Chris Murray is moving in Toronto to take the position as city manager.Glenn Lowson/The Globe and Mail
Toronto’s next city manager has spent almost a decade in the same role in nearby Hamilton, where he earned a reputation for quietly stickhandling difficult problems.
Those who have worked with Chris Murray say his background in Hamilton will serve him well in his new job, where he must answer to a fractious and much larger city council while leading a 34,000-strong civil service with an $11-billion operating budget.
“In Hamilton, politics is played with live bullets,” said Hamilton City Councillor Sam Merulla, who credits Mr. Murray for what he describes as his city’s renaissance. “There is nothing that he is going to be subjected to in Toronto that he hasn’t already been around the block for in Hamilton.”
A native of Fredericton, the 56-year-old Mr. Murray will take on his new role in August, after a unanimous vote by Toronto’s city council on Wednesday.
He will immediately face a number of challenges: several senior city positions need to be filled including that of chief financial officer; a refugee crisis in the city’s shelter system and a new PC government led by Doug Ford at Queen’s Park. He will also inherit the city’s perennial budget headaches, a regular source of conflict between his predecessor, former provincial civil servant Peter Wallace, and some on council.
In an interview, Mr. Murray said his first priority will be establishing trust between him and his new political masters: “First and foremost is really to build a good relationship with the mayor and council. … I’ll spend my time certainly trying to build the respect and of course the trust and the confidence in what we’re doing.”
A hiring committee made up of four city councillors in Mayor John Tory’s inner circle and Mr. Tory himself sat in on interviews. Mr. Murray was chosen over a number of external and internal candidates, including several current senior Toronto bureaucrats he will now lead.
Giuliana Carbone, who has served as interim city manager since Mr. Wallace left earlier this year for a senior job with the federal government, will return to her job as a deputy city manager and is expected to play an important transitional role. In a memo sent to city staff after Wednesday’s vote, Mr. Tory praised her leadership, noting that in her short time at the helm, she had to guide the city’s response to an ice storm, the April van attack and the wind storm last month.
Mr. Murray who, unlike Mr. Wallace, has made his career in municipal government, earned his reputation as a problem-solver long before he took on Hamilton’s top job in 2009 after running the city’s social housing agency. He beat out other more senior candidates from within the city’s bureaucracy for the top position.
On Mr. Murray’s watch, his boosters say, a series of tough issues wound up resolved, including negotiations with the CFL’s Hamilton Tiger-Cats over their new stadium, originally built for 2015 Pan American Games.
A planner, he started his government career in the mid-1990s with what was then the regional government of Hamilton-Wentworth, assigned as project manager to one of the most divisive local projects in Hamilton history: The Red Hill expressway.
Mr. Murray had to defuse fierce opposition from both environmentalists and First Nations, but observers say he managed to earn respect even from his opponents.
“It was a lightning rod of Hamilton politics,” says Terry Cooke, the former chairman of Hamilton-Wentworth who hired Mr. Murray and put him on the Red Hill file. “There continue to be strong opinions on both sides of that issue. But he demonstrated remarkable composure.”
Jeff Gray