The lesson of Howard Moscoe: work hard, play hard, win

Eras end all the time. But Howard Moscoe's departure from municipal politics feels more like the end of an age - say, the Bronze Age - or maybe a period - i.e. the Jurassic.

Wags of certain political stripes might make some sport with that last one. But if Howard Moscoe, who ends 32 years as an alderman, controller and councillor this fall, is a dinosaur, then he is surely one of the fiercer ones.

Moscoe is one of Toronto Council's original pit fighters. When people who don't watch council very closely call city politics dysfunctional, they often point - often incorrectly, I must point out - to Moscoe and his trouble-making ways.

Since he was elected in 1978 to North York Council, Howard Moscoe was a trouble-maker.

His entry into North York politics came the same year as the old City of Toronto elected its left-of-centre reform council headed by John Sewell, and it's hard not to look at Moscoe's entry into the game as a north-of-the-401 echo of a similar sentiment.

It was a pretty noisy echo. Moscoe soon proved himself to be the nearly-perfect antithesis to North York's showy, populist mayor Mel Lastman, matching the former appliance salesman's cheeseball mugging with his own schoolyard antics.

Moscoe usually came out on top.

When a newly hairplugged Lastman gave up his toupee to a charity auction, Moscoe bought it and used it to dust off his chair at council. When a local alternative weekly magazine was found to have sex trade advertisements in the back, and Lastman ordered it banned from the North York Civic Centre - Moscoe waited until he was on rotation as acting mayor and declared an Official Day in the name of said magazine.

It drove Lastman crazy. The only thing that saved him was the creation of a directly-elected Metro Council in 1988 and Moscoe's decision to seek his fortunes there. Of course, the two faced off again in the megacity, when Lastman made the mistake of letting Moscoe chair the TTC and tried to get him ousted, in what Moscoe successfully branded the "Kindergarten coup." The mayor failed, as surely and entertainingly as the coyote fails to catch the road runner, or Elmer Fudd misses out on rabbit stew every time he goes hunting.

More than any other city politician in his time, Moscoe knew how to use the media to get across his message and use that message to win the day for his causes: on transit; on taxi reform; on electoral reform; on development.

It didn't hurt that he also knew how to do his homework.

One former North York councillor told me that when then-Metro Councillor Moscoe came over to her house, he'd take the North York council agenda for bathroom reading, and come out 10 minutes later with a half-dozen items marked up with questions and suggested amendments, ideas for reform.

This habit tended to get results - and irritate his opponents and colleagues to no end. Moscoe brought in so much reform at the TTC when he chaired it, that not one but two chief general managers quit in frustration. Finally, it got to be so much that Mayor David Miller - who has always been an ally of Moscoe - moved him off the TTC in 2006, and put him in charge of the city's licensing and standards committee, and left him to pay attention to smaller things - like the transformative, comprehensive and controversial reconstruction of Lawrence Heights in his ward.

Now, Moscoe is heading out the door. Some of his pupils remain - councillors as diverse as Giorgio Mammoliti and mayoralty candidate Rob Ford have taken pages from Moscoe's playbook.

But few have taken the whole lesson: work hard, play hard, win. And if you should happen to loseâ?¦ be sure to look like you meant to.