Former mayors share how the job has changed and the toll of governing during a pandemic

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The pandemic served to boost the profile of Canada’s mayors. They were the faces of their cities, often on television daily, announcing public-health measures that were welcomed by some and hated by others, as they helped steer their communities through the crisis.

But the heightened visibility was only another chapter in a rising profile for the country’s big-city mayors, who had already been grappling with increasing responsibility for years. And even the pandemic anger was only a magnification of public vitriol that had been growing.

There’s a line, often attributed to the late former Mississauga mayor Hazel McCallion, to the effect that in Canada, the federal government has all the money, the provinces have all the power, but the cities have all the problems.

Being mayor of a large Canadian city is to take on a mammoth and often unappreciated job – one that is now occupied by new faces in most of the country’s biggest municipalities.

Toronto will join that list after residents go to the polls Monday in a by-election sparked by then-mayor John Tory resigning earlier this year after acknowledging an affair with someone on his staff.

The Globe and Mail spoke recently with the former mayors of Edmonton, Hamilton, Ottawa, Victoria and Winnipeg, all of whom left office within the past two years. Mr. Tory also agreed to a rare interview, though he would not answer questions about the circumstances of his departure.

These former leaders described a job that grew even as their power didn’t; the stress of dealing with public anger and embittered social-media users; and how anyone seeking high municipal office should do so with their eyes wide open.

Public anger

Former Winnipeg mayor Brian Bowman remembers the time protesters came to his house one night in 2021 and left a bunch of anti-police signs on the lawn. Although the message didn’t target him directly, he was alarmed they had found out where he lived, breaching what he saw as the “no-fly zone” that had formerly kept personal residences off-limits. And he had to reassure his then-10-year-old son, who was concerned that interlopers had been on their property while the family slept.

Most of these former mayors say they believe people are angrier than they were a decade ago but also that anger is more visible on social media. At the same time, misinformation and disinformation are so ubiquitous that an increasing part of being mayor is arguing not over solutions but instead which versions of reality are true.

There are also safety concerns, as anger on social media can become anger in real life. While Canadian mayors don’t generally have personal security, a few mentioned beefing up protection at city hall and an increased willingness to ban people who harass municipal staff.

Local politicians themselves are an easy whipping post for angry constituents. They are accessible and visible in a way that other politicians often aren’t. People see them in the community. And some norms of decorum have vanished in recent years.

“Folks are settled into more extreme positions than ever, more divided than ever and more unwilling to listen than ever,” former Edmonton mayor Don Iveson said. “And then they correspondingly feel unheard even more, and so it is a vicious cycle.”

Former Victoria mayor Lisa Helps saw over her two terms how municipal leaders become lightning rods for criticism – though she was spared some of its more visceral form by not being on social media for her latter years in office. “I got off of Facebook in 2018 and off of Twitter in 2020 and I never looked back,” she said.

Those protesters in Winnipeg weren’t the only time Mr. Bowman, who is Métis, faced new levels of public anger. Whenever he tweeted about Indigenous issues, he received a wave of hate. Early in the pandemic, social media became so toxic that some big-city mayors discussed abandoning Twitter entirely, he said, though in the end most continued using it in some fashion.

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Mr. Tory didn’t monitor Twitter himself, he said, having his staff wade through the negativity to report on trends or themes. By doing so, he missed thousands of attacks in last year’s mayoral race. An analysis of eight 2022 municipal elections by the Samara Centre for Democracy, released Monday, found that he was tagged in nearly 500 tweets a day over the final 65 days of the campaign, one-quarter of them deemed abusive.

In Ottawa, former mayor Jim Watson became more judicious in his use of social media. He became more adept at not taking the bait, accepting that he couldn’t win against the trolls and realizing that many of the people railing at him weren’t constituents – or even Canadians.

In Hamilton, former mayor Fred Eisenberger eventually disengaged from social media, saying it was too much of a downer.

“Criticism just abounds on social media. And you know, whether it’s truthful or not, it doesn’t seem to matter,” he said. “Toward the end of my time as mayor, I had to ignore social media altogether because it was just too demoralizing, quite frankly.”

A changing role

Ms. Helps said that the global trend for mayors taking on larger roles played out over her time as leader in Victoria. Whether the issues were housing or economic recovery, mayors became point-people even if they didn’t have the formal power to address many of the problems.

One answer, she found, was to use what she described as the soft power of the mayor’s office to convene – to get the right people together to work on solutions. She pointed to Victoria 3.0, a 20-year economic recovery plan she said was crafted by stakeholders without the use of consultants. And she warned that the issues today’s mayors must grapple with include ones far from the traditional job description.

“People are lonelier,” she said. “Weaving and reweaving the social fabric is one of the most important projects for mayors.”

Doing an ever-expanding job is difficult not only because mayors have little formal power – in most cases they’re only one vote on council – but also because cities have limited abilities to raise revenue. Mr. Eisenberger, in Hamilton, said mayors remain stuck with what he called a “cap in hand” approach to budgeting that forces cities to plead for money from higher levels of government.

This has been the case since downloading of federal and provincial responsibilities began in earnest a generation ago, but the fiscal situation has become more dire in recent years.

Mr. Eisenberger said that the amount of money flowing from Ottawa to the provinces has gone down, adding: “And therefore that has also diminished the funding going to municipalities.”

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Toronto’s fiscal situation had become so precarious even before the pandemic – after years of low-tax policies left the city struggling to make ends meet – that Mr. Tory said he felt the need to take a much more hands-on role in crafting the city budget. And he said that working on his relationship with the federal and provincial governments became an increasingly large part of his job.

It hasn’t always been pretty. In 2017, Mr. Tory complained memorably that he was like “a little boy going up to Queen’s Park in short pants to say ‘please.’” And in 2018, in the middle of a municipal election campaign, Premier Doug Ford slashed the size of city council nearly in half. The smaller council was easier for Mr. Tory to bend to his will, but he still fumed publicly about the lack of consultation.

In Alberta, Mr. Iveson faced the additional difficulty of a provincial government that found it politically advantageous to beat up on his city and on Calgary. In one notable example, in 2019, the UCP government abruptly announced it would revoke the city charters for Alberta’s two biggest municipalities, prompting Mr. Iveson to abort a trip to Europe and go straight to the legislature to protest.

“It was a very abrupt shift into wedge politics,” he said of the switch from an NDP to a UCP provincial government, noting that the fractious relationship hampered progress on issues such as housing and homelessness. “Without full alignment from all three orders of government, it’s a very difficult goal to achieve.”

Advice to new mayors

These trends are unlikely to end, forcing the new generation of mayors, and their successors, to spend even more time managing angry constituents while trying to wring money and power from the premier of their province and from the prime minister.

Mr. Watson, in Ottawa, said that mayors have to be willing to take a firm line with other governments. He acknowledged that the leaders of some small municipalities may worry they are burning bridges if they protest too vigorously, but he said that cities can’t take poor treatment lying down.

“Dealing with other levels of government is not a tea party,” he said. “You have to be respectful, but you also have to be forceful to ensure that we get our fair share and that they don’t go back down that path of downloading to local governments.”

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Cities are already responsible for many of the day-to-day interactions citizens have with government, from the supply of clean water to the state of roads and sidewalks.

“From the moment you wake up in the morning, you’re affected by municipal politics,” said Winnipeg’s Mr. Bowman.

“The question I think people should be asking themselves when they’re going into a ballot box for a provincial or federal [election] is who’s going to support my community and who’s going to work well with my mayor.”

However, some of the mayors said that constant interaction with constituents can also be a highlight of the job.

Hamilton’s Mr. Eisenberger warns not to use social media as a bellwether of reality. Real life is a better measure and may also be more convivial. In Winnipeg, Mr. Bowman said that even as social media became vituperative, the tone of in-person interaction didn’t change as much.

Mr. Tory agreed about the need to get out and meet residents. His time as mayor of the country’s most populous and most diverse city included a seemingly endless series of engagements. That was crucial to seeing Torontonians and hearing their concerns, he said, but he warned politicians not to take it too far.

“You don’t have to keep a campaign pace, necessarily,” he said. “I did that and probably if I had the life to live over again, I might have reduced that by 10 per cent and frankly devoted the time not to more work but to my family.”