Episode 02: John Tory, Mayor of Toronto

Steven Murphy:

From the corner of Bay and Dundas in downtown Toronto, this is Like Nobody's Business, a podcast of thought leadership and business innovation. I'm Dr. Steven Murphy, Dean of the Ted Rogers School of Management at Toronto Metropolitan University.

John Tory has been mayor of Toronto since 2014. Before becoming mayor, John Tory worked as a lawyer, political strategist, and businessman and was the leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario from 2004 to 2009. Mayor Tory joined TRSM's distinguished counsel in residence, Ralph Lean, to talk directly to TRSM students about law and business as part of the lecture series Law, Business, and Politics: The Real World.

Speaker 2:

In CBC News article, it stated that you are a strong supporter of changing the taxi and Uber regulations so that it can allow almost anyone to operate their personal car. My question is what steps are being taken to regulate and prevent more incidents such as this from occurring?

John Tory:

Well, let me deal with the most important part of this first, which is to do with how we chose to regulate Uber in the end, although that has become a model the people around the globe are looking at as being successful, but the most important thing is obviously that we make sure that Toronto residents, in any vehicle or in any place, are safe from being assaulted, sexually or otherwise and in that case, one of the advantages to the Uber system is that it actually does allow you more so than any other kind of vehicle of its kind to know who the driver is, to know when the pickup took place, and a lot of those kinds of details that oftentimes in a taxi cab you don't know.

And so we have to count on the company and they have been very cooperative when incidents of this kind have come up to provide that information to the police when an allegation of this kind or an incident of this kind happens, and I think that that is actually one advantage to that system in that the technology actually allows you to see who the passenger was, who the driver was, exactly what time and place things happened because it does record that. Having said all of that, I think we have to, and we certainly have indicated to Uber as we do to the taxi industry, that we have zero tolerance for that sort of thing and when I say we, we are the regulators of those businesses. We are not the police. The city oversees the police but the police operate under their own leadership accountable to a Police Services Board of which I am a member, and I can only say that I think the message has been sent loud and clear that there's zero tolerance for that kind of thing or anything even approaching it.

And I think as these incidents have come up, fortunately they have been few and far between, they've been death with by Uber and/or by the taxi companies and/or by us in a stricter manner as you possibly could expect and the police have, again, tried to do their job. I want to just say on the general subject of Uber and how it was admitted into the Toronto marketplace, they came into the Toronto marketplace in a way that I did not approve of where they just came in here and operated without any regulation at all, and just figured they could just arrive and so on. I came to the conclusion partly for reasons of what I think is sound strategy for the city and partly for reasons of accepting reality. By the time I took office, they were into the hundreds of thousands of customers in Toronto, and so if I was to do what people were urging me to do from the cab industry and other quarters who supported the status quo, they just wanted me to send them out of town packing and tell them to sort of roll up their carpets and leave.

I didn't think that was either realistic or good for the city. I believe this city should be serving as a home for people who have disruptive technologies who represent the way of doing things in the future, but that they have to come into a city and do business on a basis that is fair. So instead of trying to chance them out of town as they've tried to do in a number of other cities and had huge conflicts in the process, we worked instead to develop a series of regulations that essentially accomplish two things.

One, it brought Uber under regulation so there was a degree of control, and this is important to your question, the sexual assault part, that there were screenings done of the drivers that were satisfactory to us that were similar to the screenings that are done on cab drivers, screenings as in personal background checks that met a standard we set. Two, that there was insurance in place to protect people that is equivalent to what taxi cab drivers are required to have. And three, that the rules under which they operated were equitable vis a vis fair competition with the cab industry who've been around for a long time and paid money for their licenses.

At the same time, the second objective we were trying to set was to lessen the regulatory load on taxis so that they could compete more fairly because over time they'd become subject to a lot of long pages and books full of regulations, and we actually did reduce some of that regulatory load and reduce some of the requirements on that, and the idea was to create a circumstance in which people could be safe. First and foremost, safe from assault, safe from accidents, safe from drivers that had bad backgrounds, could have choice and including the adoption of and embracing of the latest technology of which Uber was a representative, and that they would compete fairly with taxis.

And I am proud of what we achieved there because you haven't heard much about it in terms of conflict since that time, and unlike some other cities where they "successfully" chased Uber out of town, we have Uber here and I quite frankly hope some of the other companies like Lyft will come here and compete as well so we'll have even more choice, because I think that's good for consumers to have choice as long as it's fair choice, safe choice, and regulated choice and I think that's what we have in Toronto now.

Speaker 4:

Why is it the financial obligation of Toronto's tax payers to subsidize your and other council members usurping of law, even if done for moral reasons, given the costly burden illegal immigrants often impose on the city services?

John Tory:

Well, I don't accept the premise of the question and what a sanctuary city is meant to mean, and I think anybody should take a look at the wording of what is said, and I think actually the notion of Toronto being a sanctuary city, if you look at it for what it is, is something that we would buy into as part of those sort of pretty basic values that I talked about earlier on. What it says is that if somebody shows up for a city of Toronto service, so if they show up to use the library or if they show up to public health to get a vaccination for their children, they're not going to be asked to show their documentation that proves their citizenship.

We will say look, they're a resident of the city. Their immigration status actually doesn't matter in the context of their getting their child vaccinated or using the library, and that it is not consistent with the way we generally do business that you'd be asked for your immigration papers. I mean, think about it for a minute. Some of you in this room are probably permanent residents of Canada as opposed to citizens. Do we go around saying to people, "We want you to show us your documentation to show whether you're a citizen or a permanent resident." No, we don't.

Now, I'm not condoning the fact that people will enter the country outside of the law and there are people who have done that over time and some of them have now lived here for 20 or 25 or 30 years and have had three or four children here who are Canadians themselves, and I would say that that is a failure of the federal governments over time of all parties, to sort of decide they were going to do something to allow those people to regularize their documentation because it's a politically explosive issue and nobody's been prepared to sort of deal with it, which would be the sort of fair and appropriate way to address the fact there are people living in our midst who every day perform important functions in the city working somewhere, doing work for people, and have families that go to school and so forth and so on.

But having said that, given that we have those people, are we going to get into a situation where we're going to start to get people to show their documentation that sort of proves what their citizenship is any time they're wanting to access a city service? And so I guess I would just say I'm comfortable with where we are as a sanctuary city because I think it sends the message out that obviously, and I said this in a letter I wrote on refugees today or yesterday to the Minister of Immigration, it is very important to me in the context of even our very open hearted and open minded and open arms approach to refugees in the current global context that due process be followed, we have a system that has worked well for us over time to apply due process to both those who are applying as refugees and to the country, to represent the country's best interests, and I think that has to continue, but at the same time I think we have to be open hearted and open minded with respect to the fact there are people in this city who are here today that we don't want to be.

For example, let me give you an even more stark example. Are we going to turn away somebody at a city operated shelter on a cold night like tonight because we have somehow somebody decides it's in their best interest to ask them to show their papers? Their papers with regard to their immigration status. Is that a relevant consideration to those people being admitted to a shelter overnight or not, and I would say it's not. They're human beings that are living in the city and they may be living in a different status or on a different basis than some of the rest of us are, and that should probably be resolved over time, but that it certainly shouldn't affect their access to basic services, which is really what the sanctuary city designation says.

Speaker 5:

As you know, recently there's been various hate crimes that have been occurring. Such examples are the anti-Semitic notes as well as the Muslim woman attacked both verbally and physically. In both situation, you commented saying, "Such actions are unacceptable." What would you like to see done in regards to the regulation and enforcement to minimize such actions?

John Tory:

Well the obvious response you often hear, and thank you for the question, is that we should sort of more strictly enforce the hate crime laws, but that's complicated and I don't know if you've discussed those laws but what actually has to happen there is that the police, in consultation with the [inaudible] attorneys, have to designate to give an offense as being something motivated by hatred and it then gets treated differently in terms of the penalty that's applied and so on, and that law's under review right now in Ottawa. I don't think law at the end of the day is going to represent the answer, because a lot of these people I would describe as being sort of deranged and obsessed people who the law to them doesn't really matter. I mean, the fact that like last night somebody would try to burn a Mosque is like, to me, such an act of treachery and so on that those people don't pay attention to what the law says.

So I think what we have to do, and I had a meeting yesterday in the wake of these events, the anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim events, I had a meeting of all the different faith leaders from every faith you could possibly imagine. I mean, when I say every one there was like 40 people in the room so there were 40 faiths represented but I'm sure there are others. But we have 40, or 20, 35 faith leaders in the room, and what they focused on was a couple of things. I would say coming out of that meeting, and we're now going to take the list away, they focused on education, and I know it sounds like something we would say, "Well, education." We always hear that and people will roll their eyes.

We simply have to have people understand more about each other's faiths, understand that the strength of Toronto is represented by the fact that people have come here from different faith groups that oftentimes didn't get along at all in other places where they might have come from, but have been able to coexist here on the basis that we made an effort to understand each other and to understand we're all in this together, and if we could have people learn about each other's faiths... And they told me some interesting stories yesterday about programs where people have gone to visit a group of Jewish leaders will go to a Mosque and they'll talk to each other about their respective faiths.

And what you figure out, by the way, because when you're in a job like mine I've been to every kind of religious institution that you could name, a religious place, and seen every kind of service and you come to realize, of course, that pretty well all of them are based on the same core set of values about how you treat each other and things you don't do and things you do and how you look after each other and so forth. They really are. I mean, the Quran and the Bible and the Torah and so on, if you look at those they contain many of the same fundamental underlying values and I think the more we understand that, the more we realize what an artificial division it is between people who are Muslim and Jewish and Christian and Buddhist and all the rest.

So education was something they named and then secondly they said, "We've got to keep demonstrating in the city every day the fact that we do live differently here." We are weaving a different narrative for the world of how instead of moving in the direction as we're seeing in many places in the world, including some close to home where we're trying to polarize people based on their faith or their skin color or a bunch of other stuff, their sexual orientation, what have we done here? We've said, "No. We recognize people are going to be different. We're going to celebrate that. We're going to learn from that. We're going to strengthen ourselves for that," and they felt that the outward articulation of that by leaders but also events that show that you'll have people standing together.

This is one of the great strengths of Pride in Toronto is that Pride isn't a million people who are all LGBTQ. I mean, there are many who are but there are lots of other people who aren't who are there to say, "Hey, we all live here together. You're fabulous fellow citizens. We're celebrating that you've had certain victories in your rights and certain other challenges that still lie in front of you," and so on and so on. It's a celebration, and so that was the underlying message that came from this was yes, make sure the law is applied and strengthened as much as it can be, make sure we make a huge effort at education so people understand the importance of this and not letting our way of life get messed up by what's going on around the world, and thirdly to make sure we have people see every day the strength that comes from diversity and the strength that comes from inclusion, as opposed to the downside of polarization that you're seeing happening elsewhere.

And so I'm trying to be upfront about that every single day, just about, and there are people who criticize me for that because they have a slightly different view and if they don't like it, I guess they can vote me out at the next election and I hope they won't, for a bunch of reasons, but I hope that's one of them that we need to stay the course on our values. Our values are the ones that are admired around the world and I think we are not perfect, but we're weaving a much different narrative than many other places.

Speaker 6:

My question for you is when it comes to the public safety and pedestrian safety, why would such an important issue be underfunded and why are politicians reluctant to take a stand and push for higher fines in driver accountability when it comes to distracted driving?

John Tory:

Well that's a good question, [Tassy], and I would only say to you that a lot of things that are controversial strike fear into the hearts of politicians. The question of underfunding is a different question and I think I covered that by sort of saying that one person would say it's underfunded, one person would say it's overfunded. So I think what we did was we established a budget, which is in the 10s of millions of dollars of new money put in this year's budget, to do the things that we felt were going to be effective in cutting down to zero, hopefully, the number of pedestrians that were killed, because we did have a very, very unacceptable year last year. I mean, any death is unacceptable but last year it got to kind of new record levels, and we're actually out there doing the things now that need to be done.

So when you mention speed limits, there are speed limits being changed all over the city. All over the city, the road safety plan that sets a zero target changed speed limits in many areas where there had been a particular incidence of pedestrians and drivers getting into collisions, and so those were changed. In the city of Toronto itself, like the city of Toronto, the downtown part, they have a community council. It took the decision to change all the speed limits on their streets because it's a local decision they can make within the context of our city government.

We have sought and received permission, although it's not been legislated yet, it's frustrating because it takes so long, to reintroduce photo radar, which was very controversial. I mean, a lot of people didn't like it but we got permission to reintroduce it in school zones so that in school zones we can cover a lot more of them, make kids safer but not have police officers' time tied up sitting in a car with a radar gun, which is frankly the old fashioned, very expensive, non-sustainable way of doing it. We are changing the configuration of the roads all over the city, the intersections, so that we're making it more necessary for cars to pay more attention to pedestrians because they're forced to by the configuration of the roads.

We've changed traffic signals all over the city to take account of the fact that seniors with the aging population are taking longer to cross the street so we should allow them that time even if it makes drivers wait a little bit longer so seniors can get across the street and not be unsafe. We're creating senior safety zones, which are zones where there will be signage and speed limits and so on that will be different because a majority, about 60% of all the pedestrian deaths that happened last year happened to people who were, I think, 55 or 60 years of age and older, so there are a lot of things we're doing as part of this plan and it's not representing any lack of courage or boldness. There's only so much you can do at a time. I think the money that's been allocated is certainly very sufficient to get a very substantial amount done in the next few years and we're out doing it because we take this very seriously and we have set the goal of saying zero, which is a goal that we're going to work hard to achieve.

Speaker 7:

With cost of living rising, the fact that the government is not providing funding for affordable housing is a big problem in one of the most expensive cities in the country. From your knowledge, what steps if any have been taken to include a benefit that would help low income Canadians in the next federal budget scheme? In addition, what steps have been taken to uphold Trudeau government to his promise of affordable housing?

John Tory:

Well I have been like a broken record on the latter point, which is to make sure the federal government comes through with its commitments that they made during the election campaign, and I will tell you they have been good partners for Toronto on transit funding so far, and we've had extensive discussions because they haven't announce their plan for housing funding. It's going to come in the budget will come sometime in the next probably 30 days, and I have joined together with all of the other big city mayors, so we're a united front on this, in asking them to specifically carve out, because they have something now call a social infrastructure fund which could cover a whole bunch of things, and we've said housing is so urgent in the big cities that we've calculated a number we think that would be adequate to allow us to get a much better head start than the rather small number of 4000 units spread across the country. That doesn't do much when there's thousands of people looking for affording housing.

And so we've asked them to carve out of the infrastructure plan over the next number of years 12.6 billion dollars for housing and Toronto would be the single biggest recipient of that money, simply because the scale of the problem here is bigger than it is obviously anywhere else in the country. If they come through with that, and I have reason to believe they will, first of all you'll see me commending them heartily because that was the right thing to do. Secondly, we've said to them they must insist in the next round of announcement of this money that the province's match their money, because what happened with the transit money is in some provinces, the province did not match the federal government's money and if they do match then you get obviously twice as much, and then the municipality adds some of its own money and you end up with a very substantial sum of money to build affordable housing because addressing the supply issue is really the number one key to trying to make more affordable housing available to more people.

Simply passing laws to say, "Well, we're going to put on a foreign buyers tax or we're going to impose rent controls," I happen to believe that when rent controls were imposed in this province previously back 25 or 30 years ago, they didn't work because what they succeeded in doing was creating a false environment in which rents were controlled, but all that succeeded in doing was making sure that nobody built any rental apartments at all. There were none built for probably 20 years in Ontario because people said, "Well, why would we put our money into that when we're going to get no return because the government's saying we're not allowed to get a proper return on their money? So instead we'll go build something else." They either build single family homes or they went and built apartments somewhere else, and I just think they've been proven over and over again in all parts of the world not to work, and so if you don't favor that then you have to favor the only other alternative, which is increase the supply of affordable rental housing, and I'll mention one last thing.

We have taken some steps as the city, regardless of what the other governments do, to encourage developers to build affordable rental housing by, for example, putting up I think 15 now valuable pieces of city land. We've said, "We'll put up that land which is a big cost of a developer, obviously, when they come to build a building, if you will come along and build only affordable rental and ownership housing. It has to be affordable and we will either give you that land, we'll lease it to you for a dollar a year, or make some very favorable arrangement with that piece of land," and on the first three pieces of land out of the 15 or whatever the number is, we've had huge competitive response to it, so we have a competition among developers to get the right to build it, and we've created as opposed to the last year before I took office where we had zero units of affordably housing, I think this year we've already approved hundreds of units of affordable housing that are going to be built.

And it's still not enough, but I'm hopeful with this money that's going to come, I'm confident in the budget we'll both be able to get on with the appalling backlog of repairs on the social housing in which we ask our most vulnerable people to live, citizens, and the supply of affordable housing that you talked about.

Speaker 8:

What made you change your mind, and do you believe that the issue of carding, this practice, has really made this city a safer place to live?

John Tory:

No, and that's why the Police Services Board... I mean, the way you described the history, I won't go back and give you the entire history, but the bottom line is that by virtue of provincial regulation that they subsequently took on and passed a regulation province wide which the Toronto Police Services Board has adopted and put a policy in place underneath that regulation. The practice of carding, which is you have to be careful how you use these words, but carding was the arbitrary stopping of people in the street who were not suspected of or accused of doing anything merely for the purposes of kind of asking them questions about who they were and why they were there and so forth and so on.

And if you said to me do I believe, and of course the facts have shown that especially in the years when carding was most prevalent which was around 2011 and 2011, when in Toronto there were 250000 people and the carding name came from the fact that there was a card that police officers filled out that had information about the person they stopped, and there were 250000 people stopped in each of those years, and disproportionately they were people of color and from racialized communities and in all cases, though, of the carding pretty much they were people who weren't doing anything. They were just sort of walking down the street or wherever they were, and it might have been in the middle of the night, it might have been in the middle of the day.

And do I think under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in this country that we have the right to walk down the street and not be stopped arbitrarily unless there is some suspicion that we're involved in a crime or for purposes of investigating a crime that's occurred? No, I don't think that police should be doing that and I voted accordingly to institute a policy that is now in place and the training has happened underneath that policy, it goes a couple of steps further which you'll be interested to know that that doesn't mean, and that's one of the things that's been misunderstood in the city is that people now think no one will ever be stopped by the police again unless they literally sort of just left the bank with a gun in their hand and a bag of money.

The police are now still have to go on stopping people because they might believe they're suspicious of something happening or because they are trying to investigate a crime, but they now have to inform people if they do stop them that you have the right not to answer the police's questions if they are just asking you how you're going or why you're where you are, and they have to tell you that right proactively and say to you, "Now, you do have the right not to talk to me if you don't want to," and that didn't necessarily sit that well with the police who felt that would make it difficult for them to have conversations that can be very beneficial.

I mean, conversations between the police and people in the community lies at the heart of having a proper relationship between the police and the community where they build trust in each other, but the bottom line is I can tell you that the policies that are in place today if you read them, and are voted for by me and other members of the Police Board, it was unanimous, quite expressly set out that this arbitrary stopping of people on the street just in the hopes you might find something out or you might take down some information about them has now been precluded from happening and there are very strict rules in place, including the proactive information to be given to people about their rights that now applies and information about how the data that is collected from people will be safeguarded, so that's where the thing stands today.

It's a very difficult issue and I had to learn about it, I'll be honest with you. And you know, I'm a [inaudible]. I'm the first mayor, I think, ever elected to the mayoralty city of Toronto without having first served on the city council, so if I told you I had a lot to learn when I walked into this place where many of the people had served there for 25 years, including about the police and about the practices of the police and how things unfolded, and I'll admit I've made some mistakes in things that I've said or done on some of these issues.

I'm a human being. I'm not perfect, far from it. My wife would tell you that in spades, and my kids, and my grandchildren, but I'm a human being and I'm learning as I go and I hope I'm working hard and learning fast, but a lot of these issues are incredibly complicated and you're going to put a foot wrong in the odd time. I think I've done not too much of that, but that was an issue where I got off to a bit of a rocky start in terms of exactly how to deal with it the right way, but I think we arrived at the right place in the end, which is what's really important.

Speaker 9:

Thank you. I hope you see that the citizens of Toronto are very well served. You really know the issues. You're not afraid to talk about all the issues and you work really hard, so you got my support and I hope you got everyone in the room's. Thanks, John.

John Tory:

One last thing, if any of you have any really good stories about Ralph for the roast next week, you could email them to me and I'll be sure to incorporate them and write a routine and ask for additional extra time to deal with them. Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it. The questions were great. Thank you.

Steven Murphy:

Like Nobody's Business is a presentation of Toronto Metropolitan University's Ted Rogers School of Management. For more information about TRSM, visit torontomu.ca/tedrogersschool. I'm Dr. Steven Murphy. Thank you for listening.