Toronto Council Needs To Decide What Toronto They Want

On Loving Your City

I am quite sure that every member of Toronto Council, if asked, would say they love Toronto. I am even quite sure that they genuinely believe they love Toronto. But it’s curious that the Toronto they love is a city they’re systemically opposed to being available for those coming next.

The reason I make the point to attack Council, and not just Olivia Chow, is because the Council is also plenty to blame for this disaster we face. The fact that leading this column questioning the love of Chow alone would be incredibly racist, especially after the online discourse about permanent residents and their role in Canadian politics last week. (It’s also absolutely hilarious that this white knighting about a few Liberal staffers being staffers before becoming citizens is coming from people who have regularly attacked the left for indulging personal statuses above individual competency or talent. If you want to make Canada a better place, Canada should welcome you - and wanting to serve a country that has not granted you the benefits of citizenship yet is more righteous, not less.)

But at some point, the week after Canada Day, and two weeks after Chow’s refusal to speak on the sixplex motion, it’s fair game to ask what it is that these councillors - and yes, a Mayor who has no problem speaking to the press after the fact but who couldn’t be arsed to stand up for a deal she signed - actually love about Toronto. Because they seem content to throttle their city, and they don’t seem to understand they’re doing so.

I don’t love Toronto, I don’t even really like Toronto, but it is a city that has to be marvelled at. It is an immense accomplishment - a city that has allowed itself to be reinvented upon and strengthened by immigration over the decades, but also a city that was supposed to be a shining star for those seeking a better life. It was supposed to represent opportunity for young professionals and creatives and the dispossessed, a place to go to change your fortunes. Whether it was for gay kids from conservative small towns to live in a place with a vibrant gay community and significantly less bigotry or for people from one factory towns to come and find a way that wasn’t following Dad into the mill, or for any number of bands and artists and general creatives to go to try and make it, Toronto was supposed to be a place of hope. Now? It’s a shell of itself, stagnating through the consequences of bad policy.

I rarely get emotional about this country, because most of the time my attachment to this country isn’t emotional, but rational. I’m immensely grateful to be born in this country, but I understand both the luck of the genetic lottery that led me to that place and the history of the place that came before me. But when I do, it’s almost always anger - at our past atrocities, yes, but also at our present failures. If we are to make this country’s experiment worth it on whatever level we can, if we are to make right the hell we’ve imposed on Indigenous communities in the name of building this nation, then we have to actually get this right. There can be no greater failure than doing all that merely to waste it in a fit of indulging the already powerful and established.

And yet that’s what Toronto is doing.

Britain, in the post war period, suffered from what was often called managed decline. After Atlee, there was no will, either political or economic, to make the hard decisions that the country needed, and so things just atrophied. Thatcher is often credited for the end of managed decline, but it is Blair who authored most of the achievements that broke Britain of its post war doldrums, from massive reductions in homelessness and rough sleeping to increases in employment and wages, the institution of a national minimum wage, legislated central bank independence, numerous projects to increase educational attainment and help poorer, less wealthy students, and more. The centre-left in Britain took risks, fought battles, and made their country better. In Toronto, Chow refuses to even fight.

Chow doesn’t need to be a card carrying communist nor a centrist Liberal, but she needs to understand that she is managing this city, not building it. She is presiding, not governing. She is what we were promised in 2014 we wouldn’t get from Chow, as she attacked Tory for not being a city builder. And yet when a chance to build a city where a greater variety of people can live showed up, Chow’s fine getting outvoted by her suburban opponents without a fight. And that distinction should matter.

If Chow and this Council want to run for reelection on the idea that everything is hunky dory in Toronto they should have the balls to say so in public. They should stop couching their critiques of change behind words like ”community character” and just say that Toronto is closed for business. Just say that if you don’t work for a Seven Sister or Deloitte, or your parents didn’t buy before Crosby’s Golden Goal, that you’re fucked. Have the guts to say that Toronto has ceased to be what attracted so many people to it.

We have so much opportunity to do good in the next few years. We have a PM who wants results more than he wants announcements, and instead of working with him Council spits in the face of the Feds. As much as I - someone born and raised in Ottawa to two Montrealers - hates Toronto, Canada needs Toronto. It needs a thriving, vibrant, growing, and generally healthy Toronto. And this Council is trying to do everything in its powers to strangle it.

So I have to ask again; does Council love Toronto, or do they just think they do? Because the answer to that question might decide whether Toronto is understood as Canada’s future, or a living monument of its own failure to stem managed decline. Your choice, everybody. Don’t make the wrong one.