Elephant hunters inspecting complete side walks; Engineering expertise in Toronto's age of municipal reform.(Case study)

Introduction

In March of 1855 the City of Toronto advertised for a "City Engineer and Surveyor," receiving several applications including one from Sandford Fleming, later famous for his work on the transcontinental railway line and the creation of standard time. He lost out, however, by a single vote, as city council instead selected William Kingsford who had learned his craft on-the-job surveying a plank road while serving in the First Dragoon Guards in Lower Canada and later worked as deputy city surveyor in Montreal. (1) His new position carried with it an annual salary of [pounds sterling]750 from which he was expected to pay for any assistance. A dispute over the terms of this provision and more generally his accountability to council led by 3 Sept. 1855 to his dismissal being proposed by the City's Board of Works. By 22 October Kingsford's resignation was in the hands of council and he on to a varied career as an engineer, journalist and author of a ten-volume History of Canada. This incident thus set an early precedent; civic politicians in Victorian Toronto accepted that the technological challenges of urban infrastructure would require them to seek expert assistance in overseeing the city's growth but they wanted their engineers on tap not on top. A generation later, battle was joined again, this time over a cluster of issues including the engineer's authority, the competence of his staff, aldermanic privilege and development of the city's infrastructure, played out against a political backdrop of municipal reform. (2)

Like other late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century reform movements, urban reform was largely a phenomenon of middle-class, Anglophone, big-city dwellers. The cast of characters included journalists, business people, professionals, social gospellers, planners and some civic politicians. They wanted a more activist city government but not more democracy. "Convinced of the omnipotence of science ... reformers did place increasing emphasis on the appointment of well paid, highly trained experts" with sufficient powers and sufficient autonomy to regulate the life of the city without the meddlesome interference of the mayor and the aldermen." (3) Reformers tried to restrict the power of council while expanding the scope of city governance. New managerial and administrative entities (boards, commissions) "could and did protect their decisions with references to the public good and to the highly technical nature of their task." (4) Progressive reformers in both the United States and Canada often couched their criticisms in terms of rational expertise vs. political interference. What the particular case detailed in this paper and others like it show instead is the inherently political nature of such expertise. The possession of expert knowledge and the appropriation of a mantle of scientific rationality did not remove politics from decision-making but rather made salient the essentially political nature of expertise.

A Growing City

Turn-of-the-century Toronto experienced the sort of outward and upward physical growth, which challenged both the political structures and infrastructures of so many North American urban areas. (5) Not even the devastating conflagration that would consume a large part of the downtown in 1904 would seriously interrupt the city's emergence as Canada's second metropolis. (6) Gad and Holdsworth identify the 1880s to the 1920s as the third phase of Toronto's economic development, one in which it grew and functioned "as a manufacturing centre with a parallel role as financial and head-office city for an increasingly larger area" but without yet the national function of Montreal. Toronto both expanded outward by annexation and built upwards with a new generation of commercial buildings in the central business district (CBD), a number with six to ten stories and a handful with ten to twenty. This growth was fuelled by a combination of Western settlement, New Ontario's mining boom and the consolidation of manufacturing capacity. Not until quite late did the managerial revolution have a significant impact; only a half dozen companies had a hundred or more office staff in their Toronto establishments. (7)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The street railway and other utilities facilitated the rapid growth in the Toronto area's population. (8) Concrete sidewalks replaced wooden while electricity supplemented and came to overshadow gas as a source of light and heat. While sewerage was being improved, untreated waste continued to be dumped into Lake Ontario. (9) From a variety of motivations, private ownership of some but not all of the city's utilities gave way to public. (10) Along with the physical infrastructure, Toronto also developed a legal and administrative structure of by-laws regulating the use of municipal space for a variety of purposes. (11) Again, in common with other cities, Torontonians struggled to define the roles to be played by their mayor and other elected municipal representatives and city staff. (12) As is well known, Canadian cities are creatures of their Provinces. Local self-governance rested on statute law, such as the pre-Confederation Baldwin Act. Council as a whole found it difficult to control spending as its committees spent and contracted on their own resulting in deficits. Attempts to create an executive committee in 1877 partly drawing inspiration from the 1875 Tilden Commission in New York proved premature. A proposal in the 1880s for a U.S.-style Mayor and Commissioners to reduce "aldermanic interference with officials" was not taken up. A later suggestion for a board consisting of the mayor and heads of standing committees as a sort of city cabinet met a similar fate. Not until 1896 would the Province of Ontario mandate a Board of Control for Toronto, composed of the mayor and three controllers appointed from and by the aldermen. (13)