Why losing reporters at city hall is bad for all of us

This is a bit of a rant inspired by a tweet, which in turn was inspired by news.

Today, reporter Scott Johnston tweeted that Global News has laid him off. Johnston, who reports for Edmonton’s 630CHED, which Global owns, has been a reporter for 27 years. If you ever go to Edmonton City Hall, you almost always see him there. Johnston’s very much a reporter from the old mold — covering his beat, reporting near everything that comes up.

Scott Johnston (left) was the person who didn’t miss anything at city hall. Photo: Mack Male/Flickr

Having tried to emulate this old-school approach when I had the Yukon legislature beat at the Yukon News, back in 2005-2006 (receipts here), I can relate to how much work this is, how nuanced your understanding of issues becomes, how essential your reporting of often mundane, banal facts is not only to keep power in check but keep people on the outside informed. Our system depends on well-informed actors making reasonably well-informed decisions.

That’s why I see this as a dark day.

As many city councillors will tell you, their experience at the doors when campaigning is that voters are upset about things, but aren’t at all clear which level of government is responsible. Sure, this goes all ways, and isn’t unique to city politicians: It’s doubtful federal candidates in Edmonton don’t hear complaints about potholes, or hospitals, or that provincial ones don’t hear complaints about Don Iveson.

Still, city politics and issues are unique in that cities are limited to what they can do by the province. Edmonton can’t unilaterally decide to bring in new ways to raise money to pay for infrastructure, for example. Instead, it has limited tools and lots of direct contact with the often angry public. So councillors at the doors hearing anger have even less agency to do much about it.

The reason today is particularly dark is because the more we get away from fact-based discussions on city issues in Edmonton, the more people who work outside the world of facts and fairness will be rewarded. Which is a polite way to say the more people who manipulate and spin will see opportunity.

“As many city councillors will tell you, their experience at the doors when campaigning is that voters are upset about things, but aren’t at all clear which level of government is responsible. ”

For example, almost all discussions I’ve seen on social media about city “waste” point to things like the funicular and the proposed gondola. The first example saw Edmonton spend just $1.6M of the total $24M cost; the latter, regardless of whether you think it’s a wise idea or not, is currently not going to cost the city a dime. No matter: Both are now examples angry residents point to when they express frustration with city “pet projects.”

We’re seeing the opportunists realize ignorance offers rewards. We already have one city councillor who screams about bike lanes but could care less about Edmonton debt-financing the Yellowhead expansion to the tune of $510M.

Without reporters like Johnston, offering daily, ubiquitous coverage of each and every city discussion and issue, we should expect this worrying trend to accelerate.

*I’ve amended the cost of the funicular from the first draft I posted

How provinces build unaffordable cities

There’s a scene from an episode of the Simpsons where Dr. Robert Terwillegar, best known as Sideshow Bob, steps on a succession of rakes that lay at his feet. Each time Bob steps on the upturned rake, the handle flies up and smacks him in the face. Each time this happens, Bob whimpers, but then continues to step on another rake. This continues for what feels like an eternity. And that itself is the joke. All Bob needs to do is stop.

Edmonton is more than a quarter century along in a Robert Terwillegar rake moment. The recent announcement that the Alberta government will invest $120M to widen Terwillegar Drive into a freeway is just another step onto just another rake. It offers a lesson in how it isn’t just city councils and planning departments that build cities. In Canada, it’s our provinces.

Opportunity cost: The Anthony Henday ring road. Credit: Mack Male/Flickr

Freeways are questionable investments for cities in the best of times. During a pandemic that’s plunging us deep into debt, it’s arguable they’re even more questionable. But let’s push that aside and consider what the United Conservative Party government choosing to invest money on another freeway over other projects means for Edmonton. It means yet another investment that leads to Edmonton (and the lesson applies to other provinces and their cities) taxpayers being latched to a development pattern that will lead to higher property taxes. Full stop. Sprawl is expensive. Freeways incentivize sprawl.

While city councils take all the heat in the process of building cities, provinces often force decisions. In choosing to inject their huge resources into projects like the Anthony Henday ring road, the Yellowhead freeway expansion and Terwillegar Drive, and by ignoring others, like transit, they shape the development patterns that make life less affordable and less enjoyable for all of us. Freeways incentivize inefficient, expensive outward development that, over time, drags a city down and forces property taxes to climb.

More concerning is the idea of agency. Once the Terwillegar announcement was made, several city types made note that Edmonton City Council had shared with the UCP government a list of potential capital projects (the whole push here is a laudable effort to create jobs in a province that has shed them during the pandemic) that could be put into commission as economic stimulus. The list is revealing. It includes LRT expansion, recreation centres, a flood mitigation project and several potential road rehabilitation projects. You can have a look here.

But the UCP government seems to have ignored the city’s list and decided on its own what Edmonton needed.

To be extremely fair, the Terwillegar freeway has long been called for and was actually first committed to, in a much different guise, by the former New Democratic Party government. Several have long called for the area to get a freeway, because its traffic levels are high. Several in the city are celebrating the announcement it will be built. And we must celebrate the fact the UCP has decided the project will include space for active transportation lanes and transit lanes. Here’s a news clip.

But, with that out of the way, and to be less charitable to freeways, please consider what Sen. Paula Simons had to say in her former guise as a columnist, as she reflected on the 26 years of capital investment and attention that it took to build the Anthony Henday ring-road around Edmonton (price: more than $4B). Link here.

“The Henday has forever reshaped our city, connecting us in new ways, redefining our city limits, but also connecting communities in new ways. It was originally billed as an industrial corridor to get heavy truck traffic out of the city, not a commuter highway. No one seems to have grasped just how dramatically it would transform urban growth, igniting huge residential building booms outside its boundaries.”

What does not happen in this scenario is an organized plan to build more affordable, more liveable, more desirable, more enjoyable cities. Provinces make decisions that, in reality, city councils will be forced to sort out and find ways to budget for. City councils make decisions that, in reality, are ignored or left to wilt on the vine by provincial governments that control them. Provinces hold the keys to the relationship. They could open it up to allow cities like Edmonton to have more tools to raise money and make their own decisions. It would be a more direct, more democratic arrangement.

But they don’t.

Each new freeway will always have its supporters, who argue that it’s badly needed. In isolation, these arguments are compelling. Taken as a whole, and looking at the development patterns that follow and the higher property taxes that inevitably come with them, these new freeways can be seen as rakes sitting at our feet.

Another one just hit our face.

Lesson from Toronto: Dismiss Mike Nickel at your peril

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford greets supporters at Ford Fest 2014. Photo: Flickr, Alex Guibord.

In 2010, Toronto elected Rob Ford as mayor. Ford had worked as a city councillor for a nearly a decade, returning every phone call, refusing basic perks, holding the line on spending. But Ford was also a bully, in council meetings and public. In 2006, he was caught lying about drinking and yelling obscenities at a couple while at a Toronto Maple Leafs game. These failings were held as proof before 2010 that Toronto would never elect someone like Ford. Then Toronto did.

I lived in Toronto through some of the Ford years, from 2010 to 2013. Edmonton feels similar to that city right now. We’re a city divided thanks in part to a loud politician — Councillor Mike Nickel — pouring fuel on our divisions. He’s declaring our city broken. He’s not offering up lines like ‘gravy train’ — yet — but Nickel is brash enough go politicking during a pandemic. It all feels very Ford-era Toronto.  

The conclusion many have drawn is that Nickel’s campaigning to be mayor in 2021. It’s a distinct possibility. His new petition sounds like an election platform: Cut property taxes by five per cent and cancel the Valley Line - West LRT project.

Edmonton City Hall. Photo: Flickr, IQRemix

Nickel is not like Ford in many ways: he’s calmer, kinder, more composed. But he’s similar in a few very important aspects. Like Ford, Nickel positions himself as a defender of taxpayers. Like Ford, Nickel uses outbursts to gain attention, which he’s done recently by attacking city council as a whole. Like Ford, Nickel operates best as a lone wolf, and is not known for his ability to collaborate. Also like Ford, Nickel is highly responsive to those who have troubles with the city machine.  

But Edmonton’s reaction to Nickel is why I’m writing this column. It’s been dismissive. Many point out Nickel’s numerous losses as a politician and his many gaffes. Many claim, confidently, that he’ll lose in 2021 if he does run for mayor. People point out he’s already lost to now-mayor Don Iveson once, in a race for a council seat. But Toronto’s experience with Ford surely has a lesson here. A populist with a long-constructed narrative that city hall is broken is not someone to dismiss. Given our unprecedented times, given the state of the city’s finances in the wake of COVID-19, I think this lesson applies even more in 2020.

In Toronto’s 2010 election, which saw the highest voter turnout in its history, Ford defeated George Smitherman by more than 93,000 votes. Smitherman was the centrist, progressive, safe-bet mayoral candidate in one of the most diverse cities on the planet. But Ford’s stunts and antics over a decade had built a narrative foundation. He provided his constituency reasons — factual or otherwise — to be distrustful and dismissive of city hall. He once took the city to task for paying less than $100,000 in an operations budget of $9-billion to water plants on city property. Ford complained that he watered his own plants at home, and that spending money on such things was wasteful. Most rolled their eyes, but it was another brick for the Ford narrative. Ford would sweat the pennies yet mostly ignore the dollars. The constituency Ford was building heard a story that enraged them. Waste! Excess! Flowers! That constituency, known as ‘Ford Nation,’ was told to help Ford stop the ‘gravy train’ in 2010.

This should sound vaguely familiar to Edmonton. Nickel is angry about the closure of vehicle lanes to drivers (and the opening of them to walkers, cyclists and rollers, who have few places to go right now and maintain social distance). To him this is proof that city council is spending money on pointless things during a crisis rather than making hard decisions. To be clear, whatever this has cost is pennies, if not less than pennies, when considered within the city’s overall budget. To be clear, things like bike lanes (which Nickel voted for) cost fractions of pennies compared to Edmonton’s budget for drivers and driver infrastructure. But this fits Nickel’s narrative. So he’s pouncing.

Nickel, like Ford, has been repeating many of these rhetorical targets — bike lanes, downtown, tax waste are all favourites — for a very long time. And he has slotted himself within a narrative that existed long before people knew his name. Consider that Nickel’s bio notes he was a member of the Edmonton Stickmen, a conservative group known for its simplistic billboards that targeted Edmonton’s former mayor, Jan Reimer, and helped Bill Smith win the 1995 election. Consider, too, that a quote from a Stickmen representative (not Nickel), from a 1995 story in the Edmonton Journal: “We’re not saying the entire council has to go. But there are aldermen who put bike paths, not economic growth at the top of their agenda.”

The ‘city hall is broken’ narrative is built, regardless of whether it’s true or not, and Nickel summons the anger surrounding it when it suits him. City council attempts to reign him in on this, by using code of conduct rules, will only build his brand. Unsurprisingly, Nickel has responded to this by saying “bring it on.”  

Sign depicting Mike Nickel, April 2020. Photo: Conrad Nobert

What irks me about all of this is that Edmonton needs a person with Nickel’s values, if not his methods. He’s right about the Metro Line. He’s right that big projects take too long — the current LRT build included. He’s right that some things cost far too much. He’s right that administration can often manage to complicate simple things and that council can manage to speak a mean game on virtuous things (cough, anything to do with active transportation, cough) but drop the ball on basics. He’s right that Edmonton can be a tough place for small business. 

But Nickel can slip into fictions to serve his narrative. These fictions lead us to argue about pennies (bike lanes) rather than dollars (dubious infrastructure projects like the Yellowhead freeway expansion). It all reminds me of Ford.  

At a Manning Centre event in the fall of 2019, Nickel was part of a panel that discussed how conservatives could win council seats in 2021. During the talk, Nickel said that many constituents who skew right or left can agree if you talk about value for money. Then he brought up Edmonton’s bike lanes. Asking constituents about return on investment changes the conversation, he said. “You just ask to measure what [bike lanes] do. Count how many bikes are on that bike lane. That’s called metrics, targets and outcomes. Measure what you do. Then you’ll be able to decide whether or not it’s worth the money …”

Then Nickel added his kicker. “There are bike lanes that maybe work, but we don’t know because we’re not counting.” (Full video here.)

Nickel surely knows Edmonton counts bike-lane numbers. Its many detailed reports and maps can be found here. These facts don’t matter. His narrative demands we don’t count numbers on bike lanes. Waste! Excess! Bike lanes! Fiction, not facts. The narrative wins.

Few who subscribe to Nickel’s narrative will worry about such discrepancies. This is why Nickel should not be dismissed in 2021. Depending on those on the right, who are itching to create a slate to overthrow the centrist Iveson and the progressive-ish councillors who align with him — yet may have other plans for their mayoral horse, if Nickel has not forced their hand — Nickel might be the loud and brash mayor few believed could win. 

Just realize that Toronto has some experience with that.  

NOTE: I reached out to Mr. Nickel through Facebook and through email for this column. Someone viewed the message on Facebook but I received no reply to either. I gave Mr. Nickel 24-hours to respond.

Further reading:

Mike Nickel’s Facebook page

Andrew Knack’s response to Nickel

Ryan Jespersen show discussion of the Nickel situation

The Gravy Train podcast, about Rob Ford and Toronto