Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Why was Rob Ford able to kill Transit City unilaterally?

On his first day as mayor, Rob Ford came into work early and killed Transit City.

With all the other things that happened since then, I've forgotten how this happened and why it was possible.  I was under the impression that it needed to be voted on by Council, and googling around the idea I see lots of people saying that he shouldn't have been able to do it unilaterally and it should have been voted on by Council.

But he did it and, at the very least, set transit back a year until Council was able to reinstate it a year later.  Why was he able to do that?  Why did it take Council a year fix it?

I feel like I should understand this before I vote for the next mayor. Will the next mayor be able to do similar things unilaterally?

4 comments:

jay said...

Didn't he have a lot of supporters on city council at first?

laura k said...

That's what I would have thought - that it wasn't Rob Ford acting unilaterally so much as a Rob Ford coup. Not really sure, though. It's surprisingly difficult to access recent history from newspapers online. I think you'd need to go through your library website to see archived articles.

impudent strumpet said...

I have the impression that he managed to kill it before a vote was taken, like he made an announcement and then the TTC began implementing that announcement. But I'm not 100% certain that I'm remembering that correctly.

The problem with when I look up newspaper articles from the time is that they were updated (i.e. within the first 24 to 48 hours of being posted). So the information I'm looking for is taken as a fait accompli and the articles are discussing the next round of things that happened.

(It's analogous to if I were looking for articles reporting on a widespread power outage, but everything I googled upon said "Power's back on now!")

laura k said...

Right. To do real (serious, accurate) research involving newspapers, one needs an article database.

You probably have access to that through your TPL card. :)