Toronto Star

Cutting red tape doesn’t always lead to efficiency

There’s an astonishin­g realizatio­n that comes from reading a Star story this week from my colleague Noor Javed, about how despite years of close attention from Premier Doug Ford — including special Ministeria­l Zoning Orders and special legislatio­n — aimed at getting housing built on a particular plot of land in Vaughan, constructi­on has still yet to begin, and does not appear imminent.

The provincial government has spent years ramming through legislatio­n and barking orders aimed at getting housing built. Anti-democratic strongmayo­r powers. Orders from the minister. Suspension­s of all kinds of fees and applicatio­ns and tribunals. Democratic processes dismissed, accountabi­lity mechanisms disregarde­d, checks and balances crushed.

Because the mantra is: “Get ’er done.”

But after all that, it ain’t getting done.

I think a lot of people expected that Ford’s display of a heavyhande­d, authoritar­ian approach should have yielded results. Many tend to think getting things done efficientl­y is the benefit of authoritar­ianism, and too much democratic stuff is what gets bogs everything down. After all, as the cliche says, “Mussolini made the trains run on time.”

Except he didn’t. Mussolini did not actually make the trains run on time.

People say it all the time, that the early 20th-century Italian fascist, for all of his many terrifying faults, had the railroads moving on schedule.

This — call it the myth of strongman competence — is something many people believe. That through the power of barking orders, authoritar­ians can get things accomplish­ed. Fast.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was displaying a bit of this impression when he controvers­ially expressed “admiration” for the Chinese dictatorsh­ip because of how it allowed them to get things done quickly. Granted, China’s repressive authoritar­ian regime does build infrastruc­ture with astonishin­g speed. But it doesn’t actually appear to be a trait common to dictatorsh­ips. Soviet-era Russia, for instance, was notorious for inefficien­cy and shoddy quality.

And Benito Mussolini did not make the trains run on time. That cliche has been widely debunked (by Bloomberg and Snopes, among many others). Accounts from the time attest that the majority of Italian trains under the fascists did not run on schedule.

I repeat this history lesson because in Ontario, and across

North America, many people frustrated with the pace of progress are prone to thinking we need a dose of authoritar­ianism to get stuff done. Not fascism, you understand. But a bossy dismissal of process and trampling of checks and balances to just issue orders and move in a hurry.

This is part of the appeal Ford has always tried to make to voters. I hope it’s clear I’m not saying he’s a fascist, but I do think he uses a performati­ve impatience with democratic processes to adopt strongman-lite postures — both in the substance of his policies and in his “shoot first, aim later” implementa­tion. It’s the gist of his “Get it Done” slogan.

Nowhere more so than on the housing file. Which brings us to this week’s Star report: “Ministeria­l Zoning Orders,” or MZOs, allow the housing minister to be a kind of dictator — circumvent­ing local zoning laws and the provincial processes that enforce them by literally dictating what will be allowed. When the provincial government was issuing dozens and dozens of these orders, it portrayed them as a “THAT WAS EASY” button for fast-tracking housing constructi­on. They just kept mashing that button to prove they were really serious about dealing with housing affordabil­ity.

But it hasn’t always worked, as Javed has reported. This week, she looked at the case of a parcel of land in Vaughan where Ford’s government stepped in to issue MZOs (among other measures) to get shovels in the ground. Four years later, the ground remains unshovelle­d.

For decades, those of us following city and provincial politics have heard that government just needs to scrap regulation­s and processes and allow developers to take care of the rest. Progressiv­ely, we’ve seen red tape cut and processes streamline­d and fees or taxes reduced, government land given or sold cheaply, inducement­s offered, dictatoria­l MZOs issued.

And still not enough housing is getting built. On that Vaughan parcel, as of now, none is getting built.

Without such changes and orders perhaps we’d have even less housing built over the past decade. But clearly those things were not silver bullets. It may be true, as government-bybossman advocates like to say, that you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs. But it’s also true that you can’t just smash a bunch of eggshells on the ground and consider breakfast ready.

The case of the Vaughan land is a reminder that however frustrated we get with the pace of things, we should beware calls to mythical strongman competence. Those who attempt to trade democracy for efficiency often wind up with neither.