Tough times for Toronto: Can it regain it’s balance?

Photos from event

Notes for speech by John Sewell
Toronto Dollar dinner club
Hot House restaurant, Church and Front Streets,
Monday May 9, 2005.

1. Thanks for having me. Gloomy subject on a bright fresh day.

2. As people who love the city, we know that a city like Toronto is a place where the good is often ambushed by the bad; wealth is offset against poverty; the powerful are contrasted with the powerless; beauty is degraded by drab ugliness; the natural environment is fouled by contaminants; and so forth. Cities are a locus of contrasts. The question of how a city is doing is best answered when those contrasts are at a minimum. So how are we doing?

3. The issue of inequality is the most pressing problem in the city. About one-third of all Toronto children are raised in poverty. 70,000 households are on the waiting lists for affordable housing. We stumble over the 2,000 or 3,000 thousand souls who are sleeping rough on the streets and in parks, knowing that the shelters are full with another 5000 who are homeless. And on and on.

One response to inequality lies in charity. Charities are instruments of good but their impact is amazingly limited. Take for example the impact of the United Way, one of the strongest charitable organizations. Last year the United Way held its most effective campaign drive ever, raising more than $89 million, an enormous sum, and the United Way deserves congratulations for being so successful. However, this is a drop in the bucket when it comes to the money needed to deal with issues of poverty. Welfare rates in Toronto and in Ontario were cut by 22 per cent in 1995. The amount of money lost to each welfare household because of these cuts is in the order of almost $3,000 a year. If all of United Way’s money were to be used to make up this gap – and most of it now goes to pay for staff of social agencies - it would reach about 20,000 households, perhaps half the households on welfare in the city. And there would be nothing left for those working for minimum wages or those who no longer receive unemployment insurance because of federal government cuts – two other groups of the poor. The funds raised by the United Way hardly make a dint in the city’s poverty. What is needed to deal with poverty are the kinds of funds and programs only available to governments which have access to taxing powers. But governments don’t want to spend money in this way. The new provincial government has had two years to make substantial improvements to the payment of people on welfare, and they’ve raised benefits by less than 10 per cent.

And it’s not just the province that must act. So must the city. But three months ago city politicians signaled they will criminalize the homeless: those trying to sleep on Nathan Philips Square, the safest place to sleep, will be charged with breaking a new law. This will clean up the city by removing the homeless from this very visible spot – the very visibility makes it safe from sleeping – but will do nothing to solve the problem of homelessness. What are needed instead are programs to provide affordable housing for the homeless – perhaps by converting the $130 million a year that Toronto spends on shelters into permanent housing.

I want to make one other comment, that’s about the amount of violence in the city. All those guns, all those deaths. Most of the violence is among the youth, and much of it is in visible minority communities. This should be no surprise. We cut off many recreation programs for kids at the city level starting in 1999, and the province made it more difficult to use school properties for reaction programs. Put kids into this situation for seven or eight years and guess what – they have found their own ways to occupy themselves and it isn’t fun. We are paying – or rather they are paying, since most murder victims in Toronto are from visible minority communities – for our lack of support. Steven Lewis did a report in the early 1990s after a small riot in Toronto following the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers. He said, if you don’t provide support for black youth, there will be big problems. We didn’t and there are. We can’t say we didn’t know.

When it comes to gross inequality, we are in very poor shape as a city, and apparently doing little about it.

4. Let me deal with a second problem – the way we are governed.

Toronto no longer has a workable system of local government. In 1998 the provincial government imposed amalgamation on Toronto, ending 50 years of a two-tiered metropolitan system of government which had successfully addressed both regional and local concerns. Many believe that Toronto’s success in the second half of the twentieth century was a result of the metropolitan system of government, but it was destroyed for ideological reasons, and to ensure that Toronto could no longer govern itself in any reasonable way.

Today, without a functioning local government, there is no useful feedback mechanism which allows the city decision-makers to understand the problems they should be addressing and responding to with workable programs. Instead councillors have become extraordinarily powerful in their own wards. Each demands freedom of action in their own turf in exchange for others having the same powers in their turf. It’s the city of fiefdoms. You may remember in January when Mayor Miller asked the Integrity Commissioner to advise whether a councillor could be involved in an issue in another ward, as though councilors were not elected to government the city but to deal only with their ward. Fragmentation has gone too far. Meanwhile, the mayor tries to do the impossible which is to be on a first name basis with the 2½ million residents of the city.

Worse, Toronto consists of two entirely different urban forms. One is the compact dense multilayered city built before the 1950s, the other is the low density suburban areas of Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough, large portions of which were built after 1950. These two urban forms demand different services, but because two-thirds of the councillors come from the suburbs, the suburban standard of service have been generally applied everywhere. Thus budgets for street cleaning in the downtown have been slashed and we all know the results. Transit service in the downtown has been cut back substantially in order to create funds to offer marginal improvements to transit in the suburbs. Police on foot patrols downtown have been reduced in favour of police in cars which may be appropriate for suburban areas but not for the downtown.

Downtown culture is one that invested in social services, affordable housing and other programs of social justice and equity, but those are not the values of the suburbs, and these programs have generally been cut back.

The response to this situation is amazing. You would think that people would immediately realize that the former system of two-tiered government should be restored in some fashion. But no, that’s not on the agenda.

Instead, the big talk is about introducing the American system of strong mayor – where the mayor picks a few of his friends and they run the place and make the important decisions. So why does anyone think that American cities are government well? Isn’t the strong mayor system exactly what Mayor Mel Lastman did? He hand picked the treasurer, Wanda Lyzcik, and what a mess she put us in wit the MFP scandal and the contracts to her former friend. He picked the Commissioner of Urban Development Services and she’s the one who threw her vote to make sure 100 year lease for Union Station went to the lowest rather than the highest bidder. (She has since been rewarded by the present council with an extension of her contract and a special place where she can hang out at full pay for a year or two until she is eligible for a full pension.) The strong mayor system puts everything into the back room where a few group of players can operate.

The fact we don’t have a good system of local government is a big problems and the fact people are talking about making it worse is astounding. Until local democracy is restored in Toronto the chance of getting a city government which can respond to its problems is very limited.

5. Let me touch on a third problem – city powers and city revenues.

Here’s a small example of the problem, illustrated by the Canada West Foundation. In 2002 Calgary City Council proposed a 3% property tax increase for the year. On a $165,000 home (that was the median value of homes in Calgary in 2001) the extra tax paid because of the 3% increase was $21 during the year, or about $1.75 per month. There was a lot of political difficulty trying to pass a small tax increase – just like in Toronto this year.

Compare that to the easy ride provincial and federal governments have generating tax revenue. Assume a woman in Calgary earning $60,000 per year in 2001, received a 3% pay increase for that year, giving extra compensation that year of $1,800. The extra income tax paid by that person in 2002 was $400. Assuming that half the raise was spent on goods and services, the federal government collected a further $63 from the GST. So the provincial and federal governments collected $463 more in taxes by doing nothing. (In any other part of Canada, provincial sales tax would also be added in.)

City council must endure much criticism to generate an extra $21 from the two, three or more people living in one house, while the federal and provincial governments sit back, relax, and declare they are opposed to increasing taxes as the money rolls in. It is a picture that needs changing.

Here’s another side of the money problem. Currently the provincial and federal governments between them generate a tax surplus of more than $10 billion a year from Toronto, an extraordinary sum which they then use in other parts of the province and the country. Toronto’s ability to generate wealth and tax is being carted away by those other governments. The federal government itself has had a surplus for the last half-dozen years and is not feeling any financial pain. But rather than addressing social needs Ottawa devotes the surplus to paying down the debt, as though no one in Toronto were homeless, or without affordable child care.

Yes, they will give us a portion of the gas tax – maybe $70 million a year – peanuts compared to $10 billion.

The city also needs more powers to do the kinds of things it needs to do. Currently it is hampered by a Municipal Act drafted in the 1840s. The city needs provincial approval to install a new stop light on a road. It does not have the ability to give final approval to a Committee of Adjustment decision on whether a builder should be allowed to exceed the zoning bylaw by a few inches. It is unable to establish its own criteria for the detail of the property tax system.

Toronto is larger than five other provinces both in terms of its population and its annual budget. It runs the largest child care program in Canada, apart from the province of Quebec. It runs the largest social housing program in the country. Yet it is constrained by powers that are more appropriate to a municipality of 4,000 or 5,000 people.

Unfortunately, these issues do not appear to be concerns for most of the 22 Members of Parliament elected from Toronto. With the exception of the NDP leader Jack Layton, the other Toronto MPs, all Liberal Party members, rarely raise these issues and rarely are champions of the city’s interests. Representation is marginally better at the provincial level but few MLAs are pushing to give more powers and more financial resources to Toronto.

There is talk about a new City of Toronto Act, but I’ve been unable to find out what they are planning to do. The city won’t say. The mayor won’t call any public meetings. Whose government is this, anyway, you might ask.

6. Let me mention a fourth problem, and then I’ll stop. It’s the foot print problem

As an urban area, our foot print is too big. We do not step lightly on the world, we trample it. We sprawl needlessly over vast tracks of Class 1 farmland. The emissions from automobiles result in 1500 deaths a year that otherwise would not happen. Our beaches are unswimmable because of sewage. Little is being done in Toronto to reduce greenhouse gases. We ship our garbage to Michigan.

In legislative life, these issues of air and water pollution, contamination, and waste are largely provincial and federal responsibilities. But those governments seem uninterested in Toronto’s problems. Perhaps these other levels of government have decided to slough these problems off to the city without providing the legislative or financial framework for local action. The city has no choice but to assume responsibility for reducing its footprint – the situation is critical. If the temperature increases because of greenhouses gases as predicted by numerous studies, there will be hell to pay in 45 years. Ye we continue to sprawl outwards – even the Greenbelt legislation permits another 20 years of the kind of sprawl we’ve had for the past twenty years. This is a disaster facing us that we are refusing to pay attention to – much like the problem of refusing to provide good recreation services for kids.

6. So there are four big problems: inequality in all of its ramifications including income, housing, child care, education; local governance; powers and revenues; our big footprint. I didn’t touch on beauty, nor on the maintenance of the city’s public spaces.

As a city, we’ve lived off our capital for twenty five years. Now we must make our own way. We must change our direction. Are we capable of doing that? Is there new leadership which will help take us there? Or have we run out of energy as a city. Are our best days behind us. Are we managing decline, and will that be our fate?

You can answer these questions for yourself. I think there’s little time to lose, and we need to press very hard for change. If we don’t, Toronto will not regain its balance.

Thank you.