Big Daddy by Timothy J. Colton

Author:Timothy J. Colton [J. Colton Timothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 1980-04-07T05:00:00+00:00

THE WISE USE OF RESOURCES

Gardiner dragged and steamrollered his associates into many of their key decisions. This was the approach that best suited his personality, which had most to do with his success, and by which he will best be remembered. But he tellingly employed other legislative strategies as well. Chief among these was his astute plumbing of the valued resources brought into being by the new metropolitan regime.

It was intended from the start that the act of federation would enable a large increase in the pool of goods and services allocated by municipal authorities. In some of his early pronouncements, Gardiner harped on this impending expansion in unrestrained terms. ‘There is nothing we cannot afford in the way of services,’ he averred shortly after his appointment.33 Gardiner was well attuned to the possibilities this bounty offered for building political support for the organization he headed, much as he declined to emphasize the linkage in public at the time. ‘If these people [the politicians] were going to do business together, there was going to have to be something in it for them. I would have had to be blind not to see what a bit of wise use of resources could do for me and for Metro.’

The resources best lending themselves to prudent allocation were those channelled through capital spending programs. One of Metro’s principal powers was its exclusive authority to issue government debentures or bonds for its own projects and for all the capital undertakings of the thirteen constituent communities and their boards of education. In 1953 local governments in the region had spent about $30 million on capital projects, some of it raised at unfavourable interest rates. Metropolitan government altered the equation radically. The volume of capital spending was increased twofold in its first year of operation and more than threefold by 1957. Funds were procured at rates of interest as much as two per cent less than those prevalent for many communities prior to 1953. When interest rates climbed after 1956, Metro’s aggregate borrowing power remained of irrefutable use in securing preferential borrowing terms.

In slicing up this rapidly swelling pie, Gardiner followed three rough decision rules. The first might be called the principle of non-interference in spending decisions of a narrowly local nature. Approximately two thirds of Metro’s capital borrowing resources were allotted on this basis. One dollar in three went to the Metropolitan Toronto School Board, which doled out the funds to the local boards with almost no meddling by Gardiner or Metro council. Another third was funnelled to the area municipalities themselves for public works spending in fields under their jurisdiction. Subject to political bargaining at the margin, the breakdown by municipality was arrived at by means of a mathematical formula involving population and property assessment. Within these limits, Metro’s formal power to scrutinize all bond proposals notwithstanding, the local council had licence to make choices as it saw fit. ‘We have discovered,’ Gardiner stated in 1957, ‘that if we set the capital appropriation, it

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