Dear Toronto City Councillors:
Thank you for your very sensible vote to restore LRTs yesterday. I immensely appreciate seeing political cooperation to do what's right for our city, and look very forward to seeing more of the same in the future.
In the interest of achieving that, I have something I'd like you all to think about. Rob Ford unilaterally announced that Transit City is dead on December 1, 2010. Your successful vote to reverse that decision came yesterday, on February 8, 2012. That's over 14 months. Even if everything goes absolutely perfectly from now on, the best possible outcome is we're 14 months behind where we should be.
So here are two questions you need to think about quietly to yourselves and then brainstorm together until you get workable answers:
1. Why did it take you 14 months to reverse such a destructive decision that the mayor had no authority to make?
2. What will you do to make it possible to prevent or reverse future destructive decisions in a more timely manner, so we don't lose a year every time the mayor does something stupid?
I'm not posing these questions to make you defend yourselves. (If anyone posts spinny damage control in the comments I will be very unimpressed.) They are not for answering immediately, or slapping together a talking point for a briefing note and checking off the list. I'm posing these questions so you'll actually think about them, at length and over a period of time. Let them fester in your brains, think of ideas, share them and build on them with other councillors, and ultimately come up with a way to prevent this problem from happening again.
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