Simple fix for Toronto’s parks: have staff actually do their jobs

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One of the enduring frustrations of Canadian urban life is that the nice things we all want — the things we gawk at on vacation on other continents — cost far more here than they do elsewhere. This manifests itself most noticeably with respect to major infrastructure. According to the Transit Costs Project, Toronto’s woebegone Eglinton Crosstown LRT project has (so far) cost US$232 million per kilometre. A comparable project in Rennes, France, completed two years ago, cost US$125 million per kilometre. The Barcelona Metro’s ongoing Line 9/10 project comes in at US$162 million per kilometre. Montreal’s Blue Line Metro extension is currently budgeted at a mind-melting US$703 million per kilometre.

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There are various explanations for this, but none are satisfying. Most boil down to some variation of “we’re just really terrible at this.”

The problem extends to smaller-ticket items too. Toronto implemented a 9.5-per-cent property-tax increase this year, the biggest in the city’s modern history, and not a single thing has gotten noticeably better. Garbage cans still overflow. Still, no one is in charge of public transit: Streetcars and buses travel in herds, like sheep. Toronto’s parks department understandably attracts a lot of the angst, because everyone likes parks and ours fail at such basic tasks: Maintaining water fountains, emptying trash cans, opening and cleaning washrooms, general maintenance.

Thanks to Tara Anderson, Toronto’s auditor general, we now have some insight into that particular problem: A fair few parks department employees simply aren’t doing their jobs.

It’s almost a relief. Unlike that Montreal Blue line price tag, it at least makes sense.

Anderson’s team found the average parks crew reported in their logs spending four hours and five minutes per day at parks, an hour and 12 minutes at other facilities such as waste-disposal sites, and two hours and 43 minutes of “assumed driving time.” When the auditors checked the GPS logs, however, they found an average of just two hours and 36 minutes spent at parks, two hours and two minutes of actual driving time and two hours and 15 minutes of being “stopped” either “at plazas or other non-parkland locations” or “at other city locations” not noted in the logs.

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Anderson’s report charitably concluded it was “not known whether crews were performing work (or) being productive” during that time. I think it’s more than fair to assume they weren’t. These aren’t jobs that come with a lot of Zoom meetings and paperwork — though the report did note how “paper-based” the parks department’s processes seem to be, even in 2024. (But hey, this is Ontario. My doctor still faxes my prescriptions to the pharmacy.)

I don’t wish to tar the entire blue-collar civil service with one brush. Employees who do their jobs properly, who take pride in their work, won’t ever make the news. Pride is supposed to be its own reward.

I’m considerably more irked at management. The general manager of the parks department made $204,000 last year. He’s now tasked with implementing Anderson’s recommendations, which include “ensur(ing) crews are properly documenting their daily activities,” and creating service standards for parks and measuring his department’s performance against those standards. It’s a bit like “recommending” an NHL player learn to skate backwards. Clearly this person is miles out of his depth to begin with.

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Why is the parks department monitoring its vehicles’ movements in the first place if not to check up on its employees? It doesn’t seem to be using the data to make its operations more efficient. Even in utterly gridlocked Toronto, it’s absurd that a parks crew would spend two hours a day on the road.

Every time an auditor general, journalist or — what a concept — manager goes looking for waste in the public workforce, they seem to find this kind of soft corruption in spades. In 2012, the Toronto Star discovered the perennially cash-strapped Toronto District School Board was paying in-house skilled tradespeople $3,000 to install an electrical plug, $2,400 to mount a whiteboard, $1,100 to hang some pictures, $143 to “install” a pencil sharpener, $147 to have a key cut.

Activities performed instead of work included “delivering flyers for a personal paving company, with plans to use school board equipment,” the Star reported.

In 2019, Toronto’s auditor general found very similar (ahem) discrepancies between official logs and GPS logs with respect to tree maintenance contracts with private companies. The widely proposed solution: Bring tree maintenance back in house. Because city employees would never do anything like that.

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In 2006, Montreal media turned their investigative attention to “les bleues,” as the city’s notoriously militant blue-collar workers are known. Notable findings included one crew that spent all of 20 minutes working in a day, and another that billed 90 hours — including overtime! — to repair nine pot holes.

And if you go back that far, you’ll find quite a few voices arguing against monitoring employees’ performance at all. “Systematically using GPS to check up on workers and try to determine how well they are doing their jobs would be going too far,” then federal privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart argued in 2006.

Rubbish. Thank goodness for GPS. Cash-strapped cities in cash-strapped provinces in a cash-strapped country can’t afford this soft corruption anymore. We can have nice things — little things, like clean parks, and big things, like shiny new subways — without bankrupting ourselves. We just need to be far more serious about it than we have been before.

National Post

cselley@postmedia.com

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