T.O.’s blame game is getting old

Big number: 393, the number of overdue reports requested by Toronto council per an August update to Council’s Report Request Log.

In the early days of the pandemic, Toronto Mayor John Tory started using a particular phrase to describe the urgency with which city hall was implementing policies and plans to deal with the impacts of COVID-19.

He called it “wartime speed.” And while not all the mayor’s many turns of phrase necessarily work for me, this one proved apt. “Wartime speed” was a reasonable way to describe how quickly Toronto’s municipal government moved to deal with the realities of the virus.

In the weeks and months after the state of emergency was declared, bylaws requiring mask-wearing and distancing were put in place. Hotels were leased for use as homeless shelters. Programs were designed and launched with the kind of haste I’ve never seen at city hall, like ActiveTO, creating space for exercise and active transportation, and CaféTO, offering a lifeline to restaurants through expanded patio space.

Later, the city continued with the wartime speed to open mass vaccination sites that did a pretty darn good job of getting a huge percentage of us vaccinated.

But still, as the city government moves its focus toward pandemic recovery, I worry that the wartime speed Tory liked to talk about is throttling down. Some divisions at city hall still haven’t returned to full pre-pandemic service levels, and programs continue to face huge delays, with the pandemic still offered as the reason.

For instance, I heard from a neighbour last week who had lodged a complaint to 311 about the sorry state on Mill Street, between the Distillery District and Corktown Common park. Condo construction has spilled onto the sidewalks on both sides, creating a maze of fencing and pylons. For people in wheelchairs or with strollers, it’s often virtually unpassable.

But the complaint to 311 didn’t do much. “Encroachment investigations are currently suspended due to COVID-19,” was the reply, along with a request to email in photos so staff could “refer for consideration.”

The whole thing baffled me. More than a year and a half into this pandemic, encroachment investigations — that’s what the city calls it when bylaw officers look at cases where streets and sidewalks are blocked without proper permissions and permits — still aren’t happening?

I reached out to a city spokesperson for some clarification. She confirmed that, yes, the city still isn’t inspecting like it used to.

“Proactive investigations of some construction encroachments remain paused as bylaw officers are focused on enforcement of pandemic response issues and programs,” city spokesperson Marcela Mayo wrote to me in an email, adding that complaints submitted to 311 about blocked sidewalks could still result in action if it’s deemed the encroachments “pose an immediate or serious public safety concern within the public right of way.” There’s no timeline for when full investigations will resume.

That kind of answer could have seemed reasonable in the early days of the pandemic, when everyone was still scrambling to deal with the unexpected. But 18 months in, it feels a bit ridiculous to still be blaming COVID for reduced service levels for something as fundamental as proactively making sure sidewalks aren’t blocked.

But COVID is taking the blame for a lot of things. At the October meeting of Toronto council, Coun. Kristyn WongTam requested an update on the city’s requirement for Uber and other vehicle-for-hire drivers to go through an accredited training program. Council approved the requirement in 2019, after a passenger in an Uber was killed in a crash.

Alas, the training requirement, approved to save lives, still isn’t in place two years after approval. The reason? COVID.

There’s a huge pile of similar delays, some of which predate COVID and some of which have been made worse by COVID. In a data set last updated in August, the city reported that an incredible 393 reports requested by the mayor and council are now past their due date. That includes 18 requests related to pedestrian safety and infrastructure, 30 related to transit and 66 related to housing. These requests from the mayor and council to staffers for reports are generally how progress starts. A whole lot of progress is stuck in limbo.

I don’t mean any of this to sound harsh. The pandemic performance of staff at city hall was impressive in the toughest of circumstances. But time is running out for using COVID as a reason for delays and inaction. City hall must put in place the budgets and staffing levels needed to really drive rapid civic and economic recovery. This war is changing, but it’s not over. City hall is still going to need that wartime speed.

Time is running out for using COVID-19 as a reason for delays and inaction at city hall