April 3: I recently attended the screening of a documentary that focused on the transition of Venice from a living, vibrant city to a tourist destination and investment vehicle for the wealthy and privileged. The commentator for the evening was Shawn Micallef, urban affairs columnist at The Toronto Star and author of Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto. During the evening, he said that calling Toronto a “world-class city” sounded sad and faintly desperate.
I shared that feeling for many years as I watched the city gradually slide into mediocrity and decay. Where once the city was known for its’ innovative governance, advanced planning and sound infrastructure, I now see a lack of vision, timid public policy and crumbling public assets. What is truly alarming is that many, if not most residents see this decline too, but there seems to be little or no political will to improve the situation.
A significant portion of citizens is largely ignored and disenfranchised by our politicians who are, for the most part, privileged and indebted to corporate interests. Property owners are protected at a cost to those who rent: while private equity generates the construction of condominium developments at a furious rate, public housing deteriorates and more than 98,000 households are waiting for affordable homes (Q3 2018). City-funded free programs become fee-based and only affordable for families with discretionary income. Improvements to public transit, which are well-known and desperately needed, remain a faint hope years from realization. Our roads, which spent many weeks under banks of snow and ice which the City was unable or unwilling to clear, continue to crumble into minefields of potholes and shards of lose pavement. Public parks and recreation facilities are tattered and deteriorating from lack of maintenance.
The thing is: If you are from that portion our population that has a good job, lives in a good neighbourhood, goes to the right club and sends your kids to the right schools, I suspect that you really don’t care all that much about the plight of those who are not so fortunate. The roads may be a bit rough, but at least you’re not on the subway. And our Mayor and Council will look after you by keeping increases to your property taxes to the rate of inflation. My Father always taught me that if you are not beating the rate of inflation, you are not making any money. You are merely breaking even. If the City is not increasing its revenue through greater taxes (or perhaps the faint hope of larger grants from senior governments), how will it ever deal with the exponentially-growing expense of making our city a great place to live ? It seems like Council is balancing the budget by selling the furniture to pay the mortgage on the house.
We are at a fork in the road. We need a Mayor with a vision for the future of our city, and a vision of what it will take to make it truly great once more. We need a financial plan to take us there. And we need the courage to make it politically palatable for all of that to happen. Sadly, I see none of that in our current Mayor and Council. And ultimately the City is “a creature of the Province” – it can’t make many decisions without the Province agreeing. We saw how well that works when Council decided to toll the expressways and the previous Liberal government refused to allow that to happen. Now that the Conservatives are in power, the provincial government has become malevolent, vindictive and prone to spontaneous ill-informed decisions. There’s little hope anything will improve for the next 3 years.
As food for thought, I offer the following article from John Lorinc who says many of these things much better than I.
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