Big Daddy: Frederick G. Gardiner and the Building of Metropolitan Toronto 9781442653023

Table of contents :
Preface
Acknowledgments
Contents
1 Private and political beginnings
2 Not really first-class politics
3 The metropolitan experiment
4 Getting the shovels into the ground
5 Taking it to the politicians
6 The world without and the world within
7 What kind of city?
8 Changes of season
Notes

Citation preview

Big Daddy Frederick G. Gardiner and the Building of Metropolitan Toronto

Frederick Gardiner's public life was rich and long, from his initiation into politics as a Toronto schoolboy before the First World War, through his involvements with the Ontario Conservative party and suburban politics in the 1930s and 1940s, on through his years as first chairman of Metropolitan Toronto (1953-61), to the relinquishing of his last public office in 1979. This is a readable and perceptive biography of the exuberant and powerful politician who captured the public imagination of Toronto and created a legend around himself during his lifetime. The book focuses mainly on Gardiner's experience as founding boss of Metropolitan Toronto. This first metropolitan government in North America was in many ways his personal machine. Gardiner made an indispensable contribution to its effectiveness and to its very survival. He presided over an unprecedented boom in urban development and construction. His public works projects included the first urban expressway in Canada (the Gardiner Expressway). Gardiner's political nickname, 'Big Daddy,' fits him well. He revelled in his reputation as a political bulldozer, and was often described as the Canadian equivalent of Robert Moses, the famous and feared coordinator of construction for New York City. Gardiner was a man for the times, an unusual person whose character seemed to match the requirements of a city bursting at its seams. His lack of interest in public participation generated great controversy and left a lasting impression on Toronto's metropolitan government. Readers concerned with politics and urban government will learn much from Gardiner's experiences and conduct as he wrestled with his political surroundings and with urban policy problems such as planning, housing, and transportation. And this portrait of a dynamic and aggressive man who symbolized the Toronto of a generation ago will appeal to those who remember these years. TIMOTHY J. COLTON is a member of the Department of Political Economy and of Scarborough College, University of Toronto.

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T I M O T H Y J. C O L T O N

Big Daddy Frederick G. Gardiner and the Building of Metropolitan Toronto

U N I V E R S I T Y OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 1980 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-2393-2

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Colton, Timothy J., 1947Big Daddy Includes index. ISBN 0-8020-2393-2 1. Gardiner, Frederick. 2. Toronto metropolitan area, Ont. - Politics and government. 3. Municipal officials and employees - Ontario - Toronto metropolitan area - Biography. I. Title. FC3097.41.G37C64 F1059.5.T6853G37

352.0713'541'0924

C80-094479-8

The cover photograph was taken by Kryn Taconis.��

To Pat

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Preface

The study of urban politics in Canada has recently been characterized as being in transition 'from infancy to the early stages of puberty.'1 Some, myself among them, will find this an excessively complimentary progress report. Whether it is on the mark or not, there is no question that the enterprise falls woefully short of the maturity that Canada's status as a society of city dwellers would have us expect. The reasons, no doubt, are complex, having to do with national myths, the make-up of the political agenda, and the training of social scientists. Until the late 1960s, most of what little was written about Canadian urban affairs was devoted to government machinery in the narrow, technical sense. Since then there has been a refreshing surge of interest in issues and politics, as distinct from formal structure. However, the results have by and large been opinionated statements on the problems of the day, not works of a lasting value to a national or international audience. This political biography of Frederick G. Gardiner is the first full-length study of a Canadian municipal politician of the twentieth century. Its principal focus is Gardiner's experience as the founding chairman of Metropolitan Toronto, from 1953 to 1961, but it considers also the other phases of a public life that was as rich as it was long. It began in a desultory way before the First World War, when an adolescent Gardiner and his father traipsed the sidewalks of their neighbourhood in support of a sectarian candidate for the Toronto Board of Education. After a long interlude dedicated to amassing a private fortune, Gardiner's political career blossomed during the years of the Great Depression, which found him propelled by circumstances into the central councils of a down-and-out Conservative party and the affairs of Canada's most exclusive suburban community, Forest Hill. His star peaked in that decade and a half of extraordinary expansion and optimism following the Second World War, a period that has recently acquired a certain mystique in

viii Preface the popular culture but has so far received short shrift in Canadian scholarship. His role petered out in the 1960s and 1970s as old age overtook him and new moods of second-guessing and opposition were turned upon those tendencies in city government and politics that he had personified. This project would never have been undertaken had its subject not been a person of unusual abilities and attainments. Gardiner must surely be ranked as the most influential civic official to operate in this century in Toronto, probably in Ontario as a whole, and conceivably in all of Canada. When a provincial royal commission in 1965 characterized his leadership as 'legendary,' it was not overstating the general impression.2 There truly was a largerthan-life aspect to his behaviour and style. Gardiner was Big Daddy, the tyrant and charmer who towered above the others. He was big in size, big in ambition, big in appetites, and big in rhetoric. He was the man who revelled, as he put it, in 'talking millions' (of dollars), who grinned at mention of his reputation as a political bulldozer, and who was described more than once as the Canadian equivalent of Robert Moses, the 'master builder' of New York City. More than that, he was the first head of the first metropolitan government in North America. This invention, which perhaps attracted as much informed interest abroad as any product of Canadian political ingenuity ever has, was Gardiner's personal machine in its formative years. It was believed by virtually all of his contemporaries that without him the metropolitan experiment would have failed. Gardiner's imprint is indelibly stamped on the largest metropolis in Canada, the home (depending on whose statistical definition one prefers) of one eleventh to one ninth of the country's population. His years in power, which witnessed the congealing of new institutions of governance, were also a time of massive physical building and rebuilding. The horizontal sprawl of Toronto's suburbs and the vertical thrust of its downtown skyline bear equal testimony to the city-building boom that Gardiner and his cohorts helped realize. It was not a boom shaped by a single vision or a master plan, but it was no less potent and no less subversive for that. Each day, hundreds of thousands of Torontonians drink from the water mains, travel the roads and bridges and subway lines, make use of the sewage and drainage projects, study in the schools, and stroll in the parks and conservation areas completed or initiated by Gardiner's government. On the average weekday, one hundred and fifty-four thousand automobiles, trucks, and buses - nearly twelve thousand an hour during the commuter rush - pound down the great arc of a lakeshore roadway, two thirds of it elevated on reinforced concrete columns and trusses, that bears Gardiner's name. 'The Gardiner,' as motorists have known it since the first section was opened in 1958, was the first urban expressway in Canada, and it remains

ix Preface the most densely travelled. 3 The ease with which it shrinks previously forbidding distances is its obvious benefit; its din, fumes, and grime, and the energy-wasteful diurnal rhythms it encourages are its costs. Six miles to the north, another huge band of cement and asphalt - still referred to colloquially by the name Gardiner gave it, the Spadina Expressway - stands half completed, spewing its traffic onto midtown streets. Gardiner sponsored the original design for Spadina in the late 1940s, rammed through approval of the first stage of construction in his final month in office in 1961, and watched from retirement as one of the most incendiary issue conflicts in Canadian urban history swirled around the project. The oft-made comparison to Robert Moses, the long-time co-ordinator of construction for New York, neglects major disparities of scale, outlook, and structure between the cities that Gardiner and Moses moulded and between the societies of which they were a product. It slights also the real differences of temperament and background between the two men.4 Moses came from an affluent family and a minority ethnic group. Gardiner's origins were in the working-class segment of Toronto's dominant British-Irish population. Moses had graduate degrees from Oxford and Columbia and committed himself to the world of government in his mid-twenties. Gardiner was a lawyer and a promoter of assorted commercial enterprises who did not work full time at politics and administration until he was almost sixty years old. Moses was vindictive toward enemies and hostile toward almost all criticism of his works. Gardiner was slower to rise to genuine anger, seldom held grudges, and was an expert at using humour to defuse antagonism. In other ways, though, the parallel with Moses is a suggestive one. Gardiner resembled Moses in the activism, will-power, and sense of exigency he brought to his task. He yielded nothing to Moses in his fascination with the marvels that men and machines could work in steel and concrete and brick and earth. Like Moses, he converted his dreams into reality by resort to a panoply of political weapons, marshalling them often in overbearing and ruthless combination. Like Moses, he was not directly elected by the public whose interests he was sworn to uphold. Like Moses, he came to bask in a personality cult that augmented his power in addition to reflecting it. And like Moses, too, Frederick Gardiner lived to see the day when his deeds and his methods would be questioned and even reviled by many. While recognizing Gardiner's record as exceptional, one can also read it for lessons of more general relevance. Prior to 1953, as a backstage power in the Ontario and national Conservative parties and an effective suburban politician, he moved on terrain that has barely been charted by historians. In both roles, and especially in the unhurried rounds of civic and county assemblies

x Preface that comprised the suburban ground, it is the ordinariness of much of what he did that most merits detailing. During his heyday as chairman of the metropolitan council as well, Gardiner confronted many of the perennial problems and constraints that beset local politicians all over Canada. The quotidian environment of his actions - a parochial-minded local legislature unstructured by political parties, a welter of bureaucracies and semi-independent boards, senior governments blessed with superior resources, the expectations of business and other interest groups and of public opinion at large - would likely be familiar in its broad contours to the mayor or chief executive of any modern Canadian locality, large or small. Much can be learned from Gardiner's successes and failures in dealing with his surroundings. Broader applicability is also to be found in the working out of the objectives that Gardiner and his colleagues pursued in the Toronto of the 1950s. The inception of the metropolitan federation 'marked the beginning of the modern era' in Canadian municipal history.5 Gardiner's metropolitan government was a response to, and an attempt to give constructive impetus to, the singular expansion of urban settlement in post-war society. It sought to promote rapid urban development, and it did so primarily by enlarging the territorial and functional reach of the traditional institutions of local government. Whatever the hopes of Metropolitan Toronto's creators and its irrefutable achievements as a regime, the embrace of growth and bigness brought about a new set of dilemmas and concerns. Now that the Toronto archetype has been imitated across the country, Toronto's problems-of tangible services, institutional design, and popular participation - are those of urban Canada as a whole.

Acknowledgments

It is a pleasure to record the contributions others have made to this study. To David Crombie and Jack McLeod I owe my introduction, in the spring of 1975, to Frederick Gardiner and his story. Without ever trying to influence the outcome, Mr Gardiner graciously submitted over the next four years to two dozen interviews and numerous written queries. The fruit of these exchanges is to be found on almost every page of the book. To the ninety-seven other individuals who gave their time for interviews my debt is also great. Peter Silcox, J. Stefan Dupré, Victor Jones, and the two anonymous reviewers for the University of Toronto Press provided incisive comments on the manuscript and prompted many revisions, major and minor. In the University of Toronto, both the Division of Social Sciences at Scarborough College and the Department of Political Economy have furnished many of the small conveniences, hard to come by in an age of shrinking budgets, that smooth the scholar's path. R.I.K. Davidson and Lydia Burton have seen the manuscript through the several stages of editing and production with admirable dispatch and good humour. Chris R. Grounds made the map for Figure 1, and for the illustrations Alan Miller worked wonders with cracked photographs and speckled newspaper microfilm. The Toronto Star was generous in permitting use of its photograph collection. Of the many archivists, librarians, and officials who facilitated access to documentary materials, I wish to thank especially Alex Ross of the Public Archives of Ontario, Anthony Rees of the City of Toronto Archives, Kenneth Johnson of the Trent University Archives, Eileen Berriman of the Metropolitan Toronto chairman's office, and Edward Stewart of the office of the premier of Ontario. Two closing acknowledgments are in order. The first is to say that this book is being published with the help of a grant from the Social Science Federation of

xii Acknowledgments Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and with the assistance of the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council. The final note is directed to Patricia J. Colton. For her insights and support, a dedication page is quite inadequate as a token of my gratitude. TIMOTHY J. COLTON

Contents

PREFACE vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi 1

Private and political beginnings 3 2

Not really first-class politics 26 3 The metropolitan experiment 52 4 Getting the shovels into the ground 74 5 Taking it to the politicians 96 6 The world without and the world within 123 7 What kind of city? 151 8 Changes of season 174 NOTES 187 INDEX 209

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left

David and Victoria Gardiner, 1888 (Mrs Newton J. Powell)

right Myrtle, Frederick (standing left), and Samuel Gardiner, about 1903 (Mrs Newton J. Powell)

Frederick Gardiner in Canadian Mounted Rifles, 1916 (Mr & Mrs Frederick G. Gardiner)

Gardiner's graduation photograph, Osgoode Hall, 1920 (Mr & Mrs Frederick G. Gardiner)

top Gardiner (right) with close friends Charles Grainger (left) and Norman Holtby aboard their cabin cruiser, 1928 (Mr & Mrs Frederick G. Gardiner) bottom A formal portrait of the successful lawyer, 1935 (Mr & Mrs Frederick G. Gardiner)

In Ottawa for the Progressive Conservative leadership convention, 1948, with MP Howard Green (Mr & Mrs Frederick G. Gardiner)

top Laying down the law at planning session for the future Gardiner Expressway, 1954, with engineer A.D. Margison (Leo Harrison) bottom With Ontario Premier Leslie Frost at opening of first leg of the Gardiner Expressway, 1958 (Metropolitan Toronto Planning Department)

No doubts about the outcome as Metropolitan Toronto Council prepares to re-elect Gardiner, 1960 (Kryn Taconis)

With Toronto Mayor David Crombie, 1973 (Star photo)

Big Daddy Frederick G. Gardiner and the Building of Metropolitan Toronto

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1 Prívate and political beginnings

January 21, 1895, was an exceptionally mild day for the middle of winter in Toronto, Ontario. The balmy breezes and fine drizzle deflected residents' thoughts from the two months of snow and freezing northwest winds separating them from the first day of spring. As if this was not reason enough to smile, at City Hall there was a special cause for celebration. 'Palms and banners, fair faces and fine costumes, the portraits of Chief Magistrates looking down on all. It was a bfave show that His Worship Mayor Kennedy made his first official bow to... at the inaugural meeting of the Council of 1895. The old Council chambers put on an air of gaiety that is quite unusual by the good offices of the Parks Commissioner, who was lavish of exotic and bunting.'1 Before strolling to McConkey's restaurant for a luncheon underwritten by the civic treasury, the city fathers had occasion to remark in general terms on Toronto's heritage and on its recent progress. From remote outpost of Empire, it had become the second largest city in Canada, the capital of a flourishing province. At the same time it remained, they were pleased to acknowledge, a British city and a Protestant city, its citizens' private and public existences heavily coloured by the Anglican church, the swelling evangelical denominations, and the fantastic array of fraternal organizations anchored in the English and Irish working-class neighbourhoods. Toronto was in the thick of a long and passionate struggle over Sunday streetcar service. Victory would go to the secularizers in 1897, but Toronto the Good' was to endure in fact and fable for decades more. Spiritual influences to the side, the dynamics of buoyant capitalism, mass immigration, and transportation technology were forging in Toronto a bustling industrial settlement which 'looked for all the world like a hundred other aspiring commercial cities on the continent.'2 Most of its factories and warehouses were still huddled around the waterfront and rail yards, within walking

4 Big Daddy distance of the City Hall at Front and Jarvis streets and of the slender, red brick houses in which most of Toronto's denizens lived. Already, however, the forces of dispersion and disorder were doing their work. Residential and commercial clusters had made an appearance in the environs, and along the newly electrified lines of the Toronto Street Railway Company serrated queues of buildings were taking shape. Within the compact city core, questions were being raised about unsatisfactory and inequitable civic services. Rapid urbanization was bringing in its train, as Mayor Kennedy's address cautioned, problems of a palpable sort that it was the duty of the city's government to mitigate. Now was not the hour, he told the assembled dignitaries, 'to waste precious time on... visionary schemes.' He adumbrated instead a sober schedule of'improvements' - to the fire brigade, police force, utilities, parks, schools, and relief services - such as might have been served up to the legislature of any city of several hundred thousand in North America. If January 21,1895, was a date for felicitations at City Hall, so it was at the home of David and Victoria Gardiner twenty-five blocks to the west and north, past the new, Romanesque City Hall structure half-way completed at Queen and Bay streets. This was the day of the birth of their second son, Frederick Goldwin Gardiner, who six decades into the future would stand tall in the politics of a much larger and much changed Toronto. DAVID GARDINER'S SON

David Gardiner, heavy-set and plodding of gait, was close to being a typical member of the city's working population. 3 His birthplace, in October 1854, had been a farm not far from the town of Clones in county Monaghan, Ireland. John Gardiner and the former Isabella Hall, his parents, were tenants on the small, infertile property worked by Isabella's father before them. They were able to impart to their ten children (six boys and four girls) an astringent Methodise upbringing, a yearning for economic advancement, and little else. Four of the sons stayed in Ireland, only one of them on the homestead. Four daughters and two sons, George and David, were to follow thousands of their countrymen to the new Dominion of Canada, in each case beginning in Toronto. George and, evidently, one of the sisters had already made the journey when David Gardiner alighted in Toronto, penniless and without formal schooling or trade, in the summer of 1874. He spent his first month as a labourer at Dixon's Carriage Works on Queen Street, then hired on as a carpenter's assistant on Toronto Island, where he aided in building the cottages and amusement facilities to which Torontonians thronged on hot summer days.

5 Beginnings In 1876 Gardiner procured the job of attendant at the Toronto Asylum for the Insane on; Queen Street, where his brother had been employed previously and two of his sisters were to have positions later. This tending to society's outcasts might not have been uplifting labour, but it was indoor work, it was secure, and it left him the evenings free to work on his reading and writing and to take on odd carpentry jobs. Eight years at the asylum generated enough of a financial stockpile for him to meet the down payment on a narrow, roughcast, two-storey house on Euclid Avenue, in a district of west-central Toronto populated mainly by recent immigrants from the United Kingdom. Prefiguring his later behaviour, David Gardiner used the house to accumulate capital, renting it out and utilizing the proceeds to help retire the mortgage in less than a decade. The same year, 1884, he achieved another slight improvement in his prospects by moving from his attendant's job to a better-paid and less disheartening post as a guard at the province's Central Prison, a sooty and overcrowded installation erected in 1873 at the foot of Strachan Avenue. By 1885 he could exchange boarding-house living for residence in a small house on busy Arthur Street (later called Dundas Street), around the corner from his Euclid Avenue property; this place he bought with $3,300 in cash. At a social evening held for the asylum's employees during his last months there, Gardiner had made the acquaintance of a new staff member, a twentytwo-year-old nurse by the name of Victoria Robertson. This fellow Methodist was of Scottish-Canadian extraction and was erect in bearing, somewhat stout of waist, and quick to smile. She hailed from the small Ontario town of Port Hope, out of which her father sailed for many years as a Great Lakes freight boat captain. The Robertsons moved to Toronto in the mid-1870s, and it was here that she attended secondary school and a nursing course. Following a leisurely courtship, Victoria Robertson and David Gardiner were married in April 1888 and she became the mistress of the Arthur Street house. In time three children were born, Samuel David in 1893, Frederick in 1895, and a daughter Myrtle in 1899. The family maximized its resources, Frederick Gardiner remembered many years later, by 'scrimping, saving, and mending our own socks.'4 To supplement his salary and satisfy a craving for property ownership that only deepened as he grew older, David Gardiner took up what was in effect a second career. His initial choice had been to buy and operate a little bar across the corner from the Gardiner home. This proposition was unacceptable to his wife, so he decided to devote most of his spare time to acquiring, upgrading, and renting out small buildings in the neighbourhood. By 1900 he owned eight properties, all near the Arthur-Euclid intersection; his tenants included several immigrant families, a grocery store, a pharmacy, and a shoemaker's shop.

6 Big Daddy The resulting improvement in the Gardiners' income enabled them to move in 1901 to more commodious quarters, two doors east on Arthur Street. In 1911, the year after David was promoted to deputy warden of Central Prison, they relocated around the corner at 1991/2 Euclid Avenue, a newer house with a brick face that was a shade larger again (but was still only seventeen feet wide). In 1911 there also came the news that at the instigation of a reformminded provincial secretary, W.J. Hanna, the prison would be closed down. When the last inmates evacuated its claustrophobic cells and workshops in 1915 for the new 'prison farm' at Guelph, David Gardiner balked at moving and took early retirement. From then on, being a landlord was his sole occupation. Although David Gardiner's second son later exhibited some of the banter and bravado often associated with the Irish-American politician, little of this was picked up at home. The head of the household was a tight-lipped and refractory teetotaller who, save for a weakness for Irish music, had no interest in his cultural heritage. His life revolved around his work, and once young Ted (as Frederick was known to his friends) turned eleven, the father expected him to lend a frequent hand with the shingling, plastering, plumbing, and painting of his properties. On sundry occasions near the end of the summer building season the blonde-haired, husky boy was dispatched with a pushcart to gather discarded sand and nails at construction sites north of their neighbourhood. The assignment especially rankled because it coincided with the annual run of the Canadian National Exhibition, which many of his friends were at liberty to attend with a tidy supply of nickels for midway rides and refreshments. 'I felt abused,' he would recollect later, 'but it was good training. In his own way my father tutored me in how to work and showed me that you do not get anywhere without it. Not only that, he taught me how to build things, practical things that people could use.' Much afterward, when Gardiner as a public administrator managed construction projects that dwarfed his father's, he was wont to refer back to that early experience and to surprise colleagues with his familiarity with building materials and techniques. No matter what the long-term by-products, it cannot be said that at the time he would not have preferred his freedom. With David Gardiner refusing to budge, Ted continued to assist him throughout his years in school. As an adolescent, he also stowed away his first savings by delivering telegrams on bicycle for the Great Northwestern Telegraph Company on holidays and weekends. Victoria Gardiner much surpassed her husband in sociability and culture. She had more education than most women of her day and sustained a lively interest in books, music, and current ideas. It was she who was responsible for Frederick's middle name of Goldwin, after the celebrated publicist and

7 Beginnings admirer of American institutions, Goldwin Smith, whose Grange Park residence was only a few blocks from the Gardiner house. It was also Mrs Gardiner who shepherded the children through Sunday school and services at Parkdale Methodist Church on Dunn Avenue. On Sunday evenings she often took the family in tow to other churches - Walmer Road Baptist, Queen Street Methodist, Bond Street Congregational - to be elevated by the sermon. Ted Gardiner was moved more by the form than by the content of what he heard. Without becoming deeply religious, he was transfixed by the church oratory, particularly the florid homilies of the Reverend Byron Stauffer at Bond Street Congregational. These ingrained in him a belief in the power of the spoken word, which he applied widely in future. Young Gardiner was also inculcated at a tender age in the institution that was for many Protestants in Toronto, most of all Irish Protestants, as significant as formal religious observance. The Loyal Orange Lodge, that unique synthesis of bigotry, imperialist sentiment, and the self-help tradition, was then at the apogee of its prestige and influence. David Gardiner was a fervid participant in its affairs, one of the stalwarts at the meetings of the King William IV branch and a personal friend of Billy Harper, the neighbourhood baker who rode the white horse at the head of the big Twelfth-of-July parade. He was, too, a charter member of the Ulster Lodge of the Masons. His son took part in the Orange order's youth activities as a matter of course, marching in the parades and enjoying the picnics, and was enrolled as an Orangeman at the age of eighteen. In like fashion he became a Mason three years later. The precept of childrearing on which David and Victoria Gardiner were in complete accord was the importance of formal education. From the start, they imbued this idea in their children by admonition and down-to-earth inducements. It was a family rule that a child who did not finish in the top five of the class would have his household chores increased. Of the three children, there was never any question that the parents' fondest hopes rested on the elder son, Sam, who shone in school from the early grades and soon proved himself to be a prodigy at classics and foreign languages. As a reward, he was absolved of the drudgery of helping his father with building maintenance. Ted Gardiner began kindergarten at Grace Street School on the third day of the new century and entered first grade that September. In contrast to his brother, he was a reluctant learner. 'I was driven into it, really, because I was not a natural student. I just did not take to it like Sam did.' He resented what he saw as the preferential treatment of Sam, yet was unwilling to emulate the favoured son's diligence and, it would seem, laboured under a fair bit of an inferiority complex. Ted's marks were so low in the fourth grade that he was forced to repeat the year. Chastened though he was by this, until well into his

8 Big Daddy teens he preferred street games and team sports, in particular baseball and rugby, to books. After he moved on in 1909 to Parkdale Collegiate Institute, a large secondary school ministering to pupils from a potpourri of ethnic and class backgrounds, his parents seriously wondered if he would come to a sorry end. 'Ted was the rough and tough type, forever getting into hot water and putting sports ahead of his studies,' according to his sister's recollection. 'He was the kind who would trudge through the house in muddy shoes, or accidentally throw a ball through a plate-glass shop window, or swim in the forbidden swimming hole.' The role of disciplinarian after untoward incidents belonged to his father. His mother did most of the worrying. 'She appeared to be frightened that he might turn out to be an extreme person instead of the staid and reliable individual she was.'5 Mrs Gardiner fretted at what she considered Ted's inordinate interest in her home-made dandelion wine and was positively distressed when he turned thumbs down on an offer of $500 in cash in exchange for a renunciation of cigarette smoking. Belying his parents' doomsaying, Gardiner at Parkdale Collegiate conceived a vague ambition for a business or professional career, a path to economic security and prosperity more direct and less backbreaking than the one trod by his father. In the third form of high school he began to envince the competitiveness and straining for material success that would subsequently impress everyone he met. 'It was rivalry with the others taking over as much as anything,' he said later. 'All of a sudden I felt what it could be like to outdo them, to be out in front of the crowd.' Victoria Gardiner believed for the rest of her days that her pestering had goaded him onward. Whatever the precise cause, her son's grades and outlook improved markedly. In June 1913, without forsaking his place on the school rugby team, the dilatory scholar passed his junior matriculation (twelfth year) examinations with his finest standing to date, second in his class. Thus far the future chairman of Metropolitan Toronto had given little sign of political talents. He took no part in student politics and possessed no apparent aptitude as a public speaker, in contradistinction to his precocious brother. When compelled to deliver his inaugural speech as a Mason in 1916, he was edgy and flustered several days before the event. Catching sight of two of his friends in the hall awaiting the performance, 'He looked like he would have murdered us if he got the chance.'6 He was hard pressed to make it through the ritual at all. Of politics in the larger sense, he was by no means ignorant. From an early age he was drawn to it as a spectator sport, one that unlike the games of the street and schoolyard could be savoured and talked over at home. As he

9 Beginnings matured, this interest grew, as did the attachments that ordered his perceptions of the political world. The basic commitment was to the regnant force in Toronto and Ontario politics, the Conservative party. For David Gardiner, as for many of his fellow arrivals from Ireland and Britain, being a Protestant and an Orangeman went hand in hand with being a Tory. Thus it was with Frederick Gardiner, who came to experience conservatism by way of piecemeal exposure and acceptance as opposed to considered conversion. 'I knew very few of the fine points of party politics. I took part because it was expected of me. It was a natural reflection of the circumstances I grew up in.' Young Gardiner's first campaign effort occurred in the ten days preceding the January 2, 1911, civic elections, and was exercised on behalf of Dr W.J. McKay, who stood for the board of education for the Fifth Ward. The candidacy of McKay, a physician and the president of the ward Conservative association, bore the emblem of the religious and linguistic tensions astir in Canadian politics. He was one of eleven candidates for the board, ten of them Conservatives, who ran as a 'Protestant slate' pledged to 'guard the public school as the most potent influence for the blending into one loyal Englishspeaking people of the children of every nationality, language, creed, and colour.' While the spark for their crusade was the revelation that the Toronto board had inadvertently engaged a practising Roman Catholic as a teacher, more broadly they catered to the skittishness of the majority community at the influx of non-British immigrants into the city and the mounting insistence by French-speaking Ontarians on their right to bilingual schools. McKay and his fellow candidates contrived (the Globe reported with disfavour) 'to arrange for an active campaign, and to secure persons to "root" at nominations, and to "round up" the lodge and party vote on election day.'7 One of those persons was fifteen-year-old Frederick Gardiner, who jumped at the chance to move in adult circles. In the company of his father, he clapped and jeered at meetings, licked envelopes, and handed out cards for McKay. These exertions were crowned with success, as McKay and seven other members of the slate were elected. The Gardiners performed similar services during the campaign for the December 1911 provincial election. The Tory candidate, E.W.J. Owens, a barrister noted for his advanced views on care for the aged, prevailed by a four-to-one margin in Toronto South, Seat A. That Ted Gardiner was only one of dozens of campaign workers did not keep Owens from conveying his appreciation in good pork-barrel style. In the summer of 1914 Owens recommended him for employment at the Post Office, an establishment where few treaded without a patron in the governing party. For $15 a week Gardiner

10 Big Daddy lugged mail at rush hours and toiled on the registry desk, handling bags of cash brought in by the banks. Grimy as the work was, by then he needed the wages because in September 1913 he had landed, by a circuitous route, at the University of Toronto. His first thought had been of business school, as straightforward a road as could be found to middle-class employment. After enrolling in such a program in the summer of 1913, it took him exactly one day of instruction to decide that he had erred. Appalled by the low quality of the teaching, he withdrew from the course, gained late admission to the university, and set his sights on law school. Gardiner registered at University College in the general arts course, the only one open to students with just four years of high school. His first-class grades in his opening year allowed him to transfer into the honours course in political science. It was, the student newspaper the Varsity observed, 'the easiest to enter' of all the honour programs, and it was universally understood to be 'a sort of stepping-stone to the study of law.' The program was crammed with seven or eight courses a year in economics, constitutional and political history, actuarial science, and law. It left most students hardly any time to read or think. 'One is constantly going to lectures taking notes - pages and pages of notes. What an intellectual crutch for life!'8 Gardiner had little to do with the rich club, society, and political life of the university. Rooming at home and absorbed in his studies, he was also in financially straitened circumstances. After covering his tuition from his savings, little remained for the delectations and refinements which, he observed, were within handy reach of those from more favoured backgrounds. His main extracurricular pursuit was again athletics. The entry under his name in the 1916 university yearbook typecast him as an 'athlete enthusiast,' and he was all of that. In 1914, as a lowly second-year man, Gardiner played outside wing and several other positions for the University of Toronto rugby football team, which won the national championship. In the December title game against the Argonauts in Toronto, he was conspicuous as a 'ferocious tackier.'9 The joy of winning was dulled by what Gardiner thought the unreasonable demand by the majority of his teammates that he join one of two off-campus fraternities, Kappa Alpha and Zêta Psi, neither of whose dues could be fitted into his budget. When he had been unable to come up with the money himself and failed to talk his father into a loan, he was proscribed from out-of-town play late in the 1914 season. This was a humiliation that was never effaced from his memory. He had just resolved not to play again for the varsity team when word was received that interuniversity competition would be suspended for the duration of the First World War. In 1915 Gardiner played as captain of the University College team and roved the field in addition for the Capitals, a

11 Beginnings rambunctious power in the regional league which that year made its way to the provincial title. He also served three months as assistant sports editor of the Varsity in 1915-16. By now Gardiner was approaching his course work with the same alacrity he displayed on the playing field. In May 1916 he completed his third year at the head of his class and won the political economy department's Alexander Mackenzie Medal. For the first time he was emerging from the shadow of his gifted older brother. Sam Gardiner, who began the university's honours course in classics in 1912, was a promising scholar and accomplished student politician when he was accepted for an overseas commission in the British Army in late 1915. He was later badly injured in a war-time air crash and, though his body healed, his spirit would never be the same again. The war in Europe also cut into the education of Frederick Gardiner.10 He first put in for a commission in the autumn of 1915. The recruiter, harbouring illusions later than most, told him 'not to bother because the war would be over by Christmas.' That fallacy having been exploded, Gardiner enlisted in the militia in the spring of 1916. In August 1916 he signed on, at the rank of lieutenant, with the Depot Regiment of the Canadian Mounted Rifles in Hamilton. When this cavalry regiment was disbanded, he was shipped to England in October 1917 to an infantry battalion in the Canadian Expeditionary Force. An infantry officers' course at Reading University was followed in February 1918 by a transfer at his request to the Royal Flying Corps, in which Gardiner was given pilot's training and in quick order took over a flight instructor's slot. In September 1918 he was attached to the Independent Air Force, a bombing and reconnaissance unit manned mostly by airmen from the other British Dominions and based at Nancy, France. He piloted a HandleyPage night bomber on several missions in the concluding month of the war, but felt let down at not seeing more action. The grand issues of the war did not make a profound impression on Frederick Gardiner. Much as the phrase may have suited his brother, he was most decidedly not a member of the 'lost generation,' its psychic moorings sheared by the carnage, that was to be eulogized in post-armistice literature. 'For me the war was just something I had to go through, just another experience. Maybe because I was never in the trenches, I didn't dwell on it later.' More than for the average young serviceman, however, the military life appears to have fostered Gardiner's personal poise and sense of independence. His first sojourn away from home abetted other skills as well. In England and France Gardiner developed a proficiency at cards and dice and a capacity for Scotch whiskey with which many Toronto politicians would later be familiar. He played poker on every day of the eleven-day return voyage across

12 Big Daddy the Atlantic, seeing his stake dip from $1,500 to $300, then climb back to $3,000. In May 1919, upon discharge in Toronto, and with all the energy pent up by three years in uniform, Gardiner set about realizing his now firm intent to become a lawyer. The University of Toronto had awarded him an honours degree in 1917, relieving him, like all students on active service, of the last year of his studies. He now discovered that Osgoode Hall, the training ground of the Law Society of Upper Canada that had granted him admission in 1918, would permit him and other returned soldiers to dispense with the first year of the three-year program and take the second year in an accelerated summer course. Gardiner paid his tuition from his poker winnings, hastily arranged to do in-term articling work with Harry S. White, a law society bencher who took on bright students wanting in 'connections,' and plunged into the study of law. Morning lectures in overflowing halls, with the odd dice game squeezed in between classes, were the only point of contact with faculty and fellow students. Afterwards came a scramble for textbooks, which were in acutely short supply, and a day of note taking and memorizing at the Osgoode library and the city's reference library.11 Gardiner's meticulous synopses of the texts were much in demand by other students, and it was these, rather than native brilliance, that he regarded as the key to his success. 'I was not particularly clever. What I realized was that if I worked longer and harder than everybody else there was no way they could beat me.' No one did beat him. In May 1920, to the consternation of some of his peers and in spite of the handicap of telescoping three years into one, Gardiner graduated first in what was regarded as a superior class. He received the Chancellor Van Koughnet Scholarship, $400 in cash, and the law society's gold medal. It was the proudest day of his life. He was elated that he, the son of a prison guard who had never set foot in a classroom, had finished ahead (by a bare 4 marks out of 1,000) of John R. Cartwright, a member of one of Ontario's most distinguished families (and a future chief justice of Canada).12 MAKING A DOLLAR

The Osgoode Hall gold medal was ensconced on Gardiner's desk for the rest of his career. Most of the $400 prize he used to buy an engagement ring for Audrey Seaman, a railway clerk and the daughter of the chief proprietor of a prosperous flooring company. He had known her since 1913 and had pursued her affections in earnest since his return from the war. Red-haired, petite (almost a foot shorter than Gardiner), effervescent, and strong enough not to be pushed around, she was an excellent match for him. The two were married

13 Beginnings October 1, 1921, and moved into a modest west-end house they had purchased. For several months after being called to the bar, Gardiner worked with the downtown firm of Crooks, Roebuck, and Parkinson. The brief exposure was enough to induce the middle partner, Arthur W. Roebuck, to invite him to enter into a two-way partnership. Gardiner demurred on the grounds that Roebuck's political opinions were too liberal, and persisted even when Roebuck (who was seventeen years older and later became attorney-general and minister of labour in the Ontario cabinet and a Liberal senator) took it as a personal slight. In the late summer of 1920 Gardiner began a partnership with Roebuck's erstwhile colleagues, A.D. Crooks and Harry S. Parkinson (an acquaintance from Parkdale Collegiate), only to set out on his own the following spring in order to pursue commercial opportunities opened up by some newly found connections. He had been befriended by Harry W. Baldwin, a Toronto businessman about ten years his senior, when Baldwin was adjutant to the Depot Regiment in 1916-17. Baldwin, the grandson of Robert Baldwin, one of Ontario's most renowned nineteenth-century politicians, was best man at Gardiner's wedding. In 1921 he and his slightly younger brother, William W. Baldwin, persuaded Gardiner that a profit was to be turned by importing into Ontario a major new invention of American capitalism - the consumer credit corporation, which made cash readily accessible, at high interest rates, to the purchasers of automobiles and other manufactured products. Gardiner acted as the Baldwins' legal associate in organizing one of Canada's first consumer finance firms, Commercial Credit Company of Canada. For the next two years he worked out of a Bay Street office supplied by Commercial Credit, of which Harry Baldwin was the managing director. It was William Baldwin, trained as an accountant but an inveterate promoter and speculator, who most fired Gardiner's imagination. He introduced Gardiner to Toronto's financial community, took him on his novice trips to Wall Street, and embroiled him in the first of a long string of money-making ventures. Gardiner, despite his eventual disenchantment at Baldwin's inadept management of his own affairs, remained a faithful friend and never lost sight of his debt to him. Gardiner's immediate objectives were now fixed. 'In my whole life I only made up my mind in advance to get two things done. One was to win the gold medal at Osgoode Hall. The other was to become a millionaire. I had a bounding ambition to make money and I kept it a secret from no one. There is no other way to put it except to say that it took possession of me.' Selfassertiveness, the desire to provide for his family, acquisitiveness, vanity, the urge to deal as an equal with the progeny of wealth and breeding who had

14 Big Daddy snubbed him at university - all of these motivations, and conceivably others too, lay behind that 'bounding ambition.' Gardiner was not given to introspection, then or later, about these innermost drives. In the here and now, he was out to earn as much as there was to get, and this target was there for all to see. To this end, Gardiner joined forces again with Harry Parkinson in 1923. Two years later the partnership was enlarged to encompass Harry's brother, H. Fred Parkinson, and a fourth man, Donald H. Rowan. The business flowered in the giddy atmosphere of the 1920s, held its own in the early years of the Great Depression, then began to grow again. With the addition of Harry A. Willis in 1930 and the departure of Rowan in 1934, the firm of Parkinson, Gardiner, and Willis, with offices in the Northern Ontario Building at 330 Bay Street, was a stable fixture of the Toronto legal establishment for two decades to come. Like most of the thriving law concerns of its time, it was a diverse enterprise functioning in the several major fields of law. Gardiner's fancy was for criminal cases, which he sometimes accepted for no fee. Not surprisingly, given his aim to enrich himself, he abided by the overall dictates of the market: 'You just had to take whatever you could get, whatever it took to make a dollar.' Exploiting his early efforts, he built up a lucrative expertise in the law of conditional sale agreements, which he handled on behalf of Commercial Credit (with which he severed ties in the mid-1930s), Industrial Acceptance Corporation, and other clients. He also took on civil litigation of all kinds, divorce cases, automotive insurance disputes (often involving the Toronto Transportation Commission's streetcars), the intermittent labour case, some real estate deals (this was Harry Parkinson's specialty), and as much corporate financial and organizational work as he could find. He put in herculean hours and, in the words of Harry Parkinson, 'drove his associates into the ground.'13 Gardiner's rise as a lawyer was rapid if not meteoric. By the early 1930s, several of his Osgoode Hall classmates had come by the rank of King's Counsel, the provincially awarded sign of professional prowess. Gardiner attained his in January 1938, welcoming the somewhat devalued laurel (it was shared with about a quarter of Ontario's lawyers) as a prerequisite for attracting prime clients. He would probably have done so several years earlier except for two extraneous circumstances: his open identification with the Conservative party, which was evicted from provincial office by the Liberals in 1934; and the enmity of the man whose offer of partnership he had spurned in 1920, Arthur Roebuck (attorney-general in the first Liberal cabinet).14 More telling than the KC was Gardiner's name with his fellow legal men. Over time he was more and more frequently a lawyer's lawyer, called in by reason of his forensic

15 Beginnings skill to act as counsel in cases formerly in the charge of other lawyers. By 1945 he was probably one of the half dozen most-sought-after trial lawyers in the province. He saw to it that this prominence was embodied in his fees. This professional prowess completed the turnabout of the expectations of David and Victoria Gardiner. Ted was well established. Their daughter Myrtle had graduated from the University of Toronto, become a home economics teacher, and married a lawyer. But Sam, the apple of his parents' eye, failed abjectly to achieve the glories once presaged for him. After finishing law school and practising for several years with one of the biggest Toronto firms, he abruptly abandoned his legal career. He moved to western Canada, where he worked as a truck driver and farm labourer, and returned to Toronto in 1930 or 1931 when his father became bedridden. David Gardiner died in January 1933, leaving his widow assets of $35,000, most of it in real estate. She lived until three weeks short of her ninety-fifth birthday in 1957. For all those years Sam resided at 199% Euclid, cared for his mother, and superintended her properties. Old before his time, he died in a Toronto nursing home only two years after her passing. Frederick Gardiner, with his fierce career orientation, could not bring himself to approve of Sam's choice, and did not ever give up offering to find him steady, salaried employment. Heartsick though he may have been at Sam's fate, it seems only to have heightened his resolve to make his mark in the world. If that mark was made it was, in Gardiner's opinion, by dint of the industry and thoroughness that were characteristic of his political style later on: I succeeded because I was a worker. Wherever I was, I was a student. I knew I would never leave my footprints in the sands of time if I sat in my cabana on the beach. [Gardiner sometimes chose to express this saying in more earthy language.] If I was getting a criminal case ready, I was a student of criminal procedure. If I was shooting craps, I was a student of shooting craps. It has to be that way or you don't get anything done. In this life either you're an aggressive go-getter or you're a flap-doodle.

In fulfilment of this self-image, Gardiner came to be perceived as a systematic, stubborn, and sometimes acid-tongued advocate and negotiator. He was reliable as an ally and implacable as a foe - not a man to be crossed lightly. His trademark as a courtroom counsel was the methodical marshalling of detailed evidence, garnered from painstaking research and delivered with what usually looked like absolute self-assurance. He created an impression of potency, underlined by his physical-dimensions - two inches short of six feet in height, well over 200 pounds, burly shoulders and arms, and an encroaching midriff that eventually gave him a somewhat keg-like shape - all of this

16 Big Daddy normally sheathed in a capacious three-piece suit. His speaking style was forceful but deliberate, never effusive; his vocal power could unnerve even listeners who had studied his frame. At first Gardiner had to work consciously at injecting human interest into his addresses. As he stored up experience in swaying juries, the wit ran more freely and he also acquired a flair for dramatic and rather high-flown summary statements. These very often had the desired effect on judge and jury, although opposing counsel tended to see them as pompous. One of the more puzzling contradictions in Gardiner's character was between this air of assiduous application and his openness to risk taking, a receptivity perhaps implied by the yoking in his memory of criminal procedure with shooting craps. Gardiner's gambling, which figured so largely in the flamboyant image surrounding him as a politician, was in the main a phenomenon of his leisure hours. By 1930 he was partaking regularly, with zeal and not a small measure of abandon, in weekend and evening games of chance often involving quite weighty stakes. He was not the highest of high rollers, but he later owned up to participating frequently in games where thousands of dollars were wagered and to losing $6,000 in one bad night in the late 1930s. Gardiner also became a regular at playing the horses and spent many an hour at the fences of the several race tracks in the Toronto area. Once in a while his betting instinct cropped up in its baldest form in the law office. Several times (by his own testimony and that of others) Gardiner flabbergasted clients to whom he had rendered diligent service by offering to toss a coin or throw the dice over the amount of his professional fee. Gardiner also shouldered hazards on a more sustained and controlled basis. The fact that he realized his dream of becoming a millionaire several times over can be traced in large part to business undertakings that he nurtured over and above his law practice. Gardiner invested the $10,000 he had collected by 1925, and all the money he could borrow, in industrial and mining stocks. In early 1929, acting on a premonition, he sold all of them except for 400 shares in Noranda Mines. He retained these after the Great Crash, at which time he also sank his remaining capital, much of it borrowed, into the stock of the Bank of Toronto. From these sources, above all his bank stock (which appreciated steadily in extent and value), would in due course flow a considerable private fortune. It says something of Gardiner's impulse to prove himself in pecuniary terms that he was always on the lookout for other springs to enlarge the stream. In the early 1930s Gardiner began to accept stock in place of money for payment of legal fees. Later in the decade, as his law practice solidified and his political contacts broadened, he sought out numerous commercial opportunities and responded favourably to many others brought to his attention by the

17 Beginnings Baldwins and other associates. His behaviour bore testimony to a restless nature, and just as powerfully to an unusual talent for keeping track of helter-skelter commitments. By 1940 he was president of Adanac Realty (a real estate holding company), vice-president of a metal stamping firm, and director of another manufacturing corporation. By 1945 he was also president of Mission Sawmills (a British Columbia-based forest products concern), vice-president of a tanning company and a trucking firm, and director of a fire brick company. By the early 1950s he would be vice-president of Supreme Aluminum Industries (the president of which was Harold V. Lush, later the head of the Canadian Manufacturers' Association) and of SOS Manufacturing, and member of the board of a household cleanser manufacturer and a car rental company.15 Clearly there was a strong streak of the promoter and the hustler in Frederick Gardiner. He did not shirk this label, and at times he was willing to lend himself to projects that departed substantially from the model of the extraprofessional enterprise accredited by most members of the downtown legal fraternity. At several junctures in the 1930s and during the Second World War he acted on behalf of individuals facing prosecution under the laws regulating gambling and the retail liquor trade. He participated at this time in a number of ventures together with Sam Steinberg, a raffish Toronto entrepreneur well known for his addiction to high-stakes gambling. Steinberg, whom Gardiner first met at a race track, was a principal in Mission Sawmills. At one point the two men also conjointly owned several race horses and a motor vehicle dealership, Drayton Motors, which in the late 1940s advertised itself as 'Canada's Largest Used Car Dealers.' Perhaps Gardiner's least orthodox endeavour was Sage Enterprises Limited, into which he entered during the war in partnership with Sam Steinberg, one Lou Epstein, and William Armstrong, the reeve of the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke. Sage bought and managed hotels in Toronto and outlying districts. At its peak it had in operation five such establishments, all of them plying mainly beverages and live entertainment. The private life Gardiner fashioned for himself had plenty of comforts, some extravagances, and a few ostentations. It always had a distinctly haphazard appearance to it, since Gardiner was like many self-made men in being more enchanted with making money than with spending it or otherwise enjoying his leisure. The old ties of religion and ethnicity now made limited claims on his loyalties. The punctilious Methodism of his childhood was succeeded in the mid-1920s by a more slack affiliation with the new United Church of Canada, and his Orange Lodge and Masonic memberships were reduced to a formality. In the home, Gardiner abdicated to his wife most of the responsibility for managing the household and raising their son Warren, born

18 Big Daddy in 1924, and daughter Anne, who arrived three years later. Cramped in their first house and with their financial outlook on the upswing, the couple took the chance in early 1929 of buying a residential lot on Spadina Road in Toronto's most expensive suburb, Forest Hill. Builders were commissioned to put up a three-storey stone house, much of it designed by Gardiner himself. In 1931 the family moved in 'with the house unfinished and the downturn on Bay Street meaning we couldn't afford living room furniture for a year, and with me [Gardiner] having to borrow against one insurance policy to pay on the other.' Within half a decade not only had the building been completed but Gardiner had freed it of major encumbrances. Like many of their neighbours, Frederick and Audrey Gardiner now employed a full-time maid, drove two cars (one of them a Cadillac), owned the latest household gadgetry, and sent their children to private schools. Gardiner possessed an extensive library and read with special avidity books on economics, government, and biography. His mannerisms and deportment, on the other hand, were anything but bookish. In keeping with his upbringing and the milieu in which he pursued his livelihood, he was gruff, forward, and irreverent. He walked with a swagger and was not timid about professing his likes and dislikes. Gardiner's cocksureness and lack of surface polish and deference neither attracted nor recommended him to what passed for high society in Toronto. His memberships in several of the city's more high-priced clubs meant little. These he valued mostly for their utility as luncheon and entertaining spots. As a rule, his diversions had a pronouncedly bourgeois flavour, at times even a plebian one. His taste for gambling has already been mentioned. He and his wife were also cottage proprietors, having acquired a place on Lake Simcoe from her parents. From 1927 to 1932 Gardiner and his two closest friends, Norman Holtby and Charles Grainger, both of them businessmen living in Forest Hill, owned a cabin cruiser that they sailed in clement weather to the cottage, camping and fishing along the way. Fishing remained an enthusiasm of Gardiner's for decades. Once he could afford it, he liked nothing better than to charter an aircraft and depart with a small company for a weekend of angling and poker at a northern lake. As for foreign travel, he was disinterested in any destination outside of the United States and the Caribbean; he did not return to Europe after 1919.16 Without a doubt, Gardiner's biggest indulgence and his most egregious weak spot was his consumption of alcohol. What had originated as a source of sporadic entertainment evolved by stages into a regular escape from the cares of work. His drinking increased in volume and frequency as he entered middle age, until in 1940, fearing outright dependence and under pressure from Audrey Gardiner to check his habit, he took a resolution to forswear it

19 Beginnings altogether. This abstemiousness lasted nearly a decade. He would allow himself to drink again after 1949, only from then onward it was in much greater moderation than before. Gardiner's new-found temperance, combined with the weight of public and private business, lessened (though by no means did away with) his adventures with horses, cards, and dice. As a partial recompense, he took up golf, at which he never progressed beyond mediocrity. At home he planted and tended a large garden of red roses, which won several local horticultural prizes. Amazing his friends - and even himself- Gardiner in the 1940s developed a strong and lasting interest in the visual arts. He began to patronize galleries in Toronto and other cities, to study art history, and to assemble a generous collection of landscape and portrait paintings. He also started to collect modern and antique silver artifacts. Throughout the first decade and a half of his law career, Gardiner took some notice of politics, as any up-and-coming barrister had to. Nevertheless, this counted for far less in his scale of priorities than private mobility and accumulation. Shortly after law school, he shrugged off a suggestion by Billy Harper, the marshal of the Orange Day parades of his childhood, that he run for the school board. In 1920 his father took him to the convention that selected the voluble Howard Ferguson as head of the Ontario Conservatives, and in the ensuing years he closely followed the party's fortunes and debated public issues with friends and colleagues. When appeals and divorce cases took him to Ottawa, he often took in sessions of Parliament. Marvelling at the fidelity to principle and the verbal ingenuity of Conservative leaders Arthur Meighen and R.B. Bennett, he also brooded about whether their fluent outpourings were not doomed, like those of the Reverend Byron Stauffer to which he had listened years before, to pass above the heads of a populace increasingly immersed in making a living. Gardiner's office was three short blocks from Toronto City Hall. He assimilated something of the rhythm of municipal politics and administration from the gossip of 'the Hall' and from his work in licensing, assessment, and civil damages cases. Still, there had been for all this time, throughout the phases in life when most politicians make their maiden pass into the limelight, no active involvement in politics. Curiosity and inchoate ambition there were, but participation would come only when circumstances beckoned. INTO THE W H I R L P O O L

On June 19, 1934, the Conservative government of Ontario was toppled from office by Mitchell Hepburn's Liberals. Under Howard Ferguson and George S. Henry, the Tories had ruled the province for eleven years, and for all but

20 Big Daddy four years of the eighteen before that. Now they had been brought down by the depression, by the temporizing leadership of Premier Henry, and by the campaigning of Hepburn, the onion farmer from Elgin county who was one of the greatest crowd pleasers in Ontario political history. The rout gave rise to a crisis of leadership and purpose within the party. An astute and marketable leader would later be found in George A. Drew. The Ontario Conservative Association, the extraparliamentary association that had existed largely on paper since its founding at Ferguson's behest, would also be revivified and modernized. None of this, it hardly need be said, could have been foretold in 1934. Neither was solace to be found in the condition of the federal Conservatives. They were resoundingly defeated in the October 1935 general election, which diminished the contingent of Conservative MPs from Ontario from 59 to 25. Gardiner had watched the 1934 electoral debacle with interest, but did nothing to stem it beyond making a small campaign donation. In the aftermath of the defeat, he expressed dismay with the parlous state of party organization to several Conservative friends and acquaintances, and he did so in his habitually pugnacious terms. One of his listeners was Harry I. Price, a Toronto insurance broker who was a kingpin in the financing of Ontario Conservative campaigns from the early 1920s to the mid-1960s. At the coaxing of Price and several others, Gardiner took his first concrete step into party affairs in late 1934. He accepted a nomination for the presidency of the Conservative Businessmen's Association of Toronto, and was promptly elected. Headquartered in the party's Albany Club on King Street, the association offered cheap lunches, political conversation, and a chance to rub shoulders with visiting Tory grandees and with Conservative MPPs, many of whom boarded at the club when the provincial legislature was in session. Like many of the organizational emanations of Canadian political parties, the Businessmen's Association was vulnerable to cyclical fluctuations in membership and morale. Gardiner took it over at a low point in the cycle. 'It needed somebody to walk in and shake it up and make it important. I figured it might as well be me do the job.' By the time he gave up leadership four years later, membership had doubled to about 500. Gardiner had become the first skipper of this unassuming vessel to see to it that dues were paid on time, and his involvement with the party had increased immeasurably. One day in early December 1935, Gardiner was in the Albany Club lounge discoursing on the lessons of the recent federal campaign (in which he had made several speeches in assistance of local candidates) when he was interrupted by his friend Robert C. Rowland, the owner of a Toronto brick yard and a resident of Forest Hill. If Gardiner knew so many of the answers,

21 Beginnings Rowland wanted to know, why did he not try his own luck at politics? The affairs of Forest Hill, of all places, were in a state of mild excitement, and the village council needed steady hands at the helm. Gardiner was receptive. 'It was easy enough to convince me to dip my toe in. I wasn't sure I wouldn't want to run for the legislature or for Parliament later. I had yet to see what being an MPP or an MP does to your law business.' The Village of Forest Hill was a recent artifact of the process of political fragmentation so typical of North American cities and which in the Toronto region no one was ultimately to do more than Gardiner to negate. It occupied a comely, verdant site of about 175 city blocks on the northwestern flank of the City of Toronto proper. Initially it was an ill-defined expanse of rolling countryside, known informally as Spadina Heights but officially part of York township, the rural municipality demarcated in York county to the north of Toronto in 1850. Most of the land had been held in several large farms first settled in the 1830s, the largest of them the estate of the Baldwin family. When it was marked off into residential lots, the original owners usually insisted on big plots and 'were particular to whom they sold,'17 often negotiating covenants which forbade further subdivision and required that any buildings attain a prescribed size or market value. As population began to flood in during the 1890s, the area was viewed as a natural extension of what were then the most costly neighbourhoods in the city. This impression was confirmed in the flurry of development before 1914 and in the larger wave of building after 1920. In 1910 the district had been recognized as constituting a public school section, that is as being self-governing for school purposes. In 1912 the Spadina Heights Ratepayers' Association asked the city, in vain, to annex the area and install municipal services in it. They got no response when they repeated the plea in 1922, after economy-minded farmers from the northern tier of York township bisected it by carving out a separate unit, North York township. Upon failing to win support for creation of an integrated city in the western rump of York township, the Spadina Heights group successfully petitioned the county council for permission to set up an autonomous municipality. Forest Hill came into being December 15, 1923. It had about 4,000 residents when Gardiner purchased his lot in 1929. This number doubled by 1935, and doubled again by the late 1940s, but the village was always a place of intimate scale and face-to-face relations. Forest Hill was almost entirely a locale for residing rather than for producing. In 1950, 98 per cent of its citizens who worked did so beyond its boundaries, mostly in the central city.18 Village leaders liked to tout it as the foremost residential community in Canada, and this assuredly was an honour to which it could stake claim; its only rivals would have been the enclaves of

22 Big Daddy Westmount in Montreal and Rockcliffe Park in Ottawa. On commemorative occasions much was made of Forest Hill's pioneering beginnings, when no one was sure 'whether the infant municipality could afford to buy a couple of loads of cinders' to make the spring mud of Eglinton Avenue passable.19 The bracing nature of such reminiscences could not alter the fact that the Forest Hill of the 1930s was essentially a community for the well-to-do and the almost well-to-do. It contained some of the largest and best appointed houses in all of Canada, as well as two of the country's leading private schools, Upper Canada College and Bishop Strachan School. On its ratepayers' list stood the names of many of the economic and social notables of the greater Toronto area - Baldwin, Gooderham, Ritchie, Eaton, Atkinson, Laidlaw, Cartwright, Matthews - in addition to hundreds of businessmen and professionals vying for such status. To move up to Forest Hill, as Gardiner did as soon as he could pay the price, was to move up the prestige ladder, and everyone knew so. Before 1935 the political leadership of Forest Hill had operated principally through co-option and consensus. There were no issues that sharply divided the community and few that troubled people other than those directly affected by the outcome. The only question betraying serious potential for dissension was that of what to do with the 'North End' of the municipality. This district, north of the major artery of Eglinton Avenue, had been appended to the original school section only in 1919. It included about 200 little houses (many of them built and improved by their owners), several dozen farm properties, and a handful of building supplies plants and coal yards. By the mid-1930s it had undergone little residential construction compared to the south, although there was lively land speculation in the area. In 1931 the Forest Hill ratepayers had agreed in a referendum to follow the recommendation of a consultant to develop the North End as a residential district. The village council subsequently bought out the small industrial concerns and proceeded, in 1934-35, to discuss how to subdivide and service the area for residential habitation. It was at this point that for the first and only time in the village's history the political elite split internally. In mid-December 1935 a group of about fifty persons christening itself the Citizens' Committee of Forest Hill Village broadcast its intention to defeat the attempt of Deputy Reeve Arthur S. Leitch to succeed retiring reeve Hugh Cooke, and to put in power in their stead a five-man slate headed by Hugh H. Donald, a barrister with a dense Scottish burr and a predilection toward sporting his kilt in public. The new group promised 'a strongly entrenched business administration' dedicated to preserving Forest Hill as 'Canada's premier residential community.' 'The Citizens' Committee,' stated its manifesto, 'has been formed as a protest against the inefficiency and indecision that has recently characterized the administration of our civic affairs. Not only has there been a costly lack of promptness in

23 Beginnings dealing with pressing problems, but there has been a tendency to allow the Village to be exploited by special interests, in ways that are threatening to destroy the spirit of unity that once was, and still should be, one of the chief charms of our community life.'20 The committee took greatest umbrage at what it detected as schemes to develop the North End on a less palatial scale than that found in the settled part of the village. Its sharpest arrows were directed at Andrew G. Hazlett, a real estate agent and builder who had served two years as reeve of Forest Hill in the 1920s and was now selling small plots and houses north of Eglinton at a hastening clip. The Citizens' Committee, formed and run by comfortably situated lawyers and businessmen, scored a propaganda coup by portraying Hazlett and Ms~sympathizers as self-seekers conniving to undermine the village's distinctiveness and serenity for squalid profit. Little was said but much was implied about the present and potential occupants of the narrow lots across Eglinton Avenue, undesirables who would import into Forest Hill the very sort of basically urban circumstances and problems that its original residents had sought to escape. With issues like these in the air, the January 1, 1936, balloting was the culmination of'the most strenuous election battle in Forest Hill's history.'21 It was the first election in ten years in which no incumbent had been afforded acclamation. Into these troubled waters - with little to serve as chart, compass, or ballast - cruised Frederick Gardiner. When he first agreed to Robert Rowland's suggestion, Gardiner had not known that the election would be a hotly disputed one. He blithely procured the backing for a seat on council of Reeve Cooke, Deputy Reeve Leitch, former reeves Hazlett and A.H.K. Russell, and A.O. Thompson, another builder with an interest in the North End. At the nomination meeting on December 21, 1935, he followed convention by putting his name forward for two offices, councillor and deputy reeve. Rowland seconded his nomination for councillor but actually nominated the incumbent, Dr Gordon Hyland, for the latter post, which was generally gauged to be an apprenticeship for the reeve's chair to which only veterans of the council could pretend. To Gardiner's surprise, Hyland decided on the spur of the moment not to file a declaration of qualifications and the neophyte politician found himself in a two-way contest for deputy reeve with George Butterfield, a retired manufacturer's agent and the candidate of the Citizens' Committee. Gardiner's campaign was improvised and, at times, apologetic. In an interview with the pro-Citizens' Committee Village Post, he 'confessed ... that he had not been approved by the Citizens' Committee' but vowed 'to follow sound, progressive policies and keep the tax rate at thirty mills.'22 He was ill-prepared to lay siege to the Citizens' Committee because he had little grasp

24 Big Daddy of their grievances or of the political complexion of the municipality. What was worse, the more he reflected on the issues at hand, the more he divined that his views tallied with the opposition's. 'I was so ignorant of village affairs when I started that I didn't realize that I was going against my natural friends. If I had comprehended the situation in the beginning, I probably would never have run at all.' Gardiner's candidacy cost him $800 for posters, cards, transportation, and refreshments. This was a sum unheard of in Forest Hill, where most campaigns were run for less than $200. He was assisted greatly by the blessing of village bigwigs like Russell and Cooke. He was well served also by the bungling campaign of George Butterfield, whose only message to the electors was that as a salesman 'representing English, French, and United States interests' he had travelled widely in Canada and brought himself into 'close touch with municipalities and their varied problems.'23 Gardiner was able to garner some support with his vigorousness and his credentials as a lawyer, yet he soon came to the conclusion that without backing in the North End itself he could not win: It was a situation that defied nature, really. Here I was, a bloated capitalist working seventy hours a week to make it into the company of the same high-hatted bastards who were trying to run these people out of Forest Hill. All the same, I wanted to win that election. I put on my best suit and went around to every house in the North End, taking a break only for Christmas day. I had a long talk with the head of each household. There wasn't that much I could do for them, but I asked them what was on their minds and told them that we were going to do the best we could manage.

Gardiner was given a crucial boost by Andrew Hazlett, who canvassed not only the North End but a section of apartment houses and small homes on the southern outskirts of the village where he had lived as a youth. 24 In the North End Gardiner also called on the efforts of family friends. One of them, Ben Sadowski, a Jewish automobile dealer whom Gardiner had rescued from a beating by local toughs when they were students at Parkdale Collegiate, made a special tour of Jewish families in the district. Leitch defeated Donald by a mere 61 votes. Gardiner gleaned 1,244 votes to Butterfield's 919. Of the 12 polls in the village, Gardiner won 7, only 3 of them by sizable margins. These 3 polling stations gave him a net advantage of 384 votes, without which he would have lost the election. All 3 were in or adjoining the North End. It was a muddled initiation into politics, and in an anomalous corner of Canadian urban society. Muddled or not, it was a beginning. It meshed well

25 Beginnings with Gardiner's new entanglement in the Conservative party. 'Once you get infected with politics, there is no antibiotic to cure you. You want to have a say, you find that one thing grows out of another. That's the way it was with me. I made connections, and they all intermingled. The first thing I knew, I was in a whirlpool.'

2

Not really first-class politics

Seldom did the political whirlpool into which Gardiner tumbled in the mid19308 spin with great force. His partisan and municipal involvements in the years leading up to the creation of Metropolitan Toronto were part-time affairs, essayed for limited stakes. 'It wasn't really first-class politics. Running Forest Hill was a breeze, and a lot of times the party was more a hobby than anything else.' Yet the whirlpool did not always revolve at a leisurely rate. Even when it did, Gardiner's activity presents a fascinating study in the workaday affairs of the Conservative party and of the suburban penumbra of English Canada's largest city. The resources Gardiner amassed here proved of inestimable value during his heyday after 1953. A P O W E R IN THE P A R T Y

No one witnessing the Ontario Conservative party in the late 1930s would have guessed that in 1943 it would inaugurate one of the longest unbroken stays in office of any provincial party in the history of Canada. The leader it anointed in May 1936, W. Earl Rowe, a personable horse breeder and MP, fared little better in the October 1937 general election than George Henry had in 1934. He also seemed incapable of containing dissension and factionalism within the party. His chief rival in 1936, George Drew, a photogenic lawyer who had been mayor of Guelph and Ontario securities commissioner, resigned as party organizer in April 1937 after an acrid disagreement over how to meet the perceived threat of industrial unionism. Under attack from Drew, an exhausted Rowe quit his post in July 1938; at the December leadership convention Drew was the overwhelming victor.1 The new leader was originally identified with an unyielding line on both the hoary issue of aid to separate schools and the new one of the social discontent bred by industrialization.

27 Not first-class politics Only gradually did Drew's Conservatives put the first question behind them and speak to the second by espousing policies of expanded social security and accelerated economic growth within a capitalist framework. Gardiner took a minor part in the 1936 leadership campaign as a votary of Ro we, along with his Albany Club friends. Later that year he was chosen president of the Forest Hill Conservative Association. Its first meeting under his stewardship drew 600 supporters and was the biggest political rally in the village to date.2 With Rowe's encouragement, Gardiner's eyes were now turning to greater things. He would certainly have sought a seat in the Ontario Legislature in 1937 were it not for the coincidence that the riding in which Forest Hill was situated, South York, was represented by Leopold Macaulay, the most senior of Henry's cabinet ministers still to be active. Gardiner contemplated challenging Macaulay for the nomination and was confident that he could have succeeded (this was the opinion of many in the riding). When he chose not to try and acted instead as chairman of Macaulay's campaign committee, the candidate was pleased with Gardiner's endeavours but also wary of his ambition and nettled more than once by his tendency 'to come on like an agent for the bricklayers' union'when a point was in dispute.3 After perusing three or four other Toronto ridings, Gardiner deferred the question of a seat in the legislature, put his legal work on hold for several months, and offered his services to Rowe and his cohorts. His main mission was to hit the hustings to boost Conservative candidates. Gardiner's shortage of experience did not prevent him from raking nomination meetings, rallies, and picnics with volleys of partisan rhetoric: Premier Hepburn and his Liberal 'gang' had broken their campaign promises, exaggerated the threat posed by CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) organizing in Ontario factories, balanced the province's budget by subterfuge and inflated liquor sales, demoralized its civil service, bribed voters by cutting the automobile licence tax, sold out Ontario's timber and mineral wealth to 'United States millionaires.'3 In a dispirited party kept largely on the defensive by its nemesis, Mitch Hepburn, this showing was sufficient to catapult Gardiner into instant prominence. Earl Rowe, for one, saw Gardiner as the best of all his associates. Had he won the election, Rowe would have named Gardiner to the cabinet and secured a seat for him later. 'He was the man I had the most faith in,' Rowe recalled much later. 'I saw him as my right-hand man if we formed the government. There was none I would have put in the cabinet before him.' No less an authority than Hepburn opined to Rowe after the election that Gardiner had been the most damaging Tory campaigner in the province. He would always remember Gardiner, he told Rowe, as 'that son-of-a-bitch who left me covered in blood and feathers.'5

28 Big Daddy The closest alliance Gardiner welded in 1937 was with Cecil G. Frost, the organizer of the Conservative campaign. Frost was a main-street lawyer and town councillor from Lindsay, Ontario, a tall and even-featured man of incorrigible optimism, placid mien, and liberal leanings on policy. While mayor of Lindsay in 1936, he had been elected first vice-president of the Ontario Conservative Association. The following year Rowe named him to replace Drew as provincial organizer. Gardiner and Frost shared a similar outlook on the party's problems and an interest in municipal politics; they also developed a friendship that became one of the most intense of Gardiner's life. One of Gardiner's first speeches in 1937 was at a rally for Leslie M. Frost, Cecil's older brother and law partner, who was to win his initial seat in the legislature in Victoria riding. Leslie Frost was less of a thinker than Cecil, more the gregarious, glad-handing, small-town politician exemplified in the previous generation by Howard Ferguson. He would later become premier of Ontario, and as such would make key decisions affecting Gardiner's career, but at this time he was seen as much less of a coming force than Cecil. At the July 1938 general meeting of the party, Cecil Frost and Frederick Gardiner arrived in tandem at the head of the Ontario Conservative Association, control of which was one of the few plums in the politics of a party with no immediate hope of governing. The meeting opened with a skirmish over the new association constitution, which Gardiner had drafted with Frost's help the previous spring. For the first time, it would give only formally chosen delegates, most of them from riding associations, the right to vote in the election of officers. Gardiner maintained that it would make the association 'more democratic' and prevent the packing of annual meetings and leadership conventions; others beheld in it a device to turn the party into a 'closed corporation.'6 The fight against the Gardiner proposal was marshalled by A.D. (Alex) McKenzie, a lawyer from Guelph (he now lived in Forest Hill) who had been a friend of Drew since childhood. The delegates adopted the constitution after a debate that 'nearly reached the Donnybrook stage.'7 In the subsequent balloting, Frost and Gardiner ran as a team. Frost bested the pro-Drew candidate for president, Bay Street lawyer Joseph Sedgwick. When McKenzie shrank from challenging Gardiner and accepted the association's third vicepresidency, Gardiner easily beat out a rural candidate to become first vicepresident. In his official and unofficial roles, Gardiner was now one of the handful of individuals who saw the Ontario Tories through the bleakest years in their history. Since Cecil Frost did not reside in Toronto, many of the more humdrum duties devolved upon him. Until 1943 Gardiner devoted anywhere from several hours to several days a week to party business, including speech giving,

29 Not first-class politics selection of candidates, finances, and improving organizational management. The amateur, even primitive nature of this last operation within the party could be traced to years of neglect and to a present dearth of effort and knowhow. These failings were sorely exacerbated by the high degree of dependence on the federal party. In September 1939, when the party's national leadership decided (because of the war) on a peremptory closing of the Toronto office shared with the Ontario association, the Ontario organization was forced into an inelegant hunt for accommodations. It was Gardiner who, on one week's notice, arranged for storage of office records and furniture at the nearby warehouse of his friend Norman Holtby and personally carted some of the material to its new location. Permanent offices were not reopened until December 1940, until which time much of the association's paperwork was conducted out of Gardiner's law office. Gardiner complained to Cecil Frost that the federal organization had broken faith with its provincial counterpart and urged that the Ontario party henceforth 'finance its own operations independently of any other organization.'8 This advice was heeded. Beginning in the early 1940s it was the federal party in Ontario that was beholden to the provincial association and not the other way around. A major factor limiting Gardiner's participation was his poor relationship with George Drew. In the months of strife preceding Drew's capture of the leadership in 1938, Gardiner had stood by the anti-Drew forces; he backed Earl Lawson, the MP for South York, at the convention. He never forgave Drew his treatment of Earl Rowe, and Drew did not forget Gardiner's early opposition. Although Gardiner at times worked in close quarters with Drew, his distaste for the insular leader only grew over the years. There was never any pretense of friendship. Our discussions were always very impersonal, very formal, with all hands on the table. I always had the feeling that I was an outsider with him, that he was looking over my shoulder to see who was behind me.' Partly on account of this disaffection, Gardiner spent six months in 1939 mulling over whether to enter federal politics. The incumbent member for South York (Lawson) was retiring, and the nomination for the coming general election was his if he wanted it. Convinced that the Tories would remain in opposition and he would be condemned to 'sit in the back row of the Commons and wait for the boss to tell me when to make a speech,' he decided against running. Whatever his qualms about elective office, during the next half decade his inclusion in the business of the federal party deepened steadily. To begin with, his rhetorical talents were soon deployed on its behalf. John R. MacNicol, the Toronto MP who was president of the Dominion Conservative Association until 1943, found (as did his fellows in the provincial party) that

30 Big Daddy Gardiner was a dependable and entertaining speaker who could reach audiences at annual conclaves, nomination meetings, and the like in the towns and rural backwaters of southern Ontario as efficiently as in the city. Gardiner spoke without notes, in tough-guy tones, and at a robust volume. While most of his listeners were party supporters seeking affirmation of their views, the meetings were open (he was pelted with ripe tomatoes on one stage in Peel county) and interlopers sometimes had to be turned aside by wisecracks and direct rebuttal. For Gardiner, such service was equally a gift to the party and a part of his own education: I would get a day's notice that there was a meeting in Peterborough or Kitchener or some little crossroads out in the country that couldn't do without me. The event could be set up anywhere - a theatre, a hall, or one of those church basements where in the winter the wood stove would be burning your backside while your nose was turning blue with the cold. I would walk in, not knowing a soul, and have to get them fired up, anything from a half dozen to a couple of hundred people. It was the best damn training I ever had. I never had to worry about facing a jury after that. This kind of thing brought you down to earth, made you able to talk to people at their own level.

As in his 1937 debut, Gardiner's speeches were not distinguished by their subtlety. They were topical, unstintingly partisan, and often brazenly overstated. In a 1939 address to a service club, for example, he pounded away at the Mackenzie King and Hepburn governments for extravagant spending and denounced the proposed national film board ('perhaps if this board is created we will have to buy licenses for the privilege of attending our favourite movie'). In late 1940 he demanded that the federal government step up the war effort 'and not be worrying about what Quebec is doing.' In January 1943 Gardiner took the provincial Liberals to task for unimaginative economic policies that threaten to return Ontario to depression conditions. Later that year he harangued the CCF (Co-operative Commonwealth Federation) for planning to institute a dictatorship of 'muscle-men and gangsters' and declared that some of the CCF's supporters 'are already fomenting discontent in the belief that they will be commissars' under the new order.9 In the pre-television age, such a capacity for thumping the table in support of the cause was sure to be warmly appreciated by party strategists. By the early 1940s it had made Gardiner the most popular orator in either wing of the Ontario party. 'Everyone knew him as a rip-roaring speaker,' one party organizer said in synopsis later. 'He was the rough-and-tumble type. He didn't need a microphone. He could go into the most crowded hall and lift them right out

31 Not first-class politics of their seats. You could always count on excitement when Fred Gardiner was going to speak.'10 By this time Gardiner was also raising his voice in the inner councils of the national party, and in a way which was more sensitive and innovative than his sonorous platform personality might have intimated. After the 1935 federal election, a group of young Conservative lawyers and businessmen in Toronto (initially styling themselves 'the Drones,' but later referred to as 'the Toronto group') began to meet regularly to discuss the party's fortunes and the revamping of its philosophy in a 'forward-looking' direction. Gardiner sat in on many of these get-togethers and reacted sympathetically to the ideas being floated at them. When he attended his first national Conservative convention in July 1938, his interest in policy reform was enough to earn him a seat on the policy committee. Like most members of the Ontario Conservative hierarchy, Gardiner came to feel in 1940-41 that the Second World War effort must be the paramount claim on the party's attentions. In November 1941 he was one of the 150 party leaders who met at Ottawa and invited Arthur Meighen, the Conservative leader in the Senate and former prime minister, to return to the national leadership on a platform of 'total war' and immediate conscription for overseas service. Gardiner was soon to witness close-up what a blunder this had been. On February 9, 1942, Meighen lost a by-election in Gardiner's own riding of South York, where the seat had been vacated by Alan Cockeram, the mining executive who won it in 1940 after Gardiner declined the nomination. The standard bearer of the upstart CCF, a teacher named Joseph Noseworthy, triumphed in the by-election, largely because the Liberals deliberately fielded no candidate. But Meighen's defeat was ensured by his engrossment in the war and his inattention to the social issues that stirred the working-class voters of York township (he carried Forest Hill by 1,537 votes but lost York by 6,118). Gardiner, who advised Meighen on strategy and was in charge of fund raising and organization in Forest Hill, tried to impress this point on the former prime minister. His advice was shunned and Meighen dubbed him 'Social Security Gardiner' for pushing it so strenuously.11 Gardiner thereupon moved speedily to whole-hearted identification with the progressive movement within the party. In the spring of 1942 he joined in the renewed deliberations of the Toronto discussion group, the principal members of which were now J.M. Macdonnell, the president of the National Trust Company, Donald M. Fleming, a city alderman and lawyer, and lawyers David J. Walker, Dana Porter, and Roland Michener. It was these men, Macdonnell in particular, who hatched the idea of the party's first national policy

32 Big Daddy conference, the famous 'round table on Canadian policy' held in Port Hope, Ontario, in September 1942. One of Gardiner's first actions on behalf of the group was to reconcile the Ontario leadership to the plan. Cecil Frost and McKenzie were asked to attend; no invitation was issued to Drew, who did little to conceal his mistrust.12 Gardiner's thoughts on policy, like those of the other'Port Hopefuls,' were basically pragmatic, stemming from a recognition that the party could survive as a political force only by fusing its traditional commitment to free enterprise with a new willingness to enlarge the social and economic role of government in favour of the weak and disadvantaged. If he stood out from his companions, it was in the obstreperousness with which he flayed the defenders of old dogmas, dismissed purely theoretical considerations as ethereal, and prophesied the electoral consequences of failing to keep step with the times. His main personal contribution was to map out and defend the Port Hope group's policy on labour relations, a subject on which the South York catastrophe and some of his own legal work had taught him Conservative attitudes were especially in need of softening. In May 1942 he composed a lengthy memorandum on labour policy and circulated it among Ontario colleagues. The following month Cecil Frost prodded R.K. Finlayson, the Winnipeg lawyer who was in charge of organizing the round table, to give Gardiner rein on this vital issue: I think Fred is out of town this week but I would like you to contact him and have a chat with him. Fred is rough and ready but exceedingly brilliant. Fred Gardiner is an exceedingly able lawyer and possessed of clarity of thought and utterance. I would suggest that you contact him and have him ready at the commencement of the conference to give a clear, concise analysis of the laws respecting labour. He could speak with authority and could clarify the whole situation in the minds of the committee members ... While Fred's services have been sought by the employers, his personal leanings are towards labour and he has a good political mind. In addition he is an excellent draftsman and would be a great help in making the committee findings terse and clear.13

Finlayson had no difficulty acceding to the proposal. On the opening day at Port Hope, September 4, 1942, Gardiner demonstrated just how 'rough and ready' he was by insisting, to the dismay of some of the organizers, that the entire discussion be open to the press. The conference, he said, would be an empty exercise unless it had an impact on public opinion, showing people 'there are still Conservatives who are willing to stand on their feet, express their views, and let the people decide whether they

33 Not first-class politics are entitled to their commendation.' 14 He won a partial victory - plenary sessions were made public, and only meetings of the four committees were closed. Gardiner chaired the two days of debate of the twenty-one-man labour committee with a deft hand. The committee's report, based on his May memorandum, called for transfer of legislative jurisdiction over labour relations to the federal government, legal safeguards for collective bargaining, and 'uniform and general standards' in wages and working conditions. At Gardiner's bidding, the committee squelched opposition to several compulsory features of the proposed legislation. Notably difficult to subdue was R. A. Bryce, the president of Macassa Gold Mines and one of the leaders of the fight to keep the CIO out of the northern Ontario mines.15 In the plenary discussion on September 7, Gardiner gave a forceful exegesis of the committee report. In retort to an objection from the floor that the document was one-sidedly in favour of employees, he argued that 'for social reasons' such an emphasis was necessary at this time. The sole amendment of significance to the report, moved after discussion by Gardiner himself, gave specific authorization to provision for the closed shop in collective agreements.16 Unquestionably the resolution on labour ranked with that on social security as among the most important adopted at Port Hope. The Montreal Gazette described it as 'an advanced labour policy'; the Toronto Globe and Mail called it 'a departure for either of the two major parties.'17 At the national leadership convention in Winnipeg three months later, most of the Port Hope proposals for a reformed capitalism were accepted as official Conservative policy, giving the party the systematically drafted platform it had never before had. Cecil Frost was the chairman of the convention's resolution and policy committee, which winnowed policy proposals and put them in resolution form for floor discussion. Gardiner chaired the committee's labour subcommittee and steered through it a resolution that differed only slightly from the Port Hope position. He also mounted a vociferous endorsement of the Port Hope recommendations on social security: 'if we can stand a budget of four billion dollars a year for war, we can afford what is necessary for reconstruction and the improvement of our standards of living.'18 In the general debate, Gardiner acted as Frost's lieutenant, hammering out compromise resolutions and twisting arms in advance of the voting. When his and Frost's first choice for party leader (Sidney Smith, the president of the University of Manitoba) declined to stand, Gardiner turned his support to John Bracken, the Progressive premier of Manitoba. He was one of the fifteen delegates who conferred with Bracken on his terms for accepting the leader-

34 Big Daddy ship. With Joseph Sedgwick, he led the lobbying effort required to sell Bracken's demand that the party alter its name to Progressive Conservative.19 BACKING OFF

Following Winnipeg, the way was open for Gardiner to build on his successes of the past year. His strengths were now as well known at the pinnacle of the national party as they were in Ontario. As early as February 1941 the Conservative House leader, R.B. Hanson, had mentioned them to J.M. Macdonnell (in the afterglow of a high-spirited Albany Club dinner): 'Mr. Gardiner gave us a great send-off. If there were a few more people like him we would have no difficulty.' A month after the Winnipeg convention, Hanson implored Cecil Frost to keep Gardiner engaged in party work. 'Apart from yourself... the two men who have impressed me most with their desire to devote serious study to problems affecting the Party are Fred Gardiner and Don Fleming... They are both students and hard workers.'20 Gardiner was flattered by the attention, but he chose not to capitalize on it. Donald Fleming was to be elected to Parliament in 1945, contest the party leadership three times, and be John Diefenbaker's minister of finance. Dana Porter became a senior Ontario cabinet minister and chief justice of the province; Roland Michener was to be speaker of the House of Commons and governor-general of Canada; Macdonnell and David Walker served in Diefenbaker's cabinet. Alone of the Toronto group, Gardiner, who arguably was its most able member, did not advance in federal or provincial politics. That he did not try to do so perplexed his peers and many others in the party. Gardiner's backing off from electoral office can be attributed in part to his heartfelt ambitions for private wealth. 'I didn't want to lose my prime years,' he said in explanation later. 'There is nothing you can do in politics that makes the cash register ring.' Related to this was an anxiety about the psychological consequences of failure or obsolescence in politics: 'Nothing is more to be pitied than a discarded politician. Ten minutes after you're out you're nothing.' However, Gardiner's diffidence was affected also by interpersonal dynamics, and most of all by his lack of enthusiasm for the party leaders. Less than a month into Bracken's mandate, Gardiner protested furiously to the party's main organizer about the new chieftain's declared intention not to seek a seat in the House of Commons until the next general election: 'The leader of a party will have great difficulty in leading it if he is not present where leadership counts most and where the possibilities of publicity are the greatest.'21 His disaffection proceeded to the point where he soon concluded, correctly, that Bracken would never lead the party to a national victory. In Ontario, George

35 Not first-class politics Drew became premier in 1943, yet even the certainty of a major cabinet post could not draw Gardiner into the ring that year (this despite the retirement of Leopold Macaulay, who had blocked his progress in 1937). If anything, his relations with Drew chilled further after 1943. Drew was elected leader of the national party in October 1948, with Gardiner's purely formal support. Leslie Frost, having made a name for himself as the genial but rock-hard provincial treasurer, succeeded Drew at Queen's Park the following spring. But by then, and more emphatically by the time of Frost's first general election in 1951, Gardiner had begun to scale down his party entanglements and was more and more absorbed in municipal affairs. Within the federal party, Gardiner shied away from an ongoing organizational role. Interestingly, his partner Harry Willis was appointed chief Ontario organizer for the federal Conservatives in the spring of 1943, a position he was to hold for twenty years. Willis's party office was housed down the hall from the law firm's, and from here he expended much of his time in searching out candidates, arranging conferences, and maintaining liaison with the provincial party. 22 Gardiner was well briefed on this activity, and took an occasional hand in it, but except for periodic policy and strategy sessions in Ottawa, which were a pleasing respite from the business whirl, he took little initiative on managerial matters. In late 1946 Cecil Frost fell ill with a brain tumour, from which he died, at the age of forty-nine, in June 1947. Whereas Frost's incapacity and death increased the demand for Gardiner's talents within the national party, the loss of his friend took away the sense of adventure the two had shared over the previous decade. In 1947 Gardiner filled Frost's seat on the national executive; he refused reappointment the next year.23 From that time forward his major contribution was in moderating the national party's episodic dialogue over policy. Again following Cecil Frost, he acted as chairman of the policy committee at the party's annual meetings of 1947, 1948, and 1950 (during which time the national party president was his Port Hope confederate, J.M. Macdonnell). The committee sessions, barred to the public and the press, were generally dull affairs. There was the occasional flare-up on policy questions; more commonly the real bones of contention were personalities and the details of organization.24 It was a measure of Gardiner's stature within the federal party that he was selected to preside over the policy debates at the October 1948 Drew leadership convention in Ottawa. It is generally agreed that he discharged this function as effectively as has ever been done at a national Conservative convention. Under his guidance the enormous resolutions and policy committee ( 193 members) distilled 410 resolutions into 30, most of which passed with-

36 Big Daddy out amendment on the convention floor. He sought little impact on the platform itself, which retained the progressive orientation inscribed on it at Winnipeg but leaned rather more on private enterprise and provincial rights. Gardiner moved the floor discussion along briskly, pausing only to hear out interpellations on women's rights, freedom of the press, and several other issues. Only once did he have to gavel down a speaker (telling him that when he had surrendered the microphone 'the camera men can take [your] picture quite as well from some other position in the hall').25 He identified areas of agreement, enlarged them by persuasion, then (in the words of Richard A. Bell, who was at the time the party's national director) 'acted as a goodnatured bully to bring the laggards into line and plow the resolution through.' 26 At the provincial level, Gardiner's intimate engagement in organizational and strategic decisions ended in the summer of 1943. Drew had named Alex McKenzie party organizer for the general election, and Gardiner's role was restricted almost entirely to speechifying. Drew's 'Twenty-Two Point Platform,' unveiled in July 1943, purloined many of its planks from the Port Hope and Winnipeg manifestos. Gardiner and Cecil Frost were barely consulted in its preparation. When Drew formed a minority government after defeating the demoralized and discredited Liberals in the August election, changes in the extraparliamentary association were ineluctable. As late as one week before the November 12 general meeting, 'authoritative sources' had it that Gardiner would succeed Frost, whose resignation had already been announced. 27 Drew, however, wanted McKenzie for the job, and Gardiner did not dissent. At the general meeting, the first since 1938, Gardiner left the executive permanently; McKenzie was unanimously elected party president, which he remained until his death in I960.28 Notwithstanding their earlier rivalry, Gardiner and McKenzie enjoyed cordial relations after 1943 (in 1960, Gardiner was to handle McKenzie's estate). McKenzie, the consummate organizer (who maintained a peerless network of contacts around the province but almost never left Toronto), frequently consulted Gardiner on questions of candidate recruitment and patronage appointments, particularly after Drew's departure. E.W. Bickle, the wealthy investor who was the Ontario party's chief fund-raiser from 1943 to 1955, was also a crony of Gardiner's. He often asked Gardiner to make financial appeals to specific sources, usually on Bay Street. Gardiner had chaired the policy committee at the 1938 leadership convention. From 1943 until 1952 he did this at what were now the annual meetings of the provincial party. Again, his pilotage was bluntly efficient: 'He would take the ball and never let it go. He was adept at heading off screwball motions and divisive debate. He would close off

37 Not first-class politics the wrangling whenever he wanted to. With that bulldog way of his, he usually got things the way he wanted/ 29 When George Drew departed for Ottawa in 1948, there was some talk among Toronto Conservatives of Gardiner running to succeed him. 30 Gardiner would have had severe liabilities in any such attempt, prime among them his lack of legislature experience and his Toronto base. He seems never to have been seriously tempted by the idea. He warmly supported Leslie Frost for the leadership, although he was able to offer him little real help because his area of greatest strength (Toronto) was the same as Frost's. While the routines of party organization remained in McKenzie's hands, Gardiner was from the start one of Premier Frost's two or three closest political confidants and advisers. The rapport between the country lawyer and the big-city lawyer, both born in 1895, both veterans of the First World War and of the same intraparty battles, covered almost all matters. The personal bond between the two also grew stronger after Cecil Frost's premature death. They saw one another frequently in Toronto (often over breakfast at the Royal York Hotel, where Frost and many cabinet ministers had rooms) and on weekends at the Frosts' summer place on Sturgeon Lake or at the Gardiners' Lake Simcoe cottage, a short drive away. A final tie with the provincial party lay in the grey zone where politics overlapped with business. As a lawyer, Gardiner had always had dealings with the province's regulatory and administrative agencies, bodies such as the Ontario Racing Commission, the Securities Commission, and the Municipal Board. He had never claimed a particular competence in this field. This changed after the Tories' return to power in 1943. He began to do much more of such work, and as he did it well his renown for excelling at it waxed commensurately. 'It was well known,' as one prominent Conservative lawyer put it in an interview, 'that Fred Gardiner had a foot in every door.'31 Gardiner exhibited singular agility at inserting his feet into the door held by the Liquor License Board of Ontario, the body which from 1944 onward licensed eating places and other public outlets where alcoholic beverages were served (at first beer parlours only, but after 1946 cocktail lounges as well). The licenses were veritable guarantees of a profitable business, since their numbers were strictly limited and Ontario was just ending three decades in which public drinking had been severely circumscribed. It was generally believed, to borrow the words of the lawyer cited above, 'that Fred Gardiner had a very good "in" with the government and with Judge Robb on license questions.' And properly so, for Judge Walter Robb, the diminutive and feisty chairman of the board, had been Gardiner's good friend ever since Gardiner was the defence counsel at Robb's first jury trial, a cattle theft case in the early 1930s. As a

38 Big Daddy token of his esteem, the judge had stored a bottle of whiskey for Gardiner's personal use in his courthouse office.32 Apart from their friendship, Robb saw Gardiner as a knowledgeable and persuasive advocate who on the strength of his reputation attracted good clients. He especially appreciated that Gardiner made a point of never appealing his negative rulings to the cabinet, as was possible under the legislation. There were some negative decisions, but there were many more positive ones, enough to inflate considerably Gardiner's income during the decade preceding 1953. His success qualified him to be a primary solicitor of contributions to the Conservative campaign chest from established firms in the retail liquor business throughout this period.33 In 1949 Gardiner's notoriety as a behind-the-scenes operator embroiled him in the party's most dangerous factional dispute since 1938. In late October a Toronto Star story ('Two Toronto Lawyers Run Party, Is Charge of Rural Tory Groups') related how discontent among party members outside the Toronto region over 'patronage' questions (including the allocation of liquor licenses) had crystallized against Gardiner and A.D. McKenzie. These two were said by one Conservative of venerable standing to 'exercise control which should be held only by those chosen in election by the people to represent them.' It was clear from both the Star report and the article in the Globe and Mail that Gardiner's behaviour had been more irksome to the rank and file than McKenzie's, thanks mainly to the fact that he had not even been a member of the party executive since 1943.34 This same lack of formal party office rendered Gardiner immune to immediate reprisal by the party's troops. Things were different with McKenzie, who at the annual association meeting on November 8 came within 25 votes of 505 cast of forfeiting the party presidency to James N. Allan, a rural reeve and dairyman. Gardiner and McKenzie had to work frenetically, with Leslie Frost's help, to forestall defeat. Ironically, they were restrained from packing the meeting with supporters by the self-same rules ordaining proper selection of delegates that Gardiner had written eleven years before, and McKenzie had opposed but never since questioned. By the late 1940s, Gardiner's star in the party had crested. He was one of 'the boys' (a phrase he liked to use) at Queen's Park and in Ottawa. Nevertheless, his opportunities and ambitions for more than this had come and gone. Although he had fought well in and for the party, the lines and tactics of political warfare were shifting and Frederick Gardiner, who was now well into his fifties, was not much interested in changing with them. It is suggestive that one of the instigators of the 1949 insurgency was the party's public relations director, Harry M. Robbins.35 Party politics in Ontario and Canada was to be drastically affected in the 1950s by the arrival of television and mass marketing techniques. It is not at all certain that Gardiner, who was most at home in

39 Not first-class politics the eyeball-to-eyeball conditions of the meeting hall or the proverbial smokefilled room where the political art had altered little since his father introduced him to it decades before, would have adapted to the new age. Some indication of this was to be provided by his later experience. SUBURBAN POLITICIAN On the small political stage of Forest Hill, Gardiner had not taken long to assert himself as the headline player. Within months of his first council meeting in January 1936, the novice deputy reeve was straining at the slow tempo of the council's deliberations: 'We've got to dispose of these things [on the agenda]. Why we can't knock them down when they arise beats me. We've got to get down to business.'36 Among the first things to be knocked down was the leadership of Reeve Leitch, Gardiner's running mate. This wealthy piping manufacturer revealed himself to be a lacklustre politician who was soon eclipsed by his brash deputy. Both men were acclaimed in November 1936, but the following fall Gardiner served notice that he wanted the top office. Leitch, who had just missed three months of council meetings because of a jaunt to Europe, prudently decided not to make a contest of it. On November 26,1937, with nary an objection, Gardiner was acclaimed reeve of Forest Hill. The next year he easily weathered a challenge by an artlessly long-winded building contractor, William W. Jury, the main elements in whose platform were elimination of the $3-a-meeting allowance for councillors and reduction of the rental paid by the municipal offices. Gardiner needed only to mouth shopworn slogans ('Re-elect Reeve Frederick G. Gardiner... energetic, efficient and economic administrator'), canvass briefly, and otherwise let Jury flail himself out. Gardiner swept the December 5 voting by a ratio of almost six to one. Not for ten more years would he face another election. The central issue of Gardiner's first several years on the council was the volatile North End question. Apart from himself and Leitch, the three other men on the 1937 council were members of the Citizens' Committee slate, all of them committed to making the North End 'pay its own way.' At one of his early meetings, Gardiner indicated general approval of their position while trying to cushion the blow with a bad joke: 'I think this village should stop any development that will only be a mortgage upon it in years to come. Some people have told me that if we made all the North End a cemetery and put a fence around it that would be a local improvement.' At the next meeting, Gardiner confessed to arrant bafflement at the situation, saying he had 'neither the qualifications nor the information' to propose a lasting solution.'37 The way out of the quandary lay with a time-hallowed stratagem for governments in distress - appointment of an outside expert to study the

40 Big Daddy problem. In March 1936 Dr Horace L. Brittain, a Toronto consultant, was commissioned to make an inquiry. His report two months later advised the council to follow a plan for the district first drawn up in 1935 (Plan 13, it was called), which would make the current building restrictions more stringent and extend street and physical services into the North End at a cost to established taxpayers of about half of what was previously forecast. Gardiner seized upon the compromise idea. In June 1936 he cajoled the council into approving the plan in principle, and implementation began shortly afterward. His support for a reduced population density and a higher standard of building in the undeveloped section propitiated the Citizens' Committee. The committee endorsed him for election that November with the aside that 'it is not the most common practice for an election organization to oppose a man only to adopt him a year later.'38 At the same time Gardiner retained and improved his standing with the inhabitants of the North End by taking an obliging attitude toward their immediate needs and dismissing any suggestion of segregation or retaliation. 'You're not going to get a lot of money out of the South,' he told a group of North Enders in late 1936, 'but you are going to get a fair deal.'39 Gardiner subsequently reneged on his backing of some of the more cosmetic aspects of Plan 13, but he persevered in pushing for basic services to the residents and addressing them as valued members of the community. He had chanced upon a middle-of-the-road position that alienated no one. He was well positioned to promise after his acclamation as reeve that he would 'continue my work in the interests of all classes in the village.'40 Gardiner's work, like that of pretty well any civic politician in Canada at the time, was far more likely to deal with the picayune features of local services than with the class conflict imbedded in the North End imbroglio. Some of the points of council debate attested Forest Hill's size and semipastoral character (as in the case of Gardiner's motion in March 1937 that the council commend the village school guard 'for his very courageous act in stopping a runaway horse on Monday afternoon last'). Others said more about the privileged economic status of most of the village's residents (to wit, council's 1938 discussion of 'the accosting of maids' on the suburb's streets).41 To a large extent, however, the items on the council itinerary were typical of those confronted by local governments everywhere in the country - roadways and traffic, water and sewage and garbage, police and fire brigades, parks and recreation, welfare, regulation of small business and land use, extensions to the school system. Often, as still is standard practice for municipal councils in Canada, these matters were pored over in insipid detail: Was the village fire hall set at the proper angle to the street? Did a constable or clerk deserve promotion (all personnel matters were dealt with on a case-by-case basis until

41 Not first-class politics 1944)? Could Forest Hill afford fly screens for the municipal offices, or overalls for its three hydroelectric linemen, or cushions for councillors' chairs? Would council permit a restaurant to hang a flashing neon sign over a main street? During Gardiner's dozen years as reeve, when Forest Hill's population increased by a fifth, its municipal expenditures climbed by more than 120 per cent (to slightly over $1.5 million). Yet Gardiner continued to insist, like most of his colleagues and constituents, that tax hikes be gradual and no service be provided 'until the public demand ... is so strong that it cannot be ignored.'42 Gardiner's Forest Hill rounded out one of the best equipped and best staffed public school systems in Canada, installed miles of sewers, and acquired its own hydroelectric and waterworks systems. It also skimped on subsidiary services such as street lighting, sidewalks, and recreation. A council proposal for a municipal building was turned down by the electors in 1944, and a collegiate institute was accepted in 1947 only after a toilsome persuasion campaign. At no point was there much concern about welfare expenditures, as few individuals requiring social assistance could afford to live in Forest Hill in the first place. The village's volunteer 'relief committee,' chaired by a leading member of its social elite, was dissolved in 1937 when it was felt that the number of persons receiving assistance (nineteen) was 'too small to warrant the services of a committee.' 43 In arriving at decisions, there seldom were deep breaches within Gardiner's councils. As one councillor remembered the process later, 'We arrived at a consensus and took responsibility for decisions together. We weren't fighting for high stakes or making or breaking high-powered careers.'44 Few Forest Hill politicians harboured designs on a higher office. Well-nigh all were middle-aged products of the same professional and managerial milieu. Gardiner's councils included seven owners and executives of large business firms, four lawyers, two stock brokers, two salesmen, and one each of a doctor, accountant, engineer, merchant, and optometrist.45 Gardiner's usual role in this homogeneous setting was to give clear expression to the commonly held sense of what ought to be done. To this exercise he brought a strong will, his powers of salesmanship, and a knack for drafting resolutions on his feet. More important, he was willing and able to acquire the knowledge of the minutiae of public business, which more often than not was enough to convince his colleagues to bow to his judgment. 'He knew more about the facts than any of us did,' a member of Gardiner's last council stated in an interview. 'He had always taken the time to check things out thoroughly and have the options spelled out. So how could you combat the man? Why would you even want to?'46 The same refrain would be sounded in the metropolitan council after 1953.

42 Big Daddy Gardiner's record as a floor leader was redoubtable. In 1938, his first year as reeve, a vote differing from his position was cast on only one of the more than 500 instances when an issue came up for formal consideration (the split vote was decided in his favour).47 In three other years (1939, 1941, and 1945) there was not a single opposing vote. Councillors voted against Gardiner on one occasion in 1940 and 1948, twice in 1944 and 1946, five times in 1942, and seven times in 1943, 1947, and 1949. In other words, all but 33 of the roughly 6,000 motions were approved unanimously. What is more striking, on only four occasions did Gardiner actually lose the vote - four times in 12 years. In few cases were the dissenting votes cast on matters of principle. In 1947, to take one year, they concerned the salaries of the police and fire chiefs (the only issue on which Gardiner lost), the work week for firemen, three building permits, and tenders for street equipment. In 1942 and 1943, much of the resistance to Gardiner radiated from one councillor, engineer George H. Williams; in 1947 and 1949, it came from Harold S. Bovaird, a loquacious haberdasher. Gadflies such as these were neutralized by the willingness of others to follow Gardiner's lead and avoid time-consuming scuffles. Gardiner was also able to recruit onto the council several private friends who shared his outlook in full detail. The best of these was Robert Rowland, the man who had drawn him into Forest Hill politics in the first place, and who was deputy reeve from 1943 to 1946. Most demands concerning village services were registered by individuals or informal neighbourhood groups. Since Forest Hill was small and was not subdivided territorially, Gardiner as reeve was often the unmediated target for complaints and requests. The pervasive satisfaction with life in Forest Hill militated against the coalescence of grievances, as did the absorption of most heads of families in occupational concerns unconnected with the local community and the lack of a village newspaper from 1939 onward. On most issues, public opinion lacked both intensity and a clear organizational focus. The businessmen from the village's two main commercial strips never acted in concert. The municipality's own employees were a relatively quiescent lot, except for the several years after the war when they waged a noisy campaign for unionization. The most potent interest group in Forest Hill was the Home and School Association. In a community acutely appreciative of the value of education (one careful study of Forest Hill remarked on 'the massive centrality of the schools' in its life),48 it could count on broad sympathy for its demands for a parental role in school management and for improvement of the school system's physical plant. Gardiner's relations with the association, whose active members were almost all women, were generally amicable, though he was at times criticized for foot dragging on construction projects.

43 Not first-class politics Political pressures of a special sort were conjured up by the Second World War. Early in the conflict, the council several times engaged in indecisive debate about the possibility that 'subversive elements' were afoot in the village. In 1942 a much more significant controversy arose, over admission of Canadian-born women of Japanese descent into the village for work as domestics. This issue was bruited in a number of Canadian communities, including the City of Toronto, but nowhere with as much heat as in Forest Hill.49 The British Columbia Security Commission required the assent of the municipality concerned before permitting such women, who were among those interned after hostilities with Japan began, to pursue employment opportunities in groups. In June 1942, at Gardiner's prompting, the village council ratified the admission of twenty women, only to revoke this two weeks later after a vehement protest by the local branch of the Canadian Legion. A year later, Gardiner raised the question again, citing the 'dire need for domestic help' and the information that Forest Hill was the only municipality in Canada to exclude Japanese women wholesale. But again the veterans objected and again Gardiner deferred to their wishes.50 When the issue was exhumed yet another time, in September 1943, Gardiner had gone beyond merely relaying the views of the veterans. He both rejected the application and summoned up some of the cruder prejudices against Japanese-Canadians: 'Japanese spread like leprosy ... I have no objection [to admitting the women] except for the fact that we have no power to send them back after the war.'51 In the end, the women were kept out and the large houses of Forest Hill had to make do with several dozen fewer maids and gardeners. The episode shed little credit on Gardiner and his fellow politicians, though in fairness it must be judged in light of the nation-wide passions aroused by the war. Apart from this unique experience, nearly all issues that bred strong conflict in Forest Hill were parochial in scope. Most had to do, like the North End dispute, with the repercussions of physical growth and demographic change. One change that had limited consequences for politics, but was very much a fact of life in the village, was on the level of ethnicity and religion. For a number of reasons, including its location and the quality of its schools, Forest Hill in the mid-1930s began to attract large numbers of new residents of the Jewish faith, many of whom settled in the North End. Eleven per cent of its population was Jewish in 1941, but 40 per cent in 1951, the highest proportion in any Canadian municipality. Jews were inactive in village politics until the late 1940s, as could be expected of any new group; the first Jewish councillor was elected only in 1950. The cultural and religious life of most of the village's Jewish families was oriented toward established institutions in the central city. There were major cleavages within the Jewish community, particularly

44 Big Daddy between early and late arrivals.52 And few Jews seemed to perceive their ethnic status to be of much pertinence to their participation in politics. On several occasions, however, this rule did not hold. In 1943 a small private school sought a change in the zoning by-law that would let it teach Jewish religious subjects. A year of pressure was necessary to produce the amendment. In 1946 another group of residents requested permission to build a synagogue in the village; their petition was turned down flat. After a similar application was rejected following lengthy discussion in 1948, two synagogues serving the village's Jewish population were constructed in adjacent York township. Gardiner had many friends in Forest Hill's Jewish community, and he was strongly supported in predominantly Jewish neighbourhoods in his several election campaigns. Regardless of this, he took a dim view of attempts by Jewish residents to exert influence as a cohesive group, even on issues of proximate relevance to culture and religion. He held out against the school application in 1943-44 and pilloried its sponsors for 'raising discordant issues.'53 He also opposed the synagogue, with redoubled energy after he was affronted by an attempt by backers of the project to commandeer the support of Sam Steinberg, his business partner. He contended, like most members of the village establishment, that a synagogue and the traffic it would engender would inconvenience nearby property owners. Far more common in Forest Hill was conflict concerning the physical aspects of growth. Popular pressure was occasionally exercised in positive support of construction of a public facility (a water reservoir, a street, a trunk sewer). But the normal pattern was for such influence to be restrictive in aim, and for it to be stirred by private and not public construction. The principal means of shielding established residents, in Forest Hill as elsewhere in North America, was the mechanism of land use zoning. Hundreds of zoning by-laws, adopted ad hoc over the years, confined individual lots to particular kinds and densities of use. In Forest Hill, a community given over almost totally to residential life, this process had several refinements. The restrictions on house lots were usually made more binding by writing into them a minimum market value for any buildings erected. After 1936 it was also required that house designs be cleared by a village board of architects. Individual residents and ratepayers' groups expected to be consulted on the terms of these restrictions, and they rarely were disappointed. Even this did not preclude frequent agitation to modify the restrictions in the direction of greater exclusiveness. Awareness of the likely objections of residents to disruptive growth was a postulate of political survival in Forest Hill. Gardiner, who as head of Metropolitan Toronto would often behave very differently, understood and

45 Not first-class politics followed this maxim fully. At his first council meeting he argued that council must see to it that a proposed doctor's office not disturb the occupants of nearby housing: 'The residents ... must be protected.' He subsequently made a habit of ensuring that whenever private construction was in the offing, 'the property owners in the whole area would have to approve of such a proposal.'54 The Citizens' Committee, which was struck to resist intrusive growth on a larger scale, growth which would make Forest Hill less of an opulent preserve, was disbanded in 1937 after its darkest misgivings over the North End were allayed. The underlying nervousness, without ever dissipating entirely, greatly attenuated over the next decade. This trend mirrored the particular circumstances of suburban growth in the Toronto region, as well as the reduced salience of redistributive issues throughout Canadian society following the depression. While some of the richest families continued to reside in the village, after 1945 the tendency was to seek out more spacious and detached surroundings in a swath of territory anchored several miles north and east of Forest Hill. This change in fashion synchronized with the disappearance of the last large tracts of vacant land in the village. Significantly, much of this space was taken up by new apartment buildings. Although these buildings did shelter mainly small families and retired people, the fact remains that the same community that had feared the construction of small detached homes in the North End in 1935 agreed to and even greeted the building of dozens of monotone apartment towers in the same district a decade later. The largest apartment projects were approved in 1948, Gardiner's penultimate year as reeve, and a bare dozen years after this the village contained more apartments than it did houses.55 Taken together, these trends made the Forest Hill of the late 1940s and 1950s a far more variegated, less status-conscious, and more liberal community than it had been when Gardiner moved to it in 1931. Gardiner's own thinking incorporated and to some extent anticipated this shift in opinion. As early as 1940 he argued that stepping up the velocity of residential and commercial development - 'bringing] back the builders to the village' - was as indispensable as limiting the side effects of growth on neighbourhood amenities.56 Under Gardiner's aegis, the village council cooperated in the development of a shopping and apartment strip along Eglinton Avenue that insulated the established district to the south from the new construction and made growth less unpalatable. Gardiner pressed vigorously for residential construction, partly on the premise that new assessment would improve the village's financial situation. He succeeded in having the market-value restrictions on many lots lowered by as much as 50 per cent. By 1947 he had

46 Big Daddy gone so far as to critize the decision of the early 1930s to prevent industrial development in Forest Hill: 'We invested the taxpayers' money to get out industry that would have helped our taxpayers.' 57 Gardiner's third and final election campaign, in the autumn of 1948, showed that his personality and policies were scarcely less popular than they had been a decade before. His ambitious opponent, William W. Breithaupt, had two years earlier ousted Robert Rowland as deputy reeve. The 1948 election had partisan undertones that were uncommonly overt. Breithaupt, a member of a prominent Liberal family, netted some support from committed Liberals as well as from Conservatives who took exception to Gardiner's backing of Leslie Frost in the Tory leadership contest.58 Gardiner, stung by the defection of the latter group, was even more incensed by Breithaupt's charge that he had become smug in office: 'I don't feel any sense of superiority. I have a perfect right to run every time the chance is offered.'59 Gardiner spent $1,500 in the campaign, knocked on hundreds of doors, called in an assortment of political debts, and ended up collecting twice as many votes as Breithaupt. It was in part a 'friends and neighbours' election, as each candidate did best in the vicinity of his home. But Gardiner's support was more broadly distributed and, with the exception of a small district where residents had fought the construction of a sewage treatment plant, he carried the North End by ratios of up to six to one. THE COUNTY DEBATING

SOCIETY

If there was any issue on which Gardiner was at one with practically all of his constituents, it was that of Forest Hill's status as a separate municipality. When he entered local politics in the mid-1930s, several schemes to consolidate Toronto's suburbs or merge them with the central city were in the air (the history of these plans is outlined in the following chapter). Aversion to being swallowed by a larger metropolitan unit had been strongly expressed by the Citizens' Committee in 1935, and Gardiner swiftly made it plain that he was in total agreement. He would have no truck with confiscation of Forest Hill's assets in the interests of adjoining communities: 'Some of these municipalities have a financial headache, and now they want somebody else to buy the headache powder.'60 He held to this position until after his last election, when he and Breithaupt tried to outdo one another in posing as guardians of the community's gates. Forest Hill contained 'the most valuable assessment of any comparable area in Canada,' he told an election meeting in December 1948; even though its neighbours 'would just love to get their hands on it,' he was not going to let them. 61

47 Not first-class politics Gardiner would before long have a change of heart on this crucial question. The way was prepared by his experience with the major institution through which Toronto's suburbs related to one another and to nearby communities - the council of the Couaty of York. Like its counterparts elsewhere in eastern Canada, the county was the child of a Victorian reform designed basically to meet the needs of a stable rural society. It provided minimal services to a region spread out over almost 850 square miles, mostly farmland but sprinkled with small and medium-sized settlements. As was the pattern throughout Ontario, it had no jurisdiction over fully urbanized areas (in this case Toronto, the only incorporated city within its boundaries). The county's expenditures were modest. Its levy was $1.1 million in 1936 and only 25 per cent more than that in 1949, Gardiner's last year on the county council. The money went chiefly to judicial administration, main roads, auxiliary policing, and the care of neglected children and of certain members of the indigent and aged populations for whom its obligations were set by provincial statute. It often looked as if the only way in which the York County Council excelled was in the unwieldiness of its structure. By the end of Gardiner's tenure it numbered fifty-one members, all of them reeves and deputy reeves chosen at the annual elections in the twenty-six towns, villages, and townships comprising the county. This size was a font of local pride - the council often billed itself as 'the fourth largest legislative body in Canada,' which evidently it was. In common with almost all municipal legislatures, the council was bereft of the discipline that political parties brought to higher levels of government. Its proceedings were further complicated by the casting of votes, eighty-one in all, according to an arcane weighting formula. The council met only three times a year, for a three-week session every January and shorter ones in June and the late autumn. Its presiding officer, the county warden, was elected from among the councillors for a one-year term. Elevation to this office was considered a badge of seniority and of respect by one's peers. The warden had next to no formal powers, and normally sought no informal responsibilities either. Most of the practical work of the county fell to a small administrative staff composed»mainly of conservative and self-educated men. The county's clerk and chief administrator until 1944 was a frail gentleman who had occupied the post since before the First World War and surrendered it only at the age of eighty-four. The pace of council business was unhurried and unconcerned. Controversial topics were bandied about session after session. Fragile accords frequently shattered on the question of financing, as there was perennial contention over the allocation of taxes (these were levied on real estate, but each municipality conducted its own assessment). Most members of the council were over fifty

48 Big Daddy years old, and at least half were usually farmers from the rural townships to the north of the Toronto suburbs. While much fuss was made about the north-south division (Steeles Avenue, the future northern limit of Metropolitan Toronto, was referred to as the county's Mason-Dixon Line), on many issues the difference was more one of style and demeanour than of substance. There was general agreement that county spending ought to be curbed as much as possible. And for farmers, small-town professionals, and suburbanites alike, the council sessions - held in a building on Adelaide Street, in the heart of Toronto - were a chance for recreation as well as for pondering the issues of the day. 'We didn't have much money to spend or many important things to do,' one county councillor recalled several decades later. 'The council was a good place to argue, sort of a debating society where you could work off your tensions.'62 A happy corollary of holding meetings in the big city was that it offered abundant sites, apart from the council chamber, in which the tensions of the county statesmen could be soothed. Most commonly used for this purpose were the facilities of two hotels, the King Edward and the Victoria, situated in convenient proximity to the county building, and the Woodbine race track, a paltry ten minutes by streetcar down Queen Street. From time to time the county legislators were reminded that they did not always exude the most intrepid of images. A year after Gardiner's election, for example, Warden William E. MacDonald of New Toronto implored the council to disprove 'the criticism from some of the public for the past ten years or so that we come down here to play euchre and sleep.'63 Exhortations did not suffice to modify long-standing habits and impressions. It was said of MacDonald himself that he had an unequalled flair for composing speeches on the streetcar from Woodbine, giving tongue to them with crisp conviction, and returning to the horses with a lapse of no more than several races. Not until Gardiner had become deputy reeve of Forest Hill did he realize that he would sit in this odd assembly. In January 1936 he had to telephone Wilbert Gardhouse, an old friend and now the treasurer of the county, to ascertain where and to what end the council met.64 He arrived determined to make an impact, and with the connivance of Gardhouse and the new warden, a small-town coal dealer and a devout Conservative, he secured appointment to the influential legislative committee at his first session. What ensued was a rapid and mutual disillusionment. Gardiner was repelled by the snail's pace of decision. Many of the councillors were put off by his unceremonious haste to change their ways. Smarting from the rebuff, Gardiner withdrew to the role of truculent defender of Forest Hill's interests against 'persecution' and 'out and out bank robbery' on the part of its less well-endowed neighbours.65

49 Not first-class politics In early 1937, having been dropped from the legislative committee, Gardiner let fly with a blanket assault on the council's procedures. 'Ten men standing on their heads,' he declared, would do better at administering the county's affairs. 'If you want to preserve yourselves, be sensible ... Canada is over-governed and, because people are paying more attention these days to government, I tell you that if we don't do something about it somebody is going to come along and wipe us out.'66 In March 1937 Gardiner applied to the provincial legislature for incorporation of Forest Hill as a full-fledged city, a change which would separate it from the county and save its ratepayers six mills in taxes. He carried on with the petition even after the village's fiscal contribution to the county was adjusted. When the application was turned down in April 1938, Gardiner countered by calling for elimination of all the county councils. The county link had 'outlived its usefulness,' and the province should simply 'take over the few and inconsequential services now administered by the counties and take the cost off real estate.' His comments were received with incredulity. 'How can the poorer sections [of the county] even exist if they are not aided by the wealthier areas?' one councillor inquired. 67 It was a good question, to which Gardiner for the time being had no answer. From now on, Gardiner's strictures were less biting. After he got nowhere in 1939 with a proposal that the size of the council be trimmed by half, he abandoned his efforts at structural reform. Later he would occasionally erupt into vitriol about the 'cracker-barrel style' of council debate: 'Every time we get into a discussion which looks as if it will exercise someone's mentality for ten minutes, we want to refer it to the next session.'68 But, after his first several years, Gardiner increasingly accepted the county's basic legitimacy. He reconciled himself to its limited capabilities and acquired the repute of being a conscientious and generally accommodative member of the council club. Gardiner soon became known as the council's leading troubleshooter and honest broker. Between 1938 and 1946 he sat on eleven of the council's standing and special committees and chaired six of them. In 1945 he accepted the presidency of the York County Children's Aid Society, a thankless task which consumed many of his weekends in the years that followed. He plumed himself on transforming it from an essentially voluntary agency, forlornly short of staff and funds, into what he termed 'a businesslike operation, a production line for helping neglected children.' By 1953, when he left the position, the number of children under the society's care had quadrupled, its budget had been increased by a similar amount, and its staff had tripled.69 Moreover, Gardiner had personally convinced the provincial government in 1948 to accept the principle of subsidizing work with neglected children who still resided with one or both parents. This decision, which Gardiner defended

50 Big Daddy as a boon to both family stability and administrative economy, marked a turning point in Ontario policy, which had hitherto been directed almost exclusively to children in foster homes and institutions. The provincial minister of public welfare came away convinced that Gardiner had a more global knowledge of child welfare problems than any other person in Ontario.70 Until the mid-1940s, at least, Gardiner was not often the framer of pathbreaking proposals within the York council. He did sponsor declarative resolutions that cost the county nothing - in favour of legalized off-track betting, national health insurance, federal payments in lieu of municipal taxes, and so on - but he authored few initiatives on county issues and was perceived as a fiscal conservative. He was disposed to believe, as he said about police protection in a 1939 report, that expenditures should be 'reduced to the minimum which is consistent with proper administration.' 71 In the formal exchanges over the dross of county business, Gardiner acquitted himself as the best debater in recent memory. Councillors and officials interviewed later remarked to a man on his ability to ferret out and articulate points of consensus. 'You could see Mr Gardiner sitting there, taking it all in and frowning and nodding at the details. At the end he would stand up, summarize the arguments on both sides, and reel off a resolution, clause by clause, which captured the sense of the group.'72 Rural members, in particular, were moved by his powers of suasion. 'He was so convincing, such a wonderful promoter. I am sure he could have taken a tin horse, stuck hair on it, and sold it as the real thing.'73 Gardiner quickly mastered the hayseed wit that was the vogue in the council and to which he recurred later in his career. His jibes at his fellow councillors, based on close observation of individual habit and vulnerability and delivered with the touch of a seasoned courtroom counsel, were much admired and much feared. After his initial period of estrangement, Gardiner also found a common language with his 'country cousins,' as he sometimes called them, in informal settings. He struck up a friendship with the affable MacDonald in 1937, and also became a fast friend and business associate (in Sage Enterprises) of William Armstrong, the reeve of the large western suburb of Etobicoke. Gardiner felt and looked very much at ease in the cabalistic and unmistakably masculine rites of council insiders. Until his 1940 renunciation of liquor, he could often be found after council hours in the warden's office, swapping stories with colleagues over a forty-ounce bottle of Scotch. He remained an adept participant in the card and dice games played in the rear room of the county building (unmolested by officers in the city police station around the corner); sometimes these extended into the predawn hours in the hotel rooms of out-of-town councillors.

51 Not first-class politics In January 1946 Gardiner offered himself for the leadership of the council he had scoffed at so openly a decade before. Elected without opposition, he began an uneventful term as the eighty-fifth warden of York county. At the warden's banquet in November, he was presented the cane traditionally awarded to outgoing wardens. In the private sphere, Gardiner had no intention of taking up the halting and restful habits that such an appliance brought to mind. But in politics, he told friends at the time, he felt he had done as much as he was ever going to do. Events were under way that would prove him wrong.

3

The metropolitan experiment

It is difficult to think of any social malady, from crime to traffic congestion to family breakdown, that has not at one time or another been ascribed to the large modern city. The list of urban problems is almost as lengthy as the roster of urban experts. Nonetheless, there was until recently a remarkable degree of consensus on one thing: that the irreducible nucleus of these ailments, in North America at least, has been a failure of political organization. 'The urban problem,' it has been agreed, 'is the existence of a large number of independent public jurisdictions within a single metropolitan area.'1 The big industrial city, so the reasoning goes, is a unified social and economic entity with basic needs that must be provided for on a comprehensive basis. Contrary to this logic, politics and administration in most metropolitan areas in Canada and the United States historically have been carried on - and in the latter country still are - in a multiplicity of artificial governmental units. With the advent of metropolitan government in 1953, Toronto went further than any big city in Canada, and any on the continent, toward following the prescription of the metropolitan reformers. Gardiner was one of those most heavily involved in the decisions that produced the change-over. Analysis of these steps is vital to an understanding of the development of Metropolitan Toronto and his performance as its leader. TORONTO'S GROWTH AND TORONTO'S GOVERNMENTS

The Toronto to which David Gardiner migrated in 1874 was undergoing an expansion that would persist through interruptions and setbacks for a century to come. The underlying stimuli were several: Toronto's humming manufacturing economy, its gradual displacement of Montreal as the financial hub of Canada, its status as political capital of the province, and its attractiveness to

53 Metropolitan experiment European immigrants. Block by block, the physical city crept forward, often enveloping and digesting older nodes of population. More dramatic advances were made possible by the electrification of the street railways in the 1890s, under whose impetus tentacles of settlement probed out from the dense urban core, mostly along and at right angles to the Lake Ontario shore. As in most sizable urban areas in North America, this physical and social enlargement was until the First World War largely matched by a redrawing of the boundaries of the corporate city. In the majority of instances the towns and villages that sprang into being along Toronto's frontier themselves petitioned the city council for annexation. The city, always interested in such entreaties, was most receptive when its economy was on the upswing. By 1912 Toronto had legally absorbed thirty bordering communities, all except a handful of them during the two building booms that crested in the late 1880s and around 1910.2 In 1911, in the course of the debate over the last major boundary extensions, the heads of the city government's administrative departments remonstrated emphatically against further annexations. The demand for services in the newly added residential sections, they submitted, 'burdens the general taxpayer with a portion of the cost entirely incommensurate with the advantage received therefrom.' 3 These words to the wise were closely cleaved to for the next forty years. Despite a short-lived recrudescence of annexationist fever in the early 1920s and a laconic discussion in the first years of the depression, the city engaged in only marginal adjustments of its boundaries after 1912. In the meantime, with people and buildings having more or less overtaken Toronto's legally defined perimeter by 1930, the outward march of population was continuing. It paused but did not cease during the depression, then resumed with multiplied force after the Second World War. The trend was to be quickened by post-war prosperity, by the return of thousands of househungry veterans, and by the first ripples of what became a flood of immigrants. More momentum, as if more was needed, was imparted by mass ownership of the automobile, which enabled not only the elongation of the original ribbons of settlement but the fleshing in of the rectangles and wedges between them. The undirected and nearly unregulated expansion of the Toronto-centred metropolis, coupled with the city council's decision against annexations, had as its inevitable result the formation and maturation of independent suburban municipalities (depicted in Figure 1), along the lines familiar elsewhere in Canada and the United States. Being essentially communities of homes for the families of blue- and white-collar workers who commuted to city employment, most had few assets other than residential property for their local authorities to tax. To the east and west of the City of Toronto lay two large and sparsely developed townships, Scarborough and

Figure 1 Toronto and its suburbs: the spread of settlement (Metropolitan Toronto Planning Department)

55 Metropolitan experiment Etobicoke. To the northwest, the railroad town of Weston had been distant enough to survive the city's early imperialism. A similar settlement, Leaside, was incorporated in 1913 when its residents' suit for annexation was denied, and along the lakeshore to the west of the city core the three small communities of Mimico, New Toronto, and Long Branch were founded between 1911 and 1930. Four more municipalities were chiselled out of York township between 1922 and 1925: the big township of North York, the small township of East York, and the villages of Forest Hill and Swansea. York township lingered on as a shrivelled remnant of its former self, the district that no one had seen fit to claim. At sundry points in time, all but two or three of the suburban municipalities, including the nascent Forest Hill community, beseeched the city to take them in. Its refusal to do so left the County of York as the sole structure spanning government boundaries in the region. The difficulty here was that, as Gardiner had said in derision in 1938, the county was designed to provide at best 'few and inconsequential services.' More damaging was that, while subsuming great expanses of farmland and a pleiad of sleepy hamlets and villages, the county had no writ whatsoever in the central city whose dynamism was the real motor behind the development of the suburbs. Many took this fragmentation to be unnatural and reprehensible from the very beginning. When it was perceived as a problem, it was understood as one fraught with dangers as much for the provincial administration as for the local governments. There was more than one attempt to resolve the conundrum prior to the Second World War. None succeeded, yet several came close to doing so, much more than most later reformers appreciated. Had any come to fruition, the founding head of Toronto's metropolitan government would assuredly have been someone other than Frederick Gardiner. The first scheme was tried out in 1924 by a Conservative cabinet minister and future premier, George S. Henry, who had been a warden of York county earlier in his career. Henry circulated within the Tory caucus, where he found only lukewarm support, a draft bill creating a Toronto metropolitan district.' The district, to be financed jointly by the city and the suburbs and administered by a council balanced between the two zones, was to deal with several major services, leaving the original municipalities to exercise all remaining government powers.4 A half-decade after Henry's initial prod a profound shock was delivered to the system of governments in the region by the depression, with its escalation of relief-related expenditures and fall-off in tax revenues. In quick step after 1930, as even the city proper reeled from the blow, all of the suburbs but Forest Hill and Swansea were declared insolvent and placed under provincial supervision. This in turn precipitated deep fault lines

56 Big Daddy within York county, where politicians from the rural north cast a cold eye on county expenditures that mainly benefited the urbanizing south. The provincial government, with Henry now as its head, responded in October 1933 by appointing the first formal inquiry into metropolitan problems in Ontario - directed, strangely enough, by the minister of lands and forests. The inquiry heard the county damn the status quo in no uncertain terms: 'No person cognizant of conditions would contend that this system was set up to meet conditions as they exist today... To attempt a defence of existing multiple units of government is to be ridiculous.'5 The county urged formation of a unit closely akin to what eventuated twenty years later — a new 'metropolitan county of Toronto' which, unlike Henry's district, would perform regional services for the city along with the suburbs. The Liberal government elected in 1934 dissolved this committee, only to come up against the same knot of problems. It helped mollify spendingconscious councils like those in the north of York county by rescheduling suburban debts and, effective in 1937, relieving all municipalities in Ontario of responsibility for mothers' allowances and old age pensions. This did not go far enough for the first minister of municipal affairs, David A. Croll, who was intent on pushing through a major territorial restructuring too. In 1936 he had his staff draw up a bill, modelled after a 1935 law affecting Croll's own city of Windsor, which would have made the built-up sections of the Toronto suburbs wards of an enlarged city. After clandestine but ferocious resistance by city politicians and businessmen (one of them Joseph E. Atkinson, the owner of the Toronto Star and a Liberal of high standing), it was decided to postpone introduction of the bill until 1937. It was hoped that by then suburban finances would have improved sufficiently to palliate city opposition. As chance would have it, Croll left the cabinet early in 1937 in a dispute over labour policy, and the bill was never introduced.6 A new crisis was at hand the following spring, when Gardiner's Forest Hill applied for secession from York county. Yet another provincial committee was assigned, this one chaired by A.J.B. Gray, a functionary in the Department of Municipal Affairs and, in his days as a York township politician, the author of the 1933 county report. The Gray committee was slighted by Premier Hepburn, desperately understaffed (it lost its only stenographer in 1939), and faced at the last moment with a farcical cabinet demand that it also study a thinly populated area of eastern Ontario.7 Undaunted, it persevered through forty meetings to reach a consensus in favour of a metropolitan county.8 Again circumstances intervened, this time in the form of the war. In September 1939, just as Gray was setting down his report (which, he had been assured, would be implemented by legislation in 1940), the announcement was made that the issue would be closed until the return of peace.

57 Metropolitan experiment The proponents of change could have made their case on two different levels. They could have argued that modifying the territorial extent of local government would better the access of citizens to public institutions. The probability was greater that the issue would hinge on government effectiveness in meeting public needs, that is on government outputs rather than inputs, and here three quite different rationales were available. First, it could have been maintained, as often has been said in the United States, that metropolitan integration would afford economies of scale in the provision of vital services. Alternatively, reformers could have based their case for effectiveness on equity grounds, holding that under current conditions the costs and benefits of public services were not being allocated fairly across municipal boundaries. Or, finally, an appeal could have been made to some species of common interest susceptible of pursuit only by all or most of the metropolitan communities in concert.9 The debates of the 1930s very nearly disregarded considerations of citizen access and participation. Obviously these were not seen as being at issue by any of the parties concerned. Instead, the discussion turned on government effectiveness, at which level further selectivity can be discerned. Most of the would-be reformers made some reference to the administrative economies thought likely to spring from larger scale government and an end to 'duplication' of services. Most also adverted in nebulous terms to an ultimate interest or destiny that the city and its suburban offshoots held in common. By and large, however, it was the logic of equity that predominated in the statements from all quarters. Like all discussions invoking justice, this one was exceedingly divisive and was difficult to carry to the point of resolution without some mechanism for coercing the losers. Everyone, it seemed, had a grievance. The rural districts of the county felt hard done by at having to shore up the suburbs. Many in the suburbs saw it as equally intolerable that at a time when 'all must bear their share of the responsibility, the poorer districts being unable to maintain themselves,' they should be denied the benefit of the city's accumulated wealth.10 To all of this City of Toronto politicians reacted with an outraged defensiveness, saying they could not ask their constituents to pay for the tribulations of other areas. When a senior city councillor, Ralph Day, gingerly suggested reconsideration of this position in 1937, he was met with a hail of criticism that forced him to beat a hasty retreat. 'There is no reason,' one of his colleagues declared, 'why Toronto should be penalized for being able to carry on its own business and still maintain its credit.'11 By 1939 Day, now mayor, was disparaging talk of 'forced annexation' and underhanded attempts by the suburbs 'to relieve themselves at the expense of our people.'12 Only one decade later, city leaders executed an about-face on this question. From the most obdurate adversaries of union with the suburbs, they had

58 Big Daddy become proponents second to none. The explanation for this change, without which Metropolitan Toronto might never have been born, lies in the transformed atmosphere of politics in Toronto and its hinterland. The city fathers did not proceed from a philosophical understanding of the advantages of metropolitan government. 'In politics, as in everyday life,' one pundit noted in 1947, Toronto prefers the homely virtues to flights of fancy or profundity of thought. The theorist, the high-brow and the young enthusiast have not cut a great figure in Toronto public affairs. The voters like men of paunchy, aldermanic quality, burgesses of solid worth with practical ideas and no nonsense about them.' 13 This having been said, there is no doubt that the practical ideas of City Hall attained a new expansiveness and exigency during the debate over post-war 'reconstruction' and the economic boom that followed on its heels. By the early 1940s there were inklings of a new spirit of confidence about Toronto's prospects, a faith tempered by the belief that only with deliberate government action could these expectations be realized. Integral to the new mood was a profound interest in growth in all its aspects. It came to be taken as self-evident that for life to get better, for things to 'get moving again,' the city and the city's government had to get bigger and busier. Indicative of this new psychology was the appointment of Toronto's first official planning board in June 1942. Its 'master plan,' drawn up the following year and endorsed by council in 1944, was the first in the city's history to proceed beyond esthetic improvements and the problems of the downtown business district to the larger and more disquieting issues of housing, land use, and transportation. Looking ahead to an increase of as much as two thirds in the population of the Toronto area over the next thirty years, the master plan sketched 'a program of vast undertakings' for slum clearance, 'superhighways,' rapid transit, and improved amenities.14 In 1943, well before its consideration of the plan, the city council approved construction of Canada's first urban subway, blueprints for which had been prepared and rejected as early as 1910; work began in 1949. In the last year of the war the council also gave the green light to the first big public housing project in the country, Regent Park. The attitudes of the city's political and business elites were powerfully underwritten by tendencies at higher levels of government. In Ottawa, the National Housing Act of 1944 committed the federal government to the active promotion of housing construction and, obliquely, of urban development. Building houses and building cities were seen both as an instrument of full employment and as a means of accommodating the expected post-war increases in family formation, birth rate, and immigration. Of more immediate impact were the intentions of the Conservative government elected in Ontario in 1943, which believed fervently that the way to social and political

59 Metropolitan experiment tranquillity lay through economic growth energetically assisted by public policy. Governments promoting economic development in cooperation with business were nothing novel in Ontario. The difference was that the Tory regime, in contrast to all its predecessors, pinned its hopes squarely on the industrial and urban sectors as opposed to natural resources and the frontier.15 Of necessity, cities and other local governments were to be full partners in the growth strategy. In May 1944 Premier Drew stated to several hundred municipal delegates at a conference on 'planning and development' that there was 'no reason why this province cannot maintain 25 million people in a higher degree of prosperity than ever before.' He exhorted his audience to 'go to the limits of the imagination' in planning for peacetime expansion. 16 In the Toronto region, whose population passed one million shortly before 1950, it was impossible to size up such a prospect without also cogitating on the territorial extent of city government. As in earlier booms, the leaders of the central city looked to the suburbs for room to stretch and grow. Significantly, the 1943 Toronto master plan pointed out that future population growth 'must largely be accommodated in the vacant land of adjacent suburbs' and went on to emphasize that 'the political boundaries of the City bear no relation to the social and economic life of its people.' Planning and public policy would have to be directed to the total urban region, and to this end it proposed, without elaboration, 'a partnership of all the municipalities in the Metropolitan Area.' Both the spontaneous engines of urbanization and the new self-consciousness about planning were pushing 'the metropolitan problem,' as it now was widely referred to, to the head of the political agenda. One of the earliest to speak to the problem directly was Gardiner. GARDINER'S CONVERSION

As reeve of Forest Hill, Gardiner had originally been unswervingly hostile to any scheme under which his constituency would cede all or any of its autonomy to a metropolitan regime. He perceived no outstanding common interest as being served by integration. He foresaw no economies of scale either (little Forest Hill eliminated 'unnecessary services' and administered others 'economically and efficiently as a separate unit').17 In terms of equity, the Forest Hill newspaper in 1938, without an iota of embarrassment, branded the discussion of a metropolitan government 'just another skirmish in the endless war between those who have and those who have not.'18 The leader of 'gold-plated Forest Hill,' as its detractors called it, was the last one to be expected to volunteer to act as a general for the have-nots. While vouchsafing that serious inequalities existed in the distribution of resources and the

60 Big Daddy delivery of municipal and social services, Gardiner insisted that these be corrected by senior, not local governments. Within the county, Gardiner was resolute against any centralization of services, including law enforcement and road building, taking alarm lest this act as 'the thin edge of the wedge' of more wholesale unification.19 By 1944 he was troubled about the chatter of several suburbs seceding from the county and abandoning it to 'fall to pieces like a barrel with the hoops removed,' yet he had little to offer as an alternative. 'Perhaps an accumulation of small municipalities, jealous of their rights, is the answer to the problem, and perhaps they will vie among each other to give the people the best and most democratic administration.' 'One thing that is 100 per cent wrong,' he told his county colleagues, 'is the establishment of a metropolitan area-that is poison.'20 The genesis of Gardiner's conversion to a diametrically opposed position can be dated to 1942, when he was named by the county council to chair a committee on the affairs of the Toronto and York Roads Commission. Founded in 1911, the five-man commission was an agent of the county responsible for maintaining and improving a network of major roads, many of them thoroughfares leading along traditional market routes into Toronto. It was a somnolent body, with no impelling sense of mission and severely hobbled by the nervousness of all three supporting governments (county, city, and province) about minimizing their financial contributions. The 1942 inquiry, called because the commission had overspent its budget trying to clean up after a rash of winter blizzards, brought Gardiner face-to-face as never before with the maze of agencies, jurisdictions, and unwritten rules governing the provision of region-wide services. He was unsettled by what he saw. In his report, which absolved the commissioners of malfeasance, he appealed for a 'spirit of cooperation' among the participant governments.21 The following year, as chairman of a county committee reviewing the road situation, he decried the 'local considerations' that were hindering establishment of an adequate system of highways in the area.22 In 1944 Gardiner was appointed to the provincial committee on planning formed after the May conference on planning and development. This body proved to be a dead letter, but Gardiner was beginning anyway to imbibe in the atmosphere of'imaginative' thinking about growth cultivated by the Drew government. This was the same climate being felt in Forest Hill, where he was talking as reeve of 'bringing back the builders,' and which was finding increasing currency in the City of Toronto. In 1945 and 1946 Gardiner, previously a rock-ribbed opponent of almost all spending initiatives (even in his several years as a renegade on the county council in the late 1930s), took the floor in

61 Metropolitan experiment council to wax in favour of ambitious new programs to lay the capital infrastructure for population and economic growth. In June 1945, for example, he demanded 'something in the nature of Joe Stalin's five-year plan' on behalf of hospital construction.23 This was a new Gardiner, or at least a Gardiner warbling a new tune. In 1946, Gardiner's year as county warden, the province decisively changed the institutional setting in which urban and metropolitan growth was to be addressed by governments. A new provincial law, the Planning Act, mandated for the first time the establishment of planning bodies in every urban and urbanizing locality in Ontario. In August 1946 the cabinet appointed a nineman Toronto and Suburban Planning Board and charged it with preparing an official land use plan for the territory consisting of the city and its twelve closest suburbs. The end product of each municipality's planning exercise had to conform with the standards set by the larger board; the decisions of both levels were to receive final confirmation by provincial authorities. Gardiner was one of those named to the Toronto and Suburban Board, and at its opening meeting he was elected vice-chairman. The chairman was James P. Maher, the well-to-do proprietor of a footwear retailing chain and also the chairman of the City of Toronto Planning Board. Gardiner's trials on this body were decisive in turning him into the leading advocate of a politically unified metropolis. At the outset, Gardiner was mortified to find that most of the suburbs refused to come forward with the small sums requested of them for support of the board's operations. In February 1947 he persuaded the county council to petition the province to redesignate the board as the Toronto and York Planning Board, a change which would draw into its jurisdiction the entire county and thereby allow submission of its budget to the county council rather than to the suburbs individually. This request was granted in November 1947, and Gardiner was the first county appointee to the restyled board. Already Gardiner was speaking of the need for an innovative political arrangement to facilitate growth in the area, a unit 'to permit development of the City of Toronto over an ever-expanding circumference without interfering with the local autonomy of the constituent municipalities.'24 He thought at the moment that the new planning board might serve such a purpose, a formula which he soon reckoned to be unworkable. On the planning board, ViceChairman Gardiner took up the stance of promoter of specific projects, often large and costly ones. In the narrow terms of the board, he was not unsuccessful. In 1947 alone he had it incorporate a suburban 'green belt' into its preliminary plan, acknowledge the necessity of a 'unified system' of arterial roads in the region, and consent to press for a single public transit network.25

62 Big Daddy Unfortunately, it was another matter to translate plans into action. In 1948, after the planning board won agreement from the city for payment of two thirds of the start-up costs of the green belt project, Gardiner drew a complete blank when he asked the county for the remaining third. His plea that development 'not be held back by a body of money-pinchers' went unheeded, as he fell short in two subsequent attempts to have the project ratified.26 Gardiner's frustration reached far greater heights on the issue of road construction. A real interest in roads, both as practical conveniences and as symbols of cooperation, had germinated in his mind during his investigations of the Toronto and York Roads Commission. He now possessed an unalloyed fascination with the thought of building multilane highways of modern design along the lakeshore, up the two main ravine ways leading from the city core, and anywhere else city and county engineers wanted to put them. On weekends he often spent hours tramping over the prospective road sites. As he vividly recounted to a reporter a decade later, these explorations led him to believe that even the engineers' plans were too modest: I'd get ahold of Mr. Maher at 10 o'clock on a Sunday morning and away we'd go, up and down the Don Valley where we couldn't get the car. We'd go into people's back yards and crawl down the hills and then we'd go and get a sandwich at a little restaurant on the Golden Mile [in Scarborough] and then start at it again. By 5 o'clock we'd begin to know what the engineers knew and what they didn't know. The problem was that there were two big hills and a narrow-gutted valley. There were railways in it and a river. The engineers were saying you couldn't put a six-lane highway in it. So we'd have a look at the railway and Jim Maher and I would say: We'll move the railway over a piece. We'll tear down the hill. We'll shift the river over a piece, then we can have the highway through there. That's what was done years later.27

Transposing railways, levelling hills, rerouting rivers - it was heady stuff, but it was all conducted in Gardiner's imagination and on paper. Neither the planning board nor the roads commission could compel road construction. On the two specific projects where Gardiner personally attempted to induce the governments involved to pull together - one a bridge across the Don River Valley, the other the Spadina Road Extension, an artery slated to proceed north and west from the city through three suburbs - he came up emptyhanded. It was the second miscarriage that stung most, as he explained in 1950: It seemed to our Planning Board that the extension of that arterial highway was in the interests of the metropolitan area. It had already been demonstrated where it was going

63 Metropolitan experiment to go ... You had all your grade separations provided for. So we tried, in the colloquial terms of the Planning Board, to 'punch' that highway through so as to get it up [through] the metropolitan area. And the Township of York told us they did not want it. No use going through all the arguments again unless you want some development of it. They simply did not want it... Anybody who has bothered to take a look at [any nearby road at rush hour] will have seen that it is one of the most congested sections of highway there is.28

The controversy over Spadina - which three decades later is still not finally laid to rest - would ripen into one of the most highly charged and savagely fought in the experience of any Canadian city. Gardiner was foiled, stymied. The walls of the planning board were lined with maps and the pigeon holes were full of plans, but it was all an exercise in frustration. We hadn't got a bulldozer or a steamshovel into the ground.'29 Gardiner itched to build facilities that would assist and invite growth. The organizational setting within which he operated prevented him from doing so. His conclusion was straightforward and, given his personal style and record, predictable: if structures were an impediment, then structures ought to be changed. Obsolete political frontiers interfering with building and with builders must be eliminated. The conventional institutions of local government were to give way to machinery more appropriate to the new age of metropolitan development. In February 1949 Gardiner was elected by the planning board as its chairman. (Maher resigned to become head of the Ontario branch of the Masonic Lodge, an interesting commentary on the priorities of the day.) On May 17, 1949, at only the third meeting with Gardiner in the chair, the board resolved that 'nothing short of a unified municipality' could measure up to the problems facing the metropolis.30 This conclusion was not made public at the time, but shortly afterward Gardiner communicated it in confidence to Premier Frost. He had found 'such a persistent demand to retain local autonomy, local taxing powers and local administrative powers as to make one despair of any cooperative effort which will solve the problems that are common to the area.'31 In mid-November 1949 Gardiner announced that after fourteen years on its council he would not seek re-election in Forest Hill. In the open he said, somewhat disingenuously, that he no longer cared to be the head of a 'Balkan municipality.' To himself he confessed that the imminent publication of the planning board's first report would leave him liable as never in the past to defeat at the polls. The board report, the central portions of it composed by Gardiner, was released to much ballyhoo on December 5, 1949. While offer-

64 Big Daddy ing concrete suggestions regarding transportation, water supply, parks, and other programs, it maintained that these were of secondary moment. 'The most important matter for consideration is not what needs to be done' by way of designing services 'but rather how those services can be effectively provided in an area divided into a number of separate autonomous municipalities.'32 The board's cardinal recommendation was that, as of 1951, political unity be imposed on the metropolitan region by amalgamation of the city proper with eight of its suburbs; the other four suburbs were appended to the recommendation in March 1950. With the report in the public domain, Gardiner thereupon began several months of speech making before civic councils, ratepayers' associations, church and labour groups, women's clubs - anyone who would listen. 'The city has shrunk at the core and burst at the seams,' he thundered in every speech. 'Amalgamation is as inevitable as the law of gravity.' An overhaul such as Gardiner had in mind could be worked only by the provincial government, which now found itself under tightening pressure to heal the decades-old sore once and for all. The problem was already before the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB), an administrative tribunal with sweeping powers over all local governments, including the power to rearrange boundaries. Hearings had been scheduled on the application of the Town of Mimico for creation of a regional board with authority over several major services. To further muddy the waters, the Toronto City Council, which had pondered the metropolitan issue on and off for two years and received a report on it from a blue ribbon panel in late 1949, was becoming increasingly exercised over the whole question. On February 2, 1950, it was to vote 19-2 to endorse the Toronto and York Planning Board report and to apply to the OMB for full amalgamation of the city with the suburbs. Gardiner, introducing himself as 'just a boy from the country,' was the keynote witness at the city council meeting. He created a mild stir by counselling against a referendum on amalgamation, saying without apology that any such proposal was 'a cinch' to be rejected by the voters. In plumping for his report, Gardiner made some reference to equity considerations. Under unification each section would 'pay on an equitable basis' for services and suburban residents could no longer use city roads, libraries, and other facilities without contributing to their upkeep. On the efficiency level, Gardiner admitted frankly that 'the usual savings of large-scale operations might not apply' to the new city, at least in the short run, since all civic employees in the region would have to be retained and the newly annexed districts would push aggregate expenditures up by demanding services equal in cost to those prevailing in older sections.33

65 Metropolitan experiment It was on the common interests to be served by growth that Gardiner pegged his case. He was now persuaded, as he wrote in the planning board report, that the greater Toronto region 'stands on the threshold of an era of development which will take twenty-five years to complete ... an opportunity that challenges the imagination.' The only thing which could fritter away this potential was the present fractured system of government, 'a barrier which must be broken.'34 It was the same thesis that underpinned the resolution adopted by the city council. Reorganization had previously been perceived in zero-sum terms; boundary extension was equated with the assumption of suburban 'burdens' by Toronto, increased levies on its home owners, and taxation hikes that would drive business away. The 1950 council took the contrary tack. Without governmental union, the city would never 'do justice to the opportunity that lies before it.' So long as the Toronto metropolis was divided into contending political units, neither the whole nor any of its parts could 'meet the intensive competition from other industrial centres.'35 A unified city was no longer a drag on economic prosperity - it was now a sine qua non of such prosperity. On January 16, 1950, Premier Frost met the heads of the thirteen governments in closed conference. His remarks were based on a draft address furnished by Gardiner. He did, however, tone down the specific insistence on amalgamation. 'That simply makes us a target for attack,' he told Gardiner. 'I have wanted to leave the matter with them to see what they say, not that I am hopeful that they will come to any decision, but it helps to formulate public opinion.' Clearly Frost was inclined to consult the local leaders, allow them to fall out among themselves, then speedily lay down the law. He was especially keen to avoid the delay of a lengthy public inquiry, which 'would add nothing to the sum total of knowledge. [We] already have a number of reports, all of which have suggested amalgamation.' Gardiner grudgingly acceded to the policy of consultation, tacking on a warning against 'further interminable discussions.'36 As had been expected, the local statesmen were quite incapable of agreement. A committee formed after the January meeting reported in March that it was riven down the middle, with Toronto and Mimico holding out for amalgamation and eleven suburbs (including Forest Hill) defiant against it. Informal negotiations continued until June, as suburban officials presented alternatives to imposed annexation, each containing 'all the old lumber, the very features that... have created the present situation.'37 At this point, taken aback by the depth of feeling aroused by the issue, Frost vacillated. Notwithstanding his earlier remarks to Gardiner about the futility of an inquiry, in June the OMB hearings, which now gave precedence to the Toronto application, were allowed to go ahead.

66 Big Daddy THE FEDERAL COMPROMISE

In the sumptuous surroundings of the legislative chamber at Queen's Park, offered by the government to highlight the gravity of the proceedings, Gardiner was the third major witness to address the inquiry directed by the new OMB chairman, Lome R. Gumming.38 He spoke standing up, perspiring in the June heat, waving his arms and jabbing his forefinger for emphasis. He refused to be lured into debate on the principles undergirding the planning board's findings, stressing that he and his colleagues were pragmatists transmuted into political activists by the mean-minded opposition to their developmental projects. 'Not being professional or academic planners, and only businessmen, we were always looking for what practical steps had to be taken to put these things in operation, and how they are going to be financed.' There was 'agreefment] in principle with the various projects we had in mind. But the moment you came down to the crux of the whole situation - Who builds it, who pays for it, and when does it start?-that was when the difficulties arose.' At times Gardiner's testimony took on the look of a sparring match between him and the opposing lawyers. He recoiled at his interrogators' repeated invocation of the concept of democracy: 'I don't know, having gone far beyond the stage where I know what that means. Everybody uses it to suit their own purposes.' He bristled during the questioning by Harold Manning, the unctuous counsel for Forest Hill, who claimed that Gardiner had been hypocritical in endorsing village autonomy during his last election campaign. The counsel for East York asked Gardiner pointedly if in pushing for his preferred projects, 'you were a little too strong an advocate of your plans, and possibly raised antagonism in that way.' Gardiner responded with a glib no, but when the next lawyer tried to pursue the same line of inquiry Gardiner parried it with questions of his own which were so ebullient that Cumming had to come to his adversary's rescue: 'Let us not get our positions reversed here.' The grilling provoked heated comment in the Toronto press, which sniffed that Gardiner had been insulted and made the victim of 'irrelevant questions and sneering personalities.'39 As the hearings dragged on-they lasted until June 1951 and occasioned three million words of oral testimony - the sparks flew less frequently. Spokesmen for Toronto, the most effective of them the ubiquitous A.J.B. Gray (now the city's assessment commissioner), added little to what had been said before. Suburban leaders reconstructed with indignation the city's earlier indifference to their plight, accusing it now of 'a mere effort to cover up the desire ... to fortify its position at the expense of more frugal neighbours.' One suburban brief did dangle the possibility of cooperation on matters of water

67 Metropolitan experiment supply, sewage disposal, and highway construction, proposing that the province create a 'metropolitan area board' to deal with them. It was implied that the board would obtain voluntary compliance from the local municipalities on a project-by-project basis.40 Neither Gardiner nor the city's representatives had anything to say about public access to civic government. They simply assumed that with the suburbs incorporated into an enlarged Toronto the opportunities for participation would be no different than they had always been for city residents. It was on this point, not on questions of government effectiveness, that suburban nay-saying was most eloquent. Mayor Howard Burrell of Leaside, as an example, advanced the view that the town's 'community spirit' would evaporate if it were merged with Toronto; small-scale governments like Leaside's were 'more readily accessible to their citizens and more familiar with their local problems.' Elmer Brandon of Swansea went so far as to recommend that the city proper be split up into a number of small municipalities: 'there would be a greater local interest among the residents of a smaller area, whereas if we find ourselves in larger cities, in larger areas, the tendency is to get further and further away from the people.'41 In scanning the mountain of evidence, Cumming and the government were confronted with several unalterable facts. In the first place, the growth of the region had accelerated drastically since the onset of post-war good times, and it had done so entirely in the suburbs. The region's population had increased by 13 per cent from 1946 to 1951, during which years the population of the central city had actually declined by 6 per cent. The inner suburbs were rounding out their growth, while in the three far-flung outer townships the expansion had been extraordinary - 120 per cent in Scarborough, 133 percent in Etobicoke, 206 per cent in North York. The available population projections, all of which turned out to be highly conservative, called for aggregate growth of up to 50 per cent within two decades. This trend was placing a rapidly swelling proportion of the metropolitan area's inhabitants beyond the reach of the central city government. Whereas only 6 per cent of the area's residents had lived outside the city proper in 1913, and only 21 per cent in 1930, this proportion had reached 40 per cent by 1950 and was rapidly closing in on half. A second inescapable datum was that the region's governments differed radically in their ability to carry out their major functions. Toronto had the lowest per capita income. Yet, because it was the site of the great majority of the region's large industrial and commercial enterprises, its assets available for local property taxation were incomparably more luxuriant than those of any of the suburbs. New Toronto and Leaside did have substantial business

68 Big Daddy assessment, and Forest Hill had its valuable homes, but in every other instance the imbalance between needs and resources was glaring. In Toronto in 1951, assessment per capita was $2,030. In only one suburb (Forest Hill) was this figure higher than $1,000; in five cases (including Scarborough, Etobicoke, and North York) it was less than $500. Expenditures per person, consequently, ranged from $107 in Toronto and $105 in Forest Hill to $54 in East York and Long Branch and $57 in Scarborough.42 It was difficult to defend on equity grounds a system under which total municipal spending was double in Toronto or Forest Hill what it was in Long Branch or East York, especially when the Long Branch home owner was likely to work at a factory in Toronto and the profits from the Toronto factory may have gone to build a mansion in Forest Hill. Of course, the inequities were not new in 1950. The biggest of the inner suburbs, York and East York, had been in a much worse relative position during the depression. Their leaders had not forgotten the city's refusal to throw them a lifeline then, and were convinced that their best course lay with independence, thrift, and enriched provincial assistance. What caused the most concern to Cumming - and to Gardiner and Frost - was the situation in the outer suburbs, where the evolving crisis was casting a shadow over summary growth possibilities. The city proper, for all its taxable assets, was almost entirely devoid of the land necessary for new housing. During the war a dire shortage of rental accommodation had brought about extensive doubling up, trailer parks in the heart of the city, and awkward arrangements with several of the suburbs for lease of dilapidated quarters for emergency housing. The pressure had only partly let up after 1945. Beyond the city limits, several communities (Forest Hill and Leaside in particular) had used zoning to exclude all but upperbracket housing development. Seven suburbs had no direct access to Lake Ontario water, and makeshift septic tank and well arrangements were becoming commonplace. In the three outlying townships, people desperate for any sort of accommodation were buying lots from farmers, land speculators, and the municipalities (which took over many properties for taxes during the 1930s). Irregular tracts of houses of sharply varying quality were being erected, often with great unserviced gaps between them. It was 'the very kind of development which at the outset of the depression had brought... ruin.'43 Scarborough and North York had already encountered resistance to the marketing of their debentures. All three of the outer townships were scrambling to alleviate their fiscal plight by aggressive bidding for industrial assessment, a process whose outcome was uncertain and which was sure to produce frictions with neighbouring communities. Scarborough was especially pretentious in this regard. Its reeve, Oliver E. Crockford, was proclaiming to general

69 Metropolitan experiment disbelief that Scarborough would soon be 'the greatest industrial centre in Canada.'44 From the point of view of the overall rate of metropolitan development, and in particular the speed of expansion of the housing stock, the weaknesses of the inherited system were widely conceded. According to Frost, in terms of both the quantity and quality of housing construction 'less progress [has] been made in the Toronto area ... than in any other area in Canada.'45 This estimation was echoed by others, including federal officials who upbraided the Toronto communities for failing to take advantage of several of Ottawa's own asistance programs.46 It was the malaise in housing supply, so obviously tied in with the growth prospects of the biggest and most important urban area in the province, which most disconcerted Frost. It was this that he tried in vain to impress upon the local leaders at his conference with them in January 1950: 'We find when we go to a certain municipality ... they say, "Why should we look at the problem when it is taking care of the problem of some other municipality?" That is [our] difficult problem, what are we going to do with the tens of thousands of people coming in?'47 What to do indeed? This was not a question that could safely be left to Lome Cumming and the OMB alone. Although nothing was said in public to tarnish the image of an impartial and detached inquiry, Frost in actuality was in regular touch with Cumming throughout his three years of work. In 1952, once Cumming had identified the main options available, he met with Frost and other government officials on as many as ten occasions to discuss the impending report.48 The premier's personal interest, such a contrast to Hepburn's nonchalance in the 1930s, was in proportion to his appreciation of the purely political stakes involved. Although his own instincts would probably have sufficed, he received ample intelligence about the potential hazards. In late 1950, for instance, Frost was warned by a Conservative MP of the 'bitter opposition' to unification among suburban residents, not excluding Tory supporters. Amalgamation 'will pile up such a cloud of grudge votes against us we will be snowed under at the next election. Amalgamation is a hornet's nest, let us leave it alone.' Reeve Crockford of Scarborough, an active Conservative, accused Frost in a letter not only of political obtuseness but of flouting fundamental principles of individual and economic freedom in considering amalgamation. 'Unification would ultimately become the first step in the formation of a dictatorship which would exercise control over the Toronto area.' Indeed (ran Crockford's hysterical forecast) this would become a precedent for the establishment of authoritarian socialism all over Canada, with all private and local activity 'brought under one master mind.'49 For political sensitivities on the subject, Frost had to gaze no farther than his own caucus. In 1953, even though all but one of the seventeen Toronto and

70 Big Daddy suburban members were Progressive Conservatives, the ragged history of the amalgamation debate put them at sharp odds with one another and with the government. These differences may have given Frost a certain latitude of action, but they also raised the costs of adopting a position at either extreme. William J. Stewart, the dour undertaker who sat for Parkdale, had been mayor of Toronto in 1931 when York and East York petitions for annexation were spurned; he still frowned upon 'forced amalgamation.' Four other Toronto Conservatives had been on the 1950 city council that endorsed amalgamation. Two former suburban reeves who had testified capably against unification (and called for a referendum on the issue) were now backbench MPPs, as was the counsel for Scarborough during the OMB hearings. If complete amalgamation was certain to produce a hue and cry in the suburbs, failure to act was inconceivable after such a lengthy prologue. It would have been unacceptable to the city political establishment generally and to the three Toronto newspapers. It would have undermined the province's own dreams of growth. The extant system of intermunicipal agreements - 163 of these had been made since 1915 and covered an assortment of services - was internally inconsistent, under great strain because of the polemics over amalgamation, and seemingly incapable of extension to cover the big problems of urban growth.50 Proposals had been made for special-purpose authorities to cope with selected services. There was much apprehension about the cumbersomeness of such bodies; Gumming and the government also doubted that they could finance their operations without powers not normally granted to agencies of this kind in Canada.51 Cumming's report, published on January 20, 1953, was conceived of as a compromise document. While conceding merits in both city and suburban cases, it rejected both and embraced a 'principle of federation' that promised to salvage the best points of each. Cumming drew on the precedent of Canadian Confederation, the more proximate example of the county councils that had operated in Ontario since 1850, and the several proposals for a two-tiered system that had been floated over the previous three decades and during the hearings. A new entity, a 'Metropolitan Council,' was to be created to perform a number of strategic functions on a region-wide basis. The existing municipalities would be retained within their present boundaries and would provide residual services. Unlike Gardiner in 1950, Cumming was moved by some of the suburban protestations about the importance of keeping local government politically accessible. He cited the need to preserve 'a government which is very close to the local residents' as one of the axial arguments against complete amalgamation. Nevertheless, the emphasis in the report was on government effectiveness, and here Cumming followed Gardiner in placing little import on

71 Metropolitan experiment economy and equity considerations. He forecast no overall savings and advocated distributive justice only to the extent that each municipality was to be capable of providing an essential minimum of services, not services of equal quality. The root objective of the new metropolitan authority was clear. It was to provide above all else for the common interest in development, to exercise the functions 'considered vitally necessary to the continued growth and development of the entire area as an urban community.' 52 The provincial cabinet, which was for all intents and purposes the coauthor of the report, immediately subscribed openly to its general thrust. On February 25, 1953, Frost himself moved first reading in a boisterous Ontario Legislature of Bill 80, known after its enactment in April by its short title, the Metropolitan Toronto Act.53 It created a new Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto, governed by its own council. In distinction from the old county councils, it would have two key financial powers: to assess real estate for taxation purposes, and to issue debentures on behalf of itself and all local governments on its territory. Its legislative powers were also without precedent for a government of regional scope in Ontario. They were to include arterial roads, major sewage and water facilities, regional planning, public transportation, administration of justice, some relatively minor social services, metropolitan parks, and such housing matters as its council elected to deal with. The old city and the twelve suburban municipalities would exercise several important powers on their own (police and fire protection, business licensing, public health, and libraries were the prime ones). In other fields of jurisdiction, they would share responsibilities with the new metropolitan government. Apart from the creation of a largely autonomous metropolitan school board, the only significant respect in which the statute diverged from Cumming's proposal was in the composition of the Metropolitan Toronto Council. Cumming had in mind, for an interim period at least, a nine-man assembly consisting of eight members named by the local councils and one by the provincial cabinet. The act established a much larger body composed essentially of elected politicians who would continue to sit on their local councils. Twelve would be the heads (mayors and reeves) of the suburban councils, and twelve would come from the city council (the mayor, the two controllers receiving the most votes, and the nine aldermen heading the polls in their wards). The twenty-fifth individual would be a council chairman, to be appointed by the province for a term lasting until January 1, 1955, and thereafter to be elected by the council itself. The middling course threaded by the legislation, offering 'most of the advantages of amalgamation and none of the disadvantages,' was hailed by the government as one of its prime virtues.54 Frost stressed the tentative nature

72 Big Daddy of the bill and held out the possibility of ultimate success to the amalgamationist camp: 'Experience, as usual, will be the best teacher.'55 By the same token, the predisposition among local politicians was to see in the plan 'a compromise solution which will satisfy nobody.'56 The city council voted in early February, with only Mayor Allan Lamport dissenting, to reject the federative idea and to take out newspaper advertisements declaiming against its principal features. City politicians assailed the 'confiscation' of Toronto's assets in favour of the new entity - 'communistic,' something worthy of Marx or Stalin, 'the greatest act of confiscation since the expulsion of the Acadians.' They also protested that the local councils would be reduced to mere debating societies, innocuous rubber stamps confined to trivial issues. The outcry was more restrained in the suburbs, where most politicians were relieved that total amalgamation had been averted. Still, there was no relieving the suspicion that Metropolitan Toronto would be a half-way house to full unification and that in the interim the suburban governments would be denuded of their major powers and forced to 'go on bended knee' in order to exercise the ones they retained.57 The furore honed interest in the identity of the person who would head up the new venture. Even as Cumming composed his report, sheltered by the fiction that his was a non-political task, Frost and his advisers studied the question of whom to select as chairman for the better part of a year. Serious thought was given to half-a-dozen names, including Mayor Lamport and A.J.B. Gray (both of them mightily disadvantaged by being Liberals), Lome Cumming himself (ruled out as having insufficient skills as a persuader and negotiator), and several of the leading lights on the county council.58 Shortly after the release of Cumming's report, Frost settled on his comrade from Forest Hill. Gardiner had Frost's complete confidence and admiration. He was an accomplished lawyer and businessman. He had done long and worthy service in the Conservative cause and was easily the most prominent member of the Ontario party outside the cabinet. He was known for being able to craft political agreement from the most forbidding of materials. He was a former county warden, had headed a municipality for twelve years, knew the city intimately, and was the only suburban figure of note to have endorsed amalgamation. Also, as a man of means, Gardiner could afford to give the job his undivided attention and was beyond personal corruption. Afterward Gardiner always claimed that Frost 'conscripted' him for the post against his inclinations. There is no reason to disbelieve him. In 1953 Gardiner was fifty-eight years old, the grandfather of four, of an age at which even the sturdiest individuals are eyeing reduced commitments. The previous summer, in one of his first steps toward a more easy-paced life, he and his wife

73 Metropolitan experiment had sold their large house and moved into an apartment, a roomy one but much smaller quarters nonetheless, in a new building on Eglinton Avenue in Forest Hill. Gardiner was earning $50,000 a year as a lawyer, was still picking up equity and directorships, and, attached as he was to money, was reluctant to forego this for the $15,000 he would receive as chairman. He also had reservations about the metropolitan government scheme. As late as the fall of 1952, he had been imploring Frost and others (including Robert Rowland, his original patron in Forest Hill politics, who had been named vice-chairman of the OMB on his recommendation in 1946) to opt for simple amalgamation. The day after the Cumming report appeared, Gardiner described it as offering 'a thoroughly sensible and practical alternative' to amalgamation, but it was obvious that he preferred the more drastic solution.59 In a meeting in the premier's office in early February, Gardiner objected and stalled at Frost's offer but consented on the spot to serve as chairman until 1955, on the proviso that he be permitted to retain his corporate connections. By his own account, his friendship for Frost was his first motivation. However, altruism was not his only inspiration in accepting the proposition. 'I had the fuzzy idea in my head that this was going to be bigger than anything I had tried before. It was only a hunch, but I could see that I could get some useful things done, maybe even in a way that people would remember after I was gone.' The appointment was announced on April 7, five days after the bill received royal assent. Weeks in advance of this, Gardiner and his secretary were inspecting offices in City Hall (in the evenings, so as to avoid detection), measuring them for furniture and filing space. When Frost unveiled the choice of Gardiner, the new chairman fairly beamed with confidence and eagerness to get on with the job. 'Why should we have difficulty?' he asked reporters at his first press conference. 'Our troubles have always been over mechanics.'60 It was a coming-out statement that sounds naive today. In Toronto in 1953 it did not seem out of place. During their conference in February, Frost had lent-him only one piece of advice - 'He just told me not to get run over by a streetcar before April 15,' when the new council was to be sworn in. Not many months were to elapse before Toronto politicians were taking counsel on how to avoid being run over by Frederick Gardiner.

4

Getting the shovels into the ground

'Mr. Frederick G. Gardiner's qualifications are so well suited to the requirements of his new appointment,' the Globe and Mail intoned with uncustomary warmth when his selection was made known, '... that it would appear as if his whole life had been a preparation for this opportunity.'1 Gardiner's performance during the initial stages of 'Metro,' as the new entity was familiarly referred to within weeks of its inception, fully bore out this observation. Well before he retired as chairman at the end of 1961, there was almost unanimous agreement on far more than his qualifications for the position. He was seen as having made the most of his assets and, in doing so, having made an indispensable contribution to the success and the very survival of the metropolitan government. Leslie Frost, who was in as good a position to judge as anyone, confided to Gardiner in 1959, 'If you had not taken over this task, this great political experiment would have failed.'2 This appraisal was repeated countless times in public. 'Metropolitan Toronto as it exists today,' the Star opined in 1961, 'is Mr. Gardiner's personal achievement.'3 The new regime began to take shape on April 15, 1953, the day on which Gardiner and his council took the oath of office at Queen's Park. It assumed its full gamut of legislative powers the following January. Gardiner found this transition phase a vexing time in more ways than one. He had just made the painful decision to part company with his law partner of thirty years, Harry Parkinson, as a result of several years of friction following the introduction of Parkinson's two sons into the business. Several months later Harry Willis, a partner since 1930 (and the federal Conservatives' chief organizer in Ontario), also left the firm, this time with hard feelings and recrimination all around. These changes, and the necessity for Gardiner to apportion his clients among his remaining associates, were stressful enough for a man who had always put

75 Shovels into the ground business and profession before politics. They were mere distractions compared to the work he was buckling down to in his oak-panelled office on the second floor of Toronto City Hall. DEFINING THE CHAIRMAN'S ROLE It can be gathered from earlier chapters that before April 1953 Gardiner had displayed in his various activities what can be called a coherent style, a habitual way of responding to the situations in which he found himself. James Barber has argued that the basic elements of political style can be traced on two dimensions: first, the extent to which the politician is active or passive in carrying out his political roles; and second, the degree to which he likes or dislikes the job he is doing. Of the four main types marked out by these variables, the style Gardiner had already manifested and was to present to the world as head of Metropolitan Toronto clearly falls into the category Barber terms active-positive - 'a style oriented primarily toward productiveness.'4 Gardiner had been both highly active and possessed of a strong affection for his work, someone who made large investments in undertakings that afforded tangible payoffs for himself and the causes he made his own. The bruising tackier on the rugby field, the lawyer obsessed with making a million dollars, the rough and ready party loyalist recommended by Cecil Frost, the freshman suburban councillor who could not wait for his colleagues to get down to business, the planning board chairman who wanted to move river-beds and build highways - he had always been a striver and a pusher, a man of action with few doubts about himself and few inhibitions about bending others to his will. Gardiner's habits and overall approach to his work did not change in the metropolitan government. If anything, his style became more apparent than before because for the first time public decisions were monopolizing his attention. Never previously had politics or administration been his vocation. Now they were almost his entire life: When I began, I figured on serving out the first two years and then on getting back to Bay Street and to making money. All these plans fell by the wayside within a couple of months, when the details and general flavour of the job started to get me excited. Right then and there I decided to stay at it for whatever it took - five, seven, ten years, I didn't know - for as long as I needed to finish up some of the things I was starting. Once in a while after that I got to feeling down in the mouth about it all, but those moods always passed. You know, I lived and breathed and talked Metro. Sometimes I even thought

76 Big Daddy about Metro in my sleep. When I was sick [in 1958], I dreamed in Technicolour that I had died and I was dickering over the terms of my final place of residence. I got bold, knocked on the Pearly Gates, and asked if I could come in. St Peter thought it over and finally said I was welcome in heaven, but on one condition - that I had to metropolitanize it. The Gardiner work day began around 9:00 a.m. when the black Cadillac limousine assigned to him picked him up at home and conveyed him, thumbing through the morning newspaper, to his office. As a rule, the chauffeur did not deposit him back at his doorstep, toting a full briefcase, until ten to twelve or more hours later. Gardiner felt free to call in his assistant to take correspondence on weekends and late at night. Many Saturdays and Sundays found him touring Metro public works projects, and impromptu visitations, interrupted by pauses for refreshments, were not a rarity on his nightly drives home. Gardiner took only two summer vacations and four mid-winter holidays in the Caribbean during his nine years as chairman. None of these respites lasted more than ten days, and even to them he brought a mound of paperwork. His only other sustained absences came in 1956 and 1960, when he attended the U.S. Republican party's presidential conventions in San Francisco and Chicago, on passes provided by a friend well placed in the party. Again, he did not leave his projects behind. Every hour that could be pried loose was spent inspecting expressways, rapid transit facilities, urban renewal sites, and tracts of suburban housing. It added up to a gruelling routine. Its self-inflicted toll landed Gardiner in hospital in March 1958 with arthritis and an intestinal inflammation, helped hasten his retirement, and contributed to the ill health that bedevilled him in his later life. This hectic itinerary meant that more than ever Audrey Gardiner - 'the boss of the boss,' her husband called her - directed the household. By choice, she had always remained well out of the foreground of his public life. She now made only the obligatory social appearances with him and did next to no entertaining of his political associates. Gardiner was protective, almost secretive, about his scarce leisure hours, even though there was little that was exceptional about them and less that bore on his City Hall pursuits. Until her death in 1957, he dutifully visited his mother at the old Euclid Avenue house. Calls on his sister and his brother, who died in 1959, were less common. Gardiner kept in close touch with his daughter Anne, who was married to one of his junior law partners. With his son Warren, now in his thirties and involved in a succession of none-too-successful business ventures, Gardiner's relations were distant, and they became more so with time. His four grandchildren (a fifth died in 1957) were a source of delight dimmed only by the irregularity of his contact with them. At home, Gardiner sorely missed his

77 Shovels into the ground prized rose garden, a casualty of the 1952 switch to apartment living. He now contented himself with pruning and watering plants in boxes on his balcony. The sale of the house had also necessitated the subdivision of his collections of paintings and silverware, chunks of which now belonged to his daughter. He barely found the time to add several Canadian landscapes to his holdings. The intervals between fishing expeditions and trips to the Lake Simcoe cottage became longer and longer. Horse races were now almost out of bounds. The odd card game or roll of the dice had to be snatched in spare moments at the office or in his limousine. Liquor afforded Gardiner the pleasures and solace it always had. Most times, but not every time, he was mindful of the rule of restraint he had set for himself when he ended his nine-year abstinence from alcohol in 1949. Frederick Gardiner, then, turned every available ounce of his not inconsiderable reservoir of energy to his new post. Although this alone made it likely that he could make some impression upon events, the opportunity for him to do so was greatly enhanced by the conditions under which he took office. If, as has been submitted by students of political psychology, it is 'ambiguous situations' that leave the greatest leeway for personality to leave its impression,5 then the setting into which Gardiner strode in 1953 was highly conducive. It was shot through with ambiguity and uncertainty. The metropolitan regime was an untested idea, concocted more out of political necessity than through any systematic matching of institutions to needs. None of the constituent governments was reconciled to its presence, although most saw worth in some of its objectives. There were no clear precedents for the operations of the metropolitan council, which may have borne a certain resemblance to the traditional county council but was taking on far more ambitious tasks. The new government was without physical plant, staff, operating codes, even a firm idea of how long it would be in existence. As to his exact role, Gardiner had virtually no guideposts. On the one hand, there was a widespread sense that somehow the chairman personally must break through the impasse brought on by the clash of local sovereignties and the onset of big-city problems. It is intriguing that this notion can be found in the first cartoon depiction of Gardiner, published in the Telegram two days before he was sworn in (see illustration at the end of chapter 6). The cartoon cast Gardiner as a 'Supermayor,' defying gravity to swoop down from on high over a traffic-gorged urban scene. With his jaw firmly set and his Superman's cloak streaming behind him, the Gardiner figure seemed endowed with transcendent abilities. Comical though it was on one level, the Supermayor epithet, which was popular for several years thereafter, summed up the air of anticipation surrounding the new chairman. In the months that followed,

78 Big Daddy effusive characterizations of Gardiner and the challenges facing him abounded. 'He's North America's first,' one journalist enthused in November 1953, 'a new kind of official invented in the hope of solving the super problems confronting most big cities in this age of super housing projects, super factories, super shopping centres, super highways and super congestion.'6 On the other hand, when Gardiner turned to the concrete powers of his office, he saw nothing deserving of superlatives. The Cumming report had mentioned the desirability of a 'chairman or head' for the interim council. It breathed not a word about his powers. Part I of the Metropolitan Toronto Act summarized his responsibilities in one sentence: 'The chairman shall be the head of the Metropolitan Council and the chief executive officer of the Metropolitan Corporation.' The statute stipulated that the chairman be elected annually by council from 1955 onward, that his salary not exceed $15,000, that he be administered an oath of office, and that he cosign certain financial documents together with the Metro treasurer. The chairman was to preside at council meetings, but unless he was already a member of the council he was to have no vote 'except in the event of an equality of votes.' Apart from this diluted voting power, he was like most municipal leaders in Canada vested with no formal sanctions whatever - no powers of appointment, initiation, or veto. Worse than that, he was not even given the largely hortatory injunction to oversee the conduct of officials, see to the execution of the laws, and communicate policy recommendations to his council that the province's Municipal Act had since 1877 addressed to the heads of other municipalities.7 What is revealing is that the impression grew - epidemic enough to be brought up by the leader of the opposition in the Ontario Legislature in 1959 -that Gardiner possessed 'extraordinary powers.'8 Gardiner may have wielded extraordinary power, it is true. By way of formal 'powers' he had almost nothing at all. Strictly speaking, Gardiner as chairman of the Metropolitan Toronto Council had less legal authority than he had previously as reeve of tiny Forest Hill. The creators of Metropolitan Toronto did not have a much more lucid idea of what the informal mandate of the chairman would amount to. In public, at least, more was said about what to call him him than about his functions. Cumming, for one, broached a more imposing title than chairman, maybe lord mayor, warden, or president of council (the title used in the early drafts of Bill 80). One MPP wanted the new chairman to be entitled 'lord high executioner,' after the Gilbert and Sullivan character.9 The only definite expectations held by the government were twofold. First, as chief executive officer, the chairman would bring order and direction to the new Metro civil service. He would be, as Cumming was to envision him in a report in 1958, the analogue of'the general

79 Shovels into the ground manager of a large commercial corporation,' responsible to the duly elected board of directors.10 As far as his political presence was concerned, it was augured mainly that the chairman would act to soften city-suburban conflict. According to Cumming, the new appointee would have to 'act as a referee' between the two camps.11 In a similar vein, the only public comment on the chairman by a cabinet minister during the 1953 legislative debate referred to him as being 'independent' of the two sides in council. 12 This obviously connoted quite a circumscribed role. The new chief executive was to be a point of equilibrium in the metropolitan legislature, not authorized even to cast a vote unless the two blocs were unable to agree. He surely was not apperceived as a focus for important policy choices or innovations. Gardiner expended little effort in trying to define his role in abstract terms. At no time did he consider acting as a passive figurehead or merely as an intermediary between city and suburbs. Neither was he willing to imitate the archetype of the popularly elected city mayor. To be sure, Gardiner did deem himself to be, as of January 1955 at least, an elected official, and he took offence when it was stated that Metro council 'appointed' him. He was pleased at being called Supermayor, and in 1955 he coined an off-the-cuff title-Metro Goldwyn Mayor - which played on his name and on the mildly self-deprecating ostentation he was beginning to project. Nonetheless, Gardiner perceived (rightly so) that few Canadian mayors were political leaders in the way that national and provincial executives were, that most accented their ceremonial and social functions and gave little consistent direction on policy matters. The fledgling metropolitan institution, he believed, could not afford to have such a person at its head. It had a special need for strong and round-the-clock leadership and he, the chairman, was the only one in a position to provide it. His model was the one he had followed in all his previous activities, that of the resourceful and diligent entrepreneur: I had always been more of a businessman than a lawyer. Now I was determined to be more of a businessman than a politician. I had a job to do. I couldn't sit around and ask the people or the council how to do it. I was convinced that if I applied myself sufficiently things would fall into place. They always had before. Somebody told me that even with all my bad habits I could have been a successful preacher if I set my mind to it, and there was something to that. Now Metro - you had to start somewhere. You had to start with somebody who had a grasp of the whole operation, who set the tone for it, who made things happen. He had to be like a businessman in that he had to have confidence in himself, and be willing to work on weekends, and be ready to dirty his hands and take some risks. When it came to selling my ideas - and no one who has two red cents worth of political experience needs to be told you have to do that - I knew I was going to have to be

80 Big Daddy a bit of a ham and a hell of a good actor. But what came first was having a product worth buying and a well-run organization to back it up.

The notion of city government as a businesslike operation was firmly entrenched in the tradition of Progressive urban reform, the revolt against the machine and the ward-heeler that exerted such an enormous influence on Canadian cities from its American base early in the twentieth century.13 However, the business virtues enshrined in this heritage were first and foremost those of the economizer, the incorruptible manager who substituted sound and sober administration for prodigal spending and boodle. Although Gardiner was not indifferent to these values, he laid far more stress on the dynamic aspects of his role. He visualized himself as an entrepreneur in the full sense of the word, the man who 'made things happen,' the innovator who searched out new technologies and new markets. 14 In moving forward, Gardiner believed that the soundest foundation for his decisions would be empirical knowledge, the kind readily verified and communicated in the practical, everyday vocabulary of work and commerce. He had a visceral distrust of theorists, advisers, consultants, and 'professors.' (The final word he rarely uttered except in a disparaging tone. The letters 'PHD,' he declared on several occasions, stand for 'pile it high and deep.') If he was to get things done, there would be hindrances aplenty in the political environment without him being fenced in by associates who would measure his proposals against what he feared would be abstruse standards of how a city should be built or governed. Only two months after taking over the Metro job, Gardiner tossed about these ideas during a visit of several days with the man to whom he has often been compared, Robert Moses, the famous (and infamous) chief construction executive of New York City: The thing that impressed me about Moses was that the first question he asked me was, 4 What the hell are you going to do with that mess up there now that you're in charge of it?' I had to think fast, but I knew what to say. I said I was going to be like Stalin. I'd have a five- or ten-year plan and I'd lay out exactly what I had and how I was going to spend it and I'd know exactly where the money was going. His only comment was, 'Never mind those high-minded advisers. Keep your staff small. Don't let them boss you around. Hire them when you want and fire them when you want. Make them work for you and not the other way around.' He didn't have to convince me. This was how I intended to proceed. I was going to run my own show. That's why they called me a bulldozer.

Despite the scope and complexity of his activities, Gardiner's staff was miniscule. His only personal assistant, a legal secretary who had worked for his

81 Shovels into the ground firm since 1937, supervised his schedule and appointments and relayed routine information to politicians. She had no political experience and would never have taken it upon herself to advise Gardiner on political matters.15 Even when it reached peak strength in the late 1950s, the rest of the chairman's establishment - the linchpin of a government whose expenditures were exceeded in Canada only by those of the federal, Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia governments - consisted of two stenographers, one receptionist, and a messenger. It contained no brain trust of'high-minded advisers' and no one to whom the chairman could delegate authority. Gardiner attended all his own meetings, drafted his own letters, and did his own negotiating. He wrote all his speeches and reports, usually in longhand in his home library; he seemed to regard recourse to a speech writer as evidence of an ineffable character defect. In short, Gardiner's office was highly personalized. Running his 'own show,' he shared the work load and the glory with no one. Although a more substantial staff would have been his for the asking, he declined to ask for it. He was equally adamant against appointment of a deputy chairman, from within or outside the council. When several councillors forced a full-dress debate of this issue in 1960, Gardiner refused to stay in the chair and sat out the discussion and vote (which upheld his position by a large majority) in his office. The parallel with Stalin, and even with Robert Moses, should not be pushed too far. Gardiner was considerably restrained by his immediate surroundings and could not have carried the day in the metropolitan council without resort to a variety of persuasive strategies. He may have been able to foresee certain facets of Metro's functioning on a five- or ten-year basis, as happened with many items of capital spending (the major subject discussed by him and Moses). But Gardiner was also an improviser and a scrambler, in much the same way as political leaders in most pluralistic societies are forced to be. He acknowledged this freely at the time, complaining that seldom was he able to give his objectives measured consideration: 'If I could sit on my pants for a day to three days at a time, instead of running all over Hell's Half-Acre, I might make a better job out of being Chairman of the Metropolitan Council.'16 This problem, like the drain on his physical capacities, could at a minimum have been eased if Gardiner had enlarged his staff, withdrawn from some of the fine points of administration and political decision, and reserved his time for the grand problems. Such an approach might well have brought about more thoughtful and more responsive policies on some issues in the long run. Better policies or not, it would have run against the grain of Gardiner's character. He was simply not the man to sit on his pants for days at a time. If there was anything he abhorred, it was planning and projecting as a substitute for action. 'It is infinitely better,' he said in 1956, 'that you take some step, and

82 Big Daddy proceed to work it out, than to stand back and work on nothing but blueprints for the future.' 17 This drive and restlessness, which were the pith of Gardiner's self-defined bulldozer style, he transmitted to all who fell under his sway. He would pepper hesitant politicians with invocations about the need for deeds: 'Do it while you're alive, you won't do it when you're dead.' 'When you're in you're in, and when you're out you're out and you've missed your chance.' 'You have to be in too big a hurry, or you'll never get things done on time.'18 His officials faced the same drumfire, especially when they recommended more planning and testing on a project to which he was committed. 'He would say, "Plans, plans, we've got a million plans. Let's get the godamn shovels into the ground."' 19 This did not imply that all ideas and initiatives were to radiate from Gardiner himself. As is normal in modern government, the source of most proposals for concrete action was the appointed bureaucracy. What Frederick Gardiner's personality and style demanded - and his several constituencies accepted - was that it was he who decided which proposals were to enter into political play. He secured the requisite agreement for them, and kept an overview of the whole 'operation,' as he was given to calling it. Although his formal title was chairman of the Metropolitan Toronto Council, Gardiner in fact became head of the Metro government. Within months of taking office he was being referred to in the pres;s and by his colleagues as the 'Metro chairman,' the man in charge of the entire enterprise. This speedy expansion of his role did not go without criticism. As early as July 1953 the senior city controller, Leslie Saunders, was enjoining Gardiner to 'stick to your own knitting.' 20 'He has a habit of taking unto himself more duties than are attached to his office,' another Toronto politician protested several months later.21 Such statements begged the question of what Gardiner's duties and office were, and what kind of a garment he ought to be knitting. Who really knew? Here the very lack of definition of his responsibilities, and the unavailability of clues to others about what constituted acceptable behaviour on his part, worked in Gardiner's favour. He was able to respond with deeds rather than words. Not once was he drawn into a discussion of his proper powers. The aggrandizement of Gardiner's role was made all the more easy because his authority was freely consented to by the vast majority of his confreres on the council and by the major players elsewhere in the Metro system. If his methods were at times overbearing, he was given full rein to use them by his associates. They did not expect a Superman, but they proved to be more than willing to accept a firm leader. 'It has been suggested,' a member of the Ontario Legislature stated in February 1954 (the second month of Metro's full

83 Shovels into the ground operation), 'that the new chairman is a dictator. Well, Mr. Speaker, the chairman is only one man and if the other twenty-four let him push them around, then they deserve all they get.'22 That they acquiesced in it and 'deserved' it was apparent in the making of hundreds of decisions over the eight years to come. More immediate evidence was furnished when the metropolitan council convened the succeeding January to choose its leader on its own. Gardiner had declared his wish to remain two months in advance of the vote, as he was to do until 1961. He was elected unanimously, and a member of his executive saluted him as 'a giant among us,' in the first of a long skein of voting-day accolades. Not until 1958 did Gardiner face token opposition for re-election. He was returned by a count of 21-2 that year, acclaimed in 1959, re-elected by 23-1 in 1960, and acclaimed again in his final year. 23 The rules of proper election were always observed to the letter, complete with nomination speeches and the removal of the placard on Gardiner's desk identifying him as chairman. About the outcome there was never the slightest suspense. The ritual having been concluded, Gardiner's acceptance and inaugural speech - prepared and printed in advance - would be handed out to the members of council by the clerical staff and read by the reconsecrated leader. Far more significant than the lopsided re-election statistics was the way in which Gardiner's leadership came to affect the overall temper of the Metro enterprise. Observers at City Hall were soon writing of 'the pervasive influence of the man who made Metro,' influence that 'permeates every decision of this experimental government, from planning a multimillion-dollar sewer project to the tearoom concession in a park.' 24 Politicians and editorial writers fumbled about for a metaphor that would capture Gardiner's bossing and wheedling presence. They found one in January 1959 when the chairman, on vacation in Jamaica, counselled his colleagues by telegram to defer consideration of a disputed issue (the internecine conflict on the Toronto Transit Commission) until after his return. The Star discerned a likeness to 'a Caesar whose seaside rest has been disturbed by news of unseemly squabbling among his minions back in Rome.' The image that stuck was supplied by a young Toronto alderman, Philip Givens. 'I don't see,' Givens told a reporter after reading the telegram, 'what Big Daddy can do to help out in this family's squabble.' 25 The appellation of Big Daddy, the imperious patriarch in Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (the movie version of which, starring Burl Ivés, had recently played in Toronto), stayed with Gardiner for the duration of his career. The Big Daddy of Williams' play lorded it over his kin, yet it was around his neck that the family's members hung when they were in dire straits. The label intimated

84 Big Daddy mixed emotions - awe, affection, resentment, bemusement. So it was with Toronto's Big Daddy. He had 'a very high regard' for Gardiner, Givens spelled out. In fact, he had a hard time imagining Metro politics without Gardiner. At the same time Givens thought that the chairman's predominance, made more and more blatant by the near suspension of decision making during his several recent absences, rated deep concern. 'I feel nothing of any consequence turns without his approval. He is a benevolent dictator.'26 He was indeed, and irrespective of the occasional objection he remained so until he departed the scene. METROPOLITAN MACHINERY

The structure of the metropolitan federation - in particular the shape of its component units, the mode of representation on the council, and the division of legislative powers - was a subject for endless rumination among journalists, politicians, and academic onlookers. The only major changes during Gardiner's administration came in 1956, when the Metropolitan Toronto Act was amended to provide for the unification of police forces and licensing authorities at the Metro level. The shortage of action did not dissuade the redesigners. The talk seemed to appeal to the architect's instinct in everyone. The avowedly experimental nature of the 1953 constitution almost invited it. Whatever his early sentiment on amalgamation, by 1955 Gardiner was publicly pledged to indefinite maintenance of the federal compromise as a form of government that 'has been found to be superior to political amalgamation.'27 Within this framework, he was responsible for his fair share of renovation proposals: transfer of policing and licensing to Metro (1954-55), direct election of Metro council from tortuously drafted wards (late 1956), weighted votes in council (1957-60), reduction in the number of local municipalities to five and Metro takeover of welfare, public housing, and public health (1961). Aside from the consolidation of police and licensing services, to which Metro council concurred with only three dissenting votes in 1955, none of these suggestions was followed. This is explained in large part by the resistance of the established governments, especially in the suburbs, to changes undercutting their identity and decision powers. Opposition predictably stiffened after the 1956 reform, when it began to be doubted that many more functions could be shifted without turning the lower-tier governments into inconsequential entities. The sluggishness in revising the Metro constitution can also be related to Gardiner's own attitude and actions. Except during his brief flirtation with the idea of a directly elected metropolitan council, he counted staunchly on the

85 Shovels into the ground political necessity of a direct link between the Metro and the local legislatures. Any system for separate election 'would create such jealousies and frictions between Metro and the local municipalities that it might undo much of what has been accomplished.'28 Once it came to the meticulous points of representation on an indirectly elected council, Gardiner was visibly impatient with lengthy discussion. Even in 1961, when Gardiner himself placed the constitution on the council order paper, he was far more caught up in the concrete business of the day, matters such as the Spadina Expressway project (which was under growing attack). On the issue of the division of powers, if Gardiner seemed uncharacteristically lax in pushing ideas for change it was because he was basically content with the existing regime, so long as it continued to assign the powers necessary for overall metropolitan development to the Metro level. Tor the present,' he explained to Leslie Frost in November 1957, 'Metro is sufficiently engaged in solving its [own] problems and is not looking for further fields to conquer. We have to remember what happened to Napoleon and Hitler when they tried to capture Moscow.'29 Indeed, he told Frost in another instance, the accumulation of legislative authority might divert Metro from its essential developmental tasks, keep it from paying 'its undivided attention to those matters which are metropolitan in scope.'30 Gardiner did give sedulous consideration to the question of the process for making decisions within the new metropolitan government, one which he judged to be much more pertinent to his success than the curlicues of the constitution. His initial handiwork here had lasting effects. Two months before his appointment was announced, he advised Premier Frost that the Metro council should have, in addition to the usual set of standing committees to treat particular policy fields, a compact executive committee to provide strong legislative direction. The executive, he said to Frost, should consist of himself and the standing committee chairmen. It should be salaried and should be granted by provincial legislation all the duties and powers affixed to the boards of control, the elected executive organs in most of Ontario's large cities, including Toronto, since the 1890s.31 When the Metropolitan Toronto Act wound up with no provision for such a committee, Gardiner engineered its immediate establishment by the Metro council itself. The executive committee to which the council agreed in May 1953, headed by the Metro chairman and including the chairmen of the four standing committees, was of almost exactly the design Gardiner wanted. 32 The powers of Gardiner's brainchild were impressive. The new executive was to nominate and supervise senior officials, prepare spending estimates (which council could increase only by a two-thirds vote), initiate all contracts

86 Big Daddy and expropriations, and, in an open-ended clause, 'consider and report on such other matters as may from time to time be referred to [it] by the Council.' Its exercise of these powers under Gardiner's direction soon provoked anxious comments from rank-and-file councillors. 'This executive committee is dictatorial,' one councillor lamented as soon as the summer of 1953. 'They are taking control of everything and we have no say whatsoever.'33 In August 1954, after several months of discussion, Gardiner agreed to a separation of the executive from the standing committees. This he justified primarily on the premise that his fellow members of the executive, all of whom retained posts on a lower-tier council, were overworked, but he acknowledged that there had been 'some criticism ... that there is too much power vested in the members of the executive committee.' 34 Henceforth executive members were to be barred from chairing other committees. However, the major prerogatives of the executive were left intact, and Gardiner's own rights were reaffirmed. He beat back a proposal (championed by Toronto Alderman William R. Allen, who was to become the second Metro chairman in 1962) to strip him of the ability to vote in standing committees. The procedural by-law now contained the provision that, other than his being entitled to vote in full council only to break a tie, 'the Chairman shall have all the rights and privileges of a member of Council.' Only in 1953 and 1954, when Gardiner cobbled together a slate of names and lobbied successfully for council approval, did he control the selection of executive members. Although he always retained some weight in this regard, it was countervailed by the requirement (adopted by council in 1954 and fixed in provincial legislation in 1958) that the executive be evenly balanced between city and suburban representatives, by the expansion of his executive colleagues to six in 1958, and by the increasing competition for executive seats, especially among suburban members. Nor could Gardiner bank on automatic voting support from members of the executive, either within the committee or on the floor of the council (see chapter 5). The utility of the executive committee to Gardiner was in providing him with a legitimate point of access for intercepting the details of council business and exercising influence on them. Chaired by him, the executive was Gardiner's own committee, his instrument for screening policy proposals and his staging area for bringing his preferences to the attention of the politicians and the public. Even though no express decision of council granted the executive the right to review the work of council's other committees, it usurped this right, at Gardiner's bidding, at the very start. All reports and resolutions of committees were considered first by the executive committee and arrived at council appended to executive reports recommending concurrence or

87 Shovels into the ground rejection. The executive reported to council eight times in 1953, thirty-seven in 1954, and an average of sixty-three times a year for the balance of Gardiner's term. Executive committee sessions, at first schedued for every second week, were by mid-1954 being held on a weekly basis. Meetings of council were frequently delayed until the executive had made up its mind on the issues to be debated that day.35 The same process of delegation and concentration of power, in favour of Gardiner personally, took place within the executive committee. Gardiner was keen to be viewed as the mainspring of the legislative leadership. How happy most of his colleagues were to go along is evident from excerpts like the following from the minutes of the executive committee (1954 and 1955). Some of these are repeated dozens of times: The Executive Committee concurred in the foregoing recommendation of the Chairman of Council... The Chairman agreed to confer with [an official] and report thereon to the Executive Committee... The Executive Committee requested the Chairman of Council to confer with appropriate officials of the Province of Ontario ... The Chairman advised that he would investigate the foregoing matter and would advise Council when this matter is under consideration ... The Chairman of Council advised that he intends to submit a report on this matter to the Executive Committee. The Executive Committee deferred consideration of the foregoing matter pending receipt of the report to be submitted by the Chairman of Council... The matter was left in the hands of the Chairman. The executive committee was far from the only forum within which Gardiner's voice thundered and was submitted to at moments of decision. He religiously attended sessions of the four standing committees of council. He served as well on seventeen of the eighteen special council committees struck during his term; he chaired four of them. As was common in large*cities in the United States and Canada, several of Metropolitan Toronto's important functions were relegated to special-purpose commissions and boards not directly responsible to Metro council. Gardiner never challenged the dogma of parcelling out formal authority to bodies of this sort. Yet this did not make him cringe at using informal means to exert power over their operations. Of the specialized authorities, Gardiner paid less than regular attention to only one, the metropolitan school board. He had little interest in the particulars of school

88 Big Daddy policy, save for annual haggling over the total amount of borrowing for school construction. Gardiner at first tried to hew a similar course with respect to the Toronto Transit Commission, the five-man authority, appointed by Metro council but otherwise independent of it, which managed the enlarged public transit system. Although he deflected repeated suggestions that he sit on the TTC, the salience of transit issues and the highly publicized rifts within the commission drew him into its decisions willy-nilly (see chapter 7). In the politics of the other major boards, Gardiner took part with no reservations. He was the prime mover in the deliberations of the Metropolitan Toronto Planning Board. When Metro's authority was extended to policing and licensing, Gardiner insisted on being appointed to both the new board of police commissioners and the licensing commission. While leaving day-to-day decisions to the boards' chairmen (he told the first police board chairman, C.O. Bick, 'You run the police and I'll run the metropolitan council'), he expected full information on their work and took a hand in it as much as his schedule permitted. 36 More than that, he at times stepped headlong into law-and-order-related controversies on seemingly accessory issues. He likened the resolution of licensing disputes to 'running a three-legged race tied to a telephone pole,'37 but his unguarded comments in this area, many of them informed as much by his personal opinions as by his responsibilities as chairman, drew the frequent fire of regulated groups (particularly taxicab operators, whom he chided for providing slovenly service and trafficking in licenses). In 1958 he publicly demanded that Toronto policemen stop using 'powder puff tactics' with criminals and be prepared to shoot fleeing bank robbers to kill. Later that year his observation that a downtown district was a 'den of thieves' (prompted by a midnight cruise through the vicinity) brought about three threats on his life. The summer after this gaffe he spent days on end at a licensing commission hearing into whether two Toronto restaurants were being frequented by prostitutes. 38 However much Gardiner savoured these forays, far more critical to his effectiveness as leader were his dealings with the mushrooming administrative apparatus of the metropolitan government itself. The new Metro civil service had almost 4,000 employees by the time of his retirement, not including the personnel of special authorities such as the transit commission and the police force. Its rapid growth and its plentiful opportunities for recognition and promotion distinguished it from all other municipal bureaucracies in the region, not least from the City of Toronto service, which was ageing at the top (a consequence of the lack of a mandatory retirement age), listless in the middle, and still remarkably resistant at the bottom to the recruitment of non-Protestants and individuals with a higher education. Compared to this, the Metro bureaucracy was open and impregnated with a strong sense of

89 Shovels into the ground mission and momentum. The presence of as commanding a boss as Gardiner fostered self-esteem and made for a firm bond of identification between the administrative apparatus and the first chief executive. 'Mr Gardiner was just so strong and powerful, so completely in control. You knew you could never be a chum of his, but all the same he made you feel as if your work counted for something.'39 Gardiner buttressed this reputation by making morale-boosting tours of Metro offices and, the odd time, by performing small personal services for rank-and-file administrators (helping one man have his son admitted to the province's home for severely retarded children, paying from his own pocket for emergency surgery for another official's child, and the like). Nowhere was the fellow feeling closer or of more relevance to political decisions than at the summit of the bureaucracy. Among the department heads (numbering fifteen by 1961) who administered Metropolitan Toronto's proliferating programs, the belief was imbued from the beginning that they were protégés of Gardiner as well as being officials with the usual, specialized administrative duties. This was in no small measure a consequence of Gardiner's success in claiming responsibility for initiating their appointments. Though he had to back down from his original position that such appointments not be so much as discussed in public (he held that the mere prospect of debate would deter able applicants), he did manage in 1953 to win council acceptance of his pre-eminence in this area. It was understood initially that administrative appointments would be divided equally between individuals from the city proper and the suburbs; by 1955 this limitation had quietly been set aside. Gardiner personally scrutinized all candidates for senior appointments and interviewed persons on the short list. Not a single one of his hiring recommendations was turned down by the council.40 Once they had been recruited - and, for younger men, once they had survived an initial period of sometimes rough-handed testing - Gardiner was assiduously protective of his leading officials' prerogatives and reputations. He paid frequent tribute to their contribution, referring even at his retirement celebration to Metro's good fortune in possessing 'the finest set of municipal officials in Canada.'41 He did not meddle in the departments' internal business or recruit informants within them. He effectively prevented other politicians from doing so, lecturing them when the occasion warranted with a potted speech on the 'managerial revolution' in government. When officials' salaries were questioned in council, mainly by suburban politicians, Gardiner came out strongly on the side of'first-class' remuneration, going so far as to depict himself in 1959 as 'a collective bargaining agent for the heads of departments.'42 His point of view prevailed on this subject, as it did on the confidentiality of high-level discussions of staffing and policy questions. The

90 Big Daddy only time the second issue became a matter for open contention was in late 1956, when the newspapers leaked word of intramural negotiations over the fate of Leslie B. Allan, a former city department head who had wrestled unsuccessfully with the combined post of works and roads commissioner for the previous two years. Gardiner defended Allan to the hilt in public, regardless of the fact that he had come to view the commissioner as maladroit and was in the process of easing him out of his dual portfolio. Allan was allowed to retire with the better part of his dignity intact. None of this is to say that Gardiner's relations with senior bureaucrats were commonly marked by great personal warmth. 43 He insisted, for example, on formally correct terms of address. He called all his associates Mister, never by their first names, and expected like treatment in return - a practice that more than a few found to be stilted. Department heads did have good access to the chairman and found him a ready source of encouragement and good cheer. Oftentimes, after council or executive meetings, several of them traded anecdotes with him while splitting a bottle or two of whiskey, usually in the office of the Metro clerk or his deputy. Rarely, however, were they invited to Gardiner's home, and almost never did he divulge deep-seated anxieties or misgivings to them. The boss was more forthcoming with the handful of senior administrators who had general staff duties, as distinct from operating responsibilities, and who possessed lengthy practical experience. Foremost among these were Wilbert W. Gardhouse, the first Metro clerk (and the main custodian of the chairman's liquor supply), who had been Gardiner's friend since the late 1920s and the treasurer of York county since 1933; G. Arthur Lascelles, the stiff-necked finance commissioner, a member of the city's staff since 1913 and its chief financial administrator since 1941; personnel director George Noble, a veteran of the city service whose toughness in dealing with the municipal unions elevated his stock in the chairman's eyes; and the assessment commissioner, the corpulent and garrulous A.J.B. Gray, an early advocate of metropolitan-wide government whose acquaintance with Gardiner dated from the 1930s. From 1955-56 onward, the big operating and spending departments (works, roads, traffic, housing, parks) were managed by younger men, generally in their thirties and early forties and recruited from lower than peak-level positions in other bureaucracies.44 While Gardiner thought highly of their expertise and ambition, and received unwavering loyalty in return, the gap in age and experience seemed to preclude all but the occasional sharing of confidences. Gardiner could be an exceedingly exacting superior. Telephone conversations with him were terse and to the point, always opening with the rasping foreword, 'Gardiner here!' Department heads were expected to

91 Shovels into the ground respond punctually to written queries, sometimes within fifteen minutes by return messenger. They could look forward each year to at least several tours of Metro projects in the chairman's limousine, usually conducted on short notice after work hours, and to occasional telephone calls in the dead of night. The commissioner who repeated himself or betrayed uncertainty in committee or on the council floor would be curtly silenced by Gardiner, who then would finish the presentation on his own. Summonses to the chairman's office were obeyed with a blend of pleasure and foreboding. 'Just the way he looked at you, sitting there in his shirt sleeves and suspenders, kept you off balance. You never knew if he was going to break out into a scowl or into a smile. One minute everything was all pats on the back and kindly words, the next it was back to the gravelly voice and the pointing forefinger.' Top officials knew that their achievements would be applauded, but also that substandard work (and, intermittently, failure to carry out a personal favour) would bring forth a crushing rebuke. 'Somehow you could stand being told how stupid you were on bad days if your work was given recognition by a man of his stature when you deserved it.'45 Although Gardiner's department heads have sometimes been thought of as a Metro 'cabinet,' the analogy is a very imperfect one.46 To begin with, Gardiner did not consult them as a group, preferring instead to solicit advice on an individual basis. As trusted a senior adviser as Lascelles or Gardhouse was able to proffer counsel only in private. With others in the room, officials were forbidden to use the phrase 'I think' (Gardiner's invariable retort to this was, Til do the thinking, you just give me the facts')- A committee of heads of departments did meet regularly, yet it discussed only questions of managerial practice and standards. Gardiner neither attended these meetings nor referred policy questions to them. Moreover, he left no doubt that purely political questions, those touching on relations with Metro council or other external constituencies, were exclusively his province. Department officials were allowed regular contact with politicians only at committee and council meetings, always under the watchful eye of the chief. All other communications had to be cleared in advance with Gardiner. Nor did the chairman solicit political advice from his officials. When it was volunteered, it almost always was ignored.47 Senior bureaucrats were, of course, not innocent of political calculations, but these figured in their dealings with the chairman only to the extent that he made it clear that officials were not to make public statements that might embarrass him or drag him into undesired controversy - 'get me into the grease,' as he was fond of phrasing it. Where their own special competences were concerned, Gardiner expected his administrators to be the generators of proposals for new policies and

92 Big Daddy variations on old ones. When he was with his senior officials in public, observers sometimes detected more than a trace of sycophancy in their deference to him. Behind closed doors, it was different. If an issue was of long standing and Gardiner had already made up his mind on it, he was testy with advice running counter to his preference, sometimes waving it off with a comment like, 'We don't pay you fifteen thousand dollars a year to tell me what I cannot do.' Otherwise, Gardiner was open to suggestions. Discussions with his associates were often an exercise in anticipating objections to their ideas, with Gardiner playing the role of gruff devil's advocate. Far from feeling threatened by assertiveness, he was lost without it. He had no use for subordinates who could not speak their minds, assist him in finding his own bearings, and help arm him for political debate. As Ross L. Clark (Metro's works commissioner from 1956 onward) put it later, 'He would say, "Go ahead and tell me what you want to do. Don't lie down on me, you're no good to me that way." You couldn't be going over to his office every ten minutes. He would have you out of there in a hurry if you did that. You were part of Gardiner's team and were expected to stay out of his way. But in return he let you know he was with you and gave you plenty of room to develop ideas and put them forward.' 48 Provided they never forgot who the captain was, the members of the team were permitted to play their own game. A P R O G R A M FOR G R O W T H

On a sweltering August afternoon in 1954, Gardiner turned a valve and officially opened his government's first new public works project. The twenty-four-inch water main began to pump half a million gallons of water a day into a residential section of North York, the kind of neighbourhood in which, Gardiner had said during the debate on amalgamation, babies were bathed in ginger ale for lack of fresh water. He was never more in his element than at the scores of openings that followed, each of them hailed as 'a milestone in the development of Metropolitan Toronto.' The metropolitan government built water filtration and sewage treatment plants and laid hundreds of miles of subterranean pipe, most of it into the burgeoning suburban subdivisions. It took over a grid of arterial roads from the local councils and began constructing its own roadways. One of the first, commenced in 1955, was Canada's first full-scale urban freeway (eventually called the Frederick G. Gardiner Expressway). It began debating a second Toronto subway in 1956, approved it in 1958, and broke ground in 1959. It put up moderate rental housing for the aged and, with much less vigour, for families with children. It invested $230 million in the erection of the new

93 Shovels into the ground schools needed for a school population that had ballooned by two thirds by 1961. It inaugurated a system of large urban parks in 1955. All in all, it presided over a rate of population increase far in surfeit of that predicted by Metro's founders. By the time Gardiner left office, the Toronto metropolis comprised 1.6 million people, 60 per cent more than when Lome Gumming opened his hearings and 800 per cent more than when Gardiner was born. 49 It had been the prospect of a period of unprecedented growth and development that gave rise to the creation of Metropolitan Toronto. This same concern - some would say later it approached the dimensions of an infatuation - dominated the programs that unfurled under Gardiner's hegemony. At times Gardiner asserted that rapid development was foreordained for Toronto and that the role of government was to do no more than respond to and accommodate this growth: 'I do not say or imply that cities are good or bad merely by reason of whether they are big or small, but what I do say is that when cities reach a population of one million, they acquire a momentum of their own which no one can stop, and that we had better get ready to serve its population and its interests.'50 At other times, Gardiner's words implied a judgment about the positive value of growth and size. Toronto, he said in 1955, must be furnished with 'those municipal services which will permit it to accomplish its maximum development,'' to grow as large as possible as quickly as possible.51 Furthermore, Gardiner often adverted to the pre-1953 system of governments in the region as a set of fetters or shackles impeding the very growth that at other moments he held to be self-sustaining. If bad public policy could not stop growth, it could misdirect it and restrain it. Gardiner sometimes held out an even more fearsome vista: had the metropolitan government not been invented (he declared in another speech in 1955), Toronto and its suburbs would by now 'have arrived at the state where they would shrink instead of expand.' The only alternative to growth, Gardiner argued when he was in this set of mind, was shrinkage and decay. Either Toronto upgraded its services and attracted people and enterprise, 'or we become a broken-down, second-rate municipality.'52 Gardiner took it as axiomatic that the basic impetus behind urban and suburban development would come from the private sector. Metro's first official plan, completed in draft form in 1959, mirrored his assumptions well. In sketching the anticipated development of the metropolitan area, it said this 'has been and will be primarily the result of private enterprise, with government... in a supplementary and regulatory role.'53 Gardiner on occasion defended the necessity of serving the needs of an expansion-minded capitalist class in language little short of preposterous:

94 Big Daddy A municipality is no different from an industrial undertaking. Both must provide adequate plant and equipment to carry on their business. If a municipality does not have adequate plant and equipment, which are the lifeblood of a city, industry and commerce will go elsewhere. Industry needs water, sewers, roads, public transit and residential accommodation for its work force. We are now equipped so that in due time in accordance with well-defined plans we can provide all of these.54

The formula that city government must function like a public business in order for the city to realize the benefits of private business was by no means original with Gardiner - it had been aired in Canada in one version or another since the turn of the century - but he affirmed it and executed it with a new panache.55 Gardiner's paeans to economic growth smack unmistakably of the chamber of commerce boosterism that has come to the fore in innumerable North American cities over the years: expansion 'at a rate faster than any of us dreamed of twenty-five or even ten years ago'; growth 'unequalled on the continent except in Los Angeles'; growth by dint of which Toronto would overtake Montreal as the country's largest city; growth which was making Toronto 'one of the most important cities in the world.'56 However, for Gardiner, as for most of those active in Toronto and Canadian city politics in his time, it was an article of faith that the fruits of growth were there to be plucked by the urban community at large, not solely by business. Physical and economic expansion, fostered by government and accompanied by an increase in public services, would bring more than fattened profits. It would carry with it psychic benefits, the excitement of being part of a big city where big things happened. It would offer practical opportunities to 'the restless, the energetic, and the ambitious,' many of them now, like Gardiner's father before, migrants to the city from abroad. Growth would yield 'dividends in the form of more convenient living conditions for our residents,' especially by greatly augmenting the housing stock and improving urban amenities. It would obviate the need for further increases in property taxation. It would enable the more rapid circulation of persons and goods. It would also make possible an extension of social services, 'which is just as important' as economic and residential development.57 What of the costs of growth? This question began to be asked, first in a tentative way and then in more earnest, as Gardiner's term proceeded. It is one to which we will return in evaluating his career. Gardiner's own answer was candid enough. 'Wherever you go,' he conceded in 1960, during discussion of an expressway project, 'you have to hurt someone ... You can't pour another million people into an area designed and built for a few hundred thousand

95 Shovels into the ground without considerable upheaval.'58 Costs there were, but building a bigger and better city more than vindicated them. This prepossession with building and growth fit in cleanly with Gardiner's overall personal and political style, what we have characterized as an active-positive stance oriented toward productiveness. Gardiner was a doer, an individual of unusual strength and vitality who was attracted to tasks that produced immediate and palpable effects. Building Metropolitan Toronto - in both the institutional and the physical sense - was precisely that kind of task. The vernacular of construction, production, and movement figured heavily in Gardiner's rhetoric after 1953. Metro was an operation, a business, a going concern, not merely a government. Its chairman was responsible for getting things accomplished, seeing that the job was done, keeping the ball rolling. As time passed and Gardiner began to dispense advice to putative metropolitan reformers, mostly from the United States, he always underlined the importance of acting rather than contemplating. 'We have found that you can line your shelves with reports, plans, and models but eventually you must choose those projects which common sense tells you are most important, give them the necessary priorities and, as Robert Moses would say, put in the steam shovels and the bulldozers. Then and then only will you know that your project is on the way.'59 Projects, steam shovels, and the selling of his own brand of common sense - that, as many who watched him operate would say, was Frederick Gardiner.

5 Taking it to the politicians

All of Gardiner's multifold plans and projects would have languished on the shelf unless he had gained backing for them among the two dozen politicians on the Metropolitan Toronto Council. It was widely prophesied in 1953 that this support would be lacking. The council's proceedings, Lome Cumming predicted in a memorandum to Premier Frost, would be marked by 'heat and controversy,' with each member considering 'that he is there to fight for his own section exclusively.' Frost was warned in stronger terms by one of the province's top civil servants that the members of the new assembly, most of whom had openly reprobated the federation scheme, might well 'prove such a disruptive force as to imperil [its] success.'1 Similar forecasts were offered by journalists and by many of the politicians themselves. It took little time to show that there would be no early demise of the metropolitan legislature, and no longer to demonstrate Gardiner's pivotal role in it. His control of the council, thorough in a way that caught unawares those conversant with his abilities as much as the uninitiated, was quickly fixed as the central fact of Metropolitan Toronto politics. 'Mr. Gardiner runs a one-man show,' an observer of the council was able to remark in 1959. The other twenty-four members of Metro Council provide little more than polite conversation.'2 It is important to state at the outset that Gardiner's success was not the product of his endeavours alone. It was the government of the province that put Gardiner in the council chair in the first place. Before and after January 1955, when the chairman was first selected by the council itself, the Frost administration's general support of the Metro concept would have played into the hands of whoever filled the office. In retrospect, there existed as well a large area of consensus in the values of the fifty-eight men and eight women who occupied Metro council seats in the Gardiner era. All of them accepted

97 Taking it to the politicians the fundamentals of the socioeconomic and political order of which the new municipality was a part. Moreover, few disagreed in principle with the broad goal of rapid metropolitan development enshrined in the Cumming report, in provincial legislation, and in the pronouncements of Chairman Gardiner. It is safe to presume that almost any head of council would have been capable of inducing agreement on some portions of the development program. And yet, contemporary observers were profoundly impressed and surprised by the degree of Gardiner's effectiveness as a legislative leader. They were looking at a man who was going far beyond the minimum predictable accomplishment. (For some attempts at measurement of his attainment, see the following section.) Even the fact of provincial support was no guarantee of success, something Leslie Frost often vouched in his private communications to Gardiner. 'I am quite well aware,' he said in a November 1956 letter to Gardiner, after perusing the results of the council's first several years, 'that the success of the matter to date has been very largely dependent upon your own personality. If you were not there, there would be real difficulty in making the present set-up work.'3 The most serious of the difficulties to which Frost alluded was the polarization of attitudes toward metropolitan issues along city-suburban lines. Questions of ideology and ultimate purpose aside, a spirit of strident territorial division, the likes of which had never been seen in the region or in urban Ontario, was rife during the several years preceding the enactment of Bill 80. After April 1953 members of the new council were prompt to read into the most minute issues implications for their self-images and for the summary distribution of influence between the two blocs. To take the most patent case, representatives of the city proper battled until 1959 to preserve a differential structure of wholesale rates for water supply favouring Toronto consumers. They endured dozens of altercations in Metro council and its committees to stave off a change that in the end added a scant two dollars a year to the water bill of the average city household. Equally inimical to the outlook for strong leadership was the highly personalized style of electoral and council politics in all of Metro's constituent communities, a situation characteristic of municipal affairs across Canada but seemingly carried to an extreme in the Toronto area. Public figures, to cite a 1950 report on the Toronto council, excelled 'in the devious art of insulting each other openly and ingeniously, to the infinite delight of the public.'4 The local politician was typically a small businessman or lawyer who had worked his way into prominence by assembling a personal following, with the benefit of neither party organization nor a stable system for allocating material rewards to adherents. His representative role amounted largely to diligent

98 Big Daddy attention to the routine service concerns of his constituents. Even in the politics of potholes and playgrounds, the premium was on combativeness, 'independence,' and the ability to extract concessions from other politicians on a quid pro quo basis. The system conferred its highest rewards on the individual who could move from this arena to project an equally resolute but more gripping image before bigger audiences. Such a person, who was to be found in many of the seats on Gardiner's councils, was bound to be less than hospitable to executive leadership on questions of regional concern. A notable specimen was Oliver Crockford, the reeve of the spacious eastern suburb of Scarborough until 1956 and the most clangorous spokesman for the suburban cause. A portly figure with piercing grey eyes and an inexhaustible voice, Crockford drove the dozen miles to council meetings in a powder-blue Cadillac convertible with leopard-skin upholstery which, it transpired, he had let a local land subdivider finance under conditions a provincial judge in 1955 termed 'most imprudent and irregular.'5 Lacing his oratory with excerpts from Scripture, a touch carried over from his days as a Baptist minister three decades before, he preached fiery resistance to the central city, to Metro, and to Gardiner. He referred to the new government as communistic, a badge he pinned with equal liberality on his political foes in Scarborough. Toronto Mayor Allan Lamport, an able but undisciplined insurance broker and promoter with an insatiable appetite for publicity, also prided himself on his unreserved and scrappy demeanour. His roller-coaster syntax and his genius for confounding simple sayings ('If somebody is going to stab me in the back, I want to be there'; 'The guy who owns the dog pays the piper'; 'You can lead a dead horse to water but you can't make him drink'; 'We need more of the kind of man who will crawl out from behind the woodwork and be counted') furnished news copy on many a dull day at City Hall. Though he was the sole member of the 1953 city council to speak in praise of the Metro compromise, Lamport caused Gardiner not a few anxious moments in the metropolitan government's first year. Luckily for Gardiner, Lamport resigned in June 1954 to take a seat on the Toronto Transit Commission, where he became chairman the next year. On the TTC, he was merely a burr under Gardiner's saddle, never the kind of obstruction he would have been within the council. For a hiatus of six months Lamport was succeeded as mayor by Leslie Saunders, a British-born ward politician of great experience and great sententiousness whose political principles were a throwback to the era of the ascendancy of the Loyal Orange Lodge. When Saunders' career foundered on the outrage at his ostensibly anti-Catholic statements, the city mayor's robes passed in 1955 to Nathan Phillips, a more phlegmatic character but one set in the same personalist mould. Phillips was a moderately

99 Taking it to the politicians accomplished lawyer three years older than Gardiner and the first Jew (and the first non-Protestant) to be elected mayor. As chief magistrate he was all but engulfed in his functions as civic greeter and host. He boasted that he attended a thousand social functions a year - for which his electoral rivals dismissed him as a 'social butterfly' - but his amiable ways were popular with voters wearied by his more abrasive predecessors. One of Phillips' few fixed opinions was that Metro was 'milking the Toronto taxpayer' to the advantage of the suburbs. Yet, when it came to debates and decisions in council, he never came close to matching the Metro chairman. Had their positions been reversed, had Phillips been the head of the metropolitan government and Gardiner the mayor of its biggest subunit, it is quite possible that the Metro enterprise would not have outlasted its infant years. THE GARDINER RECORD

By any quantitative measure, Gardiner's record as floor leader of the Crockfords, Phillips', and others was formidable. On his own he cast very few votes, owing to the restriction of his voting power to cases where the council was evenly split. He did not vote to break a tie until May 1955, and in almost nine years as chairman he did so on only eight occasions. However, in all but the most aridly formal sense Gardiner was fully engaged in every collective choice made by council. Beginning with the first meeting, he made known and promoted his voting preferences in unequivocal fashion. In the great majority of cases Gardiner prevailed. Of the almost 12,000 discrete votes cast by individual representatives on policy issues under his chairmanship, 81.2 per cent corresponded with his publicly stated position. Of equivalent significance is that opposition to him normally did not agglutinate from vote to vote and issue to issue. The array of collective council decisions had congruence with Gardiner's opinions with markedly greater regularity than the individual votes. Of the 579 policy decisions taken by Gardiner's councils, 93.4 per cent tallied with his recommendation; 33.5 per cent of all decisions were unanimously in his favour. Although no precise yardstick for comparison can be devised, it is worth adducing the parallel statistics for voting within the council of the City of Toronto. Here territorial divisions were much less severe than in the metropolis as a whole and, following tradition, none of the three mayors who sat between 1953 and 1961 took responsibility for managing a total legislative program. In these far less difficult conditions, 67.5 per cent of individual votes and 75.0 per cent of council decisions agreed with the mayor's position. To put it another way, 18.8 per cent of the individual votes cast in the Metro council

100 Big Daddy TABLE 1 Metropolitan Toronto Council support for Gardiner on policy questions, by issue area Votes by councillors

Issue area Personnel and appointments 3 Finances Major programs Water and sewage Public transit 3 Roads and traffic Parks Public housing Other programs Constitutional questions TOTAL a

Decisions by council

Per cent supporting Gardiner

Number

2,438

88.4

121

97.5

976

83.1

50

88.0

2,149 1,916 1,690

105 96

95.2 87.5 94.4

201 289

77.5 74.4 84.7 82.5 90.0 69.9

1,531 11,539

Number

349

Per cent supporting Gardiner

90 18

100

10 15

100 80.0

79.2

74

94.6

81.2

579

93.4

Appointments include those to Metro civil service at level of department head, as well as to all boards and commissions except for Toronto Transit Commission. TTC appointments are included under public transit programs.

disagreed with the chief executive, to 32.5 per cent in the city council; 6.6 per cent of council decisions in the Metro legislature were not to the chairman's liking, as contrasted to 25.0 per cent (almost four times as many) for the city mayor in his council.6 The support for Gardiner was rather firmer in some issue areas than in others. As Table 1 shows, he was able to secure better than average agreement from councillors on questions relating to personnel, finances, roads, parks, and public housing. While individual acquiescence in Gardiner's position was converted into a somewhat different profile of council decisions, in every policy field the proportion of favourable decisions by the council as a unit outstripped the level of support expressed in individual votes. Figure 2 points to the trends in individual and collective support for Gardiner from 1953 to 1961. Seconding of his views by individual councillors did drop more or less steadily until 1957; it held stable after that time and even recovered perceptibly. Council decisions, in the meantime, oscillated in a more erratic way while staying at a consistently higher level of agreement with the chairman. Gardiner was highly effective in the cardinal task of winning the confidence

101 Taking it to the politicians Figure 2

Metropolitan Toronto Council support for Gardiner on policy questions, 1953-61

Per cent supporting Gardiner

of both city and suburban politicians, as is evident from Table 2. His suburban support was higher on average, but his backing among city representatives was not far behind and exceeded his suburban support in five of the nine years. There was as much variation in support within the loosely knit city and suburban groups as between them. 7 Discernibly more bloc divisions - considered here as decisions in which at least two thirds of the city members present sided against two thirds of suburban members - occurred in the second half of Gardiner's term. Yet the trend was an uneven one, and in almost 90 per cent of council decisions no polarization by bloc can be detected. Especially disturbing to Gardiner, though rare, were bloc votes ending in an even division, which he would be expected to break with his own vote. It was to resolve such stalemates that he cast seven of his eight formal votes in council. The only issue areas in which bloc polarization occurred with more than 10 per cent frequency were finances (12 per cent) and water and sewage services (29.5 per cent), where the emotive water rates question remained on the order paper until 1959. If politicians' support for Gardiner did not depend in any systematic way on the location of their constituencies, the same can be said of voting support in relation to the socioeconomic makeup of those constituencies. No orderly pattern can be made out whether one relates voting to the most readily available index of community resources - the property tax base - or to any other touchstone. Gardiner did essentially as well with delegates from

102 Big Daddy TABLE 2 City and suburban support for Gardiner on policy questions in Metropolitan Toronto Council, 1953-61 Per cent of individual votes supporting Gardiner Year

City

Suburban

Per cent of decisions reached on bloc division3

1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961

93.6 83.8 87.8 85.0 72.9 74.6 78.4 79.0 73.0

91.2 81.1 84.8 85.1 83.3 81.0 78.0 77.4 84.9

7.1 13.2 6.0 6.2 15.7 14.3 11.7 4.3 17.9

TOTAL

79.9

82.6

11.4

a

Bloc divisions are defined here as decisions in which at least two thirds of the city members present vote against two thirds of the suburban members.

have-not districts as with those from more prosperous communities. Breakdown of voting support in terms of the characteristics of the individual councillor, in Table 3, also shows surprisingly little patterned variation. Gardiner was somewhat more efficacious with female politicians, small businessmen, individuals five to fifteen years younger than himself, and councillors who had carried their last election by a narrow margin. In every case the difference is slight and could be eliminated by shifting the support scores of one or two individuals.8 Members in their first several years on Metro council seem also to have been a little more receptive to Gardiner's solicitations; this mild correspondence washes out for the post-1956 councils. The last two background characteristics encapsulated in Table 3, party affiliation and executive committee status, bear pausing on. While Gardiner's credentials as a Conservative were well known to his colleagues, he was in harmony with most Canadian urban politicians of this century in fully accepting that party politics 'has no place' at the municipal level.9 He made no deliberate pitch for preferential support from Progressive Conservative party members and backers on the council, opposing this in principle and fearing alienation of the followers of other parties. It might have been expected, nevertheless, that so prominent a Conservative would have attracted

103 Taking it to the politicians TABLE 3 Metropolitan Toronto Council support for Gardiner on policy questions, by attributes of councillor Attribute of councillor

Sex Male (N = 58) Female (N = 8) Occupation Lawyer(N=17) Small business (N = 30) Other (N= 19) Year of birth 1 880-89 (N= 8) 1 890-99 (N= 11) 1900-09 (N= 19) 1910-19 (N = 24) 1 920 and later (N= 4) Victory margin in last election Less than 10 per cent 10 per cent and over a Previous years on council 0-2 3-5 6-8 Party affiliation Progressive Conservative (N=34) Liberal (N = 23) CCF(N = 9) Executive committee status Member Non-member a

Per cent of votes supporting Gardiner

80.7 83.4 80.9 81.8 80.8 82.0 80.5 82.5 81.2 75.3 81.7 80.8 82.1 79.3 78.9 81.7 82.4 76.9 84.9 80.2

Includes acclamations

disproportionate sympathy from his fellow partisans whether he made an explicit appeal or not. As Table 3 makes clear, Gardiner did not derive any such advantage. Although his record was weaker than average among supporters of the socialist CCF, it was only slightly above the midpoint with Conservatives. It was best of all among Liberals. Among suburban Conservatives, a subgroup with whom Gardiner's personal contacts were quite rich, his success rate was well above average (85.8 per cent), whereas with the more numerous and more influential city Tories, prime among them Mayor Phillips, he did less well than usual (78.8 per cent).

104 Big Daddy Finally, it can be seen from Table 3 that members of the executive committee teamed with Gardiner in council somewhat more faithfully than other councillors. Of the twelve persons who belonged to the executive at one time or another but also sat as ordinary councillors, only three did not vote in a fashion more congenial to the chairman when they were members of the executive (the twelve supported him 85.8 per cent of the time as executive members and 79.7 otherwise). All the same, the register of votes underlines the institution-building chore that Gardiner confronted and in large part surmounted. Granted the executive's importance as a point of entry and focus for Gardiner's policy proposals, it fell well short of being the domesticated link with the legislative rank and file that a modern prime minister takes for granted in the cabinet. Its membership was unstable (average tenure was 2.1 years for suburban members, 3.0 years for city members), chosen by procedures largely immune to Gardiner's control, and sure to contain individuals hostile to the Metro experiment (like Crockford, an executive member in 1955, or Phillips, a member from 1955 onward). Most of its deliberations were public, and debate could be highly acrimonious (recorded votes were cast on forty-six occasions, with Gardiner winning forty-one of them). Nothing could be taken as assured about the commitment of executive committee members to the chairman's program or, for that matter, to their own official recommendations once these had been passed on to the council. In one year, 1958, the voting record of executive members in council was so unflattering to Gardiner as to be marginally less supportive of him than the votes of non-executives (by 77.4 per cent to 78.0). Over the years 1953-61, executive members cast their ballots contrary to Gardiner's wishes 15 percent of the time. In a situation in which the solidarity of the collective executive was likely to be only slightly greater on disputed issues than that of the legislature as a whole, so much the more onus was put on the personal dexterity of the chairman. BULLDOZING AHEAD

Gardiner's entrepreneurial conception of the chairman's role was nowhere more in evidence, and nowhere turned more to his advantage, than in his dealings with his fellow councillors. Inclined by temperament to charge ahead at immediately apparent problems, he was also convinced that only if his council colleagues could be inspired to set out together on concrete projects was there any hope of forging them into a cohesive unit in the long term. 'I started with a council that was like a bunch of strange watchdogs. The suburbs were snapping at the [city] mayor and the mayor was going after the suburbs. I

105 Taking it to the politicians was in no position to run a revival meeting or a debating society. We had to get something done. Once we had accomplished something we would have a sense of pride.' Gardiner's contribution to getting things done started with the maximal exploitation of the powers invested in him as presiding officer. There was never any ambiguity about who was in charge at council sessions. Gardiner ruled on procedural questions with an iron hand and dared dissidents to appeal his decisions to the council as a whole, something that was never successfully accomplished in nine years.10 He demanded full attention during debate, at times in distinctly hectoring fashion. Members were scolded for speaking inaudibly, and on one occasion Gardiner went to the length of reprimanding a councillor for wagging his head during a verbal exchange. He liked to alternate major with minor items on the agenda, then to use swift agreement on the latter to create a sense of impetus that could be transferred to the more contentious items. Whenever possible, he hurried the councillors through the formalities of reading bills and showing hands. In a typical instance in 1953 (which caught the eye of a reporter habituated to the more ambling gait of the city council), Gardiner read out a complex and incompletely drafted motion, 'then called for "those in favour." A few members raised their hands in routine fashion. There was no pause to ask for dissenting votes.'11 Sheer physical presence and stamina were vital ingredients in Gardiner's legislative performance. 'He was the real bulldog type,' Nathan Phillips said later in summation of his floor style. 'When he really wanted something, he just came and beat it out of you.'12 Gardiner's voice had lost none of its projective power since it first rocked juries in the city's courtrooms thirty years before. It reverberated through the council chamber, the same one used by the old York County Council where he had presided as warden in 1946, out along the halls and stairways of the building, into the offices of the administrative and clerical staff. Tall, with heavy shoulders and an arching gut (he reached 240 pounds by the mid-1950s), his face framed by Churchillian jowls, alarmingly obtrusive eyebrows, and short-cropped, blonde-grey hair, Gardiner's person seemed to incarnate the fearsomeness he sought to weave into his words. In spite of his years, he was capable of remaining in peak form for prodigious periods of time. He threatened a half-dozen times to keep the council in session all night if it could not arrive at a decision satisfactory to him. Meetings that churned on into the small hours of the morning and sapped the strength of much younger individuals were not at all out of the ordinary. Several hours after Gardiner's last and longest council meeting in December 1961, a marathon session lasting until 4:50 a.m., the reeve of York township (a

106 Big Daddy building contractor eleven years Gardiner's junior) suffered a fatal heart attack from the strain. Although he generally kept his temper well in check, an aroused Gardiner could be a punishing and tenacious adversary. Councillors soon came to recognize the telltale flushing of the cheeks, poising of the eyebrows, and thickening of the voice to a near growl that signalled that the chairman's ire was up. Particularly if he felt a point was frivolous or reflected on his own motives, Gardiner pulled no punches. 'He scared the hell out of you. If he cut you up, he did it thoroughly. He eviscerated you, he left your entrails all over the floor.'13 Philip Givens, a future mayor of Toronto and the author of the foregoing portrait, was several times reduced to tears by Gardiner's verbal thrusts and ripostes. Another councillor who suggested that a Gardiner nominee to the planning board was caught in a conflict of interest was cut short with the remark that he 'might get to the point of being so holy that his halo would give him a headache.' Mayor Phillips was the target of especially frequent brqwbeatings. Gardiner admonished him on one occasion to 'wipe the smirk off your face' while speaking to him and silenced him another time by telling him his statements belonged on the comic pages of the newspaper. Gardiner's heaviest brickbats were reserved for Ross Parry, an inexperienced alderman from Toronto's Ward Three who in 1957 waged a one-man campaign to contest the chairman's authority on the grounds that he was not popularly elected. Tm ready to fight in the gutter or in a more rarefied atmosphere with Latin and Greek,' Gardiner trumpeted. 'If you're going to throw bolo punches, be prepared to take some back.' Gardiner isolated Parry, had his motion for changes in the chairman's status voted down, and treated him with disdain for the rest of Parry's term. 14 By the same token, Gardiner was prepared to accept some delays and reversals as unavoidable. Lacking doubts about his own role and capabilities, he very rarely interpreted individual setbacks as tests of his authority. This was especially true after the first several years. Except in the case of Parry - with the possible addition of Nathan Phillips, whom Gardiner taunted mercilessly for his habit of putting socializing ahead of legislative business - the chairman did not harbour grudges or look at present behaviour in the light of past slights. Even on the attack, he often conveyed the impression that all would be forgotten in due course, as indeed it was. 'He would get angry, but you never really felt he was angry at you personally.' 'It was like catching hell from your father. You knew you were going to be punished, but that when the smoke had cleared he would still love you.'15 Whether he was intent on daunting or courting the council, the resource Gardiner deployed most effectively was the prosaic asset of knowledge. The

107 Taking it to the politicians crux of his method here was the full utilization of the specialized competence of the bureaucratic staff, particularly the department heads, who reported to him as chief administrative officer. In political repartee, he drew on not only the substance of their knowledge but on their reputations for possessing it. Thus, when a city politician queried the timing of a Metro debenture issue, Gardiner informed him the plan had the benediction of the august finance commissioner, Arthur Lascelles: 'The finance commissioner has approved this. Who else can we ask?'16 The councillor inquisitive about apparent anomalies in property assessment would be referred to the authority of Assessment Commissioner Gray, none of whose decisions as city assessment chief before 1953 (arrived at under the arcane 'Gray formula') had ever been overturned in court. Questions about the proposed route for an arterial road might be deflected by reference to the talents of the youthful and university-trained road engineering staff. Seldom, however, did Gardiner confine himself to exploiting the repute of his senior officials. Integral to his work routine and political strategy was his insistence that he personally know as much as was feasible about the stuff of council business. It was the same labour-intensive approach he had used since his days at Parkdale Collegiate. 'I was not going to change my way of proceeding. It was more necessary than ever. My diagnosis was that if I was going to get anywhere I had to know more about any given subject than any individual councillor, and more about metropolitan business as a whole than all the members of council combined.' As the only councillor who worked full-time on Metropolitan Toronto affairs, Gardiner was indubitably in an ideal position to accomplish this. Equally to the point was that he had the ability and motivation to make full capital of the opening. Gardiner demanded in 1953 that he be made a voting member of all four of the council's standing committees; other members belonged to only one. He made it his business to attend, with remarkable regularity, the meetings of these bodies, at which most proposals for council decision were given their initial exposure. Week in and week out, Gardiner sat through the unglamourous work of the four policy committees (as it droned on for hours in overheated rooms) with more fidelity than the average councillor mustered for one.17 On questions that bore on Metro's debt position, on the city-suburb balance, or on projects in which he was greatly interested, he was apt to play a dominant role at this early stage.18 He had a further chance to acquaint himself with council business at sessions of the executive committee, which met weekly under his chairmanship and considered all committee reports in detail. Finance Commissioner Lascelles reported directly to the executive. Gardiner's personal rapport with Lascelles and his own familiarity with Wall

108 Big Daddy Street (from his trips as a corporation lawyer - the import of which he was not above exaggerating) gave him preponderant authority on Metro's money-raising arrangements. Gardiner's readiness to be the work-horse of the committees - taking on the drudgery of investigating and advising on matters as piffling as the proper size of the lockers at the municipal golf course, the desirability of'the purchase of three Giant Red Kangaroos for the Riverdale Zoo,' or the condition of the laundry facilities at a public housing project - greatly raised his prestige with his colleagues.19 It also supplied him with a unique arsenal of information, general and esoteric, into which he dipped (with his characteristic capacity for fine detail) for political ammunition at every step of the way. Throughout, he worked in unison with the topmost administrators, handpicked by him, who in the vast majority of cases drew up the detailed policy proposals. Once an idea had won his agreement, which generally was before or during the standing committee hearing, he took full responsibility for ushering it through subsequent phases of the law-making process. 'He was not just the prime minister,' his traffic commissioner recalled in an interview, 'he was the minister of each individual department.'20 Almost never were senior bureaucrats thrown on their own resources on the floor of committee or council, a common occurrence in Canadian local politics. 'When he supported you,' in the words of another department head, 'there was nothing weak-kneed about it. He would give the same arguments as you did, but they sounded bigger coming out of his mouth.' 21 This protection boosted both the civil servants' empathy with the chairman and the impression among politicians that Gardiner was in command of the proceedings. Gardiner, therefore, arrived in council fully versed in decision proposals and determined to propel them through with all the force at his disposal. His written reports were liable to be on the opaque side, more like orotund legal briefs than political documents. This failing was redeemed by oral presentations that were always more than servicable and were rarely less than animated. Gardiner usually waited to speak on an important resolution until all others had been heard in committee of the whole, the most free-wheeling stage of the debate. His addresses were well-paced and systematic, often enumerating their points and conclusions. They drew heavily on his special competence in financial matters, on his mastery of the nuts and bolts of administration, and, when public works were involved, on an amazingly detailed grasp of the topography of the affected area gleaned from memory or personal inspection. When a close ballot was anticipated, Gardiner went around the horseshoe-shaped council table, importuned the undecided, and rebutted previously voiced objections one by one.

109 Taking it to the politicians For the rank-and-file councillor, on the contrary, this was probably his first exposure to the matter at hand. The member of council was as a rule a part-time politician. In consequence of the dual structure of the metropolitan government, he seldom spent more than a third of his political week on Metro matters. For these reasons and because of the short rein Gardiner gave to administrators, the individual politician had almost no access to the information reposing in the Metro civil service, other than whatever Gardiner and his officials chose to share with him. It was not unusual for councillors to be seen cracking open agendas and rifling through background materials as Gardiner called the meeting to order. As one representative testified before a provincial inquiry in 1957, 'the reports that you get to read-the time is terrific, and I notice that some gentlemen when they get down there they just scan over the agenda and could not possibly know what is the context of a report... The average representative around that circle couldn't possibly give the time to it.'22 This state of affairs attracted barbs from the chairman about councillors who had neglected their 'homework,' remarks tendered only half in jest and which he was happy to expatiate upon during debate. The consequences of the mismatch of resources for the shape of council decisions were predictable: It was with a great deal of reluctance that you would get up in council to disagree with Mr Gardiner. Here was this big, impressive man who had spent all those years in Forest Hill and in the county, who was a friend of the [provincial] government and was well steeped in the ways of Bay Street, who was familiar with every tree and stone and service station in the area we were talking about. He seemed to know everything about everything. There weren't many who were prepared to dispute a major point with him. It was like putting your nose in a meat grinder. 23

Even if Gardiner did not literally know everything about everything - two decades later he could still remember cases where his grasp of the facts had been tenuous-he was seen as doing so. With knowledge in politics, reputation often counts as much as possession. Gardiner did not always use knowledge and force of personality to press for a prompt and open decision. He and his administrative associates laboured to keep minor disputes involving individual politicians or constituencies out of the council altogether. He viewed it as a major feat that on secondary issues painstaking backstage work made it possible 'to resolve most disputes to the satisfaction of all concerned before it hits our committee level.'24 Harold Kaplan has observed that Gardiner also possessed a strong sense of the advantages of delay and gradualism in dealing with some divisive issues,

110 Big Daddy particularly those apt to produce city-suburban polarization.25 One might note the example of constitutional reform. After the transfer to Metro of police and licensing powers in 1956, Gardiner proved to be unwilling to lean hard on suburban politicians to accept further centralization. In December 1961, after eleven months of disconnected debate initiated by himself, he voted down a restructuring proposition very close to his own (it would have strengthened Metro powers and merged the suburbs into three municipalities) rather than impose it on the suburbanites. Kindred to this was his treatment of the proposal for construction of a second Toronto subway, along an east-west axis through the city. Despite his sympathy with the idea when Toronto representatives first raised it in 1956, he put off consideration in the belief that suburban opinion was not yet prepared for it. By calling for three successive studies of the project's merits, he contrived to defer serious debate until the spring of 1958. Gardiner was more in character in the terminal stages of the subway debate, when he blared his resolve to 'pound this thing through with an iron fist.'26 Once he made a major investment in seeing a decision through, Gardiner was not one to dawdle. Primed for combat, he campaigned to envelop the issue in an aura of urgency and accelerating momentum. Frequently he carried bulldozing a step further by using preliminary and tentative council commitments as levers for forcing subsequent decisions. 'Once you get those bulldozers in the ground,' he said in reflection on this tactic in 1958, 'it is pretty hard to get them out.'27 When manning the machinery in this way, Gardiner was prepared, among other things, to overrule the opinions of the technical experts to whom he commonly paid such conspicuous deference. The most graphic illustration is provided by Metropolitan Toronto's expressway program, in whose progress he maintained a keen interest. Gardiner won executive approval for the drawing up of plans for the first project, the eight-mile highway along the Lake Ontario shore, in July 1953. The following summer, chafing to get an early start, he fended off demands for redesign of the road's central section, which was to pass near several Toronto landmarks, including the Canadian National Exhibition grounds. Time spent on review would be wasted, was his argument: 'You can go to twenty-five engineers and get about twenty-five alternatives. Some will say, "Hitch it on a skyhook." '28 In October 1954, with the plans still under discussion, Gardiner badgered the council into consenting to the initiation of construction at the east and west ends. Only mild demurral greeted his audacious claim that the middle section was best settled upon 'when the actual traffic using the expressway demonstrates which course is best to follow.'29 The flow of traffic,

111 Taking it to the politicians of course, could demonstrate no such thing, but the unfolding of the great ribbon of concrete and the likelihood of mammoth traffic snarls would step up the pressure on the politicians to agree on the controversial central strip. Sure enough, in May 1958, three months before the opening of the first completed section, Gardiner was able to storm about halting all construction work unless accord was arrived at on the final link - which it was, with compromises on all sides, by early 1959. Similar means were employed in winning endorsement for Metro's second big freeway, the Don Valley Parkway. When consulting engineers reported in January 1955 that they would prefer to consider alternative north-south routes, Gardiner raged that the councillors could not afford to 'stop, look, and listen.' Either the project was started forthwith, or 'the whole east end of the city will be on our shoulders like three tons of bricks.' The Metro executive rubberstamped preliminary plans only one month later. By early 1956 Gardiner was claiming that with the entire route securely in draft, no time could be found to ponder objections: 'We can't very well back out now.' 'We can't let the clock stand still and do nothing,' was his call as he began to ram section-by-section plans through council. On and on it went, until final council approval was cemented in February 1957.30 Objections to such tactics were sure to occur. 'He wanted to have things all his own way - it got on your nerves after a while.'31 Gardiner did not manage to have absolutely all things his own way, and did not expect to. In fact, he seemed to construe absence of resistance as evidence that he was not promoting a program strenuously enough. In quiet moments he told members of council, 'If you win every argument you are in, you are not getting into enough arguments.' However this grated on councillors' nerves, in the final analysis Gardiner was able to command the acquiescence and active support he needed to win most of the arguments he wanted to win. Falling in line behind the chairman became a habit, one effectively transmitted to new members. According to a politician who joined the council in 1959 (succeeding the unfortunate Ross Parry), 'By the time I arrived Gardiner had been right so often there was a, general inclination to go along with him. It was almost an unwritten rule: if you don't know how to vote, follow the chairman's lead.'32 THE WISE USE OF R E S O U R C E S

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

112 Big Daddy 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

113 Taking it to the politicians capital appropriation, it is probably better for us not to attempt to direct the local municipalities as to the purposes for which their money should be used, because we feel they are probably better judges than we are as to how to use that money.'34 Good judgment or not, this was a superb procedure for sidestepping conflict and conserving Gardiner's political resources for high-priority issues. On their part, the local politicians now had much more money to spend than before 1953, and with little of the accountability to a central authority that many had dreaded. A second element in Gardiner's approach might be termed the rule of balance. He was convinced that he and the metropolitan government would suffer unless spending decisions observed a basic equity between the suburbs and Toronto proper. The circumstances surrounding Metro's founding left little question that precedence would go to the physical services needs of the suburban communities. These had pride of place in Metro's capital budget in its first five years, and Gardiner astonished no one in 1958 by commenting that 'nearly the whole Metro program until now has been in or for the suburbs.' 35 At first Gardiner tried to redress this imbalance by acceding to city rquests that Metro pay for symbolic items (grants to cultural and philanthropic causes, the Toronto zoo and isolation hospital, the Toronto Island park) which previously had been, in effect, regional services borne wholly by city taxpayers. In addition he declined to press the city, which he referred to accurately as the 'financial anchor' of the federation, on the thorny issue of water rates. 'If the suburbs force this on the City of Toronto we will have lost much of the good we have accomplished since April 15, 1953.'36 None of this, however, sufficed to allay the discontent of central-city politicians, whose level of support for Gardiner in the council plummeted from 1956 to 1957 (from 85.0 to 72.9 per cent). Gardiner's response was to gravitate from sympathy to unvarnished acceptance of city demands for more congenial spending priorities. The turning point here was the decision (reached after the tabling of several Gardiner reports and much temporizing) to build the $200 million east-west subway. It ran beneath three city streets (Bloor, Danforth, and University) and was of direct service mainly to city dwellers. Confident that he had satisfied the even-handedness rule by overriding suburban objections to the subway, Gardiner nursed a uniform water rate through council in 1959. The third major guideline Gardiner observed in resource decisions was one of limitation of demand. As early as 1954, only one year after proclaiming •there was nothing the metropolitan partners could not afford in the way of services, Gardiner was cautioning against 'the belief that Metro has more money in the aggregate than we all had individually.'37 It was an imprecise

114 Big Daddy statement, for there could be no doubt that the Metro arrangement had made greater spending politically practicable. Gardiner's warning, chanted more plaintively as time wore on, expressed a philosophical conservative's reservations about uncurbed growth of government expenditures and indebtedness. It also followed a political logic, inasmuch as Gardiner recognized that unchecked demands would make for unchecked conflict. 'The politicians had to realize that they could only make reasonable claims on the metropolitan treasury. Sometimes they were like little kids in front of a toy shop window. They couldn't get everything they wanted, because they wanted more than there was to get. I didn't want to referee a free-for-all.' Some demands could be muted by deflecting them to other decision-making bodies. In 1954, for instance, Gardiner blocked council discussion of demands by suburban representatives for restructured public transit routes and a uniform fare structure. Instead, a special committee of council, chaired by Gardiner, was struck to 'listen to and cool out' the grievances behind closed doors and relay them to the Toronto Transit Commission.38 To take another example, Gardiner in 1958 snatched at increases in the province's health budget to persuade council to cease making capital grants to local hospitals, thereby relieving him and the Metro leadership of a cacophonous yearly wrangle. When city politicians sought aid for a west-end Toronto hospital in 1961, Gardiner prevailed on them to drop the request by warning that to give in to it would encourage similar entreaties from the suburbs, which would end up costing city taxpayers more than if the Toronto council ministered to its hospitals on its own.39 Gardiner put more stock in inhibiting demands on what can only be called arbitrary ceilings on Metro outlays. For instance, when Metro council successfully petitioned the province in 1955 for authority to make special grants of a cultural and philanthropic nature, at Gardiner's demand the legislation allowed grants of only $250,000 a year. For total capital spending, he began to point to the need for a fixed ceiling in 1956. In 1957 he convinced council to impose a two-mill 'special levy' for capital purposes, one which he thought would make politicians more attentive to the fiscal impact of their spending decisions. The following year he declared that he would ward off any capital borrowing beyond the annual sum of $100 million. Why $100 million? It was a figure he liked because (he said later) 'it was a nice round number' a shade above the 1957 level. Having picked it from the air did not make Gardiner any less indignant at efforts to breach it. In defiance of intense pressure, he held borrowing at this plateau until 1961, when he begrudgingly agreed to a five per cent increase - not without a dig at 'those who proclaim that we ... can borrow any amounts we desire.'40

115 Taking it to the politicians The maxims of non-interference, balance, and restraint of demand made conflict among politicians and communities more manageable. They also left Gardiner ample elbow room for making calculated political use of the policy resources at his disposal. That he did not afford the building of political support unqualified paramountcy over his other concerns did not, by any stretch of the imagination, make him insensitive to it. Gardiner had seen too much of politics to commit that oversight. In drafting his $100 million capital budget, his most obvious political tool, he commenced by earmarking $30 million amounts for Metro projects, school construction, and the local municipalities. 'I would set up these big chunks, but I was careful to leave myself $10 million or so to spare. The $90 million was for building things the way the textbooks said. The $10 million was for manoeuvre.' Manoeuvres, and that is what they were, were executed largely in response to pressures from below. Members of the council found Gardiner approachable and in many cases forthcoming on issues of particular concern to their constituencies. 'If you had a problem in your area,' one city alderman recollected, 'you could go to him and say what it was and get a hearing. If you could convince him you were making sense, he would stand up for you.'41 Especially on parochial matters, having Gardiner stand up for you was tantamount to a guarantee of council approval. City of Toronto politicians may have had fewer opportunities than suburban leaders to seek a hearing, by dint of the location of the majority of Metro projects in the suburban zone, but opportunities did arise from time to time. For example, the alderman whose appreciation of Gardiner's responsiveness was noted above sought and was granted the chairman's support for enlargement of an overloaded and malodorous sewage treatment plant located in his ward. In another ward, Alderman William Dennison, a strong adherent of the CCF and a frequent butt of Gardiner's criticism, obtained support for quickened development of a large public housing project. In 1959, Gardiner gave in to prodding by Mayor Phillips for Metro participation in the construction of the architecturally audacious City Hall project of which Phillips was enamoured. At Gardiner's suggestion, the square in front of the building was later named after Phillips.42 Gardiner was able to advance a helping hand to suburban politicians on a more regular footing. The leaders of the fastest growing community, North York, found Gardiner more than cooperative in planning for the extension of the water and sewage mains needed for residential development. Upon being requested to do so by Reeve Gus Harris, Gardiner worked into Metro's 1956 capital budget provision for accelerated installation of similar facilities in Scarborough. Likewise, Mayor Howard Burrell of Leaside found Gardiner

116 Big Daddy helpful in 1954 in expediting construction of a bridge spanning the Don River and linking the town with its eastern neighbours. Reeve Marie Curtis of Long Branch was gratified by Gardiner's receptivity toward rehabilitation and flood control plans for her small municipality in the wake of Hurricane Hazel, an errant tropical storm that caused eighty deaths in the area in October 1954. Gardiner sold Metro Council on bearing the brunt of the cost of expropriating 164 houses on the flood plain and converting the site into a park (presently to be named the Marie Curtis Park). An eleventh-hour plea by Mayor Jack Holley persuaded Gardiner in 1960 to incorporate in the Metro budget the authority for Weston to borrow money to finance the building of a parking lot for its main commercial district. On another occasion, Gardiner bent to the request of York Reeve Chris Tonks that Metro appropriate a dilapidated local road, on the understanding that it be returned to local jurisdiction after upgrading. 43 The convergence of almost all channels of communication on Gardiner's office made it possible for him to threaten recalcitrant politicians with the withholding of his and the council's support for projects in which they took an interest. This cudgel was brandished by the chairman more than once. Thus, when Oliver Crockford took exception in 1954 to a $2.6 million plan to augment water supply in North York, Gardiner warned it 'would not be wise' for Crockford to object 'if he wants something for Scarborough later.'44 As the subway debate heated up several years later, Gardiner pointed out to politicians from the city proper the repercussions of their position on water rates upon his own and suburban members' attitude toward the rapid transit project. A similar admonition was issued to the suburbs: 'If those suburbs want us to continue spending a lot of money for the improvements they need, they had better be prepared to spend some money in the place where the money comes from [the City of Toronto]. Otherwise it might stop coming.'45 In general, Gardiner confined talk of acts of reciprocity to highly visible issues such as the subway and the water rates. He did not envisage himself as a political broker, and he acted out that role very infrequently. He was unsuited temperamentally to the mechanics of arranging elaborate trades of the log-rolling type. In any case, having nothing in the way of a political staff, he lacked the time and other resources to do so properly. Gardiner began not with explicit bargaining, but by carrying his spending proposals to council in package form, particularly during the annual budget exercise. Requests for special consideration were entertained. Trades almost never were. Gardiner largely succeeded in linking favourable consideration of discrete policy requests on his part with general support for the Metro system and his leadership, rather than with specific consent to homologous demands put forward by others.

117 Taking it to the politicians To the extent that Gardiner manufactured political support through bargaining, the bargaining was mainly tacit. When he went to a politician for support, the prospect of future reward was unstated but no less compelling for that. 'Nothing was said, but from the way he looked at you you knew that voting for Fred Gardiner would serve you in good stead further down the road.' 'He just got across the impression that by going along you would be banking good will for [your municipality] for later on.'46 If the harvest of cooperation was implicit, so too were the inferred negative consequences of obstruction. Here again, the effects on councillors' behaviour were probably little less pronounced than if Gardiner had made the terms of the exchange explicit. 'I wanted to be practical,' Nathan Phillips said later (many others could be quoted on the identical point). 'I wasn't looking for a fight, all I wanted was my new subway and my new City Hall. If you wanted to get things done, you had to keep in right with Gardiner.' 47 THE SOFT S E L L Gardiner pursued his trajectory as bulldozing entrepreneur and shrewd assigner of resources with a self-consciously hard-nosed air. Being a son-of-a-bitch with his peers was the most important qualification for the job of chairman, he was quoted as saying in 1959.48 But Gardiner's personal relations with Metro politicians had a positive dimension as well. Even though this at times was constricted by his character and by other facets of the role he defined for himself, his use of a softer, more intimate touch must not be overlooked. Among the particular techniques Gardiner tended to underutilize were several demonstrated by James S. Young to have been useful to early presidents of the United States, who also faced an imperative of influencing legislators. One of these, 'the selection of confidential agents among legislators themselves,'49 was employed with some success in the nascent years of the metropolitan government. Of most moment was that Mayor Lamport was won over in private discussion to seeing himself as Gardiner's 'right-hand man' on issues relating to the city's interests. With some wavering, he was loyal to the commitment in 1953-54, in return for which he was consulted on decisions and given the chance to net favourable publicity from Metro initiatives.50 His relations with Gardiner had begun to cool before his resignation as mayor, but Gardiner was always grateful for his early assistance. C.O. Bick, the reeve of Forest Hill (he first sat on the council there in Gardiner's last year as reeve), and a member of the Metro executive until 1956, was party to a similar understanding. Once it became evident that Gardiner could not monopolize the selection of the executive committee, he

118 Big Daddy lost some of his interest in such arrangements. Nonetheless, confidential relations, in varying degrees, were maintained with upwards of half-a-dozen councillors after 1956. Principal among these were the 1957-58 reeve of North York (whose father, a downtown lawyer and one-time city politician, Gardiner had known since 1920), the heads of several small suburban municipalities, and three members of the city's board of control.51 Connections of this type were never intense and had only minor impact on Gardiner's own choices. Still, they provided him with intelligence about councillors' opinions and with improved voting support, at least on some issues. For the legislator, there was some pleasure gained in backstairs discussions with the chairman and public recognition by him. There was also the hope that Gardiner would look benignly on a councillor's policy ideas and even on his career aspirations. In this latter connection, it is worthy of note that three of Gardiner's four confederates on the original executive committee (Lamport, Bick, and York Reeve Fred Hall) went on to cherished appointed posts with Gardiner's indispensable support. The fourth, Leslie Saunders, the senior city controller and then mayor, was offered such a position on two occasions.52 Although acts of egregious patronage are harder to find in later years, councillors apparently continued to believe Gardiner wholly capable of meting out rewards to strong supporters. Some also regarded association with him as advantageous to their electoral prospects. This applied in particular to members of the city board of control, which had long been seen as a way station to the mayoralty. Three senior controllers after Saunders' day found it helpful to be openly identified as being in the good graces of the Metro chairman. Their voting support for Gardiner was much higher than the city average. One of them, William Allen, succeeded to Gardiner's post in 1962 with the blessing of the outgoing boss.53 Another technique that loomed large in the experience of early American presidents - 'social lobbying,' after-hours fraternizing with legislators - rated relatively low in Gardiner's repertoire.54 As with senior civil servants, Gardiner elected to formalize most of his dealings with rank-and-file councillors to an extent many found peculiar. In council discussion, he sometimes referred to representatives by nicknames - Mother for a suburban reeve who once treated him to her home-made apple pie, Sonny for a Toronto councillor with whose father Gardiner had been well acquainted, Demosthenes for one of the better orators on council, to mention a few. In other settings he was a stickler for proper, last-name terms of address. The several individuals who had the impertinence to call him Fred (let alone Ted, which was reserved for only the oldest of friends) quickly deduced their error from the glare on the boss's face. Partly to suit his wife's penchant for privacy,

119 Taking it to the politicians and partly because he preferred it this way, only a few members of the council ever saw the inside of the Gardiner home. Extending his detachment a bit further, the chairman refrained from sharing meals with his cohorts during breaks in council sessions. At supper time he left them behind in favour of a massage parlour rubdown and a solitary meal in a restaurant half a mile from the council chamber. While some of this behaviour can be imputed to personality, much of what Gardiner did was dictated by political considerations. He was fearful that frequent socializing with members of the council would decrease the distance that he felt fortified his leadership and would make it difficult to desist from premature commitments to councillors and from falling into the role of umpire or broker. 4 I paddled my own canoe. Sitting there eating dinner and having a couple of drinks, there was no telling what I would say. I might indicate sympathy for someone's position, I might get drawn into understandings from which I could not extricate myself later.' The maintenance of social distance also buttressed his readiness to accept slights and setbacks as an unavoidable feature of his relations with councillors rather than a test of them. Wary though he was of excessive social contacts, Gardiner was not heedless of the value of links to councillors that did not rest on naked political calculation. When the circumstances were right, he could be a convivial host and companion, especially if he was of a mind to combine badinage with drinking. Bibulous encounters, with Gardiner demonstrating the capacity for liquor he had developed over a lifetime, were unvaryingly remembered by politicians interviewed later. Many (especially men) were also awed by his knack for telling profane stories, playing cards, and picking race horses, although few seem to have had the chance to catch more than a glimpse of him in any of these guises. In one-to-one conversation, Gardiner steered away from political subjects, except for historical topics such as the revival of the Ontario Conservatives in the 1930s. He freely volunteered career advice to younger colleagues, particularly lawyers (several of whom he encouraged to forsake politics altogether for private practice and a big income). A number of times he agreed to support applications for inclusion in the province's annual list of Queen's Counsel, the latter-day equivalent of the King's Counsel status he achieved in 1938. A representative Gardiner letter, dated November 1956, commended a Toronto alderman to Premier Frost as not only an able lawyer but 'a very cooperative member of the Metropolitan Council.'55 Curiously, Gardiner often seemed better equipped to strike an intimate chord with the councillors in large, open forums than in more private ones. At climactic moments of debate, he stretched his rhetoric to invoke group

120 Big Daddy solidarity within the council, usually on the basis of their joint responsibility for the swaddling metropolitan government. He beseeched delegates to see themselves as a hard-pressed team, as a band of pioneers, as the crew of a frail bark on uncharted oceans, nay as visionaries 'cast in the die of greatness.'56 Resorting to musty but proven exhortations, he scolded them for being captious and indecisive: our backs are up against the wall, we must stand up and be counted, it is time to jump off the diving board or put our clothes back on. He made frequent recourse to the parlance of commercial enterprise, portraying himself as a salesman or promoter bringing news of an alluring investment opportunity to a group of cautious shareholders. Complex program proposals were described as sure-fire propositions, bargains, or deals, and multimillion-dollar sums as cash and even 'dough.' It was also in transparent view that Gardiner best applied a final solvent for standoffishness and querulousness - humour. The wit with which he dusted all his public utterances was homespun and extemporaneous, the genre that came most readily to his lips and was most apt to resonate with his audience. Characteristically Gardiner's drollery hinged on the reworking of a familiar image or adage borrowed from either the popular culture or the customary rhetoric of local asemblies like the defunct county council. The tone of its delivery alternated between a studied world-weariness and urbanity and a kind of disarming rusticity. Thus, Reeve Crockford's ideas were said to be so evanescent that arguing with him was 'like shovelling fog with a pitchfork'; a tiff provoked by another councillor v/as dismissed as 'not much of a tempest in not much of a teapot'; pre-Metro taxation arrangements were derided as 'a hodge-podge of hocus-pocus'; Mayor Phillips' esteemed City Hall project was 'a stairway to the stars,' and the mayor's opinions on fiscal questions were said to expose him as 'a financial accident going somewhere to happen'; the scandalized responses to Gardiner's proposals for diversifying Metro's sources of revenue were proof that 'when you smile the world smiles with you, but when you tax you tax alone.'57 Gardiner especially.liked the humour of exaggeration, which could be used to recast a political conflict as one of sense against nonsense rather than person against person. In 1955, for example, we find him protesting that the Humber River, on whose banks he was proposing construction of a large sewage plant, would without remedy soon become so polluted that 'anyone who wanted to canoe up it would have to put wheels on'; critics of the project seemed to think the plant could be suspended from the sky or built in a clothes closet. Another day he declared that 'anyone who could track an elephant through a foot of snow' would accept the gist of his argument. 58 In full rhetorical flight » notably after several dinner-hour drinks - Gardiner was sometimes prone to overkill. Left to his own devices, he could

121 Taking it to the politicians fling lines of metaphor so wantonly as to catch himself in a hopeless jumble. 59 He was often at his most effective when checked by jibes and counterwit, under which circumstances he was a master at using laughter to defuse tension and cultivate a more auspicious atmosphere for debate. A classic illustration comes to us in this journalist's account of Gardiner at work in late 1958, inveigling Metro council to sanction the sale of a vacant police station to a private firm: It was undoubtedly Frederick Gardiner's best performance since the great subway debate. He stood off to the side of his desk yesterday afternoon, his arms chopping up and down, slicing to the side, making huge basketweave strokes with the climax word of each argument. Gus Edwards [the mayor of Mimico, a retired railroad engineer], way across on the other side of the big Metro council chamber, didn't need his hearing aid: Gardiner's rich and resonant boom commanded and hypnotized the chamber as it has not done for many months. He adroitly dropped sarcasm into the lap of glowering Vernon Singer [the reeve of North York]; he deftly pointed to his own vast experience in real estate deals; he frosted the whole performance with just a touch of outhouse humour, not too much, just enough to titillate the ladies and give the boys that warm glow of locker room camaraderie. From his vast storehouse of rich political vernacular he pulled forth 'You cannot nail jelly to the wall,' and 'You can try if you want to bat the breeze with a broom.' Somehow, when Gardiner delivers them in that emphatic basso, they make sense. Someone had said they did things differently down in New York, that William Zeckendorf had built a new fire hall for New York when an old one got in his way. 'Knowing Mr. Zeckendorf and the money he's made,' Gardiner trumpeted, 'my impression would be he'd give you a rowboat for a battleship.' And that disposed of the New York City ordinance that says public lands may be sold only by public auction or by swap. 'Well,' said Gardiner, 'I could tell you the story of the Texan who was looking at the Empire State building, but I won't.' And then he did. 'And the Texan said, "Why, we have certain other structures out in Texas that are as high as that." And the New Yorker said, "Well, if you have, you certainly need them." ' A lot of them didn't catch on at first and some of them didn't want to catch on, until Phil Givens exploded in giggles three sentences later and could not stop slapping his desk in merriment and finally was wiping his eyes and giggling still.60 The selling of the police station was agreed to, in a split vote. It is interesting that some of Gardiner's best jokes were at his own expense. He dropped many a quip about his misanthropy, his girth, and the grimness of his hangovers. He could be equally engaging and self-mocking on the subject

122 Big Daddy of his political style. In 1957, with a roguish grin on his face, he paraded before a provincial commission of inquiry two metaphors he later used at a number of taut moments in council. The only music he fancied, he proclaimed in response to a question about his priorities, was 'the symphony you play on a cash register.1 The juxtaposition of images - an assembled orchestra, a tinkling cash register, the figure of Gardiner somehow suspended between the two - advertised both his staunch practicality and his awareness of the limitations on his artistry. Gardiner also told the inquiry he was so flinty in making decisions, so tough and cold-blooded, 'that if somebody came to me and got a blood transfusión they would freeze to death.' The hyperbole of the tale inflated the dimensions of the teller, but in such a way as to leave no doubt of the simultaneous intent to deflate.61

6

The world without and the world within

Gardiner's entrepreneurship was focused squarely on the Metropolitan Toronto government itself. Most at ease wearing the hat of chief administrator and legislator, he gave City Hall first call on his time and energy. Yet, as his eyes and experience told him, there existed beyond this snug home precinct a multifaceted political environment whose features he could not pass over. Like urban leaders in most societies, Gardiner was required to sink great effort into dealings with other governments, provincial and national, which possessed larger territorial domains and, for the most part, superior resources. Whatever his captivation with the Metro bureaucracy and council, he also had to communicate with and respond to the mass public and to more narrowly defined sources of private pressure. Some illustrative material emerges in the discussion of selected political issues in the next chapter. It is instructive here, however, to sketch a general picture of Gardiner's performances in the worlds of intergovernmental politics and public relations. PERSUADING THE PROVINCE

Of the external checks on Gardiner's power, the most important by far was the provincial government. It was the province to which constitutional prescription (section 92 of the British North America Act) and long usage assigned exclusive authority over municipal institutions, which created all local governments and endowed them with their powers. Generally it was true in Ontario that, as Leslie Frost put it in 1960, 'Municipal responsibilities cannot be segregated from provincial responsibilities ... because they run together.'1 The mortar was all the more binding in the case of Metro, for the decision to establish the new government had been taken at the very top and in reaction to ailments of urbanization that were seen as germane to the social health of the

124 Big Daddy entire province. In so far as the government's handling of Metro's problems reflected on its overall competence, it was no less material to the political well-being of the Conservative regime. In the Toronto region, the historic heart of Tory strength, the party's electoral grip was firm but in no way unshakable. After taking nineteen of twenty Metropolitan Toronto seats in the 1955 general election, it saw six seats fall to the opposition in 1959. Though the Metro issue did not figure prominently in either campaign, thanks in part to the stumbling tactics of the opposition, the government was forever alert to the potential for disruption. As in 1953, a prime worry was Frost's own caucus. 'Some of our Members question the necessity and workability of Bill 80,' Frost was reminded by his executive assistant in late 1956.2 The same was obviously true four and five years afterward, when several Toronto-area Conservatives criticized the Metro arrangement on the floor of the legislature.3 Necessarily, then, one of Gardiner's main concerns was with provincial intentions about the ultimate fate of the Toronto federation. As early as February 1954, when a Toronto newspaper quoted unnamed provincial officials as saying Metro would not survive for more than several years, Gardiner dispatched a messenger with a terse missive to the premier accusing the officials of disloyalty and demanding public clarification. Frost promptly invited him to the afternoon sitting of the legislature, nodded to him in the Speaker's gallery, and stated almost apologetically that he 'would not want the Metropolitan Board to think their efforts are not appreciated ... that what they do today may be undone tomorrow.'4 That was exactly the suspicion that Gardiner, placated for the moment, could never quite put to rest. Less than three years later, bowing to pressure from local politicians and members of his caucus, Frost called a public inquiry into Metro's structure over Gardiner's objections. Gardiner won a tactical victory when on his suggestion the chairmanship of the committee of inquiry was given to Lome Cumming, the author of the 1953 settlement. Having received secret instructions from Frost that it limit itself to recommendations for 'improvements in the existing organization,'5 the committee issued a bland 'first report' in March 1958 and disappeared without a trace. No more formal reviews were staged during Gardiner's administration, but in 1961, when Metro council discussed the constitution for the better part of the year, the province felt impelled to commission a parallel study by one of its senior officials, George Gathercole. The provincial report greatly complicated the Metro debate, not so much by its content as by its release less than two weeks before the decisive meeting of council. Transactions with the province usually involved much less life-or-death stakes than this. The most common was the deadly dull but absolutely

125 World without/world within necessary politicking of the province in connection with provincial legislation, general and particular, which bore on the powers and obligations of Metro's council and special-purpose agencies. Between 1955 and Gardiner's retirement, the Ontario Legislature enacted 180 substantive amendments to the Metropolitan Toronto Act, most of them after petition by Metro council. Numerous other laws and regulations also impinged on the metropolitan government. Although most communication on such matters was left to legal specialists in the Metro solicitor's office, Gardiner did intervene two or three times a year to prod the cabinet on major points and quibble with them on minor ones. Additional incentive to intercede followed from the fact that Metropolitan Toronto, like all local governments in Canada, was the recipient of hefty grants and subsidies from the provincial treasury. While some of this largesse was imparted on the basis of rigid formulas, other subventions (notably for school and road construction) were subject to an annual bout of bargaining between the two governments. So vital were the negotiations that they were built into Metro's budgetary routine. Final spending estimates were never passed until after the spring session of the provincial legislature, even though the Metro fiscal year began January 1. Gardiner wryly characterized the process in 1957: 'Between the first of the year and the time when the Legislature finishes, there are a number of pilgrimages ... to Queen's Park [where we try] - to put it colloquially - to pry loose as much as we can from the Province of Ontario by way of grants.'6 Invariably the chief pilgrim was Gardiner himself. Further cause for involvement lay in the existence of large areas of overlap between provincial and Metro programs. Municipal regulatory and policing activities were tightly integrated with provincial operations, and major appointments in this field had to be cleared by the cabinet. On numerous matters of discretion (road building is the most obvious case in point), Metro decisions had implications for provincial priorities. Most of the resultant disagreements and delays were resolved by line administrators, but in exigent cases the official turned to Gardiner for assistance. 'A lot of times,' one of Gardiner's department heads said later, 'it was simpler to ask Gardiner to go to see his associates in the cabinet than to try again on your own.'7 Finally, intervention with the provincial powers was necessitated from time to time by the susceptibility of the province to pressure from private groups disgruntled with Metro decisions. These pressures could operate on a province-wide scale, as with the well-orchestrated 'pure water' campaign that from 1955 onward succeeded in forestalling cabinet approval of Metro's plans to fluoridate its water supply. Opposition could also issue from private groups

126 Big Daddy within the metropolitan area. In 1958-59, for example, a vigorous lobbying campaign by land development and construction companies and two political associations representing them (the Urban Development Institute and the National House Builders' Association) incurred Gardiner's wrath. It delayed provincial sanction of a Gardiner-backed policy permitting Metro to enter into formal agreements with land subdividers that would force the firms to foot some of the costs of installing physical services. In March 1959, after the desired amendments to the Metropolitan Toronto Act had been rejected in committee for the second time, a choleric Gardiner complained to Frost: It is now common knowledge that an organization of subdividers made a dead set against the amendments which were introduced and it would appear had so pressured [members of the legislature] that when the Minister of Planning and Development appeared before the Municipal Bills Committee it unanimously demanded the withdrawal of [the proposals]. Last year I spent a very considerable length of time endeavouring to procure an amendment... You will recall that this was the subject matter of discussion before the Toronto members on a number of occasions but eventually met the same fate as the more recent amendments. 8

Only after this did Frost invoke party discipline to navigate the bill out of committee and through the house. The usual targets of Gardiner's statecraft were cabinet ministers and the top crust of the civil service. With them he generally strove to nourish a sense of partnership, to make in bosom discussion the point that there existed a mutual interest in doing things his way. On financial matters, for example, Gardiner maintained that provincial subsidies, besides being Metro's due, were hard-headed investments that in the long haul would gratify provincial as well as local needs. James N. Allan, the minister of highways from 1955 to 1958 and the provincial treasurer after that, described Gardiner's use of this technique as follows: If Fred Gardiner wanted something, the first thing he would point out was that it was a good thing for the government. He wasn't greedy in the sense that he talked only about his own problems or tried to make you bleed. Some municipal groups are like that, shouting for more and more. Gardiner was far-sighted. You had the impression you were talking with someone who wanted to cooperate. That's one of the reasons we built so many roads together.9

When more than one avenue of pressure was open, Gardiner was ready to take up Metro's case at all points simultaneously. An especially lucid illustration is afforded by his efforts to have the province tailor a relatively innocuous

127 World without/world within piece of legislation, providing for collective bargaining units for policemen, to Metro council's preference. In 1956 the cabinet declined Metro's request that it exclude high-ranking police officers all over Ontario from the new units. In 1958 Gardiner renewed the proposal, this time specifically for an amendment to the Metropolitan Toronto Act. He described his activities, and embellished his appeal, in a letter to Premier Frost: With respect to Metro's application for amendment to Bill 80 to exclude all Inspectors and ranks above Inspector from the collective bargaining unit: 1.1 invited all of the Toronto members [of the legislature] to a dinner at the National Club to discuss this matter and one other matter relative to metropolitan legislation; 2. I attended upon the Honourable W.K. Warrender [the minister of municipal affairs] and fully explained the situation to him and it is understood by him and his Deputy Minister, Mr. K. Grant Crawford; 3. I had the whole Board of Police Commissioners attend upon the AttorneyGeneral. This application for legislation is of prime importance to the Metropolitan Corporation. I should be very much obliged if you would give it the necessary jolt to have it enacted this year. You need have no apprehension with respect to any political implications as a result of this amendment to the Metropolitan Toronto Act as it will give rise to no repercussions in any other part of the Province and is thoroughly reasonable and simple in so far as the Metropolitan Police Force is concerned.10 As this letter and dozens of others show, Gardiner's solicitations often ended up on the desk of his old friend Leslie Frost. The personal and political intimacy between the two was one of Gardiner's biggest assets in relations with other provincial officials, none of whom could be unacquainted with Frost's affection and respect for the Metro chairman. A tone of back-slapping chumminess suffused many of the direct and telephone conversations between the premier and Gardiner, and it often insinuated itself into the written correspondence as well. 'I should like to let you know,' reads a typical man-toman passage in a 1957 Gardiner letter, 'what a wonderful improvement in this [Metro] zoo has been made possible by your very welcome contribution of $100,000 last year.' Metro politicians and officials had recently been reminded 'that it was all made possible by the $100,000 provided by "The Great White Father" in Queen's Park.'11 On many issues, Gardiner was able to appeal to Frost's sense of personal responsibility for the enterprise he had asked Gardiner to preside over. A number of his early letters call on Frost to assist 'your Metro baby.' Even in 1960 Frost is being bid to take a paternal interest in 'your child which has grown up to be a pretty strapping young fellow who is in need of some help.'12

128 Big Daddy Only seldom did Gardiner renounce private persuasion in favour of the kind of overt salesmanship and bluster typifying his relations with Metro council. The most pyrotechnic eruption came in the spring of 1956, when he became convinced of the penuriousness of provincial grants in a number of major categories. After a lengthy memorandum and private consultations failed to budge Frost, Gardiner threatened to have the Metro planning board hold up all subdivision of land and orchestrated a council resolution demanding that education grants be more than doubled. He went to the extreme of suggesting openly that Metro provoke the province by terminating all school construction: 'I am certain that this action will not go unnoticed. It will cause such a row that the roof will fall in on our heads. Then perhaps we can figure out with the province a common sense method of financing our new school construction.'13 Gardiner came forward with similar ultimatums, in public and private, on several subsequent occasions. In 1959, for example, at the height of the fracas over agreements with subdividers, he warned Frost: 'I will be impelled to have the Metropolitan Council request the Metropolitan Planning Board to withhold approval of any plans of subdivision until this matter is settled ... The subdividers appear to consider that they have won a signal victory but they will find that it is a Pyrrhic victory.'14 How fruitful were Gardiner's efforts to influence the province? While this question cannot be answered with precision, it is not rash to say that Gardiner was on the whole highly effective. Most specific provincial decisions can be counted as victories for his diplomacy. Of his nominees for appointments requiring cabinet clearance, each one was given approval. Metro won provincial assent for all the major extensions to its legislative powers that it requested, most with much less resistance than the 1959 amendment concerning subdividers. The level of provincial financial assistance changed appreciably in Metro's favour in 1957, with a thirty-per-cent increase in grants for education and improvements in most other transfer programs. A similarly positive judgment can be found in the subjective assessments of contemporary observers. 'I always endeavour to meet your point of view,' Frost told Gardiner in a 1955 letter.15 There is no justification for thinking that he was exaggerating. According to Harry Price, Frost's principal fund raiser after 1955 and one of his closest political advisers, 'There was not a minister in the cabinet who had as much influence as Ted Gardiner.'16 Local politicians had an equally propitious view, seeing Gardiner as 'a man of influence,' 'a man who can open doors,' a leader who could get results from the province.'Why, he just has to give the high sign to the provincial government and it's done,' one Toronto alderman expostulated in 1959.17 Certainly this reputation contributed greatly to Gardiner's authority within the Metro system.

129 World without/world within Yet, it must be said, impressions of Gardiner's influence with the province were not always wholly consistent with the reality. While any such impression was itself a resource that enlarged his real power, the truth is that Gardiner did not always get what he sought. The trend in provincial grants and subsidies, to latch onto the most obvious index, was less than overwhelmingly favourable. In 1961 provincial subventions, taken as a proportion of total Metro outlays, were well below the provincial average and barely exceeded the level of 1954 (the absolute amounts were, of course, much higher). 18 Many of Gardiner's financial pilgrimages ended in compromise. Others - this was especially true when operating subsidies, as distinct from the more specific capital grants, were at issue - resulted in outright rejection. Also rebuffed were several of Gardiner's favoured notions about local taxation (he wanted the authority to impose a surtax on multiple-family dwellings, a progressive income tax, and an impost on motor vehicles), his pet proposal about police bargaining units, and his demand that Metro be given unequivocal power to fluoridate water. 19 And it should be added that even when provincial decisions were positive, they frequently were arrived at only after procrastination that Gardiner found greatly vexing. Waits of one year were not uncommon, and wrangling over subsidies for construction programs often dragged on well into the summer building season. These setbacks are testimony to the vicissitudes of politics: not even Gardiner could or felt he could win at every outing. They also highlight certain inexorable facts about the governing of Canadian cities. Transactions with the province were conducted on an enormously broad front. Gardiner could not possibly have monitored all the points of contact, let alone exert power over them all. Furthermore, the hierarchical setting of provincial-local relations was biased strongly against the type of bulldozing approach upon which Gardiner relied within his own bailiwick. Unlike the metropolitan council, the provincial cabinet and civil service were hard to intimidate and hard to overwhelm with knowledge. Equally telling was that Gardiner, no matter how persuasive and well connected, spoke for only one local community, albeit the biggest in Ontario. Regardless of Frost's attitude toward Gardiner personally, as leader of an administration and political party of provincial scope he was obliged to employ a broader calculus even when tending to issues on which Gardiner's preferences were definite and strong. This was most true on financial questions, where the trade-offs and incentives embodied in provincial policy were most visible. Here Frost was apt to receive the kind of advice preferred by his minister of municipal affairs in 1955, during the weighing of a Gardiner proposal for more bighearted assistance to Metro hospitals: 'If we were to make a grant to Metropolitan Toronto... we would establish a

130 Big Daddy precedent whereby every hospital or municipality in the Province might rightfully make representations to us.'20 When it came to blunting such objections, Gardiner's closeness to the premier and the government was not always of clear-cut benefit. For one thing, it detracted from the credibility of bona fide efforts to criticize provincial priorities in public. This was evident after Gardiner's 1956 remarks about provincial grants, when a Toronto labour leader proclaimed that he was 'suspicious of a man who is appointed by a Conservative government and then turns around and fights that government.' He mused aloud if Gardiner was 'flying a kite for the provincial government to see if the people of Metropolitan Toronto will stand for some more taxes.'21 With provincial officials, Gardiner's standing could impose a tactical handicap of a different but equally ironic kind. On several occasions, it seems to have actually encouraged cabinet ministers to take a hard line in negotiations. The feeling apparently was that Gardiner could appeal any decision to Frost and, more than that, should be encouraged to do so and thus to extract from the premier concessions the minister was unwilling to grant himself.22 For his part, Gardiner was loath to ask for aid that could be interpreted as crass favouritism or that would worsen his government's already great dependence on Queen's Park. 'I was not going to sit on Leslie Frost's doorstep. What use would it be him getting me into the job and then having to do it for me? What sense would there be having a metropolitan council if it couldn't do things on its own?' This consideration moderated Gardiner's financial claims after the 1956 mêlée over school financing. He sold his two-mill surtax to Metro council in 1957, at the same time as the province sweetened its subsidy package, and from then on held to a more self-sufficient line. Just as important were the subjective restraints stemming from Gardiner's close identification with Frost and a provincial regime for which he, after all, had helped lay the foundations. This fact is evident in much of the correspondence between the two men, but it is captured best in a Gardiner letter to Frost a decade after retirement: 'Perhaps you noticed when you made me chairman of Metro that I very rarely bothered you with the problems which arose in connection with that institution. The reason was that I always felt that I had an affinity for [you] which permitted me to know under any given set of circumstances what your wishes would be.'23 On only one issue (rapid transit operations in the mid-1950s) can it be definitely demonstrated that this led Gardiner to suppress a demand for assistance.24 The more usual effect was on the style and inflection of his public demand making, particularly after the first expressions of indignation. Here it is probable that, on some issues anyway, Metro's interests would have been better served by a dose of the less

131 World without/world within inhibited and less conciliatory tactics that Gardiner used with his colleagues on the metropolitan council. What of the internal intrigues of Ontario's governing party? For most of his years as Metro boss Gardiner's role was minimal, limited by time constraints and by his chariness of letting party considerations lessen his effectiveness at City Hall. His voice in Conservative patronage, electoral, and general policy decisions was slight, except in the odd case bearing on the Metro operation (as when he helped persuade Frost in 1960 to add a former Metro councillor to the cabinet). He made but one speech during the 1955 general election - a slap at Oliver Crockford of Scarborough, a former Tory now running vainly as a Liberal-and none during the 1959 campaign. Despite this withdrawal, Gardiner's prestige within the Ontario party grew steadily, fed by his success as chairman and by national and international interest in the metropolitan government. There was, in fact, speculation among party insiders about his succeeding Leslie Frost as leader and premier. If Frost had left the scene much before 1960, Gardiner would have had a real prospect of winning the leadership had he wanted it badly. In the opinion of John P. Robarts, who took the prize in 1961, Gardiner was by this time 'second only to Frost in stature within the party, as an individual to whom people paid attention.' 25 As it happened, Frost waited until August 1961, seven months after Gardiner's retirement announcement, to make known his departure. Gardiner, in his denouement as a party politician, thereupon helped throw the leadership convention to Robarts, the minister of education from London, Ontario, a man twenty-two years younger than himself. Robarts, who lacked the temerity to approach Gardiner for backing, received it after Gardiner became disillusioned with his original favourite, cabinet minister Robert Macaulay (the son of the Leopold Macaulay who impeded Gardiner's election to the provincial legislature in 1937). Robarts' chief rival turned out to be AttorneyGeneral Kelso Roberts, one of the principals in the 1949 insurgency within the extraparliamentary association against A.D. McKenzie and Gardiner. Gardiner collaborated with the party treasurer, Harry Price (his friend of forty years), and with McKenzie's successor as party organizer, Hugh Latimer, who also happened to be in charge of registering convention delegates. In the final weeks of the campaign, he telephoned as many as one hundred delegates to drum up support for Robarts. He swayed a substantial number, many of them lawyers and some of them acquaintances from his days as a stump speaker and organizer. Both Robarts and Roberts regarded his intervention as one of the pivot points of the contest. At the October convention, held at Varsity Arena in Toronto, Gardiner chaired the party's policy session for the last time,

132 Big Daddy delivering a robust if predictable speech on the evils of socialism. Gardiner, Frost, and Price then sat out most of the balloting, old lions in a parody of the smoke-choked politicians' lair - the referees' room in the arena basement, outfitted with only wooden chairs, a small table (complete with green baize covering, whiskey bottle, ice bucket, and glasses), and a blackboard on which the three chalked up projected and actual vote totals. It was Gardiner who came closest to predicting the margin in Robarts' sixth-ballot victory.26 GETTING N O W H E R E WITH

OTTAWA

If the provincial government was a Himalaya on Metro's political horizon, the national administration often appeared to be little more than an unassuming hillock. For Gardiner, as for most civic politicians in Canada, Ottawa presented few problems and few opportunities. Cumulatively, federal decisions on housing and a host of other matters had an indisputable influence on urban development. As large as it may have been, this impact was 'uncoordinated, unimaginative, almost unconscious, and often counterproductive.' 27 Most federal policy makers bypassed city governments entirely, preferring to treat with the provinces or with private corporations. The acceptance of federal prerogatives rampant during and after the Second World War had presented a golden opportunity for erecting direct bridges to the municipalities, but in sharp contrast to their counterparts in Washington, the central authorities let it slip by. Prior to the June 1957 general election, the gulf between Gardiner and Ottawa was widened by the political circumstance of a Liberal government that had, until two months before the election, not so much as one Torontoarea cabinet minister. The Progressive Conservatives' reconquest of power under John Diefenbaker gave cause for optimism about closer and more productive relations. The Tories swept seventeen of the eighteen Toronto and suburban ridings in 1957, all eighteen in the landslide of March 1958. Three or four Toronto MPs now occupied cabinet seats and, what was more, several of them had been close confederates of Gardiner at the height of his activism in the national party fifteen and twenty years before - notably Donald Fleming, the minister of finance, and David Walker, from 1959 onward the minister of public works and the member of the cabinet responsible for housing.28 Until the 1957 change of government, most of Gardiner's initiatives were confined to the realm of housing and were carried out conjointly with provincial officials (see chapter 7 for a more complete survey of Gardiner's housing policies). A major land assembly project for the Malvern section of Scarborough was announced in September 1953; the following June, agreement was

133 World without/world within disclosed on what would end up as the biggest public housing development in Canada - the Lawrence Heights project in North York. As trilateral negotiations on implementation of these and more modest ventures wore on, it was occasionally possible for Gardiner to parlay his personal skills and contacts into influence over events. For example, in early 1954 Gardiner was informed surreptitiously by the federal minister responsible for housing, Robert Winters - a long-time business and social acquaintance - that Prime Minister St Laurent was giving thought to a veto of Lawrence Heights on the political grounds that it suggested preference for the Toronto area. Gardiner wheedled Winters into helping him compose a letter to St Laurent, over Gardiner's name, which overcame his objections. The next year Gardiner prevailed upon C.D. Howe (another cabinet minister with whom he was on good terms) to release to Metro, at a fraction of its market value, a veterans' home for use as a facility for the aged.29 All the while, Gardiner was tilting in public at federal inattention to the Toronto metropolis and to urban problems generally. One of his favourite themes was that Ottawa, in refusing to engage itself with urban questions, was taking refuge in contrived constitutional arguments: 'They forget that the BNA Act did not give them the right to tax corporations or personal income or collect succession duties, but in some manner they seem to have overcome the constitutional difficulty.' 30 Here Gardiner himself, despite his professional training, was being forgetful. The BNA Act did give Parliament precisely the taxation rights he was mentioning. That he could commit so fundamental an error in constitutional law typifies how little he cared for the formal niceties of intergovernmental relations. Gardiner wanted to make practical deals. It was an abiding source of chagrin to him that in Canada such bargains were so difficult to strike with national authorities. His 1953 call for federal assistance in the development of harbourfront park areas like the Toronto Island was ignored. So was his 1954 appeal for subsidies for expressway construction (which cited the federal excise and sales taxes on automobiles and the value of urban roads to national defence) and his demand two years later for direct aid to rapid transit systems in conjunction with roadways. In April 1957, holding forth at the Toronto rally launching Diefenbaker's national campaign, Gardiner injected a dash of bombast into his sales pitch, depicting Metropolitan Toronto as 'the forgotten city,' whose revenues 'play a delightful tune on the national cash register' but are not used to meet its needs.31 If Gardiner thought a quantum improvement would come with a Conservative ministry, he was soon grievously disappointed. Although Diefenbaker, like George Drew before him, was on record as favouring a 'new deal for the municipalities,' this fuzzy good wish was never rendered into action. The

134 Big Daddy Diefenbaker years witnessed only two incremental innovations in urbanrelated policy - the winter works program of 1959 and the 1960 inception of direct loans to municipalities for installation of sewage treatment facilities. Neither questioned the basic framework of federal-local relations. Nor was special account taken of the local governments in the prolix negotiations with the provinces on taxation and cost-sharing arrangements. What further jaundiced Metro's case was a more fortuitous consideration - the deep-set hostility between Gardiner and John Diefenbaker. Gardiner had taken an instant dislike to the Saskatchewan lawyer at the 1942 Conservative convention and supported other candidates in all three of Diefenbaker's runs at the party leadership. At the 1948 convention in Ottawa, Diefenbaker stalked out of a meeting of the party policy committee after Gardiner reprimanded him from the chair for not having properly studied background materials. Diefenbaker seemed to disapprove in equal measure of the Metro chairman's personal style (he told members of his cabinet Gardiner was a 'ruffian') and of Gardiner's links with the Bay Street 'Warwicks' he later claimed hounded him from office. He treated Gardiner with icy reserve at the 1957 kick-off of his national campaign, threatening at one point not to speak at a Forest Hill rally unless Gardiner was excluded. Gardiner in turn did not bother to disguise his objections to Diefenbaker's manner (his comments are unprintable), Diefenbaker's treatment of several of Gardiner's political friends, and even Diefenbaker's choice of advisers. Gardiner was especially piqued when Diefenbaker befriended his former partner, Harry Willis. This hard-drinking Baptist had been forced out of the law firm in 1953 after a bitter falling out but retained the post of chief Ontario organizer for the federal party that he had held for the preceding decade. It can be gathered that Willis, who was appointed to the Senate in 1962 and remained as Ontario organizer until 1963, did little to gild Gardiner's reputation with the prime minister.32 Gardiner reiterated for the Diefenbaker government's benefit his previous clarion calls for direct federal dealings with the municipalities. At his bidding, Leslie Frost agreed not to object to any such transactions. In October 1958 Gardiner presented on behalf of the Canadian Federation of Mayors and Municipalities (the chronically feeble umbrella organization for the nation's local governments) a brief to the cabinet on the fiscal problems of the municipalities. He was so despondent at Diefenbaker's non-committal reaction that tears welled in his eyes after the meeting.33 Gardiner's major diplomatic overture to Ottawa was a futile, three-year campaign for federal assistance to the second Toronto subway, a measure he at first gauged as a possible opening wedge for a new federal-city connection. With Metro council's approval, Gardiner sent his first petition for aid to the

135 World without/world within cabinet in February 1958. After Diefenbaker declined his request for a conference with the Metro executive, a letter from Finance Minister Fleming dispelled any notion that Gardiner and Toronto could expect favours: 'I have been obliged to decline requests from other municipalities for appointments to discuss matters that are clearly municipal and I am concerned over the possibilities of making an exception in the case of my own city which will be used later to my constant embarrassment. Frankly, I do not see what interest the Federal Government could possibly take in the matter of construction of the subway.'34 The proposal was formally denied in June 1958. In October 1960, in the wake of several ginger probes, Metro resubmitted its request, with Gardiner now arguing strenuously that the subway project was essential for combatting unemployment as well as relieving traffic congestion. In a wooden communication to Diefenbaker, he asked that the subway be considered 'under terms similar to those now provided for sewage treatment projects.'35 Gardiner also took the highly unusual step of importuning the Toronto cabinet ministers and MPs with personal letters and telephone calls. He lavished his warmest efforts on his old colleague, Donald Fleming, as Fleming related later: Fred was not the sort who took no for an answer, not even from the minister of finance. He would call me and press his case in no uncertain language. He was no theorist. He didn't make his case in fancy constitutional terms. I had to say, 'If we start here, where do we stop?' Fred wasn't interested in this. He said the Toronto area had demonstrated its support for the government and there was no better way for the government to spend its money than on something that benefited Toronto. He wanted money for Toronto and the constitutional complications were my problem. 36

On February 8, 1961, in what wags in the Toronto newspapers dubbed 'the subway summit,' the Metro executive committee met in Ottawa with Diefenbaker and four members of the cabinet. Gardiner laid out the Metro case, agreeing to accept any combination of loan and grant assistance, pushing his argument to the point of suggesting to an incredulous prime minister that as a large underground tube the subway could be considered the practical equivalent of a sewage main! 'Diefenbaker ran the show,' as Gardiner recreated the scene afterwards. 'As I well knew, if he took a shine to you, you were all right, but if not you had to go to the back of the class and stand in the corner. That's where I was, standing in the corner, with not a murmur of support from my friends [Fleming and Walker]. They were afraid to open their mouths.' Back in Toronto, still fuming and still without a decision, Gardiner resumed his telephone and letter cannonade. 'I have not attempted nor do I propose to

136 Big Daddy attempt to bring any pressure on the government,' he wrote David Walker in March. The letter went on to apply pressure to Walker over three tightly spaced pages, contending that if'our large metropolitan cities ... are going to continue to be prosperous... there needs to be a change in thinking with respect to the national aspects of this situation.'37 In mid-April Gardiner compensated for two months of silence by inveighing in a speech against federal neglect of the cities and treatment of mass transit riders 'as if they had leprosy.'38 Three days later, following numerous rumours of rejection in the press, he was informed by the prime minister that 'no ... legislative authority exists which would permit the making of payments by the Government of Canada for the financing of subways.' Gardiner was left to infer for himself that no such authority would be created.39 BIG DADDY AND THE PUBLIC

No aspect of Gardiner's office evoked more comment than the way it was filled. The line of accountability to the public was indirect, through the metropolitan council that elected and re-elected him by resounding majorities and made most of its policy decisions under his influence. The situation invited the stricture (voiced by one Toronto alderman in 1957) that Metropolitan Toronto was the only government in the country 'in which a man who is not elected by the people is permitted to propose taxation of the people.' It was unacceptable, the Ontario Legislature was told during one of its periodic debates on Metro, that Gardiner 'holds vast power over people, he controls vast sums of money, and he is not elected by the people.'40 Some uncertainty was to be expected about instituting what would have been by a long shot the largest electoral unit in Canada, encompassing eighteen parliamentary constituencies and more voters than seven of the ten provinces. Even so, Gardiner did not oppugn direct election on theoretical grounds. It was not possible, he granted in a 1956 memorandum to Frost, 'to successfully contend that under our democratic system... the chairman should not be elected at large.'41 True to form, Gardiner's objections were worldly and immediate. Not least was his plain desire, given the other demands on him and his general satisfaction with his performance, to avoid the stresses and bruises of electoral politics. The mechanics of a metropoliswide election were an added source of misgiving. Whereas he intended to finance any campaign of his from his own pocket (he estimated the costs at $50,000), Gardiner thought that few other candidates could do so without direct involvement of the political parties, to which he was as ritually opposed as most civic politicians of his generation. A final and more emphatic reservation had its genesis in Gardiner's basic conception of his role. Visualizing

137 World without/world within himself as an entrepreneur and manager of great and pressing projects, he reasoned that direct election would leave him exposed to self-interested pressures that otherwise he could disregard. Indirect election, he explained to Frost, would make the chairman 'much more likely to be able to perform his duties effectively and efficiently than if he must trim his sails to accommodate the political breeze as it happens to blow from time to time.'42 In only two instances, both in the City of Toronto, was Gardiner's behaviour a salient election issue. Alderman Ross Parry pegged his 1957 campaign for board of control on Gardiner's unaccountability, as did former mayor Allan Lamport in his 1960 campaign for mayor, which he depicted as an attempt to 'take on Big Daddy.' When each failed dismally, the press characterized the outcome as a vindication of Gardiner. Had there been a general election for Metro chairman or mayor, there can be little doubt that, as Gardiner himself believed and his eventual successor predicted in 1959, Gardiner would have won 'hands down.'43 With his reputation in the city and the suburbs, his campaign experience, and the assured support of most local politicians and notables, of the region's Conservative machine, and of the bulk of press opinion, it is difficult to envisage any other result. Gardiner's failure to push for popular election was more than mildly presumptuous and was short-sighted to boot. What right, in a 'democratic system' such as Gardiner described to Frost, did any politician who wielded the power Gardiner wielded have to excuse himself from the periodic judgment of the citizenry? It is impossible to say what was the effect of Gardiner's status on particular policy decisions. On this count democratic elections seldom provide clear direction in any event. What can be said is that the choice of election by politicians one long step removed from the man in the street infused the position of chairman with an air of remoteness and aloofness that Gardiner's personality could offset only in part. When all was said and done, this probably made Gardiner less influential, not more. He was insensate to this possibility, to how his power and authority would almost certainly be augmented by direct election, perhaps because his hegemony over elected politicians was already so great. He seemed to be oblivious to the fact that with the breeze of majority opinion clearly puffing out his sails, he would have been better able to accommodate or override minor and momentary gusts, presumably with the steering and tacking he had never been backward in using at other times in his career. An elected Metro mayor would also have had to shoulder the task of directly educating the public - of trying, to continue with the boating imagery, to control and vary the direction of the political wind. For this enterprise, Gardiner had great talents but, at least for the present, few ambitions and little time.

138 Big Daddy One beneficiary of Gardiner's indifference to the advantages of direct accountability was the provincial government, which harboured a deep mistrust, verging on fright, of popularly elected local politicians. During an intramural discussion of the chairmanship at the time of the 1957 Gumming hearings (in which Premier Frost avouched in one memorandum that many elected mayors 'are of little or no value'), a civil servant restated the Queen's Park attitude in a letter to Frost: 'Success at the polls might be weighted in favour of a class of candidate who is particularly adept at obtaining newspaper headlines and coverage but may not be particularly noted for his soundness and good judgment.' 44 No clue was offered as to how the happy marriage of sound judgment with mass appeal had been effected among provincial politicians. The formula, presumably, was not capable of transfer to the local level. As far as decisions other than at election time were concerned, Gardiner, in common with almost all his colleagues, took as self-evident the existing pattern of participation by interest groups and individuals and saw no need to change it. His preoccupation remained, as during the campaign for amalgamation before 1953, with the effectiveness of urban government in treating agreed-upon policy problems rather than with public access to government. He simply assumed that access would take care of itself. Reformers could safely worry about how governments did their job, not where they got their cues for action. In the case of the metropolitan government, he further contended that the two-tier structure afforded a plenitude of openings for public participation at the base, and indeed that the continuation of smallscale governments 'close to the people' was one of the system's prime advantages. His decided preference was for limiting direct contact with citizens to the thirteen local councils. Since Metro was a federation of municipalities, he said shortly after it was established, its council's deliberations 'should be restricted to views coming from the constituent municipalities, not from individuals.'45 This extreme position was never strictly adhered to. At Gardiner's behest, however, the rules of Metro committees were written to require public deputations to obtain clearance from their local council before taking up their demands with Metro. No matter what Gardiner's personal leanings on the access question, interest-group activity was a far from negligible feature of Metropolitan Toronto politics. There was, in the first place, contact with business groups of assorted sizes and shapes. It was entirely predictable, what with Gardiner's background and philosophy, that he would view private investment decisions as crucial to the city-building process and would generally be receptive toward business opinion. As earlier in his career, he was also aware of the need to take account of other values in making decisions:

139 World without/world within Certainly I proceeded from a favourable attitude toward free enterprise. I wanted people to be able to do things for themselves and to see the reward for their effort. But this is a philosophy, an indefinite attitude, not an exact science. You couldn't draw a fine line here and say this is where the government should act and that is where and how private enterprise should act. I have always had a fundamental feeling that where the city is concerned you start with the fact that it will attract the capital of wise people and that it is better to go along with them as far as you can, within reason. Let natural growth be the dictator of what can be built as long as it is reasonable. But what is reasonable? You cannot decide this in terms of principle. It gets you into personal feelings and public opinion and it gets you into politics. The shades of difference are affected by so many things it would take the Encyclopedia Britannica to tell you all of them.

While business had a preferred place in Gardiner's Toronto, as maybe it does in all Western democracies, the individual entrepreneur or business association could not reckon on automatic deference on any given issue. Business demands for a favourable decision - the land developer seeking approval for a subdivision or rezoning application, the merchant a more responsive traffic or parking policy, the manufacturing firm a congenial interpretation of air pollution regulations - were a normal occurrence in Metro politics. Not infrequently the question for Gardiner and other politicians was not so much whether to listen to business as to which business point of view to respond. So, for example, we find cartage, taxi, personal service, and contracting firms, based mainly in the city proper and seeking to serve a metropolitan-wide market, pushing early in Gardiner's term for establishment of a Metro licensing commission; resistance originates with smaller and less ambitious companies, usually situated in the suburbs, which are concerned with safeguarding their local markets. The Greater Toronto Businessmen's Association, dominated by downtown merchants, clamours for an early closing by-law for all Metro stores; opposition comes from proprietors in suburban retail strips and shopping centres wanting to keep their doors open to city customers in the evenings. The Metropolitan Toronto Traffic Conference, a committee organized by the Board of Trade (the regional chamber of commerce) and having substantial representation from the trucking, manufacturing, and construction industries, proposes a ban on parking on several big downtown streets; the contrary case is made by the Downtown Businessmen's Association and the Toronto branch of the Canadian Restaurant Association.46 By and large Gardiner accepted the extant system of municipal regulation of business activity. He was, all the same, more disinclined than many Metro politicians to see regulation expanded. (His ideas on land development are a

140 Big Daddy conspicuous exception to this generalization; they are discussed in the following chapter.) Gardiner's reaction to the 1960 proposal that Metro should control the erection of signs on its arterial roads, mainly for esthetic reasons, may be taken to epitomize his approach. Regulation was opposed by a phalanx of business associations, among them the Association of Canadian Advertisers, the Canadian Sign Manufacturers' Association, and several organizations of retailers. Their entreaties were almost beside the point, for Gardiner had made up his mind against controls in advance. A committee under his chairmanship took only one meeting to put the decision onto paper. What of conflict between different business factions? Here Gardiner's tendency, in keeping with his general growth orientation, was to side with the group most interested in aggrandizing its operation or market. To take the cases adduced above, Gardiner backed creation of the licensing commission (which was set up in 1956), opposed the early closing by-law, and advocated a variety of rush hour and comprehensive restrictions on parking. When it came to Metro's major construction activities, Gardiner took ultimate account of market trends but relied mostly on his own judgment and that of the Metro bureaucracy to interpret those trends. Business was consulted on particular projects, and here, with individual firms, Gardiner was sometimes quite willing to negotiate a mutually satisfactory accommodation. In 1955, for example, he personally arranged for the construction of an underpass beneath the Don Valley Parkway sought by the developers of the huge Don Mills subdivision, in exchange for the signing over of a parcel of land to Metro. The same year he mediated a complex land trade with a trucking company owning property at the intersection of the proposed Spadina Expressway and a major provincial highway. 47 By no means did Gardiner acquiesce in every business request. In many specific cases, he overrode and even manipulated the preferences of business groups. His clashes with subdividers over how to service suburban land are treated elsewhere in this study. Several other examples help make the point. With the Don Mills developers, for instance, Gardiner turned down a second barter deal avidly supported by the North York reeve.48 Likewise, when the Ontario Jockey Club objected in 1955 to a road extension that would have excised a corner of its Woodbine race track property, Gardiner took up the matter privately with E.P. Taylor, the well-known industrialist and principal shareholder in the club (and in the Don Mills project). Gardiner first dangled a carrot, promising Taylor to narrow the strip of expropriated land and to expedite construction of a road connection to the club's new track, north and west of Metro. When Taylor balked at the proposed expropriation price for the slice of Woodbine land, Gardiner pulled out the stick: 'I told him, "Look,

141 World without/world within any time you want to fight us by putting a value on that piece of land and suing us for it or agitating about it, you go right ahead. You will be cutting your own throat, because we'll reassess the whole race track in like terms and your taxes will skyrocket." ' Taylor backed down. The following year, Gardiner refused to bend to demands by a group of motel owners that ramps connected with the Gardiner Expressway be designed to provide access to their properties. At one public meeting, he literally shouted down the protestations of the counsel for the Greater Toronto Motel Operators' Association.49 When it suited him, Gardiner used projections of private investment and development to beget support for his personal policy ideas. Thus, when plans were revealed in 1958 for construction of Canada's largest shopping centre (the sixty-two-store Yorkdale Plaza) near the northern terminus of the projected Spadina Expressway, Gardiner exploited predictions of traffic flow to and from this private project to help sell his own expressway project to politicians and the public.50 Organized pressure from sources other than business was considerably less common. Ethnic associations, so organic to city politics in the United States, were virtually absent from Metro affairs. Several good government organizations expressed earnest views on structural and policy questions, with minor effect. Organized labour took little interest, save in maintaining its traditional representation on bodies such as the Toronto Transit Commission (which Gardiner did not question) and in Metro's negotiations with its unionized employees (which nearly produced strikes in 1958 and 1960). In an era of rapid alteration of the urban landscape, it was natural that there would be ad hoc opposition to some of Gardiner's plans and projects. Yet the intensity of the opposition caught many, including Gardiner, off guard. The most celebrated case, one which seemed to strike a raw nerve among an articulate minority of the population, had to do with the planned encroachment on a Toronto landmark, Fort York, by the Gardiner Expressway. The walled fort, the third structure on the site, was the descendant of the fortification from which the defenders of the colonial town of York faced American invaders in 1813. In 1958, when plans were divulged for the elevated roadway to transverse two corners of the fortress, they were denounced by a coalition of fifteen historical, conservation, and veterans' societies, including the United Empire Loyalist Association, the York Pioneer Historical Society, and the Canadian Legion. Gardiner's response was to declare that he would have the entire structure moved, 'piece by piece and brick by brick,' to the Lake Ontario shore a third of a mile away. 'If the Americans landed here today,' he said of the existing site, 'they would never find it,' girdled as it was by a bridge, two railway yards, a brewery, a parking lot, and an abattoir; on the lakefront the fort would be readily visible and 'a source of inspiration' to

142 Big Daddy thousands of passing motorists.51 Far from being inspired, the opposition compared the scheme to Hitler's invasion of the Sudetenland, rallied support from several dozen like-minded groups across Canada, and enunciated its readiness to obstruct the move in the courts. In one of his few public retreats, Gardiner convinced the Canadian Pacific Railway to sell to Metro land to the north of Fort York and disowned the relocation project, proclaiming that he was 'interested in progress and not in endless litigation with hysterical historical societies.'52 Of more irritation to Gardiner, and of more portent for his metropolitan regime, was political advocacy and protest based in residential neighbourhoods. There were several hundred neighbourhood and ratepayers' associations in the Toronto area, most of them located in the city proper and most characterized by long periods of dormancy punctuated by brief campaigns against private or public intrusion. 53 Notwithstanding their lack of a central organization or a guiding ideology, they were not a force to be taken lightly by any politician or official. Gardiner and Metro were seldom caught up in controversies over objectionable private redevelopment, which Gardiner remembered well from the Forest Hill of the 1930s, since the zoning of individual pieces of land was controlled by the lower-tier councils. Their most extended brush with neighbourhood resistance to private transgression came on the issue of traffic levels on Metro streets. From 1955 to 1961, an inconclusive debate raged on whether and how to regulate the distending volume of traffic, particularly the heavy trucks that were outbidding the railroads for business all over Canada. Deputations of up to several hundred residents, largely from a section of west Toronto frequented by traffic bound for the city's main stockyards, thronged into committee rooms to press for comprehensive controls. Gardiner was flatly opposed to these and was disappointed at what he viewed as the ineffectual defence of the trucking industry's principal lobby, the Automotive Transport Association of Ontario. He actively resisted the futile efforts of planners and some politicians to devise a metropolitan system of truck routes. His aversion to restrictions was the result not of persuasiveness on the part of the truckers, but of the link he perceived with the larger cause of market-determined growth. He articulated the connection in spectacularly provocative fashion in 1961: 'Nothing pleases me more than seeing hundreds and hundreds of boxcar trucks racing up and down our streets. We must have them to have a prosperous, busy, growing community.'54 The more usual focus of neighbourhood anxieties was the metropolitan government's own developmental projects. It was toward Metro expressways, the most ambitious and costly of these, that opposition was eventually to peak,

143 World without/world within to the point of throwing the entire Metro system into crisis (see chapters 7 and 8). However, the basic pattern of conflict was manifest in several incidents early in Gardiner's term. One of these concerned Metro's first big capital project for upgrading physical services, a $30 million sewage treatment plant to be built on the site of a former golf course on the west bank of the Humber River, in Etobicoke. Blueprints for the plant were released in November 1954. Nearby residents, understandably disturbed at the selection of their neighbourhood, mounted an immediate protest. Petitions were circulated, the aid of local MPPs was enlisted, and a series of rallies was arranged - the largest of them (in February 1955) attended by two thousand persons. Gardiner agreed to realign the main building, shield it with an earthen bunker, and expropriate fifty of the affected houses. Unappeased, the neighbourhood leadership held out for relocation in another municipality. Speakers at the climacteric protest meeting, warning that the plant would 'affect property values for miles around' and would stigmatize the district's children as 'the kids who live down by the sewage plant,' vowed 'to fight, kill, and bury this monstrous project.' One organizer fastened on Gardiner's personal responsibility: 'The man who is so anxious to se this thing go through doesn't even represent us. He is elected by a committee, but he has control over one-twelfth of the people of Canada.' 55 Etobicoke refused to rezone the land for the project, at which point Gardiner successfully appealed the issue to the Ontario Municipal Board. Work on the plant, which served 400,000 residents of western Metro by 1960, began in the summer of 1954, and the local neighbourhood organizations lapsed into their customary inactivity. An equally torrid battle was waged in 1954 and 1955 over the big Lawrence Heights public housing project, the first ever planned for North York. The suburb's council was apprehensive about future welfare and social service costs, but the fight was spearheaded by the ratepayers' association from the district abutting the 125-acre site, a privately developed subdivision of detached homes. Even after the project was redesigned and scaled down, a spokesman for the ratepayers declared that it would be better situated 'in the fire trap slum areas of the city.'56 Gardiner pointed out that revisions had been effected, that North York would benefit from expanded physical services and construction employment, and that it had an obligation to help out with metropolitan-wide problems. At a public meeting in March 1955, Gardiner for the first time lost his temper with a private deputation. When the president of the ratepayer group asked why Metro had not planned for a baseball field in the project, a crimson-faced Gardiner interjected:

144 Big Daddy I have not shown much annoyance to date, but frankly it seems these people are more interested in objecting to this proposal than in submitting any sound grounds as to why it should not be built... Imagine, there is no ball park! If we had one, there would be people screaming about that. Whatever we do is wrong, but I say we are right. There is no room for bamboo or iron curtains in this country. They [the occupants of assisted housing] do not want to be isolated as if they were infidels.57

Further pressure was not necessary on this particular issue, for after Gardiner's outburst North York gave its reluctant assent to the project and it was under way within several months. How is one to judge this kind of controversy? There is no ready standard, as the biographer of Robert Moses has recently affirmed: 'The problem of constructing large-scale public works in a crowded urban setting, where such works impinge on the lives of or displace thousands of voters, is one which democracy has not yet solved.'58 It is a problem that often has occasioned eclectic responses. It is quite possible, for example, to sympathize with Gardiner in his disputes with the opponents of the Etobicoke sewage plant and the North York public housing estate, and (to take slightly different issues) to root for the opposition on the Fort York and traffic-control issues. There are some, no doubt, who would see Gardiner as wrong on each and every issue. Like his most acid critics, Gardiner adopted an 'I say we are right' position that had the virtue of consistency. In Forest Hill, where he had long been inured to the jostle of neighbourhood and constituency politics, he had tended to defer to neighbourhood opinion and to those who wanted to control the effects of economic and social change on community living. As head of a metropolitan government that looked to the needs of a regional majority and aimed for rapid economic growth, his impulse was in the opposite direction. Some such revision in perspective was only to be expected. With Gardiner, the change was sharpened greatly by factors of personality and style. The Fort York affair and the other episodes recounted here point up a lack of tact and patience in dealing with private pressure groups that went beyond the normal irritancy of the public man with resistance to his ideas. In 1958 he said of the Fort York issue, 'I would rather try to handle the twenty-four members of council than twenty-four historically minded women.'59 He said so only half-jokingly: his preference for the more predictable and tractable world of the politicians was patently obvious. Neighbourhood groups were especially difficult for Gardiner to 'handle.' Once he perceived neighbourhood feelings as a potentially serious constraint on his administration and its programs, he countered with the testiness he had always displayed in such situations. His reaction only stiffened when it produced the foreseeable hardening of position

145 World without/world within on the other side. By 1961, when Gardiner spent his last several months as chairman trying to guarantee a start on the Spadina Expressway project, leaders of neighbourhood associations were carrying placards into Metro committee rooms branding him a despot. Gardiner in turn was accusing them of demagoguery, warning that pressure-group intransigence would return Metropolitan Toronto to the pre-1953 'ice age,' and telling his fellow politicians not to listen to voices from 'the cheap seats' in the committee chambers. It was a bad relationship that could only have gotten worse had Gardiner held onto office longer. Gardiner's relations with the Toronto public at large, as distinguished from the minorities mobilized on discrete issues, were much more relaxed and more low keyed. Gardiner's attitude toward selling the Metro system to the electorate was unconcerned, at times almost lackadaisical. Leslie Frost suggested to him in 1955 that the metropolitan government 'consider the matter of some improved public relations,' but this counsel was never really taken to heart.60 Only a small audience was reached by the bus tours of the Toronto area that Gardiner delighted in conducting for local groups and visiting dignitaries. He gave an average of three speeches a month in Toronto and one outside, usually in the United States. Most of these were variations on a stock address written by himself and revised no more than several times a year. Totally bereft of professional staff, Gardiner had no subordinate responsible for dealings with the press or the public. At many festive occasions (sports events, ethnic holidays, the 1959 visit of the Queen, and so on), Gardiner was content to defer to the Toronto mayor. He displayed little interest in Metro acquiring symbolic buildings or space such as a city hall or civic square, dismissing these as 'ceremonial' concerns for which Metro could spare few resources. Until well after his resignation, Metro's offices were scattered in a dozen downtown buildings. One of Gardiner's few repeated ventures in public relations was his yearly inaugural address to council, likened by some to a speech from the throne. Even this was elevated by less pomp and circumstance than was the rule with other municipal assemblies. Little more of consequence issued from his 1959 acceptance of an ornate chain of office from the Canadian division of a multinational insurance company. Weighed down with separate medallions for each Metro municipality, the chain made Gardiner resemble 'a living, walking parody of "The Seven Days of Christmas." '61 This is not to say that to the figure he personally cut in the public eye Gardiner was insouciant. He was far from that. However flaccid his conscious attempts at publicity, Gardiner did acquire a clear and imposing popular image, and he took visible pleasure in it. With no image-building strategy or staff, he came to possess a public persona which would have done proud the

146 Big Daddy slickest advertising executive or advance man. Gardiner's public presence, confected and projected mainly by the mass media, quickly eclipsed that of all other politicians on the Toronto scene. It was closely equated with, and in many ways overpowered, the popular conception of the metropolitan government itself. Gardiner was 'a virtual "Mr. Metropolis," ' one of the first stories on the new chairman proclaimed in 1953.62 The fit seemed more and more apt as time went on. Little of this was channeled through the most novel information medium, television. Neither of Toronto's two television stations, a public outlet initiated in 1952 and a private one opened in 1961, paid much attention to City Hall. Gardiner took little positive notice in return, except for several hamhanded attempts to rail against political opponents before cameras and microphones assembled outside his office. These pieces of acting failed because they relied on techniques of ad hominem argumentation and colloquial wit that fell flat outside the intimate setting of the council chamber and meeting hall. 63 While Gardiner might well have learned the more rehearsed and controlled manner demanded by the new medium, he never troubled to do so. After filming for television news programming was introduced into the council chamber in 1959, Gardiner several times was beside himself when a number of his colleagues prolonged and dandified their speeches for the camera's eye. On at least two occasions when he decided that the television reporters were impeding council business, he sidled over to them, calmly unplugged their machines, and then returned to chair a less excitable meeting. The reporters, apparently, never challenged these antics. Far outranking television and radio as a conductor for information and opinion about local politics were Toronto's daily newspapers. Gardiner took newspaper coverage seriously. He studied a clipping file prepared by his secretary and referred to articles long after their publication. At the beginning of his term he arranged office and dinner conferences with the senior executives of all three papers, only to find out that the Liberal Star was the sole publication to agree wholeheartedly to support him and the Metro experiment. The strongly Conservative Telegram, the Star's competition in the afternoon market, was appreciably cooler. The morning Globe and Mail, normally a stalwart backer of the Tories and the Frost government, was gracious to Gardiner but insistent on the need for complete amalgamation of Toronto with its suburbs. By the late 1950s both the Star and the Telegram were also advocating progress toward amalgamation, yet this did not tint their estimation of Gardiner and his government's successes. With the Globe, as Gardiner observed to Frost in 1955, the situation was less pleasing: The

147 World without/world within publicity we get from the Toronto Daily Star could not be improved upon. Generally speaking the same thing applies to the Telegram. I am sorry to say that this does not apply to the Globe and Mail, which seems to take a negative and sarcastically critical attitude toward every level of government.'64 After 1955 Gardiner's association with the Star, which had the biggest daily circulation in the country and was working especially hard at widening its suburban readership, probably gained in warmth. Its editor-in-chief, Beland H. Honderich, conversed with Gardiner several times a week, was consulted on some decisions, and frequently toured Metro projects in Gardiner's company. The Telegram was generally favourable, although it never showed as much editorial interest in Metro or its chairman and Gardiner did not develop ties with its leadership. After several early set-tos, the Globe and Mail, which billed itself as 'Canada's national newspaper' and was proud (as Gardiner told Frost) of its independence of government at all levels, worked up a rough-edged hostility to Gardiner personally. In August 1956, having simmered over recent editorials casting aspersions on his style and programs, Gardiner launched an all-out counter-attack: 'I've put up in peace and quiet with altogether too much from editorial writers who disclose their ignorance in everything they write ... They do it in those ivory towers where they don't think they have to account to anyone. They're never happy about anything that has to do with the Metro Council.' The Globe's rejoinder was magisterial: 'Although Mr. Gardiner may find it difficult to believe, criticizing is not an easy or agreeable task [especially] when the same mistakes have to be criticized over and over again.' Another two-way barrage was unleashed in November 1956, with the Globe and Mail now stating with solemnity that it 'will not undertake, despite Mr. Gardiner's bulldozing, to publish an antiseptic newspaper lacking in irritant value to officialdom.' This open venting of rancour may have had a cathartic effect, for the Globe andMaiFs enmity gave way within several years to a reserved tolerance and respect, though never to affection. By 1958 it was vouchsafing that Gardiner 'is practically indispensable if the Metropolitan Council is to achieve anything.'65 Political cartoons were an evocative supplement to formal editorial comment and a useful barometer of Gardiner's reputation. They showed little variation from one newspaper to another, perhaps because all could agree that his physiognomy was superbly suited to pictorial rendering and caricature. One survey of Toronto cartoonists in 1959 found Gardiner to own 'the head they most like to draw.' If every politician had some idiosyncrasy that could be amplified, Frederick Gardiner 'has everything': a square head permitting economy of line, bushy eyebrows curling up from gimlet eyes, a mouth which

148 Big Daddy was firm but had a way of wavering between smile and frown.66 Over the years the exaggeration of these and other features - the arch of the waist, the flourish of the eyebrows, the spread of the jowls - increased steadily. Of course, the drawings and the popular perceptions they captured had more to do with political influence and style than with physical countenance. The smattering of cartoons found in this study do not do justice to the variety of characterizations to which Gardiner lent himself. They do transmit some sense of the imagery running through them, that of domination softened by familiarity. Some of the early cartoons relay the impression of a leader unsure of his direction: a rooster looking on quizzically as two other birds (city and suburbs) peck at one another, a nervous clerk trying to lock intruders out of his office, a physician perplexed by his patient's condition.67 These soon yield to a much more overpowering figure. The 1955 Globe and Mail cartoon of an overdressed Frederick the Great standing astride a map of Metro (see illustrations at the end of this chapter) obviously points to a public person who is making his mark, albeit with pretension and arrogance. By 1959, when the Big Daddy epithet comes into general use (it is celebrated in the Duncan Macpherson drawing in the Star, duplicated in the illustrations), the object of ridicule is no longer Gardiner but the other politicians and officials who have allowed him to seize pre-eminence. Two motifs now crowd out the others. One is Gardiner the parental or custodial figure: the mother ordering her family to eat their spinach, the father at the automobile steering wheel glowering at children squabbling in the back seat, the corpulent nurse shepherding her charges along a city street, the schoolmarm sending her pupils (councillors) off to 'play election' before returning for more instruction.68 The second prototype, prefigured in the early Frederick the Great picture, is Gardiner the potentate, often of Oriental or antiquarian origins. Reproduced in this book are Macpherson's 'Maharajah of Metrostan' caricature, from 1959; a scene from the same year showing Gardiner as a loutish Nero throwing a political foe to the lions (the head of the large lion is drawn to look like Gardiner's); and a 1961 Globe and Mail cartoon casting Gardiner as a sovereign proceeding in grand style with his train borne by pint-sized courtiers, one of them Mayor Phillips (his 'mayor of all the people' electoral slogan looking ludicrous as he shuffles along obediently). A similar image crops up repeatedly elsewhere: Gardiner as a sultan ringed by a harem of politicians, as a jaded-looking monarch transported bodily along a muddy road by his minions, as a wily desert chieftain preparing to storm a fortress.69 And the catalogue does not end here. Dozens of other metaphors - Gardiner as a hulking chairman of the board (see the illustrations) or a ventriloquist speak-

149 World without/world within ing through a puppet official, as a brawny streetcar driver or construction foreman, as a town sheriff or ship pilot, as a charging bull or dashing cowboy, as a schoolyard bully or carnival barker, as a policeman or pirate captain, as a Santa Claus or a prosecuting attorney with hanging on his mind, and in many additional guises - register his overweening stature.70 Of greater importance to Gardiner's public presence was the treatment of him on the newspapers' front and inside news pages. This coverage cannot be traced to any calculated effort on Gardiner's part. Mind you, Gardiner sometimes regaled members of the press generously at his own and Metro's expense. In November 1955 reporters were among the small company that Gardiner, as Metro 'goodwill ambassador,' led west to the Grey Cup game in Vancouver. 'Not since the troop trains of World War II,' wrote the Telegram'?» man on the spot, 'has there been a trip like this one. It may possibly make railroad history.'71 Equally memorable were the goings-on aboard the private railroad car conveying politicians and journalists - entertained, wined, and dined by Chairman Gardiner - to the opening of the St Lawrence Seaway in June 1959. Gardiner was obliging, too, about posing for pictures. Nonetheless, he did not seek out close or lasting relations with City Hall newspaper men. In public, he was often curt and recalcitrant with them, berating them (like he upbraided politicians) for not doing their 'homework' and forcing them to pry information from him. The journalists came to Gardiner, in large part because of his unequalled knowledge of Metro business and personalities. They came also because, as Beland Honderich put it, Gardiner 'had the personality to make news and he was always doing things that the ordinary reader would look for.' 72 Part tyrant, part showman, and part philistine, Gardiner was the biggest story in town. His control over the Metro agenda, his sense of theatre and timing, and his capacity for distilling a controversy into a pungent phrase (hysterical historical societies, the symphony played on a cash register, shovelling fog with a pitchfork, a sewage plant suspended from the sky or built in a clothes closet) made for eye-grabbing copy and by-lines. For the journalists on the beat, Gardiner enlivened an otherwise drab municipal enterprise. He was older and wiser than most of them, yet he had not been on the downtown scene long enough for them to tire of him. He was knowledgeable without being a bore, funny without being a buffoon. He lifted their own craft above the ordinary, gave them a box seat at a spectacle with an international audience, let them observe and interpret 'a guy who pushed the pipsqueak politicians around.'73 By the late 1950s, it was no exaggeration to say that the press had created, or at least given written expression to, a Gardiner cult. It was a legend with

150 Big Daddy somewhat of an enigma at its centre, for concerning Gardiner's personal life and past the newspapers had to make do, like everyone else, with what he chose to tell them. On topics where he elected to remain silent - for example, the business activities of his son Warren, which were commented on several times in the press, or the death in 1959 of his brother Sam, whose very existence was never once acknowledged in print during his years as Metro chairman - reporters and editorial writers could say little or nothing. 74 But when Frederick Gardiner talked and acted, which was often, there was a story, usually a good story. More and more as his term wore on, City Hall news focused on Gardiner's words, Gardiner's jokes, Gardiner's prejudices. Articles previewing a joint council-transit commission meeting on subway planning describe, along with Gardiner's intentions and strategy, the location of his chair ('Big Daddy in the Middle') and his new bowler hat ('Shades of Winnie').75 Readers learn of Gardiner's lunch-time menu ('Feeding the King of Metro Zoo'), his taste in gifts ('What Could You Give Big Daddy?'), his thoughts on a successor ('Who Will Get the Job of Little Daddy?').76 Metro's department heads become 'Big Daddy's fat cats,' his new limousine 'Big Daddy's big Caddy,' his outmanoeuvred adversaries 'Big Daddy's dumb bunnies.' Gardiner's opinions on British imperialism and the cultivation of roses (favourable), on drug addiction and militant trade unions (unfavourable), and on modern art (including here his views on several leading painters, 'the Mickey Mantles and Rocky Marcianos of the art world') are assayed in detail.77 Superlative tumbles after superlative as the story is spun of 'the best-known, most maligned, talked-about, caricatured, pugnacious, energetic, plain-speaking, reality-conscious dreamer' in the history of the city. Even Gardiner's vices are big: 'Fred also drinks enormously, and will take "an inch of fifties" [fifty-dollar bills] along as he goes looking for a poker game big enough to satisfy him.'78

7

What kind of city?

Our spotlight has played in sequence on each of Gardiner's main political audiences: officialdom, politicians, other governments, and the public. Now we look at how the Gardiner system as a whole dealt with several major political issues, as distinguished from the individual projects that have been presented by way of illustration. The treatment of particular issues by Gardiner and his regime is also of great interest in its own right. The founding of Canada's first metropolitan government had strengthened the machinery for making and implementing political decisions affecting urban development. But this act of creation stated little that was concrete about the policy choices themselves. What differences, it must be asked, did Gardiner and his machinery make? What kind of growth were they giving Toronto and its people? What kind of city were they building? The inquiry here focusses on the key issues of planning, housing, and transportation. These topics ranked high on the action lists of urban governments all over Canada, then as now. The dramatic acceleration of population growth after the Second World War made answers more urgent than ever in the past. The novel metropolitan legislature and the new levers of large-scale administration raised hopes that 'solutions'-a staple word in the lexicon of Frederick Gardiner and of many other public figures of the time - would be found and put into effect. It is better to see policy choices in Gardiner's Metropolitan Toronto as responses to dilemmas than as solutions to problems. As responses, they were not without imagination. They were flexible and energetic. They were, on the whole, better conceived and better executed than government choices would have been had the reform of 1953 not taken place. But they also were imperfect choices. They were limited by the cognitions and values of those who made them, by the complexity of the problems themselves, by the social and economic realities of the Canadian city, and by the

152 Big Daddy give and take of everyday politics. The choices ameliorated problems. They also recast them, in sometimes unintended and ironic ways, for the next generation. PLANNING

FOR DEVELOPMENT

Since its inception in the 1890s, city planning in the Toronto area had followed the course conventionally pursued in North America. From an early concentration on civic beautification, it had bit by bit taken up the broader physical and social questions considered in the city's 1943 master plan. The small number of people actively concerned with the issue also arrived at a consensus that planning could be productive only if it addressed problems on a regional as well as a purely local scale. It was this belief, encouraged after 1945 by the province, that was responsible for the first area-wide planning body (the Toronto and York Planning Board, chaired by Gardiner from 1949 until its dissolution in 1953) and that helped pave the way for the metropolitan government itself. The striking thing about planning in Toronto was that as of the early 1950s it had amounted mostly to talk instead of action, even in the city proper where no fewer than seven general plans had been debated and approved since 1908. Hamstrung by public apathy, uncertainty over objectives, and an almost total lack of qualified research and administrative personnel, none of the successive planning exercises was, by candid admission of Toronto's planning director, 'ever definitely in the position of guiding the city's growth.'1 It was generally expected that the arrival of metropolitan government would turn over a new leaf in the planning story. The Cumming report recommended that the metropolitan council 'be given adequate powers to direct and control in a general way the physical development of the entire metropolitan area,' and language to that effect was written into the Metropolitan Toronto Act. Significantly, while affording planning great visibility and ample territorial scope (the Metro planning area bracketed, in addition to Toronto and its twelve suburbs, almost 500 square miles of adjacent land), the statute vested primary decision powers in the planning field in a Metropolitan Toronto Planning Board. This circumvention of politicians and the line bureaucracy in favour of an appointed committee of public-spirited laymen, advised by a specialized staff, embodied a conception of the planning function that was prevalent in Canadian and American cities and was not to be widely questioned until the 1960s. This notion, with roots deep in the ideology of the town planning movement, held that it was possible and desirable to 'take planning out of polities' (in the words of Ontario's minister of planning and development in 1953), to lift it from the sphere of routine conflict and controversy into a realm of loftier and more technically pleasing ends.2

153 What kind of city? Gardiner's attitude toward planning was strongly coloured by his pragmatism and his assumption that the overall shape of cities should be determined by private initiative. 'I was not averse to being a project planner, looking ahead with a beady eye at how to invest Metro's capital over five to ten years. But planning the whole city -1 had very mixed feelings about that because basically I am a believer in natural growth. Generally it is wisest to let a city grow naturally without a lot of artificial limitations.' To Gardiner and most Toronto politicians, the idea of a planning apparatus or any other state authority moulding the urban form in comprehensive fashion was anathema. Cities were built best by private decisions, and the private decisions that mattered most were business decisions. Paradoxically, Gardiner was quick to proclaim in 1953 that metropolitan planning would be a valued enterprise. The new planning board, he stated at one moment of exuberance, would be 'the most important thing in the whole metropolitan setup.'3 This welcome stemmed from a view of the connection between planning and politics, a view antithetical to that reigning in most planning circles. Gardiner's grasp of the planning function, for all its ambiguities and oversights, had no room for the idea of planning as a pristinely apolitical process. It was as foreign to him in Metro as it had been when he chaired the Toronto and York Planning Board. Gardiner set out his interpretation in a 1953 communication to Leslie Frost that merits quotation at length: My view is that the Planning Board properly constituted is one of the most important elements in the metropolitan administration. There will be many important questions arise in respect of which the Planning Board should receive engineering and technical reports and make its report to the Metropolitan Council so as to give to the Metropolitan Council an opportunity to base its decisions upon the engineering and technical reports and the recommendations of a planning board. To illustrate my point, the engineers' reports indicate that the Toronto sewage disposal plant will have to be substantially enlarged. The people in Ward Eight and in the Woodbine district are violently opposed to any enlargement of that sewage disposal plant and think there should be another plant built elsewhere ... If the Metropolitan Council has the recommendation of a properly constituted Planning Board it would be most difficult for the Metropolitan Council to vary from such recommendation. Similarly with respect to what shall constitute the arterial roads in the metropolitan area. This is a subject which can become the subject matter of a tremendous amount of logrolling, whereas if the Planning Board has recommended an arterial system of both east and west and north and south highways this will eliminate a great deal of continuous controversy.4

154 Big Daddy For Gardiner, then, planning would deal with tangible improvements in public services - sewage plants, roads, and the like. And the process would be of value only to the extent that it served an expressly political purpose. It was to be a filter for development projects drafted by officials and, more vitally, a mechanism for manufacturing support for such projects among politicians and the public. The planning board, manned mainly by businessmen and politicians, never reached for even the half-way independence from the Gardiner administration to which its statutory position entitled it. Its chairman until his death in 1961, the good-natured footwear merchant James P. Maher, was a personal friend of Gardiner who had preceded him as chairman of the Toronto and York Planning Board and was his deputy after that. Leaving nothing to chance, Gardiner served as a voting member of the board (he had the province make the Metro chairman an ex officio member in 1953) and attended all its meetings. In these he claimed ascendancy with his customary aplomb, moving the majority of the formal motions and depending on Maher and several other members to control the flow of business.5 Gardiner's only serious complaint against the board was that its deliberations were too slow moving. He was most restive during the first several years, when Metro council referred to the board a cavalcade of specific project proposals. Gardiner originally saw no reason why these could not be dealt with and integrated into a total land-use plan by the end of 1954, only one year into Metro's official existence. When the board failed to meet this timetable, and in the process delayed ratification of two expressway projects, Gardiner publicly reproved it for the first and only time. 'I am concerned,' he said in reviewing the controversy in early 1955, 'that we should get a Metropolitan Planning Board which will be practical and useful, which can be used by the Metropolitan Administration to assist them in decisions. Many of us can't afford to wait the length of time that the Planning Board would like to have at its disposal in order that it might, after exhaustive study, come to conclusions. We're "under the gun," as they say.'6 At this juncture Gardiner faced and resolved what had become an overt and discomfiting breach with the professional planners who reported to the board. Gardiner never had great faith in the expertise and style of 'academic planners,' as he called them. 'If you left them to their own devices, they tended to go after pie in the sky. It was often too leisurely, too delicate, and too impractical an exercise for my liking.' The situation was complicated by the death in mid-1954 of his original choice for head of the planning staff, Tracy LeMay, a well-intentioned if uninspiring individual of advanced years who had been the city's surveyor and titular chief planning officer for forty years and had worked closely with Gardiner on Toronto and York Planning Board

155 What kind of city? matters. To succeed LeMay, Gardiner settled reluctantly and after a long search on Murray V. Jones, a man in his early thirties with university degrees in political science and planning; he had considerably more flair than LeMay, but negligible field experience. No sooner had Jones been hired than Gardiner made it clear that he had no patience with Jones' appeals for time to consider impending decisions. Gardiner treated the planning commissioner for the balance of the year with detachment and occasionally with roughness - 'almost as if he wanted me to resign,' Jones recalled later.7 In December 1954, when Jones offended him by prognosticating casually in a speech that several major industries would relocate outside Toronto, Gardiner dressed Jones down in front of the planning board, had a motion passed censuring him, and fulminated about slashing the planning budget. Only a month later, as a result of mediation by Maher and adverse comment in the press, Gardiner pulled in his horns. He obliged Jones with one of his rare public apologies, retracted his threat of a budget cut, and agreed to give Jones and the planners time to prepare a proper general plan: 'I am now convinced that the substantial planning laid out by Mr. Jones, extending over months and years, must be done if the board is to have the benefit of the staffs advice and an understanding of the overall plan for the area.'8 Gardiner came away from the incident with an only slightly higher regard for the technical competence of the professional planners. Nevertheless, he quickly developed a respect and personal liking for Murray Jones, an attitude some interpreted as an unconscious compensation for his earlier asperity. Jones, who expected some autonomy but perceived planning generally in the same 'practical and useful' terms as Gardiner, became a trusted adviser, particularly on investment decisions, where he was seen as one of the few sources of intelligence unsullied by departmental bias. The planning commissioner was allowed to acquire the services of several well-known planning consultants (notably the eminent American planner, Walter Blucher) and to triple the size of his staff by complementing it with personnel of diverse ideological bent. He also was able to assign some of the planners to novel research work (which Gardiner did not see as important but which was not being carried out on such a scale anywhere else in the country) on the condition that the staff remain available for conscription for more pressing tasks. As for the planning board, which had swelled to twenty-four members by 1961, Gardiner continued to regard it principally as a sounding board, timing mechanism, and public relations organ for particular projects he espoused. 'It is difficult to avoid the impression,' one editorial writer observed in 1957, 'that the Planning Board allows itself to be used in whatever way Mr. Gardiner chooses to use it.'9

156 Big Daddy On the face of it, the most impressive product of the Metro planning process was the draft official plan for the area completed in late 1959, five years after Gardiner had first thought it possible. The bulky document was an avant-garde effort, the most comprehensive statement on big-city development produced by any government in Canada to that point. Foreseeing a 1980 regional population of 2.8 million, it outlined a public works program designed to accommodate growth (to most of the elements of which Metro was already committed) and certain gross assignments of land use (detailed regulation was left to the local councils). Yet, consonant with Gardiner's philosophy, the plan did not pose as a prescriptive blueprint for development. It was a prediction, 'an image of what is likely to be' if public and private actors 'pursue their interests in a rational way within the framework of existing institutions.' It made it explicit that private ambition and decision were to be paramount - development was to be primarily the result of private enterprise, 'of the actions of many thousands of independent agents... of forces outside the control of an official planning agency.'10 Taking into account the draft plan's limited aims and Gardiner's unflattering estimation of comprehensive planning, it is no wonder that his efforts to implement it were less than zealous. Formal adoption of the document by the planning board and the metropolitan council, and the requisite approval by the provincial cabinet, would have necessitated amendment of the official plans of the local municipalities. Mainly for this reason processing of the plan was resisted by most local politicians, and Gardiner in no wise exerted himself to overcome this opposition: 'It would have only stirred up trouble. It would have been a lot of fuss for minimal gain to the metropolitan operation. We were getting things accomplished for the metropolitan area without having to set it all down in a plan.' The 1959 draft plan never did acquire legal standing. Not until 1980, long after its essential growth had been completed, did Metropolitan Toronto obtain an officially sanctioned general plan. One feature of the evolving Toronto metropolis that became the subject of impassioned controversy after Gardiner's departure - the intensified development of its downtown section - received little proximate attention from him or the Metro planners. It was City of Toronto politicians who composed encomiums to 'development in the central core of the city that will stagger the imagination' and who strove, as Mayor Phillips put it, to make the central area 'as attractive as possible for developers.'11 Just the same, Gardiner, who had called in 1953 for abolition of all restrictions on the height of commercial buildings,12 looked with unmitigated approval on the surge in office and apartment construction that was evident by the late 1950s. He may have had no direct hand in the downtown boom, but it matched well with his growth

157 What kind of city? philosophy, was facilitated by the swift pace of metropolitan development fostered by his government, and was referred to with commendation in major Metro planning statements, including the 1959 plan. In the end the metropolitan regime as much as the city proper was to have to contend with its social and political consequences. Gardiner's most concerted interventions in planning politics occurred in defence of big Metro projects, none of which was to be turned down by the planning board. He also acted to uphold ad hoc restrictions on those private investment decisions that, in the recollection of Metro's deputy planning commissioner, 'violated his common sense - we professionals might have said they contravened "good planning principles" - by causing extreme traffic congestion, real inconvenience to established residents, or an intolerably low level of public services.'13 On one important issue, the territorial limits of the expanding urban area, Gardiner did exercise his influence in a pertinacious and constructive way. He came out sharply against 'premature' residential and industrial development in the so-called fringe communities around Metro, arguing that this would detract from Toronto's growth and burden Metro with costly physical services. Undeterred by the accusations of 'communist tactics' from fringe-area politicians and developers, not to mention the tension between his stance and his innate preference for market-induced development, Gardiner persevered and at several junctures took his case to the provincial cabinet. Under an understanding reached with him in 1953, the Metro planners were consulted by the responsible provincial minister on all proposals for land subdivision within the total suburban and fringe area. Although there were several disappointments (worst of them the province's acquiescence in the establishment of the sprawling Bramalea development northwest of Metro), Metro did succeed in vetoing many private developments and generally retarding the growth of the peripheral areas. The upshot was less spread in the suburbs and more of a compact and bounded metropolitan community than would otherwise have ensued.14 HOUSING

The anaemic state of housing production had been highly germane to the crisis of Toronto's governments before 1953. Gardiner required no convincing of the need to bear out Premier Frost's prediction that Metro would 'cut the chains binding the development of housing in the area.'15 Gardiner presupposed, as did virtually all his colleagues, that new housing would be essentially for private purchase and ownership. Metropolitan Toronto, he maintained in his first inaugural speech, must 'continue the

158 Big Daddy tradition of home ownership which has made this country one of the most stable and law-abiding anywhere.' 16 Also beyond serious debate was the location of the lion's share of the new housing in the suburbs, and especially in the outlying areas with extensive tracts of vacant land. Gardiner's view of suburban life was not without its sardonic tinges, as can be judged by his digs at 'strawberry box developments,' migrants who seek in 'Cherry Hill Gardens and Weedville Heights' an impossible pastiche of urban and rural conditions, and suburbanites who derive their ideas about gracious living from popular magazines - straining for a standard of housing and consumption 'geared to the boss's salary instead of their own.' 17 Nonetheless, Gardiner, the man who moved to Forest Hill in 1931, was not the one to play Canute to the suburbanizing tide. The suburbs, with their open space and opportunities for the accumulation of possessions, were what people wanted, and the suburbs were what Metro was going to give them. On the question of the production and allocation of housing, Gardiner astonished no one in May 1953 by declaring that it was private enterprise that should 'decide where, how high, and when to build in the Toronto area' and could 'build cheaper, better houses, faster' than government.18 Hiding in Gardiner's early pronouncements was a note of ambiguity about the role of the metropolitan government that went undetected by most of his listeners. In his May speech he said that Metro would 'provide [to private builders] areas served by roads, water, and waste disposal.' Providing business with serviced land was not the same as providing services to land owned by business. The first obviously implied a much more resolute intervention in the housing market. For one tantalizing span of several months, Gardiner argued loudly for precisely such an intervention. In September 1953, with his prodding, the provincial and federal governments unwrapped a joint scheme for the assembly and development of 1,500 acres of farm land in the Malvern district of Scarborough, several miles out from the cutting edge of suburban settlement. The largest land expropriation site in Ontario history was to be serviced by Metro, then turned over to private construction companies for building and ultimate sale of the land and buildings at regulated prices. Applauding the project and swearing full cooperation, Gardiner held it up as a model for future development in the Toronto region and all across Canada: I have no fault to find with land speculators, but it is not possible to produce reasonable cost homes through private enterprise at the development stage. By that I do not mean that I favour socialized housing. But I think the municipality can put in the roads, sewers, water lines, and so on just as cheaply as the land developer without tacking on a profit. This means that a farm which cost $1,000 an acre at purchase can

159 What kind of city? be developed without the $2,500-an-acre profit which is tacked on by the developer ... Our only hope to cut costs is to develop the land ourselves and eliminate the speculators, and then put an end sales price on the houses to be produced [so that the savings] can be passed on to the working man. 19

The dwellings were still to be produced for private consumption at a profit to business. Furthermore, Gardiner wanted acquisition only of parcels of land like Malvern that had not as yet entered the development sequence. He spurned the idea that Metro seek authority to expropriate land already owned by speculators or developers, saying they 'have a right to assemble land and get what they can for it.'20 Necessarily, the publicly developed land was going to be quite remote, thus posing a further difficulty to prospective residents and to Metro. For all its moderation, Malvern was condemned to be an isolated and beleaguered experiment, not to be replicated during Gardiner's administration. Gardiner was excoriated by Scarborough's Reeve Crockford as 'a new Hitler' who trampled on property rights and local autonomy, and opprobrium of the venture reverberated for years to come in all available forums, including the Ontario Legislature. Frost and the provincial cabinet, apparently unaware of the plan's full connotations when it was unveiled, entered into protracted negotiations over implementation with Metro, Scarborough, Ottawa, the affected farmers, and private developers and builders. This equivocation, combined with the absence of an effort to expedite physical services to the district, meant that no Malvern houses were ready for occupancy until the early 1970s. Gardiner accepted the defeat with equanimity, although he did not desist from sniping at land developers and their 'millions' in unearned profits. He went so far at one point as to unite with a CCF member of his council in requesting the province to institute a capital gains tax on profits gained by land speculation. This made no more headway than his previous trial balloons on municipal land assembly.21 Partly as retribution for these setbacks, and partly to conserve Metro's borrowing power, Gardiner began in 1955 to require the imposts from land subdividers (offsetting the Meto outlay on physical facilities) that development firms fought so adamantly at the provincial level (discussed in chapter 6). Traditionally the municipality had borrowed in the debenture market to meet these costs and retrieved them from the home owner in annual 'local improvement' charges. They now had to be assumed in the first instance by the developer, then passed on to the buyer as part of the purchase price. Setting aside the nuances of pricing and finance, what mattered most to the velocity of housing construction was that Metro was in fact installing the services, and at an unprecedented rate. Providing the physical infrastructure

160 Big Daddy for private housing development in the suburbs was clearly Metro's uppermost policy commitment under Gardiner. It was most readily apparent in the mundane yet indispensable fields of water and sewage services. Gardiner loved to recite the statistical indices of progress - five water filtration plants modernized by 1961, almost 200 miles of trunk sewers and water mains laid down, two new sewage treatment plants constructed and six remodelled to feplace the septic tanks and overloaded upstream plants that had been commonplace in the suburban and fringe zone. To thtse certainly should be appended the statistics about the public school system, the expansion of which was financed basically through the Metro levy - 133 of the new schools that stood at the centre of nearly every new subdivision, almost 400 other building projects, 102,000 new students (a 64-per-cent jump). Also of definite relevance to Toronto's development as a residential community were Metro's highly successful flood control system, the air pollution controls it instituted in 1956, and its web of large, open-space parks, amounting to more than 3,000 acres by 1961.22 The numbers that carried the most weight were those registering total housing completions, and there is no doubt that on this score Gardiner's metropolitan government made a pronounced difference. More than 141,000 dwellings were completed in Metropolitan Toronto in the years 1954-61, a yearly rate 103 per cent higher than in the period 1948-53. Not only did production improve on earlier performance, it also outstripped the rapid growth in population and reduced the average number of persons per dwelling to 3.8 in 1961 from 4.1 in 1951.23 For Metro's first three or four years, at least, the typical new housing unit was exactly the kind of detached, single-family bungalow, set on a landscaped suburban lot, that Gardiner had conceived of at the outset and that could be found proliferating in great archipelagoes around almost any North American city. Some of the new stock was collected in genteel enclaves for the rich; rather less of it catered to the poor. Most of the new subdivisions greeted people who were 'neither rich nor poor,' enticed by the suburbs' prices and crowded out of the central city by overseas immigration and the size of their own households.24 While much could be made of the shortcomings of the mass-produced subdivision and the style of life it sustained, defects that were a mainstay of post-war literature, there w,ere other controversies nearer by. One such conflict, played out in every large city on the continent, concerned public housing. To subsidized accommodation for the elderly, a cause Gardiner warmly embraced, there were few political and technical impediments. Metro's achievements here-1,041 apartment units constructed by 1961, 1,635 in progress or approved, room for 1,800 more persons in homes for the aged - cannot be measured against any objective standard. Undoubtedly more

161 What kind of city? could have been built, and should have been built, but it is also true that the program drew almost no criticism from interested professionals, clients, and politicians.25 When it came to assisted housing for families, however, there was considerably less agreement on goals and far less accomplishment relative to expectations. Some of this limp performance is explained by Gardiner's philosophical qualms about municipal supply of family housing, something he claimed in 1954 that 'no one desires as a matter of choice or general policy.'26 Allowing for this, Gardiner never denied the practical necessity of an effort in this field. His recognition of the need grew steadily over the years. Gardiner's early efforts centred on the huge Lawrence Heights project in North York, which he hoped would be a showcase and would have a demonstration effect throughout the region. By 1958 he had come around to accepting the importance of an overall program, with annual production pitched at 1,000 units; Metro council duly adopted this target. According to David B. Mansur, the founding president of the federal Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation whom Gardiner persuaded to chair the new Metropolitan Toronto Housing Authority in 1955, Gardiner 'did not push us on quotas but he did agree to everything we proposed.'27 Metro did not come within shouting distance of realizing its public housing targets. As of Gardiner's retirement only the 1,081 units at Lawrence Heights - representing less than one per cent of all completions since 1953 - were in operation, with about 1,400 other units in various stages of construction and planning. The shortfall, which richly embarrassed Gardiner at the time and afterward, owed much to the vagaries of intergovernmental relations. Public housing projects required as many as three-dozen clearances by agencies and officers of senior governments. At any given point the proposal was vulnerable to veto or delay, as was demonstrated by Lawrence Heights, which had to survive not only Prime Minister St Laurent's early attempt to cancel it but a later federal effort to diminish it to a quarter of its pre-arranged dimensions.28 A similar labyrinth had to be threaded at the municipal level, where councils and planning boards made avail of their zoning and other powers to resist and whittle down projects. Even Lawrence Heights, on which Gardiner expended great energy for two years, was reduced by almost a third and set off from the adjacent community by a buffer strip of town houses. Later project announcements were met with similar ill will. In 1958, for instance, the reeve of Scarborough predicted that a proposed development containing 100 lowrental homes 'would create a vast slum area and depress property values'; two years after this a spokesman for ratepayers disputing the same project warned that 'today the subject is low-rental homes, tomorrow it could be the erection of a glue factory.'29

162 Big Daddy Gardiner's defiance of flagrant prejudices against public housing was perhaps as noteworthy as his failure to meet Metro's modest production quotas. Of equal significance were his views and commitments regarding the location of assisted housing. Although one might not have predicted it from his general deportment, Gardiner was opposed to the clearance of dilapidated central-city housing and its replacement by high-density public accommodation. He was in fact ahead of his time in advocating the rehabilitation and conservation of ageing and unkempt neighbourhoods, making many of the points emphasized by later critics of wholesale 'urban renewal' in the United States and Canada. There is no need to tear that area apart with bulldozers,' he said of one neighbourhood, not far from where he grew up, whose demolition was under discussion in 1960. It was preferable to settle a hundred immigrant families in the area: 'They would clean it up in two years and you would have white picket fences and flower beds all over the place.'30 In only one case, the several hundred cottages on Toronto Island (later a cause célèbre in Metro politics), did Gardiner press for demolition of central-city housing, and this was to make way for enlargement of a regional park, not commercial or residential redevelopment. At Gardiner's urging, Metro's public housing effort was concentrated in the suburbs, where land was cheap and where he felt residents would have to learn to accept their share of the needy. It was in the suburbs that Lawrence Heights set a precedent, that Metro acquired a half-dozen large housing sites during Gardiner's last several years in office, and that Metro and later the province subsequently built much of the area's assisted housing. By the 1970s it could be said that in Metropolitan Toronto, in stark contradistinction to the territorially segregated pattern common in the United States, there was a virtual reproduction in the suburbs of centralcity concentrations of low-income housing.31 Two other secular tendencies in housing policy rate a mention here. Neither was foreseen by Gardiner, and neither can be attributed wholly to him or to Metro, but both were to be of great moment to life and politics in Toronto. The first had to do with the nature of the housing marketed by private producers. Although the advance expectations of Gardiner and nearly everyone else were almost exclusively of single-family homes in the suburbs (of the kind that were occupied in large quantities in the mid-1950s), by several years later a very different trend was in evidence. Annual completions of detached houses in Metropolitan Toronto were 26 per cent higher in 1954-61 than in the preceding six-year period, yet these crested in 1955 and had subsided by 1961 to a level less than half the average production of the early 1950s. The aggregate figures on completions mask the truly arresting trend in housing production - the singular boom in apartment construction. Completions of

163 What kind of city? multiple-family dwellings, mainly in large apartment houses, ballooned by 347 per cent over the eight years, and much of the increase took place in the suburbs. As early as 1957, detached houses comprised less than half of total production; in 1961 they accounted for 34 per cent, including only 44 per cent in the three large outer municipalities. 32 Generalizing on his Forest Hill experience, Gardiner had said in 1953 that apartment houses 'do not detract from an area' dominated by single-family dwellings.33 Yet he was totally unprepared for the explosion in apartment construction of the late 1950s - effected by changes in factors as various as consumer tastes, family structure, construction technology, and land prices, on top of Metro's own policies on transportation and physical services. Of high-rise public housing, Gardiner remarked presciently on one occasion about the shortcomings of life in 'piles of tinfoil... fifty-storey mansions.' 34 He had no rejoinder whatever to the unanticipated emergence of a massive rental market in the private sector, one which flew in the face of his expressed wish for home ownership as a buttress of social stability. The other unpredicted trend of great importance was in the structure of the housing industry itself. Historically the industry had been populated by a multitude of small and localized firms, most of them producing several houses a year on a speculative basis. All over North America the industry was being moved in the direction of concentration of ownership by an array of technological and economic forces. But in Toronto the operations of the metropolitan administration (as was to happen with regional governments elsewhere in Canada later) undoubtedly played a significant role in hastening and deepening the trend. Metro's regulation of the expansion of the housing market, in concert with the province, elongated production lead times and gave a new advantage to firms with the capacity to hold large amounts of land in abeyance for several years. In a cruel reversal of original intentions, the new demand by Gardiner's government for developer contributions toward physical services also strongly favoured bigger companies with extensive credit resources. The result - an abrupt increase in corporate concentration - was evident by the early 1960s. Whereas no firm in the Toronto area had built as many as 100 homes a year in 1955, by 1960 6 per cent of all dwelling units in the region financed with federal mortgages were constructed by such firms. That proportion leaped to 17 per cent in 1961 and 34 per cent the following year and reached 79 per cent by 1970.35 Gardiner had said in 1953 that his plan for municipal land assembly would 'make it possible for small contractors to take part in development.'36 When that plan collapsed and, unwittingly, he promoted policies that helped squeeze small firms out of the market, he had no public reaction. 'What could I do?' he

164 Big Daddy said in an interview much later. 'I was only dimly aware of the trend and, besides, I was not elected to be commissar of the construction industry.' Again, the social and political after-effects would have to be faced by his successors. A development industry dominated by extremely large corporations, whose motivations and actions are distrusted by a substantial portion of the politically active public, is a prime feature of Metro affairs two decades after Gardiner's retirement. THE TRANSPORTATION TANGLE

On transportation more than any other issue, Gardiner arrived in office with extensive experience and an explicit program for action. Both his experience and his program centred on roads and the automobile. Gardiner had become intrigued in the late 1940s with the techniques of highway engineering and with what he perceived as the integral link between improved mobility and urban growth. Exasperation at the institutional obstacles to building large urban roads had led directly to his taking up the banner of metropolitan reform. Gardiner's bellicose statements in 1953 left no uncertainty that he aimed to pursue his ambitions without dalliance or compromise. Streets needed widening: 'I would cut five or six feet off many sidewalks, shove the poles back, and create two new lanes for traffic.' Some residential amenities would also have to be compromised: 'There have got to be a few hallways through living rooms if we are going to get our metropolitan arterial system built.' The system required unflinching action in the name of the travelling public, 'someone with the courage to say where we should have a street and then plow through the houses and make it long enough.'37 Exhorted by Gardiner to act decisively, his council in 1953 appropriated 275 miles of arterial roads from the local street grids. Over the next decade Metro was to take over or build 83 more miles of arterial road, widen 60 miles and resurface 118, construct 101 bridges (almost doubling the number on the network), improve 171 intersections, and institute an innovative traffic control system.38 Of much more piquancy to Gardiner was the program of building high-speed, limited-access urban freeways. In 1953 and 1954 Metro's road engineers sketched a framework for expressway construction that fit both the chairman's long-standing dreams and the professional standards of the day. The system was to have a pair of loops, one around the city core and the other well out from it, and two major radial roads. An expressway along the Lake Ontario waterfront, which had been under discussion for two decades, was to form the southern rim of both loops. Provincial highways would round out the outer circle, but the rest of the system would be built by Metro: radial

165 What kind of city? expressways to the northeast and northwest, and an east-west crosstown highway to complete the inner loop. The six-lane lakeshore freeway, hurried through the planning and approval stages by Gardiner, was begun in 1955 and, to his great delight, was designated as the Frederick G. Gardiner Expressway in 1957. By this time road crews were also doing preparatory work on a radial route of similar dimensions to the northeast (the Don Valley Parkway), and planning and debate were continuing on the other two elements of the original design. Notwithstanding Gardiner's early remarks about plowing roadways through houses, most of the preliminary round of road decisions caused little disruption to residential communities. Nor, aside from protests against several street widenings, did they meet with serious political opposition. The routes of the first two Metro freeways were chosen in part to minimize external effects, with the Gardiner Expressway displacing a decaying amusement area and about fifty homes and the Don Valley winding mostly through inaccessible ravine land. But it was obvious that posterior projects would not be purchased so cheaply. This unsettled even Gardiner, for all his rugged talk in 1953. As early as May 1954 he secured indefinite deferral of the eastward extension of the lakeshore highway on the rationale that it would be 'too dirty and destructive to residential values.'39 A year later he had the same reaction to a suggestion to run a combined crosstown expressway and transit line in a broad trench through one of the most densely populated districts of the city. This proposal was returned to the drawing board. When it and others resurfaced half a decade later, the conflict was to be much more wrenching than was first feared. For the time being, Gardiner was increasingly absorbed in the other knot in the transportation tangle - mass transit. The predecessor of the new Toronto Transit Commission, the Toronto Transportation Commission, had operated the city's streetcars and buses since they came under public ownership in 1921. It had been a paragon of the soundly managed municipal enterprise, avoiding deficits, retiring a large debt, and building the Yonge Street subway from its own savings. Regardless of the appointment of its members by city council, the real power in transit politics since 1931 had been Chairman William C. McBrien, a creature of the same amalgam of lodge and ward politics into which Gardiner's father had initiated him as a boy. 4 A pretty autocratic body,' was how Gardiner categorized the commission in a February 1953 memorandum to Frost.40 Gardiner proposed unsuccessfully that Metro council be given some legal say in determining the TTC's routes, but by and large he shared the regnant view of transit as an autonomous operation sustained by the fare box. When McBrien became chairman of the new five-man commission and began to exert his customary control over it, Gardiner gladly left it to its own devices.

166 Big Daddy This strategy was undercut by McBrien's death in June 1954, two months after the opening of the Yonge subway. With Gardiner's blessing, McBrien was followed as member and, in 1955, as chairman by the opinionated and extroverted mayor of Toronto, Allan Lamport. Lamport not only opened up the TTC's business to public scrutiny but, styling himself 'the voice of the transit rider,' demanded that Metro give mass transportation a high priority in allocating resources. Gardiner at first downplayed his alarms about falling ridership and the difficulties of extending full service into dispersed suburban areas previously reached by inefficient private lines. However, when it transpired in 1955 that the TTC was running up a deficit that would soon deplete its reserves, Gardiner accepted a first measure of responsibility. He threw his support behind a Metro subsidy to the TTC as an alternative to a fare increase. In dunning Premier Frost to consent to the subvention, he stated that the other option, higher fares, would drive away riders and 'put into operation a chain of circumstances which in the United States has led to the bankruptcy of most of its transit systems.'41 The intercession was only partly efficacious, as Frost agreed to legislation sanctioning a $2.5 million subsidy for but one year and it was insufficient to stave off a rise in fares. In his inaugural address to the 1956 council, Gardiner served notice of a further change of heart. Speaking in his best foghorn voice, he called for a decisive reorientation toward mass transit and delivered an unprecedented critique of exclusive reliance on urban roads: It is the experience of every large city in America that a succession of new expressways is not the answer to efficient and economical movement of traffic. Each successive one is filled the day it is opened. The irresistible fact is that you simply cannot provide sufficient highways and parking space to accommodate every person who desires to drive his motor vehicle downtown and back each day ... Additional rapid transit is the only answer. It is a snare and a delusion to keep on spending tens of millions of dollars on highways because the province will subsidize them 50 per cent when we know that beyond a certain stage $1 spent on rapid transit is worth $5 spent on more arterial highways and parking facilities ... This Council will have to decide this year whether it will compound the confusion by building more highways or relieve the tension by constructing additional rapid transit. 42

Gardiner's disquisitions on public transit grew more fulsome over the next several years. There was, he declared, no need for a 'philosophy of despair' about transit such as obtained in the United States. Inventive leadership could keep Toronto from repeating the mistakes of Los Angeles and Detroit, where the city was festooned with freeways, starved of mass transportation, and more congested than ever. It was even necessary and desirable, he told the

167 What kind of city? Canadian Transit Association, to improve public transit in Canada to the point where it is 'restored as the primary method of urban travel.'43 Significant resistance to investment in rapid transit was offered by about half of the suburban members of Metro council. Gardiner dismissed it easily, once his own mind was made up, but he found the attitude of senior governments to be a much greater stumbling block. Ottawa turned a deaf ear to all pleas for aid to subway construction (see chapter 6). The provincial government, which met half of all road construction costs, was only slightly more forthcoming. Particularly unreceptive was Leslie Frost, whose general preference for the automobile was reinforced by the province's financial stake in road transportation. 'Our money for building highways comes from gasoline tax,' he observed to a Conservative official after Gardiner's first speeches on transit. 'Subways would be of no revenue to us whatever and could never be, and in fact we would be subsidizing people not to use our highways, and accordingly not to pay us any revenue. This has no appeal to me.'44 It took five years of Gardiner's blandishments to alter this remarkably self-centred opinion. In May 1961, following the final federal rejection of Metro's request, Gardiner convinced Frost and the cabinet to provide an indirect subsidy to the new Toronto subway in the form of à low-interest loan of $60 million. Direct provincial subsidy of rapid transit construction began only in 1963, and of operations in 1971. Problems of a different ilk were encountered with the TTC, on whom the truth was slow to dawn that Metro influence was sure to follow Metro money into the transit field. Bolstered by the traditional view of transit as an independent enterprise and by the editorial backing of the two afternoon newspapers, the commission mounted an unavailing rearguard action to preserve its autonomy. It might have come closer to success had its principal hero, Allan Lamport, been able to unify it behind him. As it was, he beckoned further Metro participation by picking quarrels with the technical staff and bifurcating the commissioners into pro- and anti-Lamport factions. By mid-1957 his chief external target was Gardiner, with whom he had worked cooperatively as mayor but from whom he> now parted company over the questions of Metro's spending priorities and its role in transit decisions. Gardiner at first seemed to enjoy the row. When reporters questioned him about a panel discussion at the University of Toronto in which he and Lamport had exchanged hot words, he replied that the evening had been good fun: 'You don't bring a couple of free-swinging guys like us down here if you want a temperance meeting.'45 The disagreement took a nasty turn in 1958, once Lamport concluded that his opponent was winning by attrition. Gardiner, Lamport now stated, was 'drunk with power' and had turned his fellow commissioners into lackeys

168 Big Daddy bowing and scraping at his every whim. Gardiner retorted by heaping scorn on Lamport's pronouncements on technical questions ('little Allan,' he said, learned about subway operations by playing with toy trains in his basement). He charged that Lamport was using the TTC for self-aggrandizement, and announced that unless decorum were reinstituted on the commission he would intercede with the province to acquire the authority to dismiss Lamport and any other commissioners who did not meet his standards. In January 1959 Lamport resigned as chairman. As a regular member of the commission, he now pushed his attacks to foolish lengths. Pressing accusations of betrayal of the TTC from within, he bullied one commissioner into taking a lie detector test and engaged in mild fisticuffs with another (the rough-housing was replayed for the edification of the press). He perpetrated his most lurid caper in June 1960, when he donned dark glasses and a straw hat (to disguise himself as a tourist, he explained to reporters), lurked outside the Metro chairman's office, then confronted and berated a TTC official who had been inside conferring with Gardiner. The usually supportive Telegram could only admit that 'the picture of [Lamport's] rotund, distinctive, and belligerent person ... soft-footing it after the subway manager, is not one to encourage the public to take the matter seriously.'46 Lamport left the commission in September 1960 to run for mayor on an anti-Gardiner platform. He was soundly trounced and so, by now, was the TTC. Lamport's claim that the TTC had been reduced to 'just a Metro department, a rubber stamp for Fred Gardiner's decisions,' was not far from the mark.47 The carnival atmosphere surrounding the commission had further discredited it at a time when its independence was already being sapped by its financial debilitation and by Gardiner's insistence on codetermination of major policy questions. Packed with more pliant members, it was now confined mainly to housekeeping and to those issues the politicians found it suitable to eschew.48 Almost lost in the commotion over the TTC's status was the content of transportation policy. In 1958 Metro took the decision, which Gardiner had presaged in 1956, to spend $102 million over ten years in constructing the second subway. Ground was broken in 1959 and in 1961, after Gardiner negotiated the provincial loan, it was decided to shave three years off the construction time. If these actions sealed the dedication to mass transit, they also raised the question of how this was to be related to the previous commitment on roadways. Gardiner's answer was phrased in terms of 'balance.' Metropolitan Toronto was to be attentive to both needs, to produce 'a practical and effective combination of expressways and rapid transit.' The two programs were to ripen in harmony: 'Expressways ands rapid transit lines

169 What kind of city? have to proceed concurrently and neither should be slowed down in favour of the other.'49 The sincerity of Gardiner's acquired convictions on mass transit cannot be gainsayed. Nor can the fact that in the long term Metro's policies were a boon to mass transit in Toronto. To be sure, the Gardiner years were a time of marked decline in gross transit ridership (down 16 per cent between 1954 and 1961) and per capita use (down 34 per cent). But these were not much more than half the rates of loss experienced in the United States. More revealing were the trends after Gardiner's retirement, when the full effects of earlier policy choices became apparent: a gradual increase in overall TTC ridership, and a holding steady of the number of annual trips per person and of transit's share of all trips (about one-third, as opposed to two-fifths in the mid-1950s). Clearly public transit had benefited greatly from the investment in new facilities and from the relatively high density of population - almost double that common in American metropolitan centres - resulting from the limitation of urban sprawl and the tendency toward apartment living. The Metropolitan Toronto of the 1970s possessed an urban transit system 'as good or better than any in North America by any criterion.'50 This point having been made, it is imperative to underline that Gardiner and his government also presided over a major expansion in the use and impact of the motor vehicle. The number of registered automobiles in Metro spiralled by 58 per cent between 1954 and 1961, and the ratio of cars to people climbed by 25 per cent. The automobile's share of total travel stopped ascending in the early 1960s, but the unabated growth in the region's population and economy meant a persistent rise in the absolute number of auto trips and in the effect of this travel on the urban fabric. Even for commuting to work, where transit's advantages were greatest, the surge in private vehicle use was relentless. By 1961 the number of cars entering the downtown core at rush hour was up by one quarter over the 1954 level (it was up by more than a half by 1970); into the intermediate zone around the core, traffic increased by a third by 1961.51 In the suburbs, particularly the mushrooming outer communities, automobile ownership and usage for all purposes far outran central-city levels. While many of these trends were beyond the control of any government, in certain fundamental ways they were aided and abetted by public policy. Metro (and provincial) road programs enabled a steady improvement in vehicular mobility; by the mid-1960s the territory within a thirty-minute drive of downtown Toronto was half again as large as a decade before.52 As far as the choice of travel mode was concerned, Gardiner's occasional talk of restoring transit to primary place was at odds with many of his other statements and

170 Big Daddy actions. When he tabled the key subway project in council, he predicted that the number of transit riders in its tributary area 'will not increase in the same ratio as population,' a remark that can only be construed as suggesting a net shift away from transit patronage.53 As to the immense suburban hinterland beyond, Gardiner said in the same speech that the soundest course was to let development proceed and leave the question of rapid transit 'for someone else to decide.' The latter statement winked at the choices about transportation implicit in the pattern of development already set in motion. Metro and the local municipalities accepted a density of suburban settlement that was higher than in most American cities but still less than half that prevailing in Toronto proper. This spread of the physical city made extensive automobile travel attractive and downright necessary to large segments of the suburban population. The only transit service practicable in most sections of the suburbs was the commuter-oriented bus route, and even graduated fares could not prevent two thirds of these from running at a loss in 1961. Neither were piercing questions asked by public authorities about the economic trends that indulged the car. Only private travel could reach most of the horizontally organized factories and industrial parks being built on large parcels of land in the suburbs and fringe. As elsewhere in North America, the overwhelming proportion of the region's new retail trade was being located in suburban shopping centres designed around auto access, facilities on the model of the Yorkdale Plaza in North York (much extolled by Gardiner and other politicians) with its 6,500-vehicle parking lot.54 The decisive shift of travel toward mass transit intimated in some of Gardiner's bolder statements would have required a different strategy for metropolitan planning. It would also have entailed a far more critical attitude toward private motor traffic. Gardiner took the popular taste for the automobile as a given, not only because the car was a versatile means of transportation but on account of its importance to the overall industrial economy (curtailed production 'would be a tragedy for the prosperity of this country') and its psychological value in a consumer society ('there is nothing which gives a man such a feeling of importance as driving ... in a two-toned automobile plentifully splashed with chrome'). The automobile user, he said, could not be 'derricked' out of his vehicle; rather, he had to be coaxed onto transit by 'a more convenient and more economical mode of travel with rapid and regular service.'55 Comparative experience shows the severe limitations on any such coaxing process. For most trips in large cities, the crux of the matter is that motoring saves time over public transit, even modern rapid transit. And time, according to much of our current knowledge (none of which was available to Gardiner), is valued by many travellers more heavily than the monetary cost

171 What kind of city? of vehicles or transit fare. Metropolitan Toronto could have tipped the transportation balance toward transit only by emphatically increasing the cost of motoring, either by slowing driving down or by collecting stiff charges for highway use and parking. 56 It could, in other words, have accepted a diminution in private mobility as a necessary cost of containing the use and impact of the motor vehicle. Such a trade-off, with its political and economic repercussions, seems never to have been seriously mooted by Gardiner and his colleagues. If there was any indefiniteness about whether the new affinity for mass transit had watered down Gardiner's commitment to road transportation, it was removed by the events of his last years in office. Subways or no subways, he meant to build roads. Promptly after the publication of the 1959 draft plan, Gardiner subscribed to its transportation recommendations. These provided for, in company with two new rapid transit lines by 1980, the construction of'a complete metropolitan expressway system with radial, crosstown, and circumferential routes.' The system would include two freeways not previously discussed at length and would raise expressway mileage in Metropolitan Toronto from 42 to 103. Even after the second subway decision, Metro transportation expenditures were already slanted to the benefit of roads ($11.2 million for roads in 1961, $7.4 million for subways). In November 1961 Gardiner projected new expressway spending of $347 million by 1980, vastly more than the $100 million for rapid transit. 57 It was perhaps fitting that conflict over expressways should be fully joined on the very issue that impelled Gardiner into metropolitan politics more than a decade before - the Spadina Expressway. As chairman of the county planning board before 1950, Gardiner saw his efforts to launch the Spadina Road Extension, as the radial highway to the northwest then was called, thwarted by York township. In June 1953 he expressed confidence that the new metropolitan administration would soon 'be able to push this thing through.'58 Events again unfurled more slowly than he anticipated. York reiterated its opposition during preliminary discussion in 1954, saying the highway would aggravate downtown congestion and cause 'a depreciation of property values' along its route. 59 Debate was adjourned at this time by the decision to give precedence to the Don Valley Parkway, without which the Spadina project would surely have been half-way to completion by Gardiner's retirement. In September 1956, after reviewing a staff report, the planning board accorded with a Gardiner motion that it was 'impossible to improve upon' the Spadina route contained in the report, a route now expanded to six lanes from four.60 Again, as Metro carried through on investments elsewhere, the project disappeared from public view.

172 Big Daddy It re-emerged in February 1960, when Gardiner had his council's roads committee approve the route drafted in 1956. Once Metro council adopted the committee report (which it did without extensive debate), Gardiner was able to use classic bulldozer tactics. 'Because of actions previously taken,' he insisted, 'the Metropolitan Corporation is committed to the route.'61 But debate did not cease. It continued and picked up force in 1960 and 1961, a tocsin portending greater strife ahead. The road was now to cost $70 million, $58 million more than when it was pondered in 1954. It was to have a rapid transit track down its centre strip, thus satisfying Gardiner's balance requirement. It was to encroach on a pleasant park and, of the utmost political importance, it was to be the first Metro expressway to require the clearance of a sizable number of homes. At its southern terminus in Toronto it was to connect with a possibly more intrusive crosstown expressway running east to the Don Valley. Even the interchange between the two roads would be, under the tentative design, an intimidating structure towering forty feet in the air, occupying sixteen acres of land, and dispacing 250 housing units. In the autumn of 1961 the first City of Toronto politicians, who as a group had consistently supported expressways since the 1943 city plan's call for a latticework of 'superhighways,' defected to the opposition. In many cases their objection was less to Spadina than to the projected crosstown artery, which one city controller termed 'a fantastic planner's dream which will wreck the heart of the City of Toronto as far as residential living and the accompanying amenities are concerned.'62 As council began to comb through detailed plans for the northern and southern extremities of Spadina, ratepayers' groups from York and Toronto joined the fray with a single-mindedness not previously seen in Metro politics. Several hundred onlookers packed the decisive committee meetings, and spokesmen for the neighbourhood groups accused Gardiner of wanting to build a second expressway monument to himself. Trading insults with members of the deputations, Gardiner adjured his colleagues on the connection between their decision and the continuation of metropolitan growth: 'You are making a big contribution to slowing development in the Metro area if you don't support the Spadina project. This whole area could grind to a halt.'63 Ransacking his storehouse of political debts and casting several tie-breaking votes himself, Gardiner shoved motions approving the first mile of Spadina and the southern interchange through the roads and executive committees. At his final council meeting, on December 12, 1961, the crosstown decision was postponed. The start to the Spadina Expressway was authorized by fifteen votes to seven. 'You could see that the council wasn't enthusiastic about it,' a participant in the meeting said later. 'Gardiner was the only one who was really attached to the thing. We were

173 What kind of city? being put into an impossible situation, yet we went along anyway. No one could have pulled it off except him.' 64 Big Daddy was leaving, but his last and most contentious project was under way.

8 Changes of season

Gardiner jolted the 1961 inaugural meeting of his council with the news that this would be his concluding year in office. The decision, which he had pored over since his spate of illnesses in 1958, was never reconsidered once he made it public. Tokens of tribute began to roll in shortly thereafter. In May 1961 the University of Toronto, Gardiner's alma mater, awarded him an honorary doctoral degree. In the autumn it was the turn of his peers and admirers in political life to observe the rites of leave taking, some of them moving and some banal. On an overcast November 9, 1961, an uncharacteristically selfconscious Gardiner was honoured by a parade sponsored by the Downtown Businessmen's Association. His open car was showered with ticker tape, serenaded by a marching band, saluted by twenty airplanes from local flying clubs, and accompanied by several squads of majorettes, eighteen cowboys in full range gear, a troop from the Toronto militia regiments, the ten finalists in the Star's 'Second Annual Sweetheart of Metro Contest,' and thirty-six convertibles chock-full of politicians. At the ceremony on the City Hall steps, Gardiner made a short speech and tripped a switch to turn on the Yonge Street Christmas lighting. Two weeks later came a testimonial banquet attended by 1,500, one of their number an impassive Prime Minister Diefenbaker, and said by its organizer to be 'the biggest dinner of its kind ever held in Canada.' The plan had been to present Gardiner with the keys to a Rolls Royce. At his request, the money collected went to establish a scholarship fund in his name at the University of Toronto. Leslie Frost, the master of ceremonies, aptly directed his remarks to the unifying theme of the retiring chairman's regime: growth. Gardiner had been 'the man for the job' of developing the Toronto metropolis. 'When Fred Gardiner took over Metropolitan Toronto, the thirteen municipalities were incapable of growing any more. Now we have great development, great throughways, great things.'1

175 Changes of season METRO AFTER

GARDINER

Toronto's metropolitan government was invented in order to further a limited range of objectives. The framers of its constitution, Gardiner included, sought to enhance first and foremost the effectiveness of urban government in addressing previously defined problems of policy, not the nature of public access to government decisions. They strove to increase effectiveness in one very specific sense: in the promotion of what was presumed to be a common and profound interest in rapid urban growth. The signal accomplishments of the Gardiner years - the 'great development, great throughways, great things' of Frost's valediction - were a deliberate execution of this original mandate. Metropolitan Toronto's growth strategy was a response to the unique opportunities presented by Toronto's location and established role in the economy. Equally to the point, it harmonized with the general circumstances of Canadian urban life in the two decades after the war. These circumstances went well beyond the readily quantifiable realities of high birth rates, massive immigration that made Canadian cities far more heterogeneous than ever before, steadily increasing incomes and standards of consumption, and cheap energy. They included also a set of attitudes, not least of them what one observer has called 'a simple demand for More, More, More' in the private sphere and a pervasive air of disengagement from public pursuits. 2 Well before Gardiner's exit, fears had been vented about the long-term viability of a system that 'is kept functioning only by the determination, and at times the despotism, of one man.' 3 A great deal was made in particular about the glaring structural stresses within the Metro federation. In his last year as chairman, Gardiner presided over an episodic debate about the maintenance of the two-tier system (which many Toronto politicians wanted superseded by one amalgamated city), the boundaries of the constituent municipalities, their mode of representation on the Metro council, and the division of legislative powers. In June 1961 Gardiner presented his personal reform plan. It would have retained the federative principle, reduced the number of municipal units to five, allocated seats on the council in rough ratio to population, and transferred to the Metro level several major functions, including welfare, public health, and all assisted housing. Council did not adopt the proposal, but one of the reasons for this (see chapter 4) was Gardiner's lack of zest in promoting it. This diffidence sprang from a reluctance to impose changes on his colleagues in his waning months in power. It bespoke also Gardiner's general satisfaction, not to say complacency, about the nature and impact of the Metro system. 'There is no use in interfering with a well-oiled and well-operating piece of machinery,' he had said as recently as I960.4 As

176 Big Daddy Gardiner pointed out repeatedly during the debate, no one was advocating a reversion to the fragmentation of the days before 1953. A thirteen- or five-unit federation, a Metro with or without additional powers, even an amalgamated city - in Gardiner's mind, all were boundlessly preferable to the arrangements anteceding Metro, and all would have been proficient at accommodating the 'era of development' he had foretold and welcomed in 1949. In the end it was the province, the only power equal to doing so, that revamped Metro's machinery. Upon receipt of a royal commission report on the subject, the Robarts government legislated continuance of the metropolitan government and the consolidation of the thirteen local communities into an enlarged City of Toronto and five suburban 'boroughs'; one of the municipalities to be liquidated was Gardiner's own Forest Hill. The reform, effective in 1967, also proportioned representation on Metro council to population, assigned several important services (among them public welfare and waste disposal) to Metro council, and fortified the powers of the metropolitan school board. The remarkable thing about these revisions, in view of all the disputation that preceded them, was 'the virtual absence of public dissent.'5 The silence attested assuredly to fatigue and boredom. It also indicated a large measure of acceptance. The structure of the Metro system has never since enjoyed the political prominence it claimed in the early 1960s. The City of Toronto is now cognizant that in any amalgamated metropolis the preponderance of power would rest with politicians from the suburbs, which contain twice as many people as the old city. Mainly for this reason, the city in the early 1970s jettisoned its demand for complete integration. In the suburbs, which have furnished both of the Metro chairmen elected since 1969, the persistence of Metro is a foregone conclusion. A provincial royal commission headed by John Robarts (now retired from the premier's office that Gardiner helped him gain) reported in 1977 that it had found no strong public sentiment for wholesale change. It limited itself to suggestions for improving the existing two-tier system rather than replacing it with something else. As the metropolitan government ages, its existence and its basic features seem more and more to be taken for granted. This is far from saying that Metropolitan Toronto's progress has been tranquil. In fact, issues much less tractable than those of structure and formal process have, since the mid-1960s, crowded onto its agenda and raised the temperature of its politics. In one sense, the metropolitan regime has been afflicted by the inescapable ailments of middle age. Metro, so new and alluring in its early years, has acquired limps, wrinkles, and sags. It is no longer a novelty, as regional governments of one type or another - all of them owing their inspiration directly or indirectly to Gardiner's system in Toronto - have

177 Changes of season become commonplace in Ontario and most other Canadian provinces. As the metropolitan government's existence has come to be taken for granted, so too have many of its accomplishments. Its shortcomings and failures, meanwhile, get more conspicuous, and its freedom of action becomes hedged by previous commitments. Metro's affairs have also been greatly complicated by the process of learning, which is integral to politics in all societies. 'Policy-making is a form of collective puzzlement on society's behalf,' writes Hugh Heclo.6 In Metropolitan Toronto, this puzzlement has produced innovation and insight. Inevitably, it has also resulted in disappointment. The most notable casualty has been the illusion that solutions to big-city problems will flow naturally from an increase in the scale of big-city government. This belief was implicit in Gardiner's brave remark to his first press conference in 1953 that 'our troubles have always been over mechanics,' and in much of what he did afterwards. Gardiner's assumption has been proved untenable by events, just as experience has called it into question in other urban societies (such as Britain).7 Metropolitan machinery in Toronto has solved some problems. It has been irrelevant to others. Still others it has alleviated, but often in such a way as to present new and unexpected puzzles to the public and its representatives. So, for example, under Gardiner the metropolitan government provided the infrastructure for a massive expansion of housing production; along the way it ministered to an eruption of apartment construction and a slide toward concentration in the development industry, neither of which was omened or desired by the system's creators. Gardiner's Metro responded to the transportation problem by seeking to balance its expenditures between private and public modes; in doing so it helped maintain and upgrade the continent's best public transit system, and still managed to stimulate automobile travel and touch off a fervent anti-expressway movement. Metropolitan government contributed in league with other factors to a boom in downtown development; Toronto was spared the decay and 'disinvestment' often found in American cities, but many of its leaders came eventually to object to the boom as too big and too fast. The most palpable changes in Metropolitan Toronto politics since 1961 have resulted from alterations to the environment within which Gardiner's successors have worked. One fundamental change has been the billowing in expectations about the dimension of politics in which Metro's founders had the least interest - public access to the institutions of government. 'The most significant change in the politics of Metropolitan Toronto during the past ten years,' Robarts noted in his 1977 report, 'is the general acceptance of the right of individuals and groups of private citizens to participate in the process of

178 Big Daddy governmental decision-making.'8 The 'citizens' movement,' (so named by its friends in a master stroke of public relations) fed in Toronto as in other Canadian cities on the mood of questioning of established authority that affected local and national politics all over the Western world and was brought to Toronto in its most immediate form by political exiles from the United States. Its germ can be discerned in some of the conflicts in which Gardiner was enmeshed as Metro chairman. It gathered coherence in disputes over urban renewal, private redevelopment, and highway projects in the middle and late 1960s. Although confrontation politics of the more theatrical variety reached its zenith in Metropolitan Toronto in the early 1970s, a residue of deeply felt attitudes remain among many of those active in its affairs: a tendency to see government as a reactive rather than an active force in society, an animosity toward concentrated power and bureaucracy, a partiality toward small units for participation and administration, a suspicion of large private corporations, and a general reading of virtue into the preferences of residential neighbourhoods. On all these scores the new credenda is antipathetic to, and is a reaction against, the style Gardiner epitomized in the generation before, with its unaffected acceptance of active and big governments that 'get things done,' disinterest in participation other than at election time, willingness to let market forces determine the shape of private enterprise, and lack of nervousness about overriding political minorities however defined. The new ideology of participation has been most influential in the central city, especially among members of the region's intellectual and communications elites who reside and work there. The suburbs have not been immune to its effects. It was there, it should be remembered, that concern about access was most pronounced when metropolitan government was being debated before 1953. Downtown and suburban critics alike have agreed that it is the metropolitan government that is most at odds with their expectations. The metropolitan regime - shaped by a man who likened a municipality to an industrial corporation, huge in budget and territory, with its indirectly elected council, its powerful chairman chosen by other politicians, and its penchant for dealing with its member governments rather than its citizens - is almost made to order for the charge. The very strength imparted to the system by its founding boss, Frederick Gardiner, and which saw it safely through its early years, has now come to be seen as its greatest drawback. This perception is most acute for the indispensable office Gardiner himself filled. As Robarts wrote: The result [of the structure of the Metro government] is that there is a general perception, borne out in many of the submissions made to the [Royal] Commission,

179 Changes of season that decision-making at Metro is a remote process, untouched by and untouchable for the average citizen. It is apparently a common view that the Metro Chairman and the Metro bureaucracy have inordinately large powers to direct and control policy and executive decisions ... The position of Metropolitan Chairman, its role and responsibilities, received more comment in briefs to the Commission than did any other single topic. While no one suggested that the power of the Chairman has ever been used improperly, there is widespread concern about the influence wielded by him. 9

This is at once a recognition and an indictment of Gardiner's institutional legacy. The second essential aspect of the atmosphere of Toronto politics to have changed since Gardiner's time is the attitude toward growth. Within less than a decade of Gardiner's retirement, the understanding of the early 1950s on which his government was founded - that massive growth of the Toronto urban community was unavoidable and highly desirable - was under frontal attack. Metropolitan growth bequeathed Toronto a more prosperous economy, a far more polyglot population bearing scant resemblance to the British and Protestant city of Gardiner's youth, and a more rich and cosmopolitan culture. It also begot what Fred Hirsch calls 'positional competition,' the contest in an expanding economy for goods whose enjoyment by some individuals is lessened by other people's enjoyment of them. Rapid urban development, like material growth in many other settings, stimulated demands 'that can be satisfied for some only by frustrating demand by others.'10 Opposition to growth was most intense in the City of Toronto, now reduced to a minority in the metropolitan community, whose politicians had earlier held the ensign of metropolitan development higher than anyone else. Like the movement for participation and citizen access, its pillars of support were sunk most firmly into the middle class. Anti-growth sentiment in Toronto attained its greatest heights on the issues of traffic and freeway construction, where the tensions among different constituencies (most acute between a central city overloaded with vehicles and suburbs dependent on the automobile for access to the centre's riches) proved especially difficult to suppress. A turning point was the campaign to stop construction of the same Spadina Expressway that Gardiner had seen through its early stages and fought to get off the drawing board in 1961. Gardiner had thought that by getting Spadina started he would give his heirs little choice but to complete it. He was mistaken. In June 1971, after several years of pitched political battles and increasingly sour controversy, Premier William Davis, the fifth in the line of Tory premiers stretching back to George Drew, announced that the provincial government would not permit Metro to finish the expressway. In December 1972 city voters underscored the change in

180 Big Daddy mood by electing a mayor, David Crombie, whose platform emphasized 'neighbourhood preservation,' retaining 'a sense of time and place' in Toronto by historical conservation and other means, and halting expressway construction. It strains the imagination to visualize a Metro chairman or any other politician proposing today, as Gardiner once did cavalierly, to dismantle and reassemble a century-and-a-half-old fort; or igniting an audience by equating Toronto's growth with that of Los Angeles; or proclaiming that the sound of trucks barrelling down city streets was music to his ears; or saying that the acme of a sound transportation policy was the courageous plowing of arterial roads through rows of houses. The exquisite irony surrounding this change in public perspectives (a change which was less clear cut outside the city proper) was that it coincided with bigger social and political trends that were rendering the question of the desirability of growth largely an academic one. Between 1971 and 1974, the province established regional governments modelled on the Metro system to the north, west, and east of Metropolitan Toronto. Territorial expansion is now precluded at a time when the great mass of the land within the boundaries of Metropolitan Toronto is developed. Of equal significance are the demographic consequences of smaller family size, reduced overseas immigration, and relocation in the suburban fringe. The best available estimates have it that the population of Metropolitan Toronto - which increased by 45 per cent from 1951 to 1961, by 29 per cent from 1961 to 1971, and by a mere 2 per cent from 1971 to 1976- will decline by 10 per cent between 1976 and 1991.11 The repercussions for the metropolitan government of the closing out of Toronto's era of development are by no means clear. They have only begun to be grappled with. But there is no cause to doubt the continuing need to address issues that transcend community and municipal boundaries. None of the federal partners acting alone, and none of the smaller communities within them, can administer public welfare with justice, protect citizens from criminals, operate an adequate mass transit system, attract the industrial investment that will no longer come automatically, dispose of solid and liquid wastes, or supply hundreds of thousands of dwellings with clean water - let alone pursue more radical visions such as serious control of automobile traffic, regulation of land prices, or material expansion of the stock of assisted housing. If not assigned to a metropolitan government responsible in some way to local voters, issues like these most likely will gravitate to the control of senior governments. If dealt with locally, they will either be tinkered with piecemeal, be pawns in an intricate intermunicipal diplomacy serving mainly the interests of politicians and civil servants, or become the preserve of appointed regional authorities such as those abounding in American cities.

181 Changes of season Practice elsewhere suggests that decentralized and improved public access to government is not incompatible with centralized financing, administration, and bargaining. However this question is approached, there is no mechanical arrangement of institutions that will eliminate the positional and other conflicts that develop along with the large industrial city. In satisfactorily coping with these conflicts lies the task of metropolitan politics. And politics, as the experience of Frederick Gardiner in his time elucidates so lavishly, probes and settles no frontiers without the art of leadership. GARDINER AFTER METRO

Gardiner cleaned out his office drawers and left City Hall in the second week of January 1962. He was intent, he said, on resuming the private career he had suspended nine years before. This prospect, which his age made unrealistic from the outset, was only partially fulfilled. Gardiner did return to his law firm, where he became the senior partner with the death of Fred Parkinson in June 1962. But as an individual practitioner he made only a few appearances in the courtroom. 'I was surprised at how hard it was to pick up the threads. Sometimes it was almost like being an articling student all over again. I had lost my contacts and my feel for procedure and my drive for finishing cases off.' Gardiner had not lost his compulsion to make money. More than ever before, his business interests took precedence over all others. Gardiner's holdings of corporate shares and securities had been worth $250,000 in 1954; they were valued at $1 million within several years of his retirement from Metro, and at $4 million by 1975. 'I had always wanted to be a millionaire, and at last I could say I had done it. It was a strange way to arrive. You don't grasp until you have been through it that the best way to make a lot of money is to have a lot to begin with.' In 1962 Gardiner realized another lifelong ambition by being named to the board of directors of the Toronto Dominion Bank; his 100,000 shares made him the biggest private shareholder in this, the fifth largest bank in Canada. His money, prestige, and connections brought numerous other opportunities for investment and influence. The ardour with which he seized them showed the same restless hunger for work and recognition that had marked his previous life. As of 1965 Gardiner was president of Acton Limestone Quarries, a large quarrying operation based northwest of Toronto, vice-president of two manufacturing concerns with which he had been associated since the 1940s, chairman of the board of SOS Manufacturing (a maker of household products), and a member of the boards of eleven other corporations - the Toronto Dominion Bank, a trust company, a mortgage firm, a consumer finance concern, a life insurance company, a chain of hotels, a steel

182 Big Daddy manufacturer, a mining corporation, a producer of heavy trucks, a brick manufacturer, and a construction materials firm. Much of his remaining time he relegated to playing the stock market for speculative gain. Gardiner's enjoyment of the corporate world was genuine. It was, however, tempered by the realization that he could not lay title here to the pre-eminence he had won in government. He looked back on the experience in a 1972 letter to Leslie Frost: You indicated in your [recent] letter that being on Boards of Directors was for a time a matter of interest to you but that the attraction in such activities soon wears off. You were very fortunate indeed in the number of directorates you were invited to become a member of, and I had the same experience. However, I think what made these activities soon lose their attraction was the fact that you had been used to being the 'Boss' of the Province, as I had been used to being the 'Boss' of Metro. We did not feel comfortable when we became simply a member of another Board where we did not have the same influence as we had in our previous activities.12

In politics, too, Gardiner would never again be a boss. The leader of the Ontario New Democratic Party, Donald C. MacDonald, had predicted in November 1961 that Gardiner would be a one-man brain trust for the new Robarts government. 13 Nothing of the kind materialized. Gardiner's retreat from the business of the provincial Conservatives was very nearly total. Not until the late 1960s was he consulted on a policy issue of major moment, the cabinet's plan to institute in much of Ontario regional governments patterned after Metropolitan Toronto. He was dismayed, he confided to Frost in 1969, that the government was not content to do it 'on an evolutionary basis,' with due regard for local sensibilities. His discussions with the cabinet minister concerned, Darcy McKeough, showed him that 'there is quite a generation gap between [our] generation and his and... a reluctance in the younger generation to listen to what are intended to be words of humble advice from some of us who have been through the mill.' Frost commiserated, but urged patience: 'I do not know what you or I can do. The younger generation, perhaps with some justification, feel that they should be running things and that we are outmoded and outdated. One has to be careful in pressing personal views on this account.'14 Frost took his and Gardiner's reservations about regional government to Premier Robarts, but to no effect. The program was put into effect in most densely settled parts of Ontario, and at the heavy political toll to the Tory administration Gardiner had predicted to McKeough. It had to be suspended short of completion in 1975. Gardiner had no more real say in the affairs of Metropolitan Toronto. The new Metro leadership did not solicit his counsel, and that counsel was not

183 Changes of season volunteered. In the spring of 1963 Gardiner enlisted Frost's support in a successful effort to persuade the provincial cabinet to extend direct subsidies to subway construction.15 That summer he made his only appearance before Metro council, to argue, again successfully, for resumption of capital grants to local hospitals. But this, excepting ceremonial occasions and ribbon cuttings (among those the opening of the final leg of the Gardiner Expressway in 1966), was the extent of his direct participation. There were days when Gardiner wanted it otherwise. 'I wish I was fifteen years younger,' he said in an interview on his seventieth birthday. 'Somebody's got to sit down and set priorities.'16 There were at least the memories of power, his memories and those of others. 'I get a kick out of people when they spot me on the street,' he acknowledged in another interview. "There's Big Daddy," they say. It makes me easy to remember, and hell, I'd be annoyed if they didn't recognize me.'17 Gardiner did accept several appointments of a semi-political nature, which he welcomed as a relief from Bay Street. He was from 1961 onward a member of the board of governors of Toronto's second university, York University, to whose founding fund he donated $50,000. In 1963 he was named vice-president of the Canadian National Exhibition. In February 1965 the Toronto City Council, unable to decide between two other candidates, invited him on short notice to take a position on the three-man board that administers the city's electrical utilities. Gardiner did not accept gracefully the physical depredations of old age. He struggled to remain active in the face of a lengthening list of infirmities. It had been his deteriorating health, particularly the arthritis in his back and right hip, that prompted his decision to leave Metro. Ten months into his new life, he underwent major surgery for the arthritis and an intestinal condition. After three months of recuperation he returned to his office, thirty pounds lighter but with less pain in his side. By the time he turned seventy in 1965 the aching and stiffness in his joints had resumed to the point that he was walking with a cane. In the summer of 1967 he suffered his most serious blow, a stroke that confined him to bed for two months. It left his speech mildly slurred, his recall of names impaired, and his capacity for work greatly reduced. In September 1971 his doctors attempted a delicate operation to restore his crippled hip with an artificial ball and socket. 'Give me a few months and I'll be strolling down Bay Street like old times,' he assured a reporter shortly afterward. 'It's like being born again.'18 It was soon evident that these hopes were misplaced. When the implanted joint failed to function properly, Gardiner was forced to rely on a wheelchair for almost all his mobility, a terrible letdown for a man whose physical vigour had always been integral to his style. Many of the old diversions, including alcohol, became a thing of the past. Gardiner's enfeebled condition hastened the curtailment of his private activities. His corporate directorships began to fall away, voluntarily or due to

184 Big Daddy age restrictions, in the late 1960s. All were gone by the middle 1970s. In January 1973, several weeks before his seventy-eighth birthday, he resigned as a partner in Gardiner, Roberts, his law firm of fifty years. He retained the honorific title of counsel and a small office and secretary in the firm's Adelaide Street headquarters. Preoccupied though he was with the changes in his personal circumstances, Gardiner took full notice of the transformations in the climate of Toronto politics. In the middle and late 1960s he liberally voiced his opinions of the pubescent anti-growth movement. He seemed to relish putting them across in as curmudgeonly a manner as he could muster. Typical were his 1969 remarks on the debate over the district around the 1890s Toronto City Hall building, which the T. Eaton Company had proposed to tear down to make room for a shopping and office complex (and whose preservation Gardiner himself had defended in 1955, 'on the ground of sentiment'). 'If I'd been there,' he proclaimed of the debate, 'I'd have got the oldest and the biggest and the most powerful bulldozer I could get hold of, and I'd make the best damn speech I ever made in my life to get somebody to redevelop that area.' Was not the structure a historic site? 'It's all out of date ... What's historical about it? It was only built in 1895. Christ, I was alive in 1895. What's historical about me?'19 In an interview the following year, he declaimed in equally caustic terms against pressure groups opposing development and against the province's plans to hem Metro in within its current boundaries. If left to its own devices, he said, Toronto 'will continue to grow at an unprecedented rate.'20 In 1971 he declared that the Spadina Expressway had been merely delayed by short-term political opportunism and that its eventual completion was inevitable. In June 1975 Gardiner made a well-advertised appearance at the public hearings of John Robarts' royal commission on Metropolitan Toronto's future. He walked alone into the hearing room, laboriously, supported by two thick canes. Speaking without notes, Gardiner preached the gospel he had followed in power. He lectured the audience on the need for politicians who get things done: 'I see that they have got Chief Executive Officers, speech writers, advisors of this kind, advisors of that. [If] I was impolite I would say that if they would get up off their rusty-dusty, as some people call it, and get out and do the things that need to be done instead of hiring a flock of experts to confuse them, the place would be better off.' Gardiner's principal recommendation was his rejoinder to the political developments of the preceding decade. He became the only major witness to call for the dissolution of the metropolitan federation - the very system he had done more than anyone to establish - and its replacement by an amalgamated city with a directly elected mayor. Only unified government would allow the metropolis to continue to grow, would 'look forward to the future and develop it in accordance with the

185 Changes of season tremendous assets that are here.' Only centralization could surmount the shovings and pullings of self-interested localities and communities. 'We have too much of a fractured system ... nobody to look after the general benefit and the general interest of the community at large.' When Robarts piped in that such a change would be rejected by the public because it would create problems of access to government, Gardiner replied with a flick of his wrist that the access question did not concern one per cent of the people. Community groups 'raise a hullabaloo that sounds like a midway circus and they cause more trouble than they do good.'21 Gardiner's last remaining link with workaday politics was his seat on Toronto Hydro, the utilities commission to which the city council appointed him in 1965. The commission had conventionally stayed aloof from open controversies, but in the politicized climate of recent years it has not been able to sidestep conflicts over rates, employee relations, the location of its facilities, and energy conservation. As vice-chairman of the commission, a trifling position compared to his previous attainments, Gardiner received an $8,000 salary and the use of a chauffeur-driven limousine. He made no public statements on hydro policy. However, as his other connections evaporated, he seemed to value the round of meetings and consultations more and more. Wisely or not, he clung harder to the office the harder others tried to take it away from him. In 1969 he easily withstood an attempt by his former tormentor, Allan Lamport, now a city controller in the twilight of his career, to oust him. In 1973, with anti-growth politicians burning to remove him as a symbol of past errors, Gardiner won reappointment by only three votes, and only after several days of lobbying, a public presentation to the council, and an endorsement by Mayor Crombie. Of his monologue before council on hydroelectric power, one of the aldermen who voted against him said, 'We learned more about Hydro today than we did in the last three years.'22 In February 1975 Gardiner's margin of victory was two votes. In 1977 he was returned when the opposition failed to agree on an alternative. During his speech to council, while arguing that it was unfair to 'criticize me for growing old,' he promised that this would be his last try.23 Two years later he was back again in his wheelchair, back for another last hurrah. One newspaper columnist sensed 'something forlorn about the Gardiner candidacy.'24 It was perhaps a bit of that, but there was something admirable, too, in this refusal to quit. On February 19, 1979, when it became clear that he would be defeated by several votes, he withdrew his application. His successor, a former writer and community organizer with an interest in ecology, was thirty-three years of age. For the first time in half of a long life, Frederick Gardiner holds no official position, except for the 'honorary chairmanship' that the metropolitan council bestowed on him, as a sop to his pride, in August 1979. Having

186 Big Daddy outlived most of his closest political and private associates, he perceives himself a survivor and has the aura of one. Robert Rowland, the Forest Hill brick manufacturer who initially involved him in practical politics, died as early as 1960. Leslie Frost, his great patron and comrade, died in 1973, his partisan adversaries George Drew and John Diefenbaker in 1973 and 1979, his Metro council foe Nathan Phillips in 1976, his lifelong best friend Norman Holtby in 1979, his son Warren in 1980. Gardiner and his wife continue to reside in the apartment they have rented since 1952. He still comes to his office each work day at 11:00 a.m., fair weather or foul, driven now in a private limousine. Amid his memorabilia and records, he spends several hours dictating letters and tending to his personal finances. He reads profusely. He growls at visitors. He remembers much, and regrets only that he is now a bystander to events.

Notes

PREFACE

1 Preface to L.D. Feldman and M.D. Goldrick, eds, Politics and Government of Urban Canada, 3rd ed. (Toronto: Methuen 1976), p. x. 2 Report of the Royal Commission on Metropolitan Toronto (Toronto 1965), p. 194. Academic studies of the metropolitan system have invariably remarked on Gardiner's pivotal role. See John A. Grumm, Metropolitan Area Government: The Toronto Experience, Governmental Research Series no. 19 (Lawrence: Governmental Research Center, University of Kansas 1959), pp. 21-2; Frank Smallwood, Metro Toronto: A Decade Later (Toronto: Bureau of Municipal Research 1963), pp. 5-6; Harold Kaplan, Urban Political Systems: A Functional Analysis of Metro Toronto (New York: Columbia University Press 1967), especially pp. 57-62, 121-8; and Albert Rose, Governing Metropolitan Toronto: A Social and Political Analysis, 1953-1971 (Berke-

ley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1972), pp. 27-8, 82-3,97, 157. 3 Traffic statistics supplied by the Metropolitan Toronto Department of Roads and Traffic. The 154,000-vehicle figure applies to the Gardiner Expressway's most heavily travelled point, near its western terminus. Highway 401, a provincial road built originally to bypass Metropolitan Toronto but now passing directly through it, has a peak daily volume of 210,000 vehicles. But, since Highway 401 consists of twelve to fourteen lanes of traffic to the Gardiner Expressway's six, the density of travel on the latter is far higher. 4 For Moses' character, I have relied on Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1974). 5 Donald J. Higgins, Urban Canada: Its Government and Politics (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada 1977), p. 138.

188 Notes to pages 3-14 CHAPTER 1

1 Globe, January 22, 1895. 2 Christopher Armstrong and H. V. Nelles, The Revenge of the Methodist Bicycle Company: Sunday Streetcars and Municipal Reform in Toronto, 1888-1897 (Toronto: Peter Martin Associates 1977), p. 2. 3 Information on David Gardiner has been assembled from his obituary in the Mail and Empire, January 7, 1933, a genealogy obtained from the Office of the Registrar General of Ontario, and entries in the Toronto City Directory and the city's assessment rolls. Crucial on this and related subjects were interviews with Frederick G. Gardiner, his sister Mrs Newton J. Powell, and Mrs Frederick G. Gardiner. Mrs Powell provided a family tree for David Gardiner as well as financial records originally compiled by Victoria Gardiner. 4 Interview, Frederick G. Gardiner. Unless otherwise indicated, all direct quotations from Gardiner in this book are taken from such interviews. Conversations with Gardiner are also the source for other information on his personal experience for which no other source is indicated. 5 Interview, Mrs Newton J. Powell, April 24, 1979. 6 Interview, Norman G. Holtby, July 5, 1977. 7 Globe, December29, 1910. 8 Varsity, November 23, 1914. 9 Ibid., December 7, 1914.

10 Gardiner's war record is outlined in a letter he wrote June 8, 1920, to the editor of the University of Toronto's Roll of Service; deposited in the University of Toronto Archives. 11 The Law Society's Ontario Weekly Notes for May 20, 1920, stated: The work, both of lecturers and students, was much hampered by the uncomfortably overcrowded state of the lecture rooms.' Gardiner and the halfdozen members of his class whom I interviewed remembered the deficiencies of the library more clearly. 12 Cartwright was appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada in 1949 and served as chief justice from 1967 to 1970. His grandfather, Sir Richard Cartwright, was a renowned parliamentarian who was a Liberal minister of finance for five years. Cartwright did not know Gardiner well at Osgoode Hall, 'as under our circumstances there was really nothing approaching "college life." ' Personal communication to the author, September 28, 1977. Gardiner was tied with A.J. Sneath for the highest marks in commercial law courses, but the prize in this area was awarded to Sneath because of Gardiner's other honours. 13 Interview, Harry S. Parkinson, April 19, 1979. 14 Roebuck resigned from the cabinet in April 1937. Gardiner's name was put on the 1938 list after intercessions on his behalf by Earl Rowe, the Ontario Conservative leader, and Peter Heenan, Hepburn's minister of lands and

189 Notes to pages 14-27 forests and a resident of Forest Hill. Interview, Earl Rowe, June 15, 1978; also interviews with Gardiner. 15 Most of Gardiner's corporate connections can be traced in Who's Who in Canada and the Canadian Who's Who. 16 One reason for this was Gardiner's fondness for American culture, and especially for American business culture. He told a reporter in 1961 : 'I was a great admirer of my contemporaries in American business and I still am. They were bright, they were sharp, they worked hard, they liked their families. They wanted their youngsters to be well educated and they were willing to do whatever was necessary to make sure they made themselves prosperous and their companies prosperous. My admiration for the Americans has never been diluted one bit' (Star, November 15, 1961). The Star changed its exact name several times during the period covered by this story. For the sake of convenience, it will be referred to throughout simply as the Star. 17 Leonard W. Archer, clerk of Forest Hill, in Ontario Municipal Board, In the Matter of the Application of the City of Toronto Pursuant to Section 23 of the Municipal Act (Toronto 1950-51), pp. 6111-12; hereafter OMB Hearings. A useful if saccharine overview of Forest Hill's development is to be found in William French, A Most Unlikely Village (Toronto: Ryerson Press 1964). A thorough survey of Forest Hill life, one of the classics of

18 19 20 21 22 23 24

urban sociology, is J.R. Seeley, R.A. Sim, and E.W. Loosley, Cresîwood Heights (New York: Basic Books 1956); unfortunately it contains little information on politics. OMB Hearings, p. 74. Village Post, June 30, 1938. Ibid., December 19 and 27, 1935; Globe, January 1, 1936. Village Post, January 3, 1936. Ibid., December 27, 1935. Ibid. Interview, Andrew G. Hazlett, November 18, 1977. One of Hazlett's fears was that some members of the Citizens' Committee were planning to promote industrial development in the North End like the kind decided against in the 1931 referendum. CHAPTER 2

1 The best account of the Rowe-Drew split is in Neil McKenty, Mitch Hepburn (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1967), pp. 119-24,187. 2 Village Post, February 18, 1937. Gardiner remained as head of the association until succeeded by his friend Robert Rowland in 1943. 3 Interview, Leopold Macaulay, Septenjber6, 1977. 4 Telegram, September 13 and 29, 1937. The exact title of this newspaper changed several times during the period covered by this book. It will be referred to throughout simply as the Telegram. 5 Interview, Earl Rowe, June 15, 1978.

190 Notes to pages 28-35 6 Star, July 21,1938. 7 Telegram, July 22, 1938. 8 Trent University Archives, C.G. Frost Papers, Gardiner to C.G. Frost, September 26, 1939. 9 Telegram, March 24, 1939, and November 15, 1940; Globe and Mail, January 15, 1943; Telegram, September 23, 1943. 10 Interview, Hugh D. Latimer, September 13, 1977. 11 The South York campaign is ably reviewed in J.L. Granatstein, The Politics of Survival: The Conservative Party of Canada, 1939-1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1967), pp. 96-111. Granatstein mentions the 'Social Security Gardiner' sobriquet on p. 102. 12 Thirty years later, Leslie Frost was surprised to be reminded that McKenzie had attended at all. 'I recollect he criticized Cecil for his part in it. I think he regretted this afterwards. This, of course, was at the instance of George [Drew]' (Trent University Archives, L.M. Frost Papers, L.M. Frost to Gardiner, February 21, 1972). My understanding of Gardiner's relations with the Toronto and Port Hope groups was greatly assisted by interviews with David J. Walker (September 22, 1977) and Donald M. Fleming (January 24, 1978). 13 PAC (Public Archives of Canada), PC Party Files, C.G. Frost to R.K. Finlayson, July 14, 1942. Further information on Gardiner's views and activities is in ibid., C.G. Frost to

14 15

16 17 18 19

20

21 22

D.R. Michener, April 18 and June 5, 1942; Frost to J.M. Macdonnell, June 16, 1942; Frost to Gardiner, June 16, 1942. Telegram, Septembers, 1942. Globe and Mail and Gazette (Montreal), September 7, 1942. A summary of Gardiner's memorandum is printed in Saturday Night, September 12, 1942, p. 6. Gazette, September 8, 1942. Ibid., September 7, 1942; Globe and Mail, September 7, 1942. Telegram, December 7, 1942. Gardiner's and Sedgwick's activities are described in the Star, December 11, 1942. Cecil Frost nominated Howard Green, a British Columbia MP and a former classmate of his at Osgoode Hall. PAC, R.B. Hanson Papers, Hanson to J.M. Macdonnell, February 3, 1941; Hanson to C.G. Frost, January 5, 1943. Ibid., Gardiner to R. A. Bell, January 8, 1943. In 1944 the national director of the party wrote that Willis 'has been in regular consultation with McKenzie, has seen cabinet ministers whenever anything arose relating toltheir district, has worked in close collaboration with all the provincial members with respect to their individual seats' (PAC, R.A. Bell Papers, 'Confidential - Problems of Organization,' undated but 1944). Willis owed his post primarily to his friend and neighbour Gordon Graydon, the MP from Peel, who served variously as organ-

191 Notes to pages 35-42

23

24

25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32

izer, House leader, president of the Conservative Association, and Conservative external affairs critic until his death in 1954. Gardiner had previously been appointed to the national executive in June 1941 and served to the end of 1942. Minutes of the meetings and press clippings on them are in PAC, PC Party Files. Star, October 1, 1948. Interview, Richard A. Bell, November 18, 1977. Globe and Mail, November 5, 1943. Gardiner later told Leslie Frost that in 1943 he 'was the logical successor and could have easily beaten my old friend Alex McKenzie as I had a much broader knowledge of the province-wide Association.' Gardiner added that he 'never could have made the contribution to the Party during the time he was organizer [and president] that Alex did' (Trent University Archives, C.G. Frost Papers, Gardiner to L.M. Frost, February 16, 1972). In my opinion, both of these judgments by Gardiner are correct. Latimer interview. Interview, Edwin A. Goodman, November 24, 1977. Interview, Joseph Sedgwick, September 21, 1977. Interview, Walter Robb, September 23, 1977. When Gardiner was chairman of Metropolitan Toronto, he and Robb took several weekends a summer to attend major league baseball games in American cities.

33 Interview, Harry I. Price, September 17, 1977. 34 Star and Globe and Mail, October 20, 1949. The Globe and Mail story did not name Gardiner but alluded to him in unmistakable terms. 35 Robbins, who was public relations officer from 1939 to 1961, was a close political associate of the man who induced Allan to challenge McKenzie, Highways Minister George Doucett. 36 Village Post, April 16, 1936. 37 Ibid., February 27 and March 5, 1936. 38 Ibid., November 12, 1936. 39 Ibid., November 26, 1936. 40 Ibid., December 2, 1937. 41 These items are taken from Minutes, Forest Hill Council, March 24, 1937, and January 19, 1938. 42 Star, June 9, 1938. 43 Minutes, Forest Hill Council, December 9, 1937. In 1933 there had been 85 families, comprising 362 individuals, on relief in Forest Hill. 44 Interview, Bruce P. Davis, September 28, 1977. 45 The occupations of councillors are taken from nomination papers iStored in the City of Toronto Archived. 46 Interview, G. Geldard Brigderi, October 25, 1977. 47 These calculations were made on the basis of the council minutes for 1938 to 1949. In the great majority of cases, the motion is simply marked 'Carried.' Most motions concerned routine, even trivial matters, and no effort was made by me to separate out

192 Notes to pages 42-50

48

49

50 51

52

53

weightier 'policy' decisions. Such a distinction is made for the analysis of voting in the Metropolitan Toronto Council undertaken in chapter 5. J.R. Seeley, R.A. Sim, and E.W. Loosley, Crestwood Heights (New York: Basic Books 1956), p. 224. See Ken Adachi, The Enemy That Never Was (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1976). Star, June 10 and 25, 1943. Telegram, September 23, 1943. It should not be thought that Gardiner's statements were the most extreme on this question. In 1942 Councillor Prescott declared that 'there are no good Japs, any more than there are good Germans.' In 1943 Councillor Williams opined: 'All Japanese should be shipped out of Canada after the war. I think we should only allow people who will assimilate with the other racial stocks here, and so form a more unified nation' (ibid., July 9, 1942; Star, June 10, 1943). The liberal core of original Jewish inhabitants, many of whom have severed almost completely their ties with orthodox Judaism, and who prize their half-acceptance by the Gentiles, symbolized by membership in Home and School, feel threatened, like the Gentiles, by the later Jewish influx, regarded by both liberal Jew and Gentile as vulgar, ostentatious, ignorant, and detrimental to the community' (Seeley, Kim, and Loosley, Crestwood Heights, p. 287). Minutes, Forest Hill Council, March 8, 1944.

54 Quotations from ibid., January 13, 1936, and March 2, 1938. 55 William French, A Most Unlikely Village (Toronto: Ryerson Press 1964), pp. 56-7. 56 Minutes, Forest Hill Council, January 2, 1940. 57 Star, February 6, 1947. 58 Breithaupt's principal backer was J. Ardagh Scythes, a prosperous businessman and a strong supporter of Attorney-General Leslie Blackwell, Frost's main opponent. 59 Star, December 11, 1948. 60 Ibid., November 24, 1936. 61 Telegram, December 4, 1938. 62 Interview, William I. Hearst, June 9, 1978. 63 Star, January 20, 1937. 64 Interview, Wilbert W. Gardhouse, June 18, 1977. 65 Globe, February 8, 1936; Globe and Mail, November 27, 1936. 66 Star, Februarys, 1937. 67 Ibid., April 5, 1938. 68 Telegram, November 26, 1942. 69 Minutes, York County Council, 1954, pp. 78-9. 70 See PAO (Public Archives of Ontario), L.M. Frost Papers, William Goodfellow to L.M. Frost, February 8, 1954. 71 Minutes, York County Council, 1939, p. 297. 72 Interview, Hilda M. Meyrick, October 22,1977. Miss Meyrick was county clerk from 1944 until 1953. Gardiner opposed her appointment on the grounds that this was one of those 'positions which women are not adequately fitted to fill' (Star, January 27, 1944).

193 Notes to pages 50-60 73 Interview, Charles H. Hooper, October 4, 1977. CHAPTER 3 1 Elinor Ostrom, 'Metropolitan Reform: Propositions Derived from Two Traditions,' Social Science Quarterly 53 (December 1972): 475. 2 See A.F.W. Plumptre, 'Report on the Government of the Metropolitan Area of Toronto' (Department of Political Science and Economics, University of Toronto June 1935), pp. 165-84; mimeographed. 3 Globe, December 8, 1911. 4 A copy of the draft bill was filed as Exhibit 28 before the Ontario Municipal Board hearings into metropolitan reorganization in 1950-51. All such materials, which are stored in boxes 966 to 977 of the OMB files, are identified hereafter as being in OMB Files. 5 Minutes, York County Council, 1934, p. 84. 6 Interview, David A. Croll, February 24, 1978. 7 These indignities are recounted in PAO (Public Archives of Ontario), Department of Municipal Affairs Files, Series M, H.H. Walker to A.J.B. Gray, August 4, 1939. 8 Interview, A.J.B. Gray, November 1, 1977. 9 The two-level rationale here follows the general discussion of access and service values in Report of the Ontario Committee on Taxation (Toronto 1967), vol. II, chap. 23. The classification of the effectiveness arguments

10

11 12 13

14

15

16 17 18 19

follows Willis D. Hawley, 4 On Understanding Metropolitan Political Integration,1 in Hawley et al., Theoretical Perspectives on Urban Politics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall 1976), p. 109. PAO, Department of Municipal Affairs Files, Series M, minutes of the Gray committee for December 15, 1938. Star, March 1, 1937. Telegram, June 3, 1939. J.B. McGeachy, Toronto? E-r, u-h... ' Maclean's Magazine, November 15, 1947, p. 53. See City Planning Board of Toronto, The Master Plan for the City of Toronto and Environs (December 1943). Government-business collaboration in Ontario's primary sector is provocatively analysed in H.V. Nelles, The Politics of Development (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada 1974). Globe and Mail and Telegram, May 9, 1944. Star, January 4, 1939. Village Post, April 7, 1938. Star, June 8, 1938. Gardiner expressed his view on this occasion on the subject of police protection in the county, which was periodically denounced as inadequate by provincial officials and the press after raids by provincial police on gambling premises that were tolerated by the local police forces. In 1937 Gardiner was a member of a county delegation that heard Attorney-General Roebuck describe one such establishment as

194 Notes to pages 60-69 resembling 4a medieval castle with fortified doors' that provincial officers had to knock down with a battering ram. Gardiner merely agreed with the sentiment of Warden MacDonald - 'You can't legislate people into heaven' (ibid., January 25, 1937). 20 Globe and M ail and Star, February 5, 1944. 21 Minutes, York County Council, 1942, p. 240. 22 Ibid., 1943, pp. 276-7. 23 Star, June 6, 1945. 24 Minutes, York County Council, 1947, p. 135. 25 Minutes, Toronto and Suburban Planning Board, March 6, October 24, and November 4, 1947. 26 Quotations from Star, May 21, 1948. 27 Ibid., November 15, 1961. 28 Ontario Municipal Board, In the Matter of the Application of the City of Toronto Pursuant to Section 23 of the Municipal Act (Toronto 1950-51), pp. 416-17; hereafter OMB Hearings. 29 Star, November 15, 1961. 30 Minutes, Toronto and York Planning Board, May 17, 1949. 31 PAO, L.M. Frost Papers, Gardiner to Frost, August 17, 1949. 32 Toronto and York Planning Board, Report (December 1949), p. 4. 33 Star, February 2, 1950. It should be noted that on several previous occasions Gardiner had called for a referendum in each municipality affected by a reorganization plan. 34 Toronto and York Planning Board, Report, p. 44. 35 Minutes, City of Toronto Council, 1950, Appendix A, pp. 261-9.

36 PAO, L.M. Frost Papers, Frost to Gardiner, January 6, 1950; Gardiner to Frost, January 10, 1950. 37 PAO, Department of Municipal Affairs Files, Series B, A.E.K. Bunnell memorandum to Frost, undated but apparently June 1950. 38 Quotations from Gardiner's testimony are from OMB Hearings, pp. 229-A, 446, 420-A, 513, 515-B; emphasis added. 39 Globe and Mail, June 30, 1950. 40 Summary of the Case of the Respondents, OMB Files. 41 OMB Hearings, pp. 5762, 6084. 42 Statistics on assessment and expenditures are taken from Ontario, Department of Municipal Affairs, Annual Report of Municipal Statistics (Toronto 1951). Information on the proportion of commercial and industrial assessment (which ranged from 57 per cent of the total in New Toronto and 50 per cent in Toronto to 6 per cent in North York) is in Civic Advisory Council of Toronto, Committee on Metropolitan Problems, First Report, section 2 (1950), pp. 169-71. 43 S.D. Clark, The Suburban Society (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1966), p, 40. 44 Telegram, December 1, 1948. 45 Ontario, Legislative Assembly, Debates, February 25, 1953, p. B-4. 46 See the remarks by the federal minister responsible for housing, C.D. Howe (Star, January 22, 1948), calling for direct co-ordination among the Toronto municipalities. Between 1946 and 1949, 9,000 units of rental

195 Notes to pages 69-77 housing for veterans were built in Ontario under agreements with the Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation; not a single one was constructed in the Toronto region. 47 PAO, L.M. Frost Papers, Meeting of January 16, 1950, Proceedings, p. 16. 48 In sending Municipal Affairs Minister George Dunbar a lengthy memorandum outlining four alternative recommendations in September 1952, Cumming referred to 'our next meeting with the Prime Minister,' implying that several conferences had taken place recently (OMB Files, Cumming to Dunbar, September 11, 1952). Frost's papers contain agendas for five meetings between October 28 and December 22, and make it clear that these treated Cumming's recommendations in detail. It is evident from the Frost-Cumming correspondence that the government was concerned about the political demands for immediate uniformity of service standards that would follow upon outright amalgamation. Gardiner apparently was not involved in these conferences. Years later Frost mentioned to him by letter 'the discussions I had with Lome [Cumming] and the changes that took place [in the report] to conform with my thinking' (Trent University Archives, L.M. Frost Papers, Frost to Gardiner, August 24, 1970). 49 PAO, L.M. Frost Papers, R.H. McGregor to Frost, undated but received December 4, 1950; O.E. Crockford to Frost, January 10, 1950.

50 See Civic Advisory Council of Toronto, Committee on Metropolitan Problems, Final Report (1951), p. 9. 51 Gardiner himself discussed the drawbacks of independent commissions in a long letter to Frost in 1950; OMB Files, December 18, 1950. 52 Ontario Municipal Board, Decisions and Recommendations of the Board (Toronto January 20, 1953), pp. 32, 46. 53 The bill underwent eighty-one amendments during legislative consideration, all of them minor and all of them at the urging of Toronto members of the Conservative caucus. 54 Ontario, Legislative Assembly, Debates, March 11, 1953, p. G-3. 55 Ibid., February 25, 1953, p. G-4. 56 Star, January 22, 1953. 57 Telegram, January 22 and February 3, 1953; Star, February 2 and 26, 1953. 58 Interview, Harry I. Price, September 17, 1977. 59 Star, January 21, 1953. 60 Ibid., April 8, 1953. CHAPTER 4

1 Globe and Mail, April 9, 1953. 2 PAO (Public Archives of Ontario), L.M. Frost Papers, Frost to Gardiner, April 16, 1959. 3 Star, November 9, 1961. 4 Quotations from James D. Barber, 'Classifying and Predicting Presidential Styles: Two "Weak" Presidents,' Journal of Social Issues 24, no. 3 (1968): 52-3. 5 Fred I. Greenstein, 'The Impact of

196 Notes to pages 77-85

6

7

8 9

10

11 12 13

14

Personality on Politics: An Attempt to Clear Away Underbrush,' American Political Science Review 61 (September 1967): 637. Ian Sclanders, 'It's a Bird ... It's a Plane ... It's Supermayor!' Maclean's Magazine, November 15, 1953, p. 21. See Paul Rickey, Decision-Making Processes in Ontario's Local Governments (Toronto: Queen's Printer, n.d. but 1973), pp. 70-5. The first two drafts of Bill 80 did contain the usual list of duties. Lome Cumming's comment on the second draft (found in the Ontario Municipal Board Files) called this 'eyewash.' It may have been his objections that forced the deletion. Ontario, Legislative Assembly, Debates, March 5, 1959, pp. 880-1. Star, January 22, 1953; Ontario, Legislative Assembly, Debates, March 5, 1953, p. D-l. Metropolitan Toronto Commission of Inquiry, First Report (Toronto March 1958), p. 13. Telegram, January 22, 1953. Ontario, Legislative Assembly, Debates, March 2, 1953, p. B-5. See Paul Rutherford, éd., Saving the Canadian City: The First Phase, 1880-1920 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1974); John C. Weaver, Shaping the Canadian City: Essays on Urban Politics and Policy, 1890-1920, Monographs on Canadian Urban Government no. 1 (Toronto: Institute of Public Administration of Canada 1977). Gardiner's self-image and performance bear an obvious resemblance

15 16 17 18

19

20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

to the model of the political entrepreneur developed by students of successful American mayors. See, for example, Robert Dahl, Who Governs? (New Haven: Yale University Press 1961); Raymond E. Wolfmger, The Politics of Progress (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall 1974). Interview, Betty W. Pearson, June 21, 1977. Minutes, Metropolitan Toronto Planing Board, February 3, 1955. Globe and Mail, April 11, 1956. These sayings were remembered with particular trenchancy by Nathan Phillips, the mayor of Toronto for most of Gardiner's term (interview, May 2, 1975). Interview, George O. Grant, June 20, 1978. Grant was Metro's roads commissioner from 1956 onward. Telegram July 2, 1953. Star, December 1, 1953. Ontario, Legislative Assembly, Debates, February 25, 1954, p. 236. In 1960 Gardiner was re-elected without formal opposition, but one councillor asked subsequently to be recorded as being opposed. Globe and Mail, September 10, 1957. Star, January 5, 1959; emphasis added. Telegram, January 15, 1959. Globe and Mail, September 30, 1955. Metro Chairman's Files, Gardiner to Frost, November 19, 1957. Ibid. Ibid., Gardiner to Frost, November 28, 1956. PAO, L.M. Frost Papers, Gardiner to Frost, February 11, 1953; also March 10, 1953.

197 Notes to pages 85-92 32 Unlike a board of control, the Metro executive could have its financial estimates reduced by a simple majority vote of council. Its members also lacked the special salary Gardiner had recommended to Frost. He suggested $2,000, the amount that was eventually authorized by provincial legislation in 1958. 33 Star, June 18, 1953. 34 Minutes, Special Committee on Procedure By-Law, August 19, 1954. There is, on the other hand, no question that executive members felt overburdened. This point was emphasized during the debate by Toronto Mayor Leslie Saunders. 35 In 1959 the council set back its afternoon meeting time by half an hour because 'the Executive Committee frequently finds it necessary or desirable to hold special meetings immediately prior to regular meetings of Council to process certain urgent or routine matters' (Minutes, Executive Committee, January 20, 1959). 36 Interview, C.O. Bick, November 8, 1977. 37 Star, August 22, 1957. 38 See ibid., February 7 and November 5, 1958; July 9, 1959. Gardiner's statement on police tactics drew heated comment in the Ontario Legislature. See Ontario, Legislative Assembly, Debates, February 21, 1958, pp. 314-15. 39 Interview, Derek Hunt, January 13, 1978. 40 The council's acceptance of Gardiner's prerogatives in recruiting top administrators was never embodied

41 42 43

44

45

46

47

48

in a formal resolution. The only appointments where Gardiner did not get his way were to the Toronto Transit Commission, which can be considered a special case. On two separate occasions, in 1953 and 1960, the executive committee overrode his recommendations. Globe and Mail, November 7, 1961. Ibid., September 23, 1959. My observations on Gardiner's relations with his senior officials rely heavily on interviews with nine former heads of departments. Three of the five men had been trained in university (as engineers), a point that further differentiated them from the more senior officials. Planning Commissioner Murray V. Jones the youngest of all (he was thirty when appointed), had degrees in history and political science and town planning. Interview, Thomas W. Thompson, April 4, 1978. Thompson was Gardiner's parks commissioner. For the cabinet analogy, see Harold Kaplan, Urban Political Systems: A Functional Analysis of Metro Toronto (New York: Columbia University Press 1967), pp. 59-61. When Works Commissioner Ross L. Clark wrote to Gardiner in the late 1950s urging that he support a suburban politician's bid to become chairman of council's works committee, Gardiner did not even reply for more than a year, and even then did so only obliquely (interview with Clark, February 17, 1978). Ibid.

198 Notes to pages 93-100 49 The 1949 report of the Toronto and York Planning Board, which was less conservative than some others at the time, had predicted that the area's population would reach 1.3 to 1.5 million only by 1970. 50 Metro Chairman's Files, Gardiner address to Canadian Club of Toronto, October 18, 1954. 51 Minutes, Metropolitan Toronto Council, 1955, Appendix C, p. 3; emphasis added. 52 Telegram, April 15, 1955; Star, March 10, 1954. 53 Metropolitan Toronto Planning Board, The Official Plan of the Metropolitan Toronto Planning Area (1959), p.ii. 54 Gardiner to Canadian Club. 55 On earlier usage, see especially Weaver, Shaping the Canadian City. 56 Gardiner to Canadian Club; Telegram, April 15, 1955, and May 7, 1954. 57 Quotations from Gardiner to Canadian Club and Minutes, Metropolitan Toronto Council, 1954, Appendix c, p. 4. 58 Globe and Mail, June 15, 1960. 59 Metro Chairman's Files, Gardiner address to Metropolitan Regional Council, Plainfield, NJ, June 16, 1959. CHAPTER 5

1 PAO (Public Archives of Ontario), L.M. Frost Papers, Cumming to Frost, January 30, 1953; Ontario Municipal Board Files, George Gathercole to Frost, January 30, 1953.

2 Globe and Mail, June 3, 1959. 3 Metro Chairman's Files, Frost to Gardiner, November 22, 1956; emphasis added. 4 Allan Anderson, 'Toronto: Fast at Last,' Saturday Night, March 7, 1950, p. 8. 5 Star, November 24, 1955. 6 There were serious problems in compiling voting statistics for the two councils. In the Metropolitan Toronto Council, Gardiner normally did not cast a vote. Hence his preferences had to be inferred from other evidence, including council minutes, press accounts, and retrospective interviews. Of necessity, I exercised my own judgment in defining 'policy' issues and decisions. There is no hard and fast rule for resolving the question. Where public spending was involved, I did not consider the issue to be one of policy unless (a) the amount was at least $100,000, or (b) the decision was contested on the council floor. Generally, all the formal stages involved in processing a particular by-law or other motion (usually five stages in all) were considered to constitute a single decision. Votes on amendments to bills were counted as separate decisions. So were votes taken on a matter of formal procedure (second reading of a bill, for example), so long as the procedural motion was formally contested. The several thousand decisions taken on routine matters of procedure covered matters such as the scheduling of meetings, the adop-

199 Notes to pages 100-5 don of unamended committee reports, points of order and privilege, ceremonial motions, the excusing of absent councillors, the adoption of minutes, and resolution of the council into committee of the whole. For the City of Toronto Council, the same general approach was taken. Since the mayor was empowered to vote on all motions, there was no difficulty ascertaining his position. Votes in which the mayor did not participate, for whatever reason, were left out of the analysis. The main problem was the myriad of votes, almost all of them unanimous, on minor public works (including socalled local improvements) and on the detailed exercise of the municipality's power to regulate land use. As with Metro, all decisions on appropriations of $100,000 were considered to be policy decisions, as were any spending decisions where the minutes indicate either debate or a split vote. Only those zoning and planning decisions with clear implications for the city as a whole, or on which there was a non-unanimous vote, were included. 7 Representatives from Forest Hill voted most consistently in Gardiner's favour (89.0 per cent) and those from Toronto's Ward Two least consistently (70.3 per cent), but there was a good range of support within each territorial group at all times. The second and third most pro-Gardiner records belonged to the city's senior controller (88.2 per cent) and its

8

9 10

11 12

Ward Six alderman (88.1 per cent). For discussion of city-suburban differences on this score over the years 1953-65, using a somewhat different methodology for gauging support, see Harold Kaplan, Urban Political Systems: A Functional Analysis of Metro Toronto (New York: Columbia University Press 1967), pp. 224-31. On only one of these dimensions is there any hint of a deliberate Gardiner strategy. He claimed in one interview years after his retirement to have attracted some support from female politicians by 'charming' them. I found little evidence to corroborate this from other sources, including the three women councillors whom I was able to interview. As far as voting and the property tax base is concerned, the representatives of the ten constituencies with a 1954 per capita assessment of less than $2,000 supported Gardiner 81.1 per cent of the time; those from the other fourteen sections provided 81.3 per cent support. See his statement in the Globe and Mail, December 5, 1957. Of the 2,259 decisions made by formal show of hands on matters of procedure, only 6.1 per cent were not unanimous and only two votes (0.1 per cent) went against the chair. Neither of the two adverse votes followed upon an appeal of a Gardiner ruling. Star, October 21, 1953. Interview, Nathan Phillips, May 2, 1975.

200 Notes to pages 106-16 13 Interview, Philip Givens, December I, 1977. 14 Quotations from the Telegram, November 16, 1955; Star, December 13, 1956; February 13, 1957; February 14,1958. 15 Interviews with Margaret Campbell (January 4, 1978) and Marie Curtis (September 20, 1977). 16 Star, March 10, 1954. 17 According to the minutes of the four standing committees, Gardiner attended 89.5 per cent of all meetings. The average attendance for other members was 80.7 per cent. Gardiner was 21.6 per cent above average attendance for the works committee, 11.5 per cent above for roads, 4.5 per cent above for housing, and 4.2 per cent below the mean for parks. 18 Recorded votes were a rarity in these committees. Seven were held in Gardiner's years as chairman, with him ending on the losing side in four. 19 These examples are taken from the Minutes, Parks Committee, March I1, 1955, and Executive Committee, July 21, 1959, and November 15, 1960. 20 Interview, Samuel Cass, February 24, 1978. 21 Interview, Thomas W. Thompson, April 4, 1978. 22 Metropolitan Toronto Inquiry Commission, Proceedings (Toronto 1957), pp. 991-2; hereafter Metro Inquiry. 23 Interview, Joseph Cornish, November 2, 1977. 24 Metro Inquiry, p. 217.

25 Kaplan, Urban Political Systems, pp. 86-9. According to Kaplan (p. 88), Gardiner 'devoted as much attention to keeping issues out of Council as he did to demanding legislative action.' This is, in my view, a serious exaggeration for which Kaplan adduces little concrete evidence. 26 Telegram, March 18, 1958. 27 Globe and Mail, September 25, 1958. 28 Star, June 9, 1954. 29 Minutes, Metropolitan Toronto Council, 1954, Appendix A, p. 1107. 30 Quotations in the Star, January 19, 1955, and March 21, 1956; Telegram, March 21, 1956. 31 Interview, Erastus W. Grant, December 19, 1978. 32 Interview, William L. Archer, February 6, 1978. 33 Star, April 9, 1953. 34 Metro Inquiry, p. 137. 35 Star, February 4, 1958. 36 Ibid., December 29, 1954. 37 Ibid., July 21, 1954. 38 PAO, L.M. Frost Papers, Gardiner to Frost, August 22, 1955. 39 See the summary of Gardiner's case in Minutes, Executive Committee, February 14, 1961. 40 Minutes, Metropolitan Toronto Council, 1961, Appendix c, p. 2. 41 Interview, Ross Lipsett, November 22, 1977. 42 Interviews with William Dennison (September 4, 1978) and Phillips. 43 Interviews with Vernon Singer (November 4, 1977), Norman Goodhead (July 25, 1978), Gus Harris

201 Notes to pages 116-19

44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51

(June 16, 1977), Howard Burrell (December 19, 1978), Marie Curtis, Jack Holley (February 8, 1978), and Chris Tonks (December 14, 1978). It is worth noting that even Oliver Crockford could recall several instances when Gardiner had been helpful in securing council approval of Scarborough proposals (interview, June 17, 1977). Star, January 18, 1954. Ibid., June 14, 1958. Interviews with David Rotenberg (January 31, 1978) and Singer. Phillips interview. Star, January 16, 1959. James S. Young, The Washington Community, 1800-1828 (New York: Columbia University Press 1966), p. 162. Interview, Allan Lamport, April 30, 1975. Lamport supported Gardiner in 95.7 per cent of council votes. The North York reeve was Vernon Singer (support score 88.4 per cent). The heads of small suburban municipalities for whom some confidentiality can be established were Harry Clark, the 1955-58 mayor of Weston (87.1 per cent); Charles Hiscott, mayor of Leaside from 1956 to 1962 (84.1 per cent); and Marie Curtis, reeve of Long Branch throughout Gardiner's term (78.2 per cent). The city controllers were Ford Brand (78.3 per cent), Jean Newman (89.9 per cent), and William Allen (87.8 per cent). All except Clark spent some time on the executive committee.

52 Lamport was appointed to the TTC (Toronto Transit Commission) by Metro council in June 1954 and became its chairman the following year. Bick and Hall became the heads of Metro's new police and licensing commissions in 1956. Gardiner approached Saunders concerning appointments to both the TTC and the Ontario Municipal Board (interview with Saunders, June 25, 1977). Councillors and journalists often overestimated the warmth of the personal relations between Gardiner and the men whom he supported for appointments such as these. Bick, for instance, was often described in the press as an intimate of Gardiner. Yet Bick had arrived on Forest Hill council as part of the slate opposing Gardiner in the December 1948 election. He and Gardiner were not personal friends, and in later years Gardiner made no secret of his feeling that Bick had taken advantage of circumstances to turn his police commission appointment into a far more important and rewarding post than Gardiner had first intended. 53 Two of the three controllers (Brand and Newman) ran unsuccessfully for mayor. Allen would probably have contested the post had he not been elected Metro chairman in 1962. 54 Young, The Washington Community, pp. 167-73. 55 PAO, L.M. Frost Papers, Gardiner to Frost, November 26, 1956. The letter concerned Herbert Orliffe, a CCF sup-

202 Notes to pages 119-29

56 57

58 59

60 61

porter not likely to fare well in the selection process. Frost's papers contain similar letters from Gardiner promoting two other councillors (both Liberals), but Gardiner seems to have written a number of others to the provincial attorney-general, the normal recipient of such an appeal. While Metro chairman, Gardiner also asked Frost to expedite the cases of six other men - five of them members of his own law firm. Telegram, March 18, 1958. Quotations from the Globe and Mail, June 30, 1954; Telegram, August 10, 1957; Star, March 12, 1958, and March 25, 1959. Star, February 23, 1955; Telegram, August 10, 1957. For an especially lurid example, see the Globe and Mail, February 25, 1960. Ronald Haggart in the Star, December 7, 1958. Metro Inquiry, pp. 39, 261. CHAPTER 6

1 Ontario, Legislative Assembly, Debates, February 4, 1960, p. 154. 2 PAO (Public Archives of Ontario), L.M. Frost Papers, E.J. Young to Frost, December 4, 1956. 3 See Ontario, Legislative Assembly, Debates, January 28, 1960, pp. 51-2; January 30, 1961, pp. 774-6; February 3, 1961, pp. 876-81. 4 See PAO, L.M. Frost Papers, Gardiner to Frost, February 24, 1954; Ontario, Legislative Assembly,

5

6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19

Debates, February 24, 1954, pp. 200-1. PAO, Department of Municipal Affairs Files, Series B, Minutes of Metropolitan Toronto Commission of Inquiry, May 23, 1957. Metropolitan Toronto Inquiry Commission, Proceedings (Toronto 1957), p. 64. Interview, Samuel Cass, February 24, 1978. PAO, L.M. Frost Papers, Gardiner to Frost, March 17, 1959. Interview, James N. Allan, September 16, 1977. PAO, L.M. Frost Papers, Gardiner to Frost, March 11, 1958. Ibid., Gardiner to Frost, October 15, 1957. Ibid., Gardiner to Frost, April 6, 1960. Telegram, March 23, 1956. PAO, L.M. Frost Papers, Gardiner to Frost, March 17, 1959. Ibid., Frost to Gardiner, December 15, 1955. Interview, Harry I. Price, September 17, 1977. Telegram, January 15, 1959. Provincial grants accounted for 24.3 per cent of all Metro revenues in 1954 and 22.8 per cent in 1961. This proportion reached its lowest point (20.9 per cent) in 1957, then climbed slowly. Calculated from the annual reports of the Metro finance commissioner. On the fluoridation issue, the province enacted legislation in 1961 making it virtually obligatory for Metro

203 Notes to pages 129-36

20 21 22

23

24

25 26

27

to test its by-law in a public referendum. For Gardiner's protest, see PAO, L.M. Frost Papers, Gardiner to Frost, March 13, 1961. Ibid., William A. Goodfellow to Frost, November 3, 1955. Star, April 20, 1956. George O. Grant, Gardiner's roads commissioner, recalled such a pattern during the 1960 subsidy negotiations with the minister of highways (interview, June 20, 1978). Trent University Archives, C.G. Frost Papers, Gardiner to L.M. Frost, February 16, 1972. See Gardiner's statement in the Star (September 9, 1955) that he did not consider asking for a subsidy because the cabinet would refuse it on the grounds that 'they would be asked to do it by ... every city in Ontario.' Interview, John P. Robarts, September 15, 1977. This account of the leadership campaign draws on interviews with Gardiner, Robarts, Price, and Hugh Latimer (September 13, 1977). The L.M. Frost papers in the Trent University Archives contain an account by Kelso Roberts (Thirty Years of Ontario Political Action [Toronto: Private Edition 1969], p. 127) that condemns Gardiner's telephone calls. The consensus seems to be that Gardiner swayed twenty or thirty delegates; this support would have been most important in the early ballots. L.S. Bourne, Urban Systems: Strategies for Regulation (London: Oxford University Press 1975), p. 170.

28 J.M. Macdonnell, Gardiner's colleague from the Port Hope days, was minister without portfolio until August 1959. Sidney Smith, whom Gardiner had wanted to nominate for the party leadership in 1942 (and who had been president of the University of Toronto since 1945), was minister of external relations for two years, but his riding was not in the Toronto area. 29 The second incident was discussed in the Toronto press. For Lawrence Heights, I have relied mainly on interviews with Gardiner. 30 Star, February 23, 1956. 31 Ibid., April 26, 1957. 32 I have drawn here on interviews with Gardiner and other party members, particularly David J. Walker, a close friend of Diefenbaker (September 22, 1977). According to Walker, he personally tried to persuade the prime minister to swallow his animosity and even to invite Gardiner into the federal cabinet. Mr Diefenbaker declined in 1977 to be interviewed on the subject. 33 Star, October 6, 1958; interview, Marie Curtis, September 20, 1977. 34 Metro Chairman's Files, Fleming to Gardiner, May 8, 1958; the letter is marked 'personal and confidential.' 35 Ibid., Gardiner to Diefenbaker, October 14, 1960. 36 Interview, Donald Fleming, January 24, 1978. 37 Metro Chairman's Files, Gardiner to Walker, March 22, 1961. 38 Star, April 14, 1961.

204 Notes to pages 136-48 39 Metro Chairman's Files, Diefenbaker to Gardiner, April 17, 1961. 40 Star, January 18, 1957; Ontario, Legislative Assembly, Debates, February 12, 1960, p. 355. 41 Metro Chairman's Files, Gardiner to Frost, November 28, 1956. For the next several months, Gardiner accepted the idea of an elected chairman, as the head of a directly elected council. 42 Ibid. 43 Telegram, October 2, 1959. 44 PAO, L.M. Frost Papers, Frost to WJ. Stewart, July 30, 1957; George Gathercole to Frost, November 6, 1957. 45 Star, May 13, 1953. 46 These controversies are described in newspaper articles and in the minutes and materials of Metro committees. 47 See Minutes, Roads and Traffic Committee, November 2 and December 28, 1955. 48 Interview, Vernon M. Singer, November 4, 1977. 49 See the Globe and Mail, February 2, 1956. 50 It was sometimes claimed during the later controversy over Spadina that the builders of Yorkdale influenced Gardiner in planning the expressway. The flow of influence was precisely the opposite of this. Gardiner had tried to have an early version of the roadway built a decade before the 1958 unveiling of the shopping plaza (see chapters 3 and 7). 51 Telegram, June 6, 1958; Star, October 4, 1958.

52 Globe and Mail, November 24, 1958. 53 In 1956 it was estimated that 200 ratepayers' associations existed in Metropolitan Toronto, with 50,000 members (ibid., January 25, 1956). 54 Star, June 14, 1961. The chief executive of the Automotive Transport Association felt that his group's public image was so bad that it would have 'put Mr Gardiner in an embarrassing position' by actively intervening on his side (interview, Joseph O. Goodman, July 21, 1978). 55 Star, January 28, 1955. 56 Ibid., December 11, 1954. 57 Ibid., March 31, 1955. 58 Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1974), p. 21. 59 Star, April 5, 1958. 60 PAO, L.M. Frost Papers, Frost to Gardiner, November 16, 1955. 61 Globe and Mail, April 30, 1959. 62 Telegram, February 25, 1953. 63 See especially the Star, March 9, 1960. 64 PAO, L.M. Frost Papers, Gardiner to Frost, November 18, 1955. 65 Globe and Mail, August 11, August 13, and November 16, 1956; March 6, 1958. 66 Ibid., February 27, 1959. 67 These cartoons are in the Star, January 29 and August 20, 1954; June 17, 1955. 68 See the Telegram, August 29, 1957; January 19 and March 4, 1960; Star, November 22, 1960. 69 See the Star, June 4, 1959; Globe and

205 Notes to pages 148-58 Mail, March 2, 1959, and June 25, 1960. 70 Aside from the first cartoon, these drawings are to be found in the Star, January 6, 1959; Telegram, July 19, 1957; June 12, 1958; January 21 and June 3, 1959; January 7, April 8, and April 28, 1960; Star, November 6, 1959, and April 12, 1956; Telegram, October 6, 1960; Globe and Mail, December 24, 1959; Star, October 20, 1960. 71 Telegram, November 21, 1955. 72 Interview, Beland H. Honderich, May 3, 1979. 73 Interview, Alden Baker, June 16, 1977. 74 For Warren Gardiner's involvement in a land purchase deal that was investigated by a provincial royal commission, see the Telegram, May 3 and 5, 1960. The May 3 page 1 headline reads 'Frederick Gardiner's Son Sought,' in reference to the initial difficulty experienced by the royal commission counsel in locating Warren Gardiner. 75 Star, February 5 and 6, 1959. 76 Telegram, February 6, February 22, and March 28, 1961. 77 Quotation from the Star, April 26, 1961. 78 William Stephenson, 'Big Daddy's Magnificent Metro,' Star Weekly Magazine, June 20, 1959, pp. 4, 21.

2 3 4

5

6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14

CHAPTER 7

1 Ontario Municipal Board, In the Matter of the Application of the City of

15 16

Toronto Pursuant to Section 23 of the Municipal Act (Toronto 1950-51), p. 4. See City of Toronto Planning Board, 'History of Planning Organization in Toronto' (1959); mimeographed. Star, March 10, 1953. Globe and Mail, April 14, 1953. PAO (Public Archives of Ontario), L.M. Frost Papers, Gardiner to Frost, March 27, 1953. To take the year 1955 asan illustration, the minutes of the board record that Gardiner personally moved 76 per cent of the motions and seconded another 5 per cent. Minutes, Metropolitan Toronto Planning Board, February 3, 1955. Interview, Murray V. Jones, June 23, 1977. Star, January 10, 1955. Telegram, August 28, 1957. Metropolitan Toronto Planning Board, The Official Plan of the Metropolitan Toronto Planning Area (1959), pp. 1, ii, S3. Globe and Mail, July 18, 1955; Telegram, October 7', 1959. Globe and Mail, June 5, 1953. Interview, Hans Blumenfeld, February 14, 1978. See especially Eli Comay, 'A Brief to the Royal Commission on Metropolitan Toronto' (Toronto April 1964). The debates over fringe development are well summarized in the planning board minutes. Star, February 26, 1953. Minutes, Metropolitan Toronto Council, 1954, Appendix C, p. 5.

206 Notes to pages 158-68 17 18 19 20 21 22

Ibid., 1957, Appendix c, p. 5. Globe and Mail, May 1, 1953. Star, October 6, 1953. Ibid., October 2, 1953. See Globe and Mail, May 9, 1956. Statistics taken and calculated from various sources, including annual reports and Metropolitan Toronto Planning Board, Metropolitan Toronto Key Facts (April 1970); hereafter Key Facts. 23 From Key Facts, Tables 17 and 22. 24 S.D. Clark, The Suburban Society (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1966), p. 38. 25 Statistics on assisted housing from Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Finance (1961), pp. 14-16. 26 Minutes, Metropolitan Toronto Council, 1954, Appendix c, p. 5. 27 Interview, David B. Mansur, June 12, 1979. 28 See the correspondence in PAO, L.M. Frost Papers; especially Gardiner to Frost, July 26, 1956, which describes the federal attempt to reduce the project as 'unreasonable and inequitable.' 29 Star, October 21, 1958, and March 10, 1960. 30 Ibid., January 8, 1960. 31 See Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto, Metro's Suburbs in Transition, Part One: Evolution and Overview (April 1979). 32 From Key Facts, Tables 22 and 23. 33 Globe and Mail, May 7, 1953. 34 Star, January 8, 1960. 35 Calculated from figures in Central

36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48

Mortgage and Housing Corporation, Canadian Housing Statistics, Quarter 4, 1960, p. 41; 1961, p. 47; 1962, p; 69; 1970, p. 84. For the role of metropolitan policies, see Jeremy R. Rudin, The Changing Structure of the Land Development Industry in the Toronto Area,' Major Report no. 13, Centre for Urban and Community Studies, University of Toronto (February 1978), p. 9-13; and Peter Spurr, Land and Urban Development: A Preliminary Study (Toronto: Lorimer 1976), pp. 193-4. Star, September 29, 1953. Quotations from ibid., April 14, April 28, and August 20, 1953. Report of the Royal Commission on Metropolitan Toronto (Toronto 1965), pp. 46-7. Globe and Mail, May 12, 1954. PAO, L.M. Frost Papers, Gardiner to Frost, March 10, 1953. Ibid., Gardiner to Frost, August 22, 1955. Minutes, Metropolitan Toronto Council, 1956, Appendix c, pp. 4-5. Metro Chairman's Files, Gardiner address to Canadian Transit Association, June 10, 1958. PAO, L.M. Frost Papers, Frost to H.M. Robbins, February 29, 1956. Telegram, December 5, 1957. Ibid., June 13, 1960. Ibid., April 28, 1960. Metro council discussed numerous proposals for restructuring the TTC. Gardiner quickly lost interest in these after Lamport's exit. At the executive committee meeting of October 7,

207 Notes to pages 169-75

49 50

51 52

53 54

55

1960, he asked to be relieved of voting on the subject, the only time he ever refused to take a position on an issue before council. Telegram, February 24, 1960. Metropolitan Toronto Transportation Plan Review, Strengths and Weaknesses of the Metropolitan Toronto Transportation System, Summary (November 1973), p. 4. For the relationship between transit and population density, see the same review's Choices for the Future: Summary .Report (January 1975), p. 7. For TTC ridership in the 1950s and 1960s, see Key Facts, Table 40; Metropolitan Toronto Planning Board, Report on the Metropolitan Transportation Plan (December 1964), pp. 12-13. Key Facts, Tables 34-37, 42. Metropolitan Toronto and Region Transportation Study, Growth and Travel Past and Present (April 1966), p. 48. Minutes, Metropolitan Toronto Council, 1958, Appendix A, p. 373. More than 10 million square feet of retail space was built in Metropolitan Toronto shopping centres in the years 1953-66, accounting for 88 per cent of all new retail capacity (Key Facts, Table 61). The 1959 draft plan (p. 100) foresaw that 'nearly all' new retail space would be in suburban plazas with three to six times as much land as floor space ('due almost entirely to ... parking facilities'). Metro Chairman's Files, Gardiner address to Ontario Good Roads Association, February 22, 1956.

56 See the argument in Donald N. Dewees, The Effect of Mass Transit on Driving and Land Use,' Policy Paper no. 11, Institute for Policy Analysis, University of Toronto (June 1974); also Mark W. Frankena, Urban Transportation Economics (Toronto: Butterworths 1979). Dewees shows elsewhere that the second Toronto subway, by removing streetcars from Bloor and Danforth streets, had the unwitting effect of making motoring more attractive in that corridor ('Some Effects of Conversion from Streetcar to Subway Transit Lines in Toronto,' Research Paper no. 76, Centre for Urban and Community Studies, University of Toronto, January 1976). 57 Star, November 18, 1961. 58 Telegram, June 11, 1953. 59 Minutes, Roads Committee, January 26, 1954. 60 Minutes, Metropolitan Toronto Planning Board, September 11, 1956. 61 Minutes, Roads Committee, April 17, 1961. 62 Star, November 1, 1961. 63 Globe and Mail, December 6, 1961. 64 Interview, True Davidson, November 23, 1977. CHAPTER 8 1 Star, November 24, 1961. 2 Humphrey Carver, 'Building the Suburbs: A Planner's Reflections,' City Magazine 3 (September 1978): 43. 3 Star, August 29, 1958. 4 Ibid., February 2, 1960.

208 Notes to pages 176-85 5 Albert Rose, Governing Metropolitan Toronto: A Social and Political Analysis, 1953-1971 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1972), p. 122. 6 Hugh Heclo, Modern Social Politics in Britain and Sweden (New Haven: Yale University Press 1974), p. 305. 7 See, for example, L. J. Sharpe, ' ''Reforming" the Grass Roots: An Alternative Analysis,' in D.E. Butler and A.H. Halsey, eds, Policy and Politics: Essays in Honour of Norman Chester (London: Macmillan, 1978), pp. 82-110. Sharpe writes (p. 82) that 'it is hard to find anyone to defend' the 1972 reform of British local government, which imposed two-tier authorities not unlike the Metropolitan Toronto system on most of England and Wales. 8 Report of the Royal Commission on Metropolitan Toronto (Toronto 1977), vol. 2, p. 115. 9 Ibid., pp. 85-7. 10 Fred Hirsch, Social Limits to Growth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1978), p. 67.

11 See Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto, Metro's Suburbs in Transition, Part One: Evolution and Overview (April 1979), p. 242. 12 Trent University Archives, C.G. Frost Papers, Gardiner to L.M. Frost, February 16, 1972. 13 Star, November 2, 1961. 14 Trent University Archives, L.M. Frost Papers, Gardiner to Frost, September 26, 1969; Frost to Gardiner, October 1,1969. 15 Ibid., Gardiner to Frost, March 5, 1963. 16 Telegram, January 21, 1965. 17 Star, August 1, 1964. 18 Ibid., October 26, 1971. 19 Ibid., August 5, 1969. 20 Ibid., January 24, 1970. 21 Quotations from Royal Commission on Metropolitan Toronto, Proceedings (Toronto 1975-76), pp. 293-314. 22 Star, March 14, 1973. 23 Ibid., February 17, 1977. 24 Globe and Mail, February 9, 1979.

Index

Acton Limestone Quarries 181 Adanac Realty 17 Adelaide Street 48, 184 Air pollution controls 139, 160 Albany Club 20,27,34 Alexander Mackenzie Medal 11 Allan, James N. 38,126 Allan, Leslie B. 90 Allen, William R. 86,118 Apartment living, trend toward 162-3, 169, 177 Armstrong, William 17,50 Arthur Street 5,6 Association of Canadian Advertisers 140 Atkinson, Joseph E. 56 Automotive Transport Association of Ontario 142 Baldwin, Harry W. 13, 17 Baldwin, Robert 13 Baldwin, William W. 13, 17 Bank of Toronto 16 Barber, James 75 Bay Street 14, 183 Bell, Richard A. 36 Bennett, R. B. 19

Bick, C.O. 88,117,118 Bickle, E.W. 36 Big Daddy (Gardiner nickname) 83-4, 148,183 Bishop Strachan School 22 Bill 80. See Metropolitan Toronto Act Blucher, Walter 155 Bond Street Congregational Church 7 Bovaird, Harold S. 42 Bracken, John 33-4 Bramalea development 157 Brandon, Elmer 67 Breithaupt, William W. 46 British North America Act (BNA Act) 123, 133 Brittain, Dr Horace L. 40 Bryce, R. A. 33 Bureaucratic officials: role in Metropolitan Toronto politics 89-92, 107-9 Burrell, Howard 67,115-16 Business groups 42, 126, 138-41 Butterfield, George 23, 24 Canadian Expeditionary Force 11 Canadian Federation of Mayors and Municipalities 134

210 Index Canadian Legion 43, 141 Canadian Mounted Rifles 11 Canadian National Exhibition 6,110, 183 Canadian Pacific Railway 142 Canadian Restaurant Association 139 Canadian Sign Manufacturers' Association 140 Canadian Transit Association 167 Capitals 10-11 Cartwright, John R. 12 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Williams) 83-4 CCF (Co-operative Commonwealth Federation) 30, 103, 159 Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation 161 Central Prison 5, 6 Chancellor Van Koughnet Scholarship 12 CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) 27,33 Citizens' Committee of Forest Hill Village 22-3, 39, 40,45, 46 City of Toronto Planning Board 58,61 Clark, Ross L. 92 Clohes, Ireland 4 Cockeram, Alan 31 Commercial Credit Company 13,14 Conservative Businessmen's Association of Toronto 20 Conservative party 9,14,46,48, 102-3, 132, 167, 182; development in Ontario 19-20, 26-7; in Ontario Legislature 69-10, 124. See also Gardiner, Frederick G. in Conservative party politics Cooke,Hugh 22,23,24 Crawford, K. Grant 127

Crockford, Oliver E. 68-9, 98, 104, 116, 120, 131, 159 Croll, David A. 56 Crombie, David 180, 185 Crooks, A. D. 13 Crooks, Roebuck, and Parkinson (law firm) 13 Crosstown expressway 165,172 Cultural grants 113, 114 Cumming, Lome R. 66, 67, 69, 72, 78-9, 93, 96, 124; report of, on Toronto metropolitan problem 70-1,97,152 Curtis, Marie 116 Davis, William 179 Day, Ralph 57 Dennison, William 115 Depot Regiment 11, 13 Diefenbaker, John 34,132,133-5, 174,186 Dixon's Carriage Works 4 Dominion Conservative Association 29 Donald, Hugh H. 22,24 Don Mills development 140 Don River Valley 62, 116 Don Valley Parkway 111, 140, 165, 171 Downtown Businessmen's Association 139, 174 Downtown development 156-7,177 Drayton Motors 17 Drew, George A. 20, 26-9 passim, 32, 34-7 passim, 59, 133, 179, 186 Drones 31 East York 55,68,70 Edwards, Gus 121

211 Index Eglinton Avenue 22, 23, 45, 73 Epstein, Lou 17 Ethnie groups 9,43-4,141 Etobicoke 55, 67, 68, 143, 144 Euclid Avenue 5,6, 15,76 Federal government: influence on Metropolitan Toronto 132. See also Gardiner, Frederick G. and relations with federal government Ferguson, Howard 19, 20, 28 Finlayson, R. K. 32 First World War 11-12 Fleming, Donald M. 31, 34, 132, 135 Forest Hill 18, 31,49, 56, 59, 65,117, 163, 176; development of 21-2, 44-5, 55,68; politics in 22-3. See also Gardiner, Frederick G. in Forest Hill politics Forest Hill Conservative Association 27 Forest Hill Home and School Association 42 Fort York 141-2, 144 Fringe communities 157 Frost, Cecil G. 28-9, 32-7 passim, 75 Frost, Leslie M. 28, 35, 37, 85, 96, 119,123,124,134,136,137,146, 147, 153, 165, 182, 186; and formation of Metropolitan Toronto 63, 65, 69-70, 71-3; on success of Gardiner 74,97, 174; and Metropolitan Toronto issues 124,127-31 passim, 138, 145, 157, 159, 166, 167, 183 Gardhouse, Wilbert W. 48,90,91 Gardiner Expressway 92,110-11, 141-2, 165, 183

Gardiner family (relatives of Frederick G. Gardiner) - John Gardiner (grandfather) 4 - Isabella Gardiner, née Hall (grandmother) 4 - David Gardiner (father) 4-6,7-10 passim, 12,15,19,39,52,94,165 - Victoria Gardiner, née Robertson (mother) 4, 5, 6-7, 8, 15, 76 - George Gardiner (uncle) 4 - Samuel D. Gardiner (brother) 5, 7, 11,15,76,150 - Myrtle Gardiner (sister) (Mrs Newton J. Powell) 5, 8, 15, 76 - Audrey Gardiner, née Seaman (wife) 12-13,18,76,118,186 - Warren Gardiner (son) 17-18,76,150, 186 - Anne Gardiner (daughter) (Mrs John B. Conlin) 18,76,77 Gardiner, Frederick G. See especially boyhood and education of 5-8, 10-11, 12; war record of ll-12;law and business career of 12-17, 74-5, 181-2,183-4; private life of 16, 17-19, 72-3, 76-7, 183, 186; in Conservative party politics 20,27-39, 72, 130-2, 182; in Forest Hill politics 23-5, 39-46, 63; as member of York County Council 48-51 ; in debate over metropolitan problem 59-66; defines role of Metropolitan Toronto chairman 73 75-6, 77-84,136-7; and creation of Metropolitan Toronto machinery 84-92; growth policies of 92-5; leads Metropolitan Toronto Council 96, 99-122; and relations with Ontario government 124-31,157,159,166, 167; and relations with federal

212 Index government 132-6, 161; and public access to decisions 136-45, 185; public image of 145-50; planning, housing, and transportation programs of 151-73; retirement of 174; final political experiences of 182-3, 184-6 Gardiner, Roberts (law firm) 184 Gathercole, George 124 Gazette, Montreal 33 Givens, Philip 83-4, 106, 121 Globe, Toronto 9 Globe and Mail, Toronto 33, 38, 74, 146-7, 148 Good government groups 141 Grace Street School 7 Grainger, Charles 18 Grange Park 7 Gray, A. J. B. 56, 66, 72,90, 107 Greater Toronto Businessmen's Association 139 Greater Toronto Motel Operators' Association 141 Great Northwestern Telegraph Company 6 Grey Cup game 149 Hall, Fred 118 Hall, Isabella 4 Hanna,W.J. 6 Hanson, R. B. 34 Harper, Billy 7, 19 Harris, Gus 115 Hazlett, Andrew G. 23,24 Heclo,Hugh 177 Henry, George S. 19, 20, 26, 27, 55, 56 Hepburn, Mitchell 19, 20, 27, 30, 56, 69 Hirsch, Fred 179 Holley,Jack 116 Holtby, Norman 18,29,186

Honderich, Beland H. 147, 149 Hospital construction 61, 114, 129-30, 183 Housing construction: early obstacles to 68-9; by private enterprise 157-60, 162-4; for the aged 133, 161-1; public housing 100,115,132-3,160-2 Howe, CD. 133 Humber River 120,143 Hurricane Hazel 116 Hyland, Dr Gordon 23 Independent Air Force 11 Industrial Acceptance Corporation 14 Interest groups: in Forest Hill politics 42-4; in Metropolitan Toronto politics 125-6, 138-45, 172 Ivés, Burl 83 Japanese domestics: as issue in Forest Hill politics 43 Jews: in Forest Hill politics 24, 43-4 Jones, Murray V. 155 Journalists 149 Jury, William W. 39 Kaplan, Harold 109-10 Kennedy (Toronto mayor) 3, 4 King Edward Hotel 48 King's Counsel 14, 119 King,W.L.M. 30 Labour groups 42,130,141 Lamport, Allan A. 72, 98, 117, 118, 137, 185; as chairman of TTC 166-8 Land assembly program 158-9,163 Land development industry 126,128, 139-40, 158-9, 163-4, 177 Lascelles, G. Arthur 90, 91, 107 Latimer, Hugh 131

213 Index Lawrence Heights project 132-3, 143-4, 161, 162 Law Society of Upper Canada 12 Lawson, Earl 29 Leaside 55,67,68,115-16 Leitch, Arthur S. 22, 23, 24, 39 LeMay, Tracy 154-5 Liberal party 14, 19, 27, 31, 36,46, 56, 103,131, 132 Lindsay 28 Liquor License Board of Ontario 37-8 Long Branch 55,68, 116 Lush, Harold V. 17 Macassa Gold Mines 33 Macaulay, Leopold 27, 35, 131 Macaulay, Robert 131 McBrien, William C. 165, 166 MacDonald, Donald C. 182 MacDonald, William E. 48, 50 Macdonnell, J. M. 31,34,35 McKay, Dr W. J. 9 McKenzie, A. D. 28, 32, 36, 38, 131 McKeough, Darcy 182 MacNicol, John R. 29 Macpherson, Duncan 148 Maher, James P. 61, 62, 63, 154, 155 Malvern project 132,158-9 Manning, Harold 66 Mansur, David B. 161 Masonic Lodge 7, 8, 17, 63 Meighen, Arthur 19,31 Methodism 4, 5, 17 Metro. See Metropolitan Toronto Metro Goldwyn Mayor (Gardiner nickname) 79 Metropolitan government: theoretical arguments for 52, 57, 177, 180-1 Metropolitan Toronto: early debate over formation of 55-7, 64-5; formation of

66-73; constitution of 84-5, 100, 110, 124-5, 175-6; boards and commissions of 87-8; civil service of 88-9; finances of 100, 101, 107-8, 112-15, 125, 129; evolution of politics in 176-81 Metropolitan Toronto Act 71, 78, 85, 124, 152; amendments of 84, 125, 126, 127 Metropolitan Toronto Board of Police Commissioners 88, 127 Metropolitan Toronto Board of Trade 139 Metropolitan Toronto Council: composition of 70-1, 84-5, 96-8; executive committee of 85-7, 104,117-18, 135; city-suburban tensions in 97, 101-2, 104-5, 109-10,113, 116, 179. See also Metropolitan Toronto; Gardiner, Frederick G. leads Metropolitan Toronto Council Metropolitan Toronto Housing Authority 161 Metropolitan Toronto Licensing Commission 88,139,140 Metropolitan Toronto Planning Board 88, 128,152,153-5 Metropolitan Toronto School Board 71, 87-8, 112 Metropolitan Toronto Traffic Conference 139 Michener, Roland 31,34 Mímico 55, 64, 65 Mission Sawmills 17 Moses, Robert 80,81,95,144 Municipal Act 78 National House Builders' Association 126 National Housing Act 58 National Trust Company 31

214 Index Neighbourhood groups 42, 142-5, 172 New Democratic Party 182 Newspapers: and Metropolitan Toronto politics 146-50, 167 New Toronto 55, 67 New York City 80,121 Noble, George 90 No randa Mines 16 North End: as issue in Forest Hill politics 22-3,24, 39-40,45,46 North York 21, 55, 67. 68, 92,115, 116, 118, 140, 143-4, I'/u Noseworthy, Joseph 31 Official plan of Metropolitan Toronto 93, 156, 171 OMB (Ontario Municipal Board) 37, 64, 65, 66, 73, 143. See also Gumming, Lome R. Ontario Conservative Association 20, 28-9, 36 Ontario government: influence on Metropolitan Toronto 123-6. See also Gardiner, Frederick G. and relations with Ontario government Ontario Jockey Club 140 Ontario Legislature 27, 71, 78, 82, 124, 125, 126, 159 Ontario Municipal Board. See OMB Ontario Racing Commission 37 Ontario Securities Commission 37 Orange Lodge 7,9,17,19,98 Osgoode Hall 12, 13 Owens, E.W.J. 9 Parkdale Collegiate Institute 8, 13, 24, 107 Parkdale Methodist Church 7 Parkinson, Gardiner, and Willis (law firm) 14

Parkinson, Harry S. 13, 14, 74 Parkinson, H. Fred 14, 181 Parks program 93, 100, 116, 127, 133, 160 Parry, Ross 106,111,137 Phillips, Nathan 98-9, 103-6 passim, 115, 117,120,148, 156,186 Planning: in City of Toronto 58, 59, 152; in York county 61-2; in Metropolitan Toronto 152-7 Planning Act 61 Plan 13 40 Police policy 88, 126-7 Political cartoons 77, 147-9 Porter, Dana 31,34 Port Hope 5 Port Hope conference 32-3, 35, 36 Post Office 9-10 Price, Harry I. 20,128,131,132 Progressive Conservative party. See Conservative party Progressive reform tradition 80 Public access to decisions: as issue in debate over metropolitan problem 57, 67, 70; as issue in Metropolitan Toronto politics 138, 177-8. See also Gardiner, Frederick G. and public access to decisions Public housing. See Housing construction Public transit program 61, 88, 100, 114, 133, 165-7; subway construction 58, 110, 113, 117, 134-6, 167, 168-9, 171, 183; relation to roads and traffic program 166, 168-71, 177. See also Roads and traffic program Queen's Counsel 119 Queen Street Methodist Church 7

215 Index Ratepayers' associations. See Neighbourhood groups Regent Park 58 Regional governments in Ontario 176-7, 180,182 Roads and traffic program 60,61,92, 100, 107,115-16, 125, 126,139-42, 153, 164; expressway construction 62-3,92, 110-11, 133, 141-2, 164-5, 171-3, 178, 179-80, 184; relation to public transit program 166,168-71, 177. See also Public transit program Robarts, John P. 131-2, 176, 178-9,182, 184-5 Robb, Judge Walter 37-8 Robbins, Harry M. 38 Roberts, Kelso 131 Roebuck, Arthur W. 13,14 Rowan, Donald H. 14 Rowe, W. Earl 26-9 passim Rowland, Robert C. 20-1, 23, 42, 73, 186 Royal Commission on Metropolitan Toronto (1963-65) 176 Royal Commission on Metropolitan Toronto (1974-77) 176, 177-9, 184-5 Royal Flying Corps 11 Royal York Hotel 37 Russell, A. H. K. 23,24 Sadowski, Ben 24 Sage Enterprises Limited 17, 50 St Laurent, Louis 133, 161 St Lawrence Seaway 149 Saunders, Leslie 82,98, 118 Scarborough 53,67, 68-9, 115, 116, 158-9, 161 School construction 87-8,92-3, 112, 128, 130, 160 Second World War 31,43,56 Sedgwick, Joseph 28,34

Sewage disposal program 92, 100, 101, 115, 120, 143, 144, 153, 160 Smith, Goldwin 6-7 Smith, Sidney 33 sos Manufacturing 17,181 South York riding 27, 29, 31, 32 Spadina Expressway 62-3, 85, 140, 141, 145, 171-3, 179, 184 Spadina Heights 21 Spadina Heights Ratepayers' Association 21 Spadina Road 18 Spadina Road Extension. See Spadina Expressway Star, Toronto 38, 56, 74, 146-7, 148 Stauffer, Reverend Byron 7, 19 Steeles Avenue 48 Steinberg, Sam 17,44 Stewart, William J. 70 Suburban municipalities: early attitudes toward metropolitan problem 56, 57, 65,66-7, 68, 72; representatives of, on Metropolitan Toronto Council 84,98, 100-1, 110, 113, 115-16, 167; attitudes toward evolution of Metropolitan Toronto system 176, 178. See also Toronto and suburbs: development of; East York; Etobicoke; Forest Hill; Leaside; Long Branch; Mimico; New Toronto; North York; Scarborough; Swansea; Weston; York township Supermayor (Gardiner nickname) 77,79 Supreme Aluminum Industries 17 Swansea 55, 67 Taylor, E. P. 140-1 T. Eaton Company 184 Telegram, Toronto 77, 146-7, 149, 168 Television reporters 146 Thompson, A. O. 23

216 Index Tonks, Chris 116 Toronto and Suburban Planning Board 61 Toronto and suburbs: development of 3-4,21,52-5, 179-81 Toronto and York Planning Board 61-4, 152, 153, 154 Toronto and York Roads Commission 60,62 Toronto Asylum for the Insane 5 Toronto Board of Control 71,85,118 Toronto City Hall 4, 19, 73,75, 115,117, 120, 184 Toronto, City of (municipalu ): early attitude toward metropolitan problem 57-9, 64-5, 66, 72; representatives of, on Metropolitan Toronto Council 98-9, 101-2,110,113, 115-18 passim, 172; voting in council of 99-100; attitude toward evolution of Metropolitan Toronto system 176, 178, 179. See also Toronto and suburbs: development of Toronto Dominion Bank 181 Toronto Hydro 183, 185 Toronto Island 4, 113, 133, 162 Toronto Street Railway Company 4 Toronto Transit Commission. See TTC Toronto Transportation Commission 14,165 Transportation program. See Public transit program; Roads and traffic program Trucking industry 139,142 TTC (Toronto Transit Commission) 83, 88,98,100,114,141, 165-8 Twenty-Two Point Platform 36 United Church of Canada 17 United Empire Loyalist Association 141 University College 10

University of Toronto 10-11, 12,167,174 Upper Canada College 22 Urban Development Institute 126 Urban renewal 162 Varsity, Toronto 10, 11 Varsity Arena 131-2 Victoria Hotel 48 Village Post, Forest Hill 23 Walker, David J. 31, 34, 132, 135-6 Wall Street 13, 108 Walmer Road Baptist Church 7 Warrender, William K. 127 Water rates issue 97, 101, 113 Water supply program 92, 100, 101, 116, 125, 129, 160 Weston 55,116 White, Harry S. 12 Williams, George H. 42 Williams, Tennessee 83-4 Willis, Harry A. 14, 35, 74, 134 Winters, Robert 133 Woodbine race track 48,140-1 York county 21,47,55,56,60 York County Children's Aid Society 49-50 York County Council 47-8, 105. See also Gardiner, Frederick G. as member of York County Council Yorkdale Plaza 141, 170 York Pioneer Historical Society 141 York township 21,31,55,63,68,70, 116,171 York University 183 Young, James S. 117, 118 Zeckendorf, William 121 Zoning by-laws 44