City Council: Use Power To Change: BENN

Knoxdale-Merivale Councillor Sean Devine wants someone to speak truth to power in OC Transpo’s next GM.

What does the cliche “speak truth to power” really mean? More often than not it is rhetoric from a self-interest group, presenting its opinions to the public. But let’s not quibble about distinctions that do make a difference.

Rather than focus on Devine’s selective memory about wanting to hear someone speak truth to power, let’s focus on a higher level – to council as a whole.

Councillors need to park their ideologies and get on with the mundane tasks of providing oversight to city staff. Oversight meaning no longer delegating authority to staff to make decisions that involve hundreds of millions of dollars. Asking pertinent, penetrating questions at committee and council meetings, to delve into what is not in the staff report. Overseeing staff decisions and the execution thereof is far more important than the sum of the virtue signals that they have passed, often on issues that are beyond the scope of council’s responsibilities.

Councillors must acknowledge, out loud and in public, that they passed a budget with a $36-million hole in the middle of it. That doing so was a flagrant abuse of their statutory requirement to not approve an unbalanced budget.

Councillors should pay particular attention to what the city auditor general and Ernst & Young reports have to say about Lansdowne 2.0. They should ask staff to reconcile the differences between the staff reports and the reports that cast serious doubt about the financial viability of the rehabilitation project.

Councillors need to stop whining about the poor quality of public transit and take responsibility for their contribution to the failures of this critical element of municipal services. They should acknowledge that what we are experiencing today is the result of underfunding public transit in budget after budget after budget. All of this was an effort to curry short-term political favour (cough … unrealistically low tax-rate increases … cough) with the electorate.

Councillors need to acknowledge that they didn’t provide enough oversight on the decisions made by OC Transpo during the conversion from buses-only public transit to buses taking riders to LRT stations. To acknowledge that they failed to take the time to understand that by allowing OC Transpo management to reduce the maintenance work on older buses was a fools’ game.

Councillors must acknowledge that they have made no visible progress on addressing the wheel-axle hub failures on the Confederation Line trains since 2019.

Councillors must acknowledge that the city has allowed the construction of the western legs of the Stage 2 LRT expansion to go on far too long. That the city has placed the convenience of the contractor too far above the consequent inconvenience that has been foisted on the local residents and businesses.

Councillors need to acknowledge that continually deferring decisions that will cost them politically is not something of which they should be proud. Decisions like what to do with the ever-growing quantity of curb-side refuse. That endorsing a social-engineering fantasy focused on how to reduce the excess quantities that are periodically placed at the curb by a very small segment of the population was a mistake. That ignoring the fundamental concept that the quantity of curb-side waste correlates directly with the population of the city is downright foolish. Councillors need to make an actual decision about an actual solution. Where will the city put the curb-side waste next? Burn it, bury it, some combination of that?  It is time to make a decision. Make it.

If Devine wants someone to speak truth to power, then he and his colleagues had best acknowledge that they are “the power” and just that because they don’t like what they hear doesn’t mean that what they are being told is wrong.

Ron Benn, a finance executive, has been a member of the Centrepointe Community Association for the better part of three decades.

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