Miller's Folly

The current strike by Toronto's garbage collectors and other City workers has usefully clarified the underlying ineptitude of Mayor David Miller's administration. The obstinacy with which the strikers refuse to contemplate even modest 'give-backs' has not gone down at all well with the local public, and their fundamental unreasonableness has a nice synecdoche in their insistence on retaining the privilege of converting as many as 18 sick days a year into paid vacation time (these can be banked over the course of a career such that an employee about to retire can do so six months early if enough of them have accumulated).

As is generally the case with such strikes, their consequent inconveniences fall disproportionately on those who least equipped to shoulder them. Many Torontonians (to be precise, those with money enough) can make alternative arrangements for the removal of their trash or the babysitting of their children. Not all, however, are so lucky. For single mothers working at minimum wage jobs, the child care centres now temporarily shuttered are indispensable, and without them they must either have obliging friends, relatives, or neighbours, or stay home in order to attend to their children themselves, with precious little chance of finding the job still there when the strike is over. If we define essential services so narrowly as to cover only those that protect life and limb (policemen, firefighters, hospital personnel), the strike does not involve them. By a definition that encompasses services whose withdrawal pushes those who depend on them into agonizing choices, it does.

But the strikers can make one point in their own defence. The Mayor, they note, is demanding of them something he has not demanded of other municipal workers up to now. The police, the firefighters, the employees of the Toronto Transit Commission; all emerged from contract negotiations with most of what they wanted and virtually nothing by way of concessions. After first taking office as Mayor, Miller allowed his NDP membership to lapse, presumably on the theory that a partisan affiliation could get in the way of negotiating with other levels of government. But you can tell from his behaviour that he remains at the beck and call of the public sector unions, card-carrying dipper or not. He has not only pandered to this constituency, he has done what he can to enlarge it; the City payroll has swelled briskly under his stewardship, with Toronto adding well over 1,000 new full-time workers this year alone, plummeting revenues and faltering economy notwithstanding.

Efficient management of the municipal fisc has not been the Mayor's overriding priority, symbolic gestures such as the brandishing of an ostentatiously 'new broom' aside. Indeed, the realm of the symbolic seems to be David Miller's natural habitat; his most visible initiatives have taken the form of crusades against minor if not largely notional irritants to public wellbeing such as plastic grocery bags, styrofoam coffee cups, and insufficiently nutritious hot dogs. When it comes to the financial picture, he prefers to blame others. That Toronto's budgetary woes are entirely the result of Harris-era downloading and McGuinty-era service mandates is for him an article of faith, and he has gone so far as to sue the Province rather than improve the efficiency with which municipal services are delivered.

Miller has defended his openhanded handling of labour questions by suggesting that those who perform the City's work should be able to afford living here. A reasonable enough point, but he pushes it too far. Toronto trash collectors and many of their colleagues performing other tasks that are not, to put it kindly, particularly demanding, are compensated at rates of well over $20 an hour. They also enjoy far greater job security than the overwhelming majority of private sector employees. That they should make modest sacrifices in a climate of economic difficulty is hardly unreasonable and it is a mark of Miller's indulgent way with the public sector workforce that it took something like our current economic difficulties to compel what feeble resistance to union intransigence he has yet mustered. He has yet to ask the Ontario Government to enact back-to-work legislation, despite palpably rising public impatience.

The trash collectors and their colleagues presumably calculated that strike action on the eve of the tourist season would maximize their leverage (so far, the management of Pride Week events has been complicated and some Canada Day events have been canceled altogether or scaled back). But it's hardly maximized public sympathy for them, or for the Mayor. Miller's popularity was less than it had been a year ago, according to recent polls, even before the strike. Now at least one survey has him losing the next election to his onetime opponent, former provincial PC leader John Tory. It would be premature to conclude that his best days are behind him politically, but it's not too early to point out that the central weakness of his leadership has been exposed, and to an electorate that seems less indulgent of him than he is of City unions.