HIS TO-DO LIST
- Save school pools
- Revitalize Oshawa's waterfront
- Establish Toronto history museum
- Settle native land claim in Mississauga
- Sell off surplus school-board land
David Crombie was in the midst of a story about a recent school-board meeting, recounting the hands he shook, the hellos he exchanged with trustees who are sons and grandsons of old political colleagues, when he tossed out a casual aside. "By the way," he said, "they've agreed not to drain the pools this summer."
Then he smiled: "Ta-da!"
It was the morning after Toronto's public board granted a reprieve to 23 school pools slated for draining next month and the news was not yet public. The magician's flourish was a joke, one Mr. Crombie, the leader of a last-ditch bid to save the pools, was quick to clarify. The extension was an expected move from trustees trying their best to let his rescue efforts unfold in an "honest" way, he insisted.
Still, it's hard to believe that the pools - which have lingered on death row for years because they cost the board $12-million a year it can't afford - could have won a stay of execution without Toronto's "tiny perfect mayor" as their champion.
Lately, it seems, the Crombie name has the power of a talisman. At the age of 72, three decades removed from the mayor's office and two decades removed from Parliament Hill, Mr. Crombie has once again become the go-to guy for intractable problems bedevilling greater Toronto.
His list of recent and current assignments reads like a catalogue of the Greater Toronto Area's thorniest files. In the past year, he has been asked to build from scratch a new company to manage and sell off the school board's surplus properties; to revitalize Oshawa's neglected waterfront; to negotiate a 200-year-old native land claim in Mississauga; and to serve as Ottawa's liaison to the non-aboriginal residents of Caledonia.
He took these gigs on top of ongoing projects, including helping to create a $100-million Toronto History Museum at the foot of Bathurst Street, serving as chancellor emeritus at Ryerson University, chairing Ontario Place and aiding in the redevelopment of a pocket of the St. Lawrence Market.
The fact that so many different groups have turned to him speaks to the reputation he has earned as the region's premier honest broker. But it may also speak to the shallowness of the civic talent pool in today's Toronto, a city with a council riven by "petty bickering, grandstanding to score points, mistrust, [and]bad blood," according to an independent report released last February; a public-school board mired in controversy over black schools and school violence; and a Catholic school board bogged down in spending scandals.
How and, more importantly, why is a man who quit the mayor's job 30 years ago Toronto's all-purpose Mr. Fix-It?
"The challenge here," said Duncan MacLellan, a municipal politics professor at Ryerson University, "is there aren't really a lot of people who you can turn to. ... There are not a lot of people who are working in this area and have the kind of knowledge that David has amassed."
Some of the reasons people seek his help are obvious. He has been around a long time. He knows a lot of people. His experience on the school-pools file provides a snapshot: He has known several of the school trustees since their childhoods. By the time Mr. Crombie arrived at the May 21 board meeting to present a report from the Toronto Lands Corp., the new school-board real-estate arm he chairs, his reputation and a warmly received public meeting he hosted had smoothed the way for an informal deal to keep pools open past the June deadline.
Mr. Fix-It is still a long way from securing a pool-funding deal - a prize that might yet elude him, the way it has the board, the province and the city over nearly a decade of bickering and buck-passing - but the reprieve is a start.
Mr. Crombie's contacts and skill have also proved a boon to the Toronto History Museum. The latest plans for the attraction, slated to open in 2015, go to City Council next month. As honorary chair, he and his name have helped to lure supporters, but his contribution was more than symbolic. He helped draw up the nitty-gritty blueprint for governing the museum as president of the Canadian Urban Institute, a job he left last year.
"In many ways, he's Mr. Toronto," said Rita Davies, the city's executive director of culture. "He's very highly regarded and that's helped."
Mr. Crombie credits his age. "There's nothing like being old," he jokes.
But plenty of ex-politicians have thick Rolodexes and long careers after elected life. What elevates him above the pack is his disarming style and flexible politics, which, despite a decade as a Progressive Conservative MP, make him one of Toronto's few public figures capable of working for and with all three major political parties.
"I have no ideology about it. Some people do, and to that extent, maybe they make themselves more blind," said Mr. Crombie, who resigned from Brian Mulroney's government in 1988 after a decade in Ottawa, the weakest years of his political career. A Red Tory who placed fourth at the 1983 leadership convention that crowned Mr. Mulroney, he admits that he held little sway.
"I made up my mind then I was out of party politics. It's not me. My great friend John Crosbie [now Lieutenant-Governor of Newfoundland and Labrador]used to say, 'David's just drawn to where his heart wants to take him.' "
Jettisoning his party colours set Mr. Crombie apart from Toronto's other surviving ex-mayors, most of whom are too political (Art Eggleton is a Liberal senator), too controversial (Barbara Hall has angered free-speech advocates as head of the Ontario Human Rights Commission) or too far away (Mel Lastman spends part of the year in Florida) to serve as all-purpose problem-solvers.
we really, really like him
Being apolitical helps to bring together players in a nasty dispute. Being likeable helps too.
Mr. Crombie is charming, energetic, almost bouncy. He doesn't seem as short as his nickname suggests - he's five-foot-five - and beneath his short grey hair and rimless glasses he has a smile that reaches his eyes, lighting up a mug that can seem stern in the rare moments he isn't talking.
Dressed in a sharp pinstriped suit and red tie at this week's urban leadership awards, he greeted well-wishers with hearty handshakes or kisses on both cheeks. When Ayan Hersi, the recipient of a youth award, poked him in the back to say hi, he bear-hugged her.
When Mr. Crombie met last week with Vancouver intern architect Annabel Vaughan (daughter of late broadcaster Colin and younger sister of rookie councillor Adam) to talk about her efforts to save a 1913 school slated for demolition in her Vancouver neighbourhood, he was careful never to utter an unkind word about the unhelpful West Coast officials.
He urged her to be patient with overworked bureaucrats; by the end of their meeting at Hannah's Kitchen, a coffee shop beneath the condo he shares with wife Shirley, 71, in the Minto towers at Yonge and Eglinton, he and Ms. Vaughan had the rough outlines for a conference on innovative ways to transform schools into community hubs.
Despite Mr. Crombie's warm demeanour, he's no pushover.
"He rarely puts up with nonsense and that's an important thing," said John Sewell, who succeeded him as mayor in 1978 (after a stint by an interim mayor).
"It's not as though he's a milquetoast kind of guy who lets anything happen."
His spine - and a hint of temper - were on display at a public meeting he hosted in Cayuga, Ont., in February to prepare a report for Ottawa on the travails of non-native residents of Caledonia, the site of the two-year divisive native land occupation.
Halfway through the meeting, a retiree in a black puffy jacket and ball cap accused Mr. Crombie of telling a neighbour that residents "have to get over it." The man stormed out.
Mr. Crombie denied that he had said it. "I really am offended if somebody wants to take somebody else's notion about what I said, put it on the Internet and blab it around as if it were true. It ain't true," he said, waving his finger and growing so animated a woman in the crowd interrupted his speech, "Why don't you calm down?"
In response to the next question, he cracked a joke. The crowd was back in his hands.
As Oshawa Mayor John Gray put it, "He can disarm the most militant, most obstinate person."
Stephen Harper's government appointed Mr. Crombie last fall to write a report on governing Oshawa's down-at-the-heels lakefront. (On the Oshawa and Caledonia files, work for which he was paid $1,500 a day, he has submitted his reports, but they've not yet been made public.)
Mr. Sewell said Mr. Crombie's conciliatory style was evident from his first election as an alderman in 1969.
"He was very good at taking our ideas, cutting off the rough edges and making them very respectable. "He did that brilliantly," said Mr. Sewell, always a brasher and more left-leaning politician. "I was hellfire and brimstone and he would say, 'This is the only rational thing to do.' "
TRAINING a master pol
The most prominent lefty ideas Mr. Crombie polished for sale to voters centred on preserving neighbourhoods. Having grown up the son of a rubber-salesman father and a stay-at-home mom affectionately nicknamed "Shortie" - she was five-feet tall - in the village of Swansea, he had a strong sense of what makes a neighbourhood great: Vibrant public spaces, nature, a mix of rich and poor, close amenities.
As mayor, a job he won in 1972, Mr. Crombie fought the Spadina Expressway and spearheaded a bylaw that limited buildings in the downtown to 14 metres. The former Ryerson University professor and father of three (son Jonathan is an actor best known for playing Gilbert Blythe in CBC's Anne of Green Gables movies) served six years as mayor before winning a federal by-election in Rosedale and beginning his career in Ottawa.
Since resigning from federal politics in 1988, has been busy with projects including Toronto's Olympic bid, work on the city's waterfront and advising former premier Mike Harris's government on amalgamation and property-tax reform.
As these examples attest, Mr. Crombie's involvement in a project is no guarantee of its success. In fact, because he's so palatable to all sides, elected officials have a history of feeding him problems to make them disappear from the limelight while he writes reports that eventually gather dust.
Dispatching him to Caledonia, for instance, could be seen as a sop to non-native residents sick of the fallout from the land occupation.
Ontario Place is another example. In 2004, Mr. Crombie commissioned a sweeping paper that suggested Queen's Park should overhaul the fusty waterfront complex and merge it with the Canadian National Exhibition. The report languished on a shelf.
Yet, somehow, Mr. Crombie's style makes even those involved in a failed endeavour feel listened to, and valued.
"I took from the Quakers the clear understanding that peace is not the absence of conflict, it's the presence of justice," he said. "I keep that as one of the lights in my head ... "
Frequently, his approach gets results. There's even new hope for Ontario Place: The province is embarking on a three-year, multimillion-dollar refurbishment of the attraction, just as Mr. Crombie prepares to leave his post as chair.
Toronto's beleaguered civic leaders must be pleased: Mr. Fix-It has a new opening in his calendar.
Kelly Grant