utility work in this city. And they don’t communicate very well. Plus, the city’s utilities are old, and not perfectly mapped, so digging up any given street brings all kinds of unexpected problems that require unscheduled fixes.

But those kinds of excuses don’t change the fact that watching a hole get dug, refilled and then dug again seems incredibly illogical and wasteful.

There has to be a better way to do things.

The same goes for a host of other smaller-scale issues that are frequently the subject of complaints. People want to know why, for example, it’s hard to get any advance notice of construction projects that’ll impact their neighbourhood. And they want to know why the final version of projects never seem to fully match their initial renders or budgets, as if  Toronto’s execution can’t match its ambition.

There’s more, too. They want to know why all the garbage cans in city parks were replaced by ugly plastic bins. And they want to know why registering a kid for a city-run recreation program requires parents to enter themselves in a high-stakes race against time.

I could go on. There are countless examples. Some of them may seem inconsequential, but any credible mayoral candidate needs to consider this stuff. Because it’s what people are talking about. For many, municipal elections aren’t about the cost of government but about the value they seem to get from it. Elections are about making government — and the city — work just a little better. Find ways to do that and we’ll all have fewer things to complain about.