Toronto's ice storm — A winter parade of incompetence

Hackneyed conversational subject though the weather is usually considered to be, the recent inclemencies around Toronto have at least helped remind us that not all the inanities of the city council and posturings of the local media can be laid at the door of Mayor Rob Ford.

It would require a mind-reader of proven insight to say whether the mayor's reluctance to declare a state of emergency during the widespread power failures just before Christmas was prompted by his desire not to deliver emergency powers to the Council. (The ability to direct the city in the event of an emergency is one of many powers that were stripped from Mr. Ford in November.) But it certainly would be understandable if that were among his motives, and the general performance of the council could leave us in little doubt of its very limited competence to deal with even the most mundane emergency.

The fact is that the army, which in domestic assignments is pretty underemployed, would have been handy in clearing the ice-encrusted trees and branches that knocked out power lines. And I suspect that they could have been invited to assist Toronto without triggering an official emergency that would have enriched our municipal Christmas with another infantile squabble about jurisdiction.

Almost everyone who achieved any publicity from the storms and power failures, except the stoical public, made asses of themselves in the last week and a half of the old year and the first week of 2014. The mayor had no business claiming that the army would have got in the way of the line crews; rather, it would have assisted in expediting the repairs and would have restored power more quickly, shortening the acute discomfort and concern of scores of thousands of people. The mayor should have asked for all the useful help that could be had in the task of clearing, and providing some other emergency services, including directing traffic at idle stoplights. There are too may such stop-lights and the ice-storm demonstrated that we are better off without many of them. But the efforts of citizen traffic controllers who strode purposefully to the centres of busy intersections and took unto themselves the role of directing, often by impressively flamboyant (if sometimes crude) gestures, the flows of traffic, motorized and pedestrian, often made matters worse. Soldiers would have been more plausible figures of authority at intersections, and would have spared the city some spectacular spikes in road rage.

The mayor's more rabid critics over-reached in claiming that he had interrupted and retarded progress by bustling around to so many work-sites and distracting the hydro-workers with photo-opportunities. His presence was encouraging, and the photographs were on-site action-shots. Perhaps the nadir of official absurdity was plumbed by deputy mayor Norm Kelly, who, feeling the need for a public-relations relaunch after taking a brief Florida vacation in the midst of the crisis, in the first days of January demanded, well after the restoration of electricity to all homes in the Toronto area, that an emergency be declared and the army be asked at this late stage to help pick up fallen trees and branches. Why not ask the continuators of the noble traditions of Vimy and the beaches of Normandy to take out the garbage too, and to stay on for spring cleaning-just another couple of months?

Mr. Kelly seemed to be uttering a wail of lamentation that he never was able to gambol amid the iced streets as acting mayor. He watched the opportunity recede with proactive disappointment.

Next in the parade of under-performers is the Ontario Premier, Kathleen Wynne. I became inexpressibly tired of her grating assurances on my transistor radio as I waited for power to come back on in our house, of how brilliantly everyone was doing. Most people were, but she wasn't. It was enlightening, in a way, to add a voice to the last apparition I had had of the premier, before television flickered out under the onslaught of the ice-storm, as she jogged determinedly along a rural road in an ad for the Ontario Liberals, and then turned and jogged up-hill like The Little Engine That Could.

It is challenging enough to try to imagine why anyone would contribute money to her party at all, after three catastrophic terms; but a puzzler requiring Solomonic insight to guess why the powers that be in that party would commission this method of endearing the premier to the voters. Possibly her keen state of physical fitness contributed to her compulsively peppy assurances that everything was splendid in Liberal Ontario, despite the absence of electricity, and to her endless assurances that everyone working at the restoration of power was doing magnificently.

© 2024 Conrad Black