Toronto: City in Transition, an audio documentary (2003)

“Toronto: City in Transition” is an audio documentary that examines numerous public policy issues in an effort to (1) portray the city’s visible decline during the past 10 to 15 years, (2) determine the causes of that decline, (3) survey proposed remedies to combat that decline.

From there, the documentary chronicles the changing racial/ethnic complexion of the city and Toronto’s rapidly growing population, exploring the ways in which these issues relate – whether in fact or only senseless reaction – to the decline.

Andy Miles (then working under the name Stephen Miles) traveled to Toronto in early September 2002, staying in the Beaches neighborhood over a 10-day period. He interviewed numerous scholars, journalists, a best-selling author, municipal politicians, city planners, and the proverbial man and woman on the street. Returning home in mid-September, he recorded several more interviews by telephone from the production studios of WLUW-Chicago and WORT-Madison.

Research was begun in August 2002 and completed in early January 2003. Scripting occurred between November and January. Miles produced the documentary as an independent academic project for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Journalism & Mass Communication. In April 2003, he received a 2002-03 Academic Excellence Award for the project.

Contents

1. Impressions

2. The City That Worked

3. The Homeless

4. Free Trade

5. Mega-city

6. Poverty

7. Housing

8. 30-Year Plan

9. Transit

10. The City Canadians Love to Hate

11. Diversity

12. Employment & Education

13. In Tolerance

14. Immigration Policy

15. After Words

Impressions

[Ron Soskolne]  “People from the States used to come here and say, ‘My god, you can eat off the streets.’ And now people look at it and say this is worse than most American cities, in terms of the level of upkeep of the public space.”

[David Miller]  “Toronto can no longer honestly claim to be the city that works. I think the decline probably started 20 years ago.”

[John Barber]  “The growth of the city has made it unmanageable. It’s still exciting; it’s much more exciting than it ever has been. But it’s also turned into a bit of a wild ride. And we’re having to grow up to that second level of thriving amid chaos that you see working well in places like New York.”

[James Spearin]  “They’ve brought too many people over here, too many immigrants into the country.”

[Andrew Pyper]  “'I’m hearing more sirens, I’m seeing more non-white people on the street.’ Yeah, I guess that’s out there, in a kind of thoughtless, barroom, hyper-conservative response to terrorism kind of way.”

[John Barber]  “The world out there is so different from the world in here, and most of them just don’t know. I have friends who come from other cities and they say, 'Is this what’s Toronto’s like now?’ Nothing prepared them for it. Because it’s so different from any part of the country, just so completely different.”

[Arsinee Khanjian]   “It is an absolute necessity to understand who we are and who the other is and what their history is as a positive step towards building a new society.”

The City That Worked

The intersection of Yonge and Dundas Streets in bustling downtown Toronto. Thousands converge on the intersection every day – by car or streetcar, subway train, bus, bicycle or by foot.

Former city planner Ron Soskolne: “Yonge and Dundas is regarded by most people as the center of the downtown core, from the point of view of public life, public activity. During the last 20 to 30 years there’s been a process of the various activities moving away from the street and the result being that the street went into somewhat of a downward spiral.”

Now, with a new public square soon scheduled to open and talk of construction beginning this winter on a long-delayed redevelopment project, lower Yonge Street is being slowly transformed. 

But Yonge Street is only one example of urban decay in downtown Toronto; the city is ailing and no one can miss the symptoms.

Ron Soskolne: “You have to understand [that] this is a city that up until 10 years ago didn’t perceive itself as being susceptible to this kind of urban decay.”

University of Toronto Professor James Lemon authored a 1982 essay on Toronto in which he described the many reasons why Toronto was then so different from comparable U.S. cities that it “could conjure up the alternative image” as the “city that worked.”

Globe and Mail columnist John Barber:

“I don’t think that those clichés ever really captured the full reality. And even when it was the 'city that worked,’ it depended on what you were looking at.”

Lemon looked at a whole range of differences, including Toronto’s “greater cleanliness, its relative freedom from crime, its efficient public transit, and the distinctive social character of its inner city and its suburbs.”

Lemon wrote the piece at a critical moment when American cities like Philadelphia, New York and Chicago were reaching low points in a long process of postwar decline. But Philadelphia, New York and Chicago have rebounded dramatically in the years since Lemon’s piece was published. And Canadian cities like Toronto have increasingly been turning to American models to restore their diminished luster.

[David Miller] “I think the decline probably started 20 years ago.”

Toronto City Councillor David Miller: “We took for granted that we were a city that knew how to plan. We were confident in ourselves, in simple things: we had clean streets.  Politically, people started fighting around the edges, instead of thinking of where is the city going to be in 20 years? People have just now woken up and said, 'Wait a minute, our planning hasn’t worked; how are we going to deal with that?’ There’s lots of things you can cite in the city you see everyday and it’s not the kind of city it could and should be.”

Homelessness and a shortage of affordable housing are two of the most pressing issues facing Toronto. The rapid growth of the city over the past two decades has only magnified these problems.

Immigration from the developing countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America accounts for two-thirds of the city’s recent growth. The 1998 amalgamation of Metro Toronto’s six previously municipalities (of Etobicoke, York, North York, East York, Scarborough and Toronto) into one “mega-city” further swelled the population of the city to 2.4 million residents, creating overnight the fifth largest city in North America.

The economic misfortunes of the early '90s also proved more tenacious in Ontario than elsewhere on the continent, contributing to a political backlash that rejected the traditional welfare state in favor of tax and spending cuts.

With the province downloading debt and services to the to the city, amalgamated Toronto teeters on the edge of insolvency. The Toronto Transportation Commission, the TTC, is starved for cash. A multibillion dollar infrastructure deficit looms. The city has reportedly fallen 10 years behind in its plans to repair roads and bridges. Fewer public works employees are keeping Toronto’s streets and parks clean.

So can Toronto still claim to be the city that works? Writer and Toronto resident Andrew Pyper:

“Well, to mind it’s a city that still works relative to a lot of other cities that I’ve visited on this continent or the European continent. Having said that, that’s a pretty low threshold in many respects. Can it make the claim of the 'city that works’ in some kind of special, noteworthy, follow-this-model sense? I’d say no. There’s just too many quite palpable, visible walk-by examples of it not working.”

One of the most visible walk-by examples of Toronto’s decline is homelessness.

The Homeless

City officials estimate that 6,000 people are now homeless in Toronto – double the number of a decade ago. Two decades ago homelessness was virtually unknown in Toronto.

Councillor David Miller: “I started working at my former law firm in 1982 as a summer student. There was one homeless man who lived downtown. He lived in a city-owned parking lot at King and University. That was 20 years ago. So I’ve watched with my own eyes – because I’ve either been a lawyer or a Metro or City Councillor; I’ve been downtown the whole time – I’ve watched the homeless population multiply.”

[Andrew Pyper] “Oh, definitely the homeless population has increased. But why in the face of an increasing homeless population has there not been anywhere near an adequate political response? I think most of that blame can be delivered to Mike Harris’s doorstep.”

Mike Harris, “Mike the Knife,” golf-pro-ski-instructor-turned-politician, Conservative party leader for five years, Ontario premiere for another seven. Harris swept into office in 1995, architect of the so-called Common Sense Revolution.

Pyper believes Harris’s policies both accelerated and neglected the growth of the homeless population in Toronto.

[Andrew Pyper] “His values, his world-view is very much in step with the affluent middle- to upper-middle-class suburbanites [that is] the largest voting bloc in the province. So I think he’s developed or encouraged a political culture of getting on with business, of cutting the crap: where the crap is sympathy for others; where the crap is taxes; where the crap is people who kind of irritatingly knock on your window as you idle in your minivan and ask for money. So there’s a level now of acceptance of being impatient with those irritating and slightly ugly social problems that are growing.”

One thing the Harris government cannot be blamed for is creating “ugly” social problems like homelessness. By the time Harris grabbed the provincial reins in 1995, the numbers of homeless in and around Toronto had already swelled to unprecedented levels.

Many were victims of the new economic reality brought about by Canada’s most prolonged recession in 60 years. And no province was hit harder than Ontario, which by 1993 had lost 80 percent of the manufacturing jobs that disappeared in Canada during the downturn.

At roughly the same time, nearly half of the country’s 1.6 million unemployed lived in Ontario, and a third of those lived in Metro Toronto. Free trade took much of the blame.

Free Trade

The Canada-U.S. free-trade agreement, or FTA, went into effect the 1st of January, 1989. By December, layoffs and plant closings were adding up, and free trade came under heavy fire.

High interest rates, high taxes, the high dollar, the U.S. recession and global competition were also cited as culprits, but none resonated as emotionally as free trade.

[John Barber] “For this regional economy that was very traumatic.”

John Barber: “It had been built up basically behind a wall of tariffs, and Toronto’s role was to serve the national market, if you will, supply it with manufactured goods. Free trade changed all that radically. And we became rather than the economic capital of an east-west country, we became another regional node in the North American economy – a fundamental change. And 200,000 jobs disappeared.”

[David Miller] “In Ontario in '88, '89, '90, and '91, every single day a factory closed.”

Councillor David Miller: “Overnight, we went from thriving, because our industries were protected by tariffs, to being a rust belt, overnight. One of the political dynamics of that was we elected a very conservative government in 1995.”

And it was no ordinary election. The Progressive Conservatives, led by Mike Harris, took back the majority they had surrendered 10 years earlier, winning 82 of the legislature’s 130 seats.

[Sound clip: Mike Harris victory speech]

John Barber: “We had this huge reaction in which this really tough-minded right-wing government took hold and went just as far in the other direction, in terms of cutting spending. So we’ve been to both extremes in the past decade. And now I think the general consensus is that there has to be more spending, that the balance is just not there and that we’re falling way behind.”

But Mike Harris presided over a dramatic economic boom that produced half a million jobs in the province during his first term as premiere. An impressive rebound in Ontario’s beleaguered manufacturing sector figured as one of the leading catalysts of the upturn.

But economic prosperity came at a price.

Just as the city was pulling itself out of recession and adapting to its new role in the North American and global economies, “mega-city” was imposed.

[Sound clip: news report]

Mega-city

The Ontario Conservatives argued that amalgamation would trim government expenditures by streamlining bureaucracy and offering single, efficient services like fire, police and garbage collection.

Andrew Pyper: “I think it was an instrument that was sold to the people of Ontario and Toronto as cost saving; this will be more efficient. 'And it’s indifferent. This isn’t a political move; this is just good sense.’ And 'streamline’ – words like that.”

[Sound clip: protests]

The government introduced the bill in December 1996, initiating a bitter four-month clash with a motley opposition that used demonstrations, general strikes, popular referenda, legal challenges, and an extraordinary legislative filibuster in an unavailing effort to defeat the bill.

Globe and Mail city columnist John Barber: “As a columnist back then I was very, very much against the mega-city. I thought it was a terrible political initiative that would be an expensive boondoggle and would not accomplish its goals of saving money or making government more accountable. And, you know, I hate to say that I’ve been proven right beyond my wildest dreams. I mean, everybody knows it’s been a disaster.”

Nearly four years after its introduction, the $275-million project had yet to produce any savings. One source reported that administration costs in the new City of Toronto had ballooned to 13 percent of the total budget. This meant that the six municipalities mega-city replaced were actually more efficient.

John Barber believes mega-city has turned Toronto’s municipal government into a negative force.  “I mean, they just haven’t been able to move forward in any way; it’s really unfortunate. Just the difficulty of reorganizing the city has absorbed the city government’s energies.”

The logistics of mega-city have been formidable. Six sets of complex city bylaws would have to be unified. And the new City of Toronto would have to square wage differences between employees of the former municipalities. That task has proven especially thorny, with one public-sector labor crisis following another.

Last summer, 25,000 municipal employees, including the city’s 600 garbage collectors, walked off the job, palpably – and rather pungently – illustrating the rigors of administering the mega-city.

[Sound clip: news report]

The many critics of amalgamation believe that such negative consequences could have – and should have – been avoided. Reforms were certainly needed, but political considerations came too conspicuously into play.

Councillor David Miller: “Amalgamation probably wasn’t the best idea in the first place, but it was very rushed and politically motivated. They didn’t like the government. The government in Toronto was perceived to be left wing. So they decided they wanted to get rid of it. No thought, no planning. And then they proceeded to cut all sorts of funding that the city had and give us responsibilities we didn’t have in the past, all of which made amalgamation even harder because there was no money to go around.”

Amalgamation has also produced a new political dynamic. In the amalgamated City of Toronto, most of the population resides outside the downtown core. Andrew Pyper believes that this has allowed for the government of Ontario to “neglect without apology” problems distinct to downtown Toronto.

“It was a brilliant tactical turn by the Conservatives because it has allowed them to treat Toronto like this block of similarly situated communities. And, of course, it’s not.”

[Kyle Rae] “And that’s part of the problem of amalgamation.”

Toronto city Councillor Kyle Rae: “You often get political leaders or heads of departments thinking that all parts of the city should be treated equally, when, in fact, the city is not the same across the municipality. There are concentrations of residents, which means you have to have different levels of service.”

One of the most glaring deficiencies in public services has been expressed on the litter-strewn streets and sidewalks and in the parks and public spaces of Toronto.

Professor James Lemon in his 1982 essay noted that public works employees swept city streets daily. And it showed. Toronto’s streets and sidewalks were known around the world for their meticulous upkeep.

Nearly 20 years later, downtown litter pickers were out twice a day and street sweepers every night, but they weren’t keeping up.

(In 2000, the mayor of Toronto launched a $2.3-million cleanup campaign, simply called “Clean Toronto. "Hundreds of new garbage containers appeared on the city’s street corners; 40 students were hired as litter-pickers; 13 new bylaw enforcers were put on the streets; 12 new sidewalk litter vacuums were acquired.  Still, the trash piled up.)

Last year, Toronto’s Clean City Task Force spent $20,000 on a "litter audit,” paying work crews to place the city’s trash into categories rather than containers, and simply confirming what most Torontorians already knew: the city was a mess.

Downtown Councillor Kyle Rae says his office receives at least one complaint a week about dirty streets and badly maintained parks. He says the complaints began right after amalgamation.

[Kyle Rae] “I think with amalgamation the number of staff were released from the city, and I fear that some of it was in that area in public works. I don’t think there were as many litter pickers in the other parts of the municipality as there were in the inner city, because you recognize in the downtown you’ve got a high incidence of littering and you need to be more vigilant.”

Ron Soskolne: “The city has generally been screwed over the last seven, eight years in terms of the amalgamation that happened here and being really starved for resources. It was given huge new responsibilities and really no money with which to deal with those things. So the standard of maintenance of public space, for example, just went off a cliff.”

[Kyle Rae] “Guests who are coming in from outside, they still say, 'This is cleaner than my town.’ But they say, 'This is not as clean as it was five years ago.’ So they do still think it’s cleaner here in Toronto than it is in New York or Chicago or L.A. But they don’t think we’ve been maintaining our cleanliness.”

But Kyle Rae, for one, won’t give all the blame to politicians.

[Kyle Rae] “People often like to point to the city that you’re not doing the job, when, in fact, the City of Toronto does not put the litter in the streets; it’s the public that puts the litter in the streets. And there seems to have been some sort of attitudinal change that’s occurred, where people no longer think that they need to be part of the solution of keeping this city clean, that there’s something drastically wrong in the attitude of the people who are coming into the downtown.”

A retired architect who came to Toronto from Romania 32 years ago has observed a steep decline in the cleanliness of the city’s streets and sidewalks. He believes the “change of attitude” can be attributed to recent immigration to the city.

[Romanian man] “I don’t want to sound racist, but there are people coming from poor countries; they’re not educated; they’re probably used to a different lifestyle. They don’t keep the place keep clean. When I came first, it was clean. And now it’s just garbage.”

Of course, many residents of Toronto would reject that argument as garbage.

Still, with 10,000 new downtown residents since 1996, it’s undeniable that the growth of Toronto has made the city more difficult to manage and maintain. John Barber believes the growth of the city has, in fact, made it unmanageable.

[John Barber] “Growing pains are very obvious here. You know, what worked for a quite compact city of 2 million or so with a very strong core doesn’t work for an urban region of 4.5 million with tremendous new demographic social strains.”

One simply cannot talk about Toronto’s new demographic social strains without talking about immigration. Fully two-thirds of Toronto’s population growth now comes from international immigration.

Without immigrants, more people would be leaving Toronto than arriving. Ontario alone attracts more than half of all immigrants to Canada. And about two-thirds of them settle in Toronto. Another 25 percent of immigrants who originally settle elsewhere wind up in Toronto after the first year.

John Barber: “You know, the ethnic demographic melting-pot effect of this place right now is really, really dynamic. Without saying good or bad, it’s very impressive – it makes an impression! And that seems to be working pretty well. I think that works, although there are, again, very worrisome signs – about income distribution, for instance.”

Poverty

Toronto’s immigrants are losing ground. The disparity between immigrant and non-immigrant incomes is growing. Poverty rates among certain ethno-cultural communities are escalating.

Ethiopians, Afghans and Somalis confront poverty rates approaching 70 percent. Approximately half of Toronto’s Aboriginals, Jamaicans and West Indians live in poverty. Vietnamese, Iranians, Tamils and Sri Lankans live, by one account, in “'severe disadvantage,’ with high unemployment, low-skill jobs, low education and high rates of school drop-outs.”

Overall, nearly one in four Toronto residents now lives in poverty, with the rate of poverty increasing a startling 67 percent between 1991 and 2001.

Meanwhile, the number of children living in poverty is also growing. In Toronto’s poorest neighborhoods, child poverty rates have climbed 35 percent since 1996.

And these aren’t an isolated handful of city neighborhoods. More than 100 Toronto neighborhoods, spread across the city, endure poverty rates of more than 30 percent. That number jumps to 60 percent in the very poorest neighborhoods.

[Andrew Pyper] “Not only have the poor gotten poorer very quickly over the last few years, but the poorest are suffering at a higher level than they were even five years ago.”

Housing

With the average two-bedroom apartment currently hovering around $1,000 rent per month, circumstances are especially difficult for low-income renters in Toronto. Close to half of the city’s residents now spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing. And there is a critical shortage of affordable housing, with city waiting lists containing up to 90,000 names in recent years.

In fact, Toronto has been losing affordable housing, as older apartment buildings are demolished and high-priced condominiums spring up in their place. Since 1995, more condominiums have been constructed in Toronto than any other form of housing.

Last July, residential construction hit its highest monthly level in 13 years, registering a 50 percent increase from June. Condominium construction accounted for much of the upturn.

As private rental unit construction continues to lag far behind, condominiums, according to one source, “are now the most significant source of new rentals in the Greater Toronto Area. The trend has already begun slowly pushing Toronto’s vacancy rate up – and the cost of rent down.

John Barber: "I tend to look at the housing construction in the central area as being a net gain. I mean, it’s good in itself, but it’s not the whole picture. I really do think affordable housing and mixed environments is very possible. We’ve done it in the past and we can continue to do it in the future, and we should really get on with that.”

City Councillor David Miller agrees. Miller, a champion of mixed-income housing, seeks to check the influence of private developers but considers it a mistake to staunchly oppose any new development.

[David Miller] “The result when you do that is way worse than if you try to help guide the development process with really good policies and rules about things like parks, sidewalks, streets, density. Development is an important tool to help the city grow well if it’s guided right and if citizens have a real say in how it’s going to shape their community.”

That’s what the authors of Toronto’s official 30-year plan hope.

Toronto’s 30-Year Plan

Three years in the drafting, amalgamated Toronto’s first official plan replaces the plans of Toronto’s pre-amalgamated municipalities.

Kyle Rae: “For three years the staff have worked on this. There have been 183 meetings with resident groups. It’s been a Herculean effort by [the city’s] planning department to weave together the old city – the prewar city of Toronto – and the new suburban parts of the city into one official plan. And I’m very pleased to be an advocate for it.”

Toronto Mayor Mel Lastman has been one of the most outspoken advocates of the official plan. Lastman has promised that the plan will “protect every community in Toronto.”

Indeed, neighborhood protection is a hallmark of the 30-year plan. Under the proposed plan, 75 percent of the city – including neighborhoods, parks and open spaces – will essentially remain the same.

With the city expected to add 1 million new residents during the next 30 years, the plan proposes to focus population and job growth in the remaining 25 percent of the city. (That area includes downtown and the central waterfront, as well as parts of Scarborough, North York and Etibicoke.)

The idea is to create “hubs” of residential and commercial activity in high-density areas where people have easy access to public transit.

Councillor Howard Moscoe: “The underlying basis of the official plan is a good idea. I think basing the official plan on public transit is a necessity. I think planning for growth is absolutely essential.”

Councillor David Miller: “It’s an environmentally friendly vision; it’s a people-friendly vision; it’s a transit-friendly vision. But some groups of citizens are nervous, because they think it means their neighborhoods will get bulldozed and just replaced with apartment buildings, which is what happened in Toronto in the late '60s and early '70s because there was just wild development.”

Those suspicions are based on the plan’s lack of density and height restrictions for new buildings. Last summer, Councillor Moscoe took his concerns directly to constituents by circulating a newsletter. Moscoe warned readers that stable residential neighborhoods would be “wiped out” under the proposed plan.

Moscoe was loudly criticized. “What Howard is doing is stupid and dishonest,” said one councillor.

[Howard Moscoe] “I’m sure that anyone who disagrees with me has always said that, but so what? If I had to exaggerate, I’d rather exaggerate in favor of my community rather than in favor of the academic niceties of the planners. So I don’t have any apologies for trying to start up a discussion in my community.”

Another point of contention stems from the plan’s emphasis on public transit. With the city’s $1.8 billion debt, critics of the plan wonder where the money to pay for new transit lines will come from.

David Miller is one of council’s most resolute supporters of public transit.

[David Miller] “The reason it’s important from a city-building perspective is [that] transportation is critical. I mean, if you don’t have good transportation, the city doesn’t live and breathe. And you end up being a place that is governed by what works for cars, instead of governed by what works for people.”

And putting the brakes on sprawl is one of the main priorities of the 30-year plan. City planner Paul Bedford believes that Toronto must attract 1 million people to avoid a population explosion in the region.

Bedford warned two years ago that without a dynamic plan to entice new residents to Toronto, another 2 million people would settle in the outer reaches of the Greater Toronto Area during the next 30 years.  And public transit would be further marginalized by car-dependency.

Even if sprawl is contained, Greater Toronto has already grown well beyond the public transit system’s ability to serve its residents. 

Councillor David Miller: “The flaw in the transit system is, first of all, that the suburbs were built for cars, so they’re not of the densities that support a transit system. So the people from the suburbs come into town in their cars; they do everything in their cars. Second problem is our transit system is built to serve downtown.  We have to think about the city as not just getting people downtown, but moving people around. And the economy’s changed.”

David Miller insists that public transit needs to be closely related to planning. But whether or not the political will exists to implement such measures, the question of cash is a crucial one.

[David Miller] “Until this year under the Conservative government in Ontario, they didn’t fund transit. We yelled and screamed enough. They now fund a third of our capital program; when I was elected they funded 75 percent. I’ve only been elected eight years.

"The reason this all matters is because all of our funding comes from the property tax. We don’t have a city income tax or city sales tax or a hotel tax, or anything like that. In the property tax, when the economy grows it doesn’t grow; you don’t get any more revenue. At every level of government, when the economy grows, you get more revenue. We don’t. In the last 10 years, federal and provincial governments’ revenues have doubled and ours have been flat.”

As Ottawa and Queen’s Park have cut provincial spending and downloaded services to cities, no change has been made in the way those cities generate revenues. This defect is perhaps a symptom of a larger issue at work: as Canada’s cities have grown, their political clout, some say, has not.

David Miller: “We’re now Canada’s sixth largest government. It gives us the opportunity to be enormously influential. But we’re still governed as if we’re a small town. Literally the laws that govern Toronto, although they’ve been tinkered with over the years, but the laws that currently govern us were basically written in 1867. And Toronto then had a population of 35,000 people.”

The City Canadians Love to Hate

There may still be another, less tangible factor in play, an age-old rivalry that pits Toronto against the nation at large.

Urban scholar Jenny Burman: “In a national framework, Toronto is the city that you love to hate, if you’re outside of Toronto, because it dominates the news often. There’s a daily newspaper, the Globe and Mail, which people refer to tongue in cheek as 'Toronto’s national newspaper,’ because it claims to be a national newspaper but it’s very much Toronto-focused.”

Novelist Andrew Pyper recently attended a small Ontario town’s book festival. Asked by a fellow writer where he “lay his laptop,” Pyper replied, “Toronto.”

[Andrew Pyper] “So, how are you enjoying your visit to Canada?” the other asked.

It’s an old joke. But Pyper, himself the product of a small-town Ontario upbringing, thinks the anti-Toronto sentiment the joke expresses is becoming less and less humorous. In fact, Pyper has become quite distressed by the perceptions – or misperceptions – other Canadians have of Toronto.

[Andrew Pyper] “It’s perceived as the unfair, disproportionate recipient of federal dollars – goodies – that people who live here are arrogant, self-involved, ignorant and even hostile to those in the hinterland, and that we’re all rich, that we’re all sort of here giggling, à la Richie Rich, on our sort of bags of gold coins.

"Those perceptions – we could argue about their validity as observations; but more important than their truth-value is their prevalence, which has led to widespread political neglect. It’s very hard to stand up right now in Canada and say, 'Toronto’s in trouble, it really needs help.’ I think the level of sympathy outside of Toronto would be next to nil.

"So it’s not a particularly favorable climate for sober exchange of data [on Toronto’s decline] when knee-jerk prejudice is more convenient.”

No matter how steep the decline, Pyper believes it will take a long time to “destabilize” those perceptions of wealth, greed and insularity.

As Toronto has adapted to its new role in the global economy, the chasm may have only widened. The Globe and Mail’s John Barber contends that Toronto is now detached from the national economy in a “fundamental way.”

[John Barber] “The new Toronto has nothing to say, really, about Canada in that same way. The attachments of the new Toronto are global, entirely global. Nobody from Canada comes here anymore. It used to be that most of our immigration came from within the country. Well, they don’t come here at all anymore.

"People who come here [now] come from other parts of the world, and they maintain their relationships with other parts of the world. And there is something that is quite different happening that removes Toronto from the national identity in a way that we haven’t come to grips with yet.”

Diversity

By several statistical measures, Toronto is now the most ethnically diverse city in the world. Ten years ago, 42 percent of people living in Metro Toronto were foreign born, double the percentage of foreign-born living in that legendary ethnic melting pot, New York City.

Today, foreign-born residents make up roughly half the population of Toronto. And where the foreign-born in Toronto used to be overwhelmingly white, well over half the city’s immigrants now come from Asia and the Caribbean.

The Armenian-Canadian actress Arsinee Khanjian, a resident of Toronto, was raised in Beirut. She moved with her family to Canada when she was 17.

[Arsinee Khanjian] “This is an actively welcoming country for all kinds of immigrants, refugees from around the world. I mean, it’s probably one of the only countries that still has that opening up to the rest of the world, for whoever wishes, if they can, for either economic reasons or for political reasons, or because they would love to live in the Canadian society to come here. So we are every day in this situtation where we encounter people from elsewhere.”

Omar Marquina recently arrived in Toronto from Mexico City.

[Omar Marquina] “It’s a shock trying to see all these multi-cultural areas because in Mexico you can see everybody’s alike. But here you can see many countries, peoples. It’s kind of a shock, but I like it.”

The people of Toronto come from 169 countries. In the city’s Jane-Finch neighborhood alone, more than 72 languages and dialects from 115 countries are spoken. By one estimate, there are close to 500 ethnic groups in the city counting 5,000 residents or more.

John Barber: “Well, I think the most amazing thing about Toronto now, at the beginning of the 21st century, is this ethnic and racial dynamic. Nobody’s ever really been here before. I mean, New York 100 years ago was kind of like this, but I don’t think there was as great a variety of races and languages that were spoken even then.

"And, you know, this is part of a worldwide phenomenon, and we’re way, way out there, in terms of how to establish a functioning multi-racial, multi-ethnic, completely globalized society. That’s really exciting.”

[Jenny Burman] “One of the reasons that I really love Toronto is the promise of Toronto.”

Jenny Burman:

“It has the real potential to be a kind of city of refuge. It has a lot of impressive services for immigrants; it has a lot of established third-, fourth-, fifth-generation immigrant commiunities. So it really does have a cosmopolitan flavor that I think can make it a very inviting place for people to move to.”

[Omar Marquina] “Yes, it’s been great, because I think Canada has had a lot of immigrants for a while. So they have several programs free of charge that will help you to settle in all kinds of areas – housing, jobs, people, everything related. And it’s helped us because we were new; we don’t know how to do it if they don’t have these programs.”

Such programs can certainly ease the transition for those who take advantage of them. But what draws so many immigrants to Toronto in the first place?

Thirty-four-year-old Omar Marquina has lived almost his entire life in Mexico City. Educated as an electronic engineer, Marquina left his job as a telecommunications manager for a Mexico City-based retail company to immigrate to Canada.

[Omar Marquina] “I had two main reasons in importance of order: I would like to find a more healthy place to live, because my wife and I are planning to have kids; the second is to be away from violence.”

Nazir Ahmed also cited violence and crime as reasons to leave his native country.

[Nazir Ahmed] “In Bangladesh, except one thing, everything is the best; I think the best in the world – only one thing: the law and order situation.”

So why Canada?

[Nazir Ahmed] “I heard that Canada is highly economically developed and that life is high – high standard of living. After coming here, I see the living standard is higher, but earning is very tough.”

Employment & Education

Educated at Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Nazir Ahmed worked 13 years in Bangladesh as a civil engineer. Currently employed as a part-time cashier in a Yonge Street convenience shop, Nazir expected to find work in Canada compatible with his training and experience. He chose Toronto for its favorable job market.

[Nazir Ahmed] “When the immigrants go for doing job they get job lower than their expectation. Nowadays, most people [who] come here are highly educated. But they don’t get any job [at] their level of expectation. So they are doing small jobs like in restaurant, this convenience store. But this is not their expectation. So they are frustrated.”

[David Miller] “One of the problems we have in Canada is we have a terrible system for evaluating foreign-trained professionals.”

Councillor David Miller: “People get recruited as a teacher or a doctor and they get here and can’t practice their profession. You know, so the stereotype of people with Ph.D.s driving cabs is somewhat true in Toronto.”

[John Barber] “There’s a demand for low-cost labor; we’re living on it.”

Again, John Barber:

“Basically, we sell citizenship for the opportunity to have people who are going to work minimum wage in our economy. It’s a pretty – on some level it’s a pretty cut-and-dry arrangement. And business knows that it needs those workers, so there’s a lot of political support for [high] levels of immigration.”

But when those workers are highly educated professionals, clearly there’s a problem. Last May, the National Post noted that thousands of doctors have immigrated to Canada, but “face huge restrictions in terms of entering medicine or getting evaluated.”

In November, Ontario’s Conservative government announced (a $36.4-million-a-year) program to license 650 foreign-trained physicians by 2007. The program, of course, will do nothing to aid the vast majority of Toronto’s underemployed and unemployed immigrants.

[Nazir Ahmed] “This is my realization: a lot of people will come here; the government should tell them, 'There is no job for you.’ From my one-year experience, the Canadian government need labor, not highly educated people. It’s my guess, what I’ve seen.”

Frustrated with his lack of success, Nazir Ahmed described himself last September as “somewhat pessimistic, but not giving up.”

Not having experienced the same frustrations as Nazir Ahmed, newcomer Omar Marquina is decidedly more optimistic. But he’s also realistic.

[Omar Marquina] “Well, I probably will have two choices: [first] to do like a 'survival job’; that is working in some[where] else that is not in my field; the second will probably be in my field but at a basic level, entry level. So [I] will probably have to move up. So that’s the two options. The better will be getting my field in my previous position.”

Eventually, Marquina hopes to get a job more challenging – and more lucrative – than the job he left in Mexico City. He knows it won’t be easy.

[Omar Marquina] “What has to be done is to be positive and to be willing to do it. Even if you get a job, a basic entry job, don’t stop, keep searching, because you can find a good job. I’m really sure about that.”

In coming to Canada, Marquina brought with him more than a positive attitude. Anticipating a competitive job market, Marquina completed the necessary coursework to ensure his academic standing in Canada. He even took a job washing dishes.

[Omar Marquina] “I went for training for one day. I stayed there from five [p.m.] till 1:30 in the morning, just wondering what will be the worst-case scenario, where I could get if I don’t find a better position.”

Arriving in Toronto last August, Marquina soon began familiarizing himself with the public transit system, improving his English skills, attending job workshops and simply meeting people.

[Omar Marquina] “You have to be out of your house; your house is your enemy when you are an immigrant.”

[Sound clip: labor protest]

For months, the workers at the Quality Hotel on Bloor Street have been protesting unfair treatment by management. One of the organizers of the protests is Rommel Favila, a Filipino hotel employee who has been in Toronto for seven years.

[Rommel Favila] “The issue is all about wages and the 18 rooms that the room attendants are cleaning right now. In here at the Quality Hotel, our room attendants are doing 18 rooms, and if they don’t finish the 18 rooms at 5:00, they’re gonna ask you to swipe out your card, sign out your paper and they’re gonna ask you to go back to your unfinished work. And this is unfair labor practices.”

In September, the Hotel Employees, Restaurant Employees Union Local 75 was calling for a boycott of the hotel until a fair agreement was reached between the workers and management. Workers had voted nine days earlier to “take any action up to and including a strike, if necessary.”

In late August and early September, University of Toronto researcher Richard Fung noticed…

“…there were a number of strikes at hotels. And I remember passing the picket lines, and those picket lines were mainly immigrants of color – Filipinos, black people, Chinese, South Asians. And those are the people who do this kind of work that white Canadians don’t want to do. There’s a kind of trans-national working class, a kind of browning of the working class.”

Of course, immigrants don’t necessarily want these jobs either. They simply have fewer choices.

[Rommel Favila] “It’s hard to find another job, so I keep working in here. But as I experience working here they’re forcing you to work, work and work.”

Before coming to Canada, Favila had worked as a legislative staff officer for the Congress of the Philippines. He left that job to join his wife, who had already settled in Toronto. There were other considerations as well.

[Rommel Favila] “I wanted really to come to Canada, because when I studied Canada – history, the way of life, the economics, politics – compared to my country, it’s much better, because if you have kids, you want to raise your kids in a good environment.”

Rommel Favila’s standard of living has improved since coming to Toronto. But that improvement has had its limits.

[Rommel Favila] “Compared to the Philippines, life here is much easier, because here you have all the liberty. But here I cannot use my education from the Philippines because right now I didn’t go to school here in Canada.”

For his education to be recognized, Favila will need up to a year of schooling in Canada. But attending school for even six months has so far been unmanageable.

[Rommel Favila] “In the first place, I don’t have enough money. And the second issue is I’m busy working two jobs, so that’s why I don’t have enough time to study. But right now I am planning to resign my part-time job and to go back to school because I want to uplift my life.”

Education is only one factor limiting job opportunities for immigrants. Work experience is another, including for those, like Nazir Ahmed, whose education is recognized by the government.

[Nazir Ahmed] “One type of reply I got from everywhere [is] that your experience is pretty good, but right now we are not able to take you in our office, so wait for later.”

Later, unfortunately, means when the applicant has obtained so-called Canadian experience.

Having only begun his job search, Omar Marquina has already encountered this obstacle.

[Omar Marquina] “They have been asking for the Canadian experience. Really, I haven’t found somebody who can tell me what actually the Canadian experience [is]. They can say, 'You have to work in a Canadian company,’ that’s it. As long as it’s Canadian, it’s Canadian experience.”

Victoria, who preferred not to use her real name, believes the demand made by employers for Canadian experience is both unnecessary and unfair. Victoria’s mother had been a bank teller in Guyana for almost 10 years. Arriving in Canada in 1972, no bank would hire her.

[Victoria] “It’s all about having Canadian experience. I don’t understand how someone doing the same job in another country – if anything, based on her experiences that she’d have there, she could accept whatever training they could offer and add that to her abilities. I don’t see how that that’s a deficiency.”

David Miller’s British mother faced similar obstacles.

[David Miller] “When my mum came in 1967 – came back to Canada; she had already been here and taught – she came back as a teacher, and they told her she wasn’t qualified. It was just absurd. It’s been going on for at least 40 years. So it’s time to fix that problem.”

But not everyone thinks the system is unsound. One letter to the editor published in September by the Toronto Starchastised an Indian immigrant for having come to Canada “thinking that his professional credentials and career accomplishments would be immediately recognizable and transferable. This is a ridiculous assumption,” the author of the letter concluded.

Meanwhile, civil engineer Nazir Ahmed gains “Canadian experience” cashiering in a downtown convenience shop.

In Tolerance

One thing neither Nazir Ahmed nor Omar Marquina have encountered in their time in Toronto is blatant racial or ethnic discrimination. The city’s slogan is “Diversity is Our Strength.” For the most part, it rings true.

[David Miller] “I think it’s one of the greatest gifts Toronto has.”

Victoria recently returned to live in Toronto after being away for seven years.

[Victoria] “It’s funny; my very first week back here I was walking down the street and there was a school bus going by, and there was a Muslim woman – and I knew she was Muslim because she had the full burka on – and she was driving a school bus. That instant was really great for me. I just thought: this is truly multicultural; this isn’t tokenism anymore. And that’s exciting.”

Muhammad, 15, has lived with his family in suburban Woodbridge for seven years. His father owns a Pakistani restaurant on Gerard Street in Little India in old Toronto East. Originally from Pakistan, Muhammad, a self-described Persian-Oriental-British-Canadian, has not encountered racial abuse.

[Muhammad] “I have no problems at all so far.” 
[Stephen Miles]  “And has that been the case as long as you’ve been in Toronto?” 
[Muhammad] “Yes. Nothing happened so far.”

If incidents of overt discrimination are relatively rare, there is evidence to suggest that some Toronto residents are skittish about the relentless flow of immigrants into the city.

Last September, the Toronto Sun, a tabloid-style newspaper with avowedly conservative politics, ran a front-page headline declaring, “Canadians Want to Clean Up This Immigration Mess.”

The Sun published the results of a nationwide poll it conducted in August that found that 35 percent of Canadians wanted immigration laws and quotas “tightened significantly,” while another 34 percent wanted them “tightened somewhat.” The Sun noted that only 5 percent of those questioned felt that restrictions on immigration should be relaxed, while 21 percent were content with the status quo.

David Miller: “I think there are some tensions, but I think if you examined those polling numbers, you’d find that predominately the people who are really most concerned about immigration are people who are a little bit removed from it in the smaller towns and don’t see it as much. That’s my sense.”

Toronto resident Andrew Pyper agrees. He thinks the sentiment the poll reveals …

“… i.e., we’re letting in too many of those 'brown people,’ is a sentiment that would be mostly held, I think, in places that, oddly enough, probably haven’t experienced that much immigration in their communities.”

Pyper says he just doesn’t hear much about current immigration policies being a mess.

[Andrew Pyper] “I don’t hear it here where "here” is really, you know, downtown central Toronto. It would be an almost impossible position to maintain, given that if you lived in central Toronto, you’d be talking quite literally about your neighbors, which doesn’t, of course, stop racists from expressing racism, but it would be hard to sustain.“

James Spearin sells Toronto Street News for the homeless on Queen Street East in the Beaches area of Toronto. While the Beaches neighborhood is not downtown, it’s not far removed from it. And the ethnic composition of the Beaches approximates that of the city at large, with a slightly larger proportion of Chinese residents. Chinese, in fact, is the second most spoken language in the Beaches.

Still, the proportion of residents reporting either British or Canadian ethnic origin in the more affluent of the Beaches’ two wards is three times that of the larger city.

Spearin is 49 years old, white, and has lived in Toronto his whole life. He shares the opinion that current Canadian immigration policy has gone too far.

[James Spearin] "Well, I don’t want to sound racist, but I think it’s that they’ve brought too many people over here, too many immigrants into the country.”

Elsewhere in the Beaches, in fact on the beach, Margaret Schuster, a 52-year resident of Toronto who came to Canada from Austria, agreed that Canadian immigration policy was in need of reform.

[MS] “Yeah, I think that would be good, because there are too many people here already.”
[SM]  “So you think they should just have restrictions where they cut the numbers?” 
[MS]  “I think so; yes, I think so.” 
[SM]  “You just think the numbers, not any certain groups.”
[MS] “No, no. Just the numbers. Less people; yeah, that’s right.”

The Romanian man whom we earlier heard from expressed similar sentiments.

[Romanian man] “I think that there are too many immigrants coming at one time and they don’t have time to adjust to the new place. So …”
[Stephen Miles]  “So slow it down.” 
[Romanian man] “Yeah. Slow it down.”

While it took little effort to find three Toronto residents who criticized Canadian immigration policy, it would be reckless to conclude that those opinions reflected – and, in fact, confirmed – the findings of the Sun poll.

University of Toronto researcher Richard Fung: “Here papers like the Sun have long had an anti-immigrant stance, and a racist stance, actually – a paper that is read by a lot of immigrants and a lot of people of color. It’s populism. Right? So it doesn’t surprise me that you’d find people on the Beaches who say, 'Oh, yes, we have to clean it up.’”

Victoria agreed.

[Victoria] “I find that there’s a tendency when you immigrate to a place, you secure your family; you make sure that everything’s okay for you. There’s a tendency to forget that there are people coming in the door behind you. Immigrants who make comments like, 'Oh, the city needs to be cleaned up; we should stop letting immigrants in,’ I think it’s about self-preservation. It’s about survival.”

But John Barber, for one, believes that concern with immigration policy is misplaced.

[John Barber] “There’s a dynamic of cultural exchange that no government policy is going to change. I think that people don’t realize that yet, and they still think that immigration is like a set of levers in a special room in Ottawa that you can pull and push and somehow change. To most Canadians that’s a realistic assessment, because the world out there is so different from the world in here, and most of them just don’t know.”

Even with calls to close Canada’s borders, an anti-immigration backlash of any serious magnitude does not seem to be developing – in Toronto or the nation at large.

More typical than the Sun poll is a nationwide survey conducted last January which found that two-thirds of Canadians either believed the country was letting in the right number of immigrants, or not enough.

— Audio continues below —

(In recent years, Canada has attracted upwards of 225,000 immigrants annually. Now the government wants to set a new target - 310,000 newcomers per year, or one percent of the population. One percent is actually Canada’s historic average, but it’s well below the three-percent peak rate of the early 1900s.

Yet even at current levels, no other country welcomes more immigrants per capita than Canada. The U.S., by contrast, admits about half as many immigrants per capita.

But birthrates in the United States have not fallen as steeply as they have in Canada.

Birthrates are especially low in Toronto, Canada’s most populous city. So it’s not surprising that for the first time since World War II, immigration is Canada’s main source of growth. John Barber:

“I think that realistically we’re going to maintain very high levels of immigration. Whether it’s good or bad is kind of beside the point.”)

Immigration Policy

But while the government hopes to increase immigration, new restrictions have been imposed, effectively raising the bar on who gets in – and who doesn’t.

Critics predict that “well-connected, highly educated” people from Europe will be the main beneficiaries of the new policy, meaning that many would-be immigrants from Asia and Africa will be shut out.

Victoria views the policy as part of an ongoing trend. Canada, she says, has “really closed its borders” and been “very selective in who its closed its borders to.”

[Victoria] “Canada is put out there as an all-accepting multicultural country. But the reality is that the immigration policy is very racist and it always has been.”

Last summer, federal Immigration Minister Denis Coderre proposed changes to Canadian immigration policy that would steer a million newcomers to the country’s less populated regions by 2011. With eight out of 10 immigrants to Canada settling in Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver, and half of those settling in Toronto, Coderre set out early last year to rectify those imbalances.

But the solutions he proposed were widely condemned, even drawing comparison to “Soviet-style” decrees.

Coderre’s plan would contractually bind new immigrants to remain in a given location for up to five years in return for Canadian citizenship.

Unemployed Toronto taxi driver James Spearin thinks Coderre’s plan would go a long way toward mending what he believes is Canada’s “immigration problem.”

[JS] “I think they should like spread them out, like make them go to the outer reaches, up north and wherever, where it’s unpopulated.” 
[SM] “Where it’s also pretty cold.”
[JS] “Yeah. [Laughs.] That too.”

[Victoria] “Someone coming from a different country who doesn’t necessarily speak English or French, putting them in the middle of a really rural area, there’s nothing there for their children. There’s very little that they have to make them feel like this is their home. And how can you expect people to build something when you’re giving them nothing to build with?”

In October, the Toronto Sun reported that Ontario will be the first province to launch a pilot program, implementing Immigration Minister Coderre’s controversial plan.

After Words

Last October also saw passage of the official 30-year plan. Council voted 34-7 in favor of the plan, with “yes” votes coming from David Miller, Kyle Rae and Howard Moscoe.

Mayor Lastman promised, “This plan is going to protect every community in Toronto.”

But Lastman will exert little influence over that process. The two-term mayor announced in January that he would not seek a third term.

New Democrat David Miller is one of several candidates lining up to replace Lastman. Miller’s priorities include pushing senior levels of government to provide operating funding for the Toronto Transit Commission.

If elected in November, Miller may find that task easier than his predecessor has. In October, the federal government finally owned up to its responsibility in providing for Canada’s cities.

[Sound clip: annual Speech from the Throne, Adrienne Clarkson, Governor General of Canada]

Transit and affordable housing were high on the government’s list of priorities. Of course, the government’s commitment to urban renewal remains to be seen.

At the provincial level, the New Democrats and Liberals are positioning themselves to topple the Conservative government, now led by Ernie Eves. John Barber believes the prudent political mood that produced back-to-back election victories for the Conservatives - in 1995 and 1999 - has now shifted.

[John Barber] “The old ideas of big spending have gone, but so have the ideological ideas of about creating dependency and all that sort of thing. We’ve been through that, all that propaganda. I think people are really focusing on targeted ways of addressing some of our problems, which require public spending.”

David Miller agrees.

[David Miller] “That attitude is starting to come back. I don’t want to overestimate it, but people are starting to realize that this mythical promise of the right wing that we’ll cut taxes but you’ll still get all the same services is ridiculous. You don’t. What it means is visible decline in, in our case, the kind of city that you have.”

Toronto, a city in flux, forges on. Harris and Lastman may be, as John Barber says, “yesterday’s people.” But who are tomorrow’s leaders? And where will they lead the city? And just when is that election?

“November 10, 2003. And the polls close at 8:00 p.m.”

That’s David Miller. And I’m Stephen Miles.

Sources

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        2002, A6.

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        October 18, 2002, 14.

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        (Ontario edition), May 2, 2002, A28.

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Credits

 “Toronto: City in Transition” was researched, written, recorded, edited and narrated by Stephen Miles.

He would like to thank Professor Jack Mitchell, Yael Gen, Larry Davidson, Joel Lorberblatt, Frank Miles, Grace Miles, Veronica Ruekert, A.J. Dubois, Kathy E. Esch, Thrill Jockey recording artists Mouse on Mars and Town and Country, Temporary Residence recording artist Fridge, Mary Janigan, James Lemon, Jean Burnet, Craig Kois, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Access Toronto, the Toronto Public Library, WLUW, WORT, and everyone whose voice is heard in the documentary.

Special thanks to audio adviser Joshua Dodge.

By late 2000, the vacancy rate in Toronto had dropped to an 11-year-low of .6 percent, barely improving since then.

City Councillor Kyle Rae believes that government policy – or the lack of it – has produced Toronto’s housing crisis.

[Kyle Rae] “In 1993, the federal government terminated its affordable housing program across the country, which has meant that we no longer have any support from the federal government in terms of building affordable rental accommodation. In 1995, the provincial government changed, and that government terminated its affordable housing program.

"It’s an appalling dilemma that we find ourselves in, and we’ve got two levels of government that are – I would call them deadbeat dads. They are senior levels of government; they are responsible for housing; it’s in their portfolios, and they have walked away from them. And it is a national shame.”

One of the first actions of the Harris government was to terminate Ontario’s nonprofit housing program. Next, the province stopped subsidizing low-income tenants in existing apartments by pulling out of the so-called rent supplement program.

Then came the Tenant Protection Act. Before Housing Minister Al Leach had even introduced the bill, Toronto Starcolumnist David Lewis Stein was considering renaming it. Stein suggested “the landlord benefit act.” Or perhaps, “the overextended developer rescue act.”

The point was obvious: the Conservatives did not actually have tenants in mind when drafting legislation in their name.

And the bill itself did nothing to allay those suspicions. The government proposed to overhaul the city’s 22-year-old rent control system to provide a stimulus for new development.

With rent controls lifted on vacant apartments, Housing Minister Al Leach predicted that construction would begin on 10,000 new rental units within two years.

Leach’s 10,000 new units did not materialize – barely 200 units were added to the city’s stock during the first 12 months of the legislation’s enactment.

Critics were finding no shortage of data corroborating their bleakest predictions. One critic reported that rent hikes of 30 to 50 percent were not uncommon. Another charged that the “Orwellian-named” Tenant Protection Act had “turned tenants into cash cows for its friends, the landlords.”

Urban scholar and former Toronto resident Jenny Burman believes that strict rent controls should “absolutely” be re-instated.

[Jenny Burman] “What I’m afraid of is that it is becoming a more expensive place to live, and a harder place to live downtown. And eventually, if it goes at this rate, people who do live downtown now will be priced out.”

Many newcomers to downtown Toronto are also finding rents difficult to manage. Thirty-eight-year-old Nazir Ahmed lived with his family in a large three-bedroom apartment in his native Bangladesh.

[Nazir Ahmed] “Here, I live in a junior single-bedroom apartment with $1,000 dollars rent. Housing is very expensive. I think it should be controlled.”

Meanwhile, condo development continues apace.

Extra text segment: Mega-city

John Barber: “As a columnist … I was very very much against the mega-city. I thought it was a terrible political initiative that would be an expensive boondoggle, and would not accomplish its goals of saving money or making government more accountable. I hate to say that I’ve been proven right beyond my wildest dreams. Everybody knows it’s been a disaster.

It’s that political disaster which basically removed, has turned municipal government into a negative force. They just haven’t been able to move forward in any way. It’s really unfortunate. Just the difficulty of reorganizing the city has absorbed the city government’s energies. And there have been corruption scandals, too, that are unprecedented in the history of this city, at least in my time. So it’s been a very very negative experience for this city, and it’s certainly an important part of the reason why Toronto as a city is floundering to a degree it hasn’t.

But most of us recognize that it’s not going to go back to what it was; that this structure is like any other structure: it can be made to work. And I’m looking forward to a day when the bugs are worked out, and we can actually make this ungainly thing operate the way its supposed to.

Councillor David Miller: Amalgamation was probably not the best idea in the first place, but was very rushed and politically motivated. They didn’t like the government. It was sort of like Margaret Thatcher getting rid of Greater London Council. The government in Toronto was perceived to be left wing; they [the Conservative Ontario government] were hard right radical Republican Tories, which isn’t a Canadian tradition (our Conservatives are different than Republicans traditionally). They decided they wanted to get rid of it. No thought, no planning. And then they proceeded to cut all sorts of funding the city had and give us responsibilities we didn’t have in the past; all of which made amalgamation even harder, because there was no money to go around.

Andrew Pyper: I think it was an instrument that was sold to the people of Ontario – of Toronto – as cost saving; this will be more efficient. And it’s indifferent. "This isn’t a political move, this is just good sense.” And “streamline.” Words like that.

On another level, though, it was an instrument that allowed for the government of Ontario to neglect, without apology, problems that were distinct to downtown Toronto. If you amalgamate, if you just call this sort of big rectangle that goes from the lake to King City … just call that Toronto, then the particular problems that are unique to downtown Toronto can be easily overlooked, whereas [they] couldn’t before. So what looked to be a-political, or just strictly an efficiency-based decision, was, of course, politically-based. And it succeeded. It was a brilliant tactical turn by the Conservatives, because it has allowed them to treat Toronto like this block of similarly-situated communities. And, of course, it’s not.

Extra text segment: 30-year plan

Councillor David Miller: [Toronto’s official 30-year plan] is an environmentally-friendly vision, it’s a people-friendly vision, it’s a transit-friendly vision.  But some groups of citizens are nervous, because it means their neighborhoods will get bulldozed and just replaced with apartment buildings, which is what happened in Toronto in the late '60s and early '70s because there was just wild development. 

What you need to do is control that development and direct it so that it works for the city as a whole. The intent of our new official plan is to try to do that. But there is some concern – legitimate concern – among some citizens about whether it will or not. That’s an important issue, because if we don’t start building in the city, we’re going to be in trouble.

Councillor Kyle Rae: The official plan has been worked on for three years and I’m very pleased to be an advocate for it. It’s quite clear, if you look at it, that it makes very little change to the inner-city or the downtown. What it’s trying to do is weave the new parts of the city into the old, and it’s using planning studies of avenues where intensification of residential and transit should occur as the spine along which our new city should be focusing its intensification. For the most part, there is very little change in the inner city where I represent, and it’s very easy to support.

But members of council have been fear-mongering that this official plan will destroy their neighborhood.  The reason why they’re saying that is that this official plan will be removing any height or density numbers from the plan for the first time. And although we’ve wanted to do this for many years, it has not been achieved until this year. So members of council who oppose the plan have been arguing that the protections, in terms of zoning and height restrictions, will be lost; when, in fact, they exist in the zoning bylaw and they will continue to exist until the zoning bylaw [is] amended by staff and consultation with neighborhoods and then approved by council.

So the first step is to clean up the official plan and make it that visionary document that an official plan is meant to be. Then deal with the specifics of height and density in the zoning bylaw, which we hope to see in the next five years.

Councillor Howard Moscoe: I think the underlying basis of the official plan is a good idea. I think basing the plan on public transit is a necessity. I think planning for growth is essential. The reservation I have is that it withdraws from me some of the tools that I need to negotiate with developers, and most development in Toronto is negotiated on a case-by-case basis between the community and the developers.  

The tools at my disposal are spelled out in Section 37 of the Planning Act, which essentially says, if a developer wants to exceed the density and the height limits of the plan, he can buy that through negotiations with the community, through community benefits. So if a developer wants to build 20 percent in excess of what the official plan allows, I have a right to sit down and negotiate community benefits like a new park or a daycare center, or any number of those kinds of things.

My fear is that because the official plan is too loose, I lose the right to do that. They’re taking away some of the tools that I have to engage in those negotiations, because they’ve eliminated from the plan the maximum densities. They’re saying density doesn’t matter anymore, that height is less important than built-form. And that sounds very good in theory, but I’m still grasping with what tools I have at my disposal to do these negotiations.

Extra text segment: Yonge Street

Thirty years ago, retailers on lower Yonge Street claimed a quarter of the metropolitan area’s shopping dollar. By 1994 that figure had dropped to 5 percent, the proliferation of suburban shopping malls and competing downtown retail districts accounting for part of the downturn.

Meanwhile, Yonge Street’s decline was being dramatized by a series of unsettling incidents. One involved the rape and murder by three men of Emanuel Jaques, a 12-year-old shoeshine boy whose body was found on the roof of a Yonge St. body-rub parlor in August 1977.

Fifteen years later, the acquittal of four white Los Angeles police officers involved in the videotaped beating of Rodney King triggered two nights of looting and mayhem along a 20-block stretch of Yonge Street.

But the Yonge Street business community knew of another factor accounting for Yonge Street’s visible decline: the Eaton Centre.

Ron Soskolne: “Eaton Centre was built in the 1970s and was very glamorous, but in planning terms a typically suburban shopping mall. The downside of the Eaton Centre is that it sucked almost the totality of the high- and middle-income retail life of the street into the mall and left a vacuum out on the street.”

A debatable point perhaps, but few could deny that Yonge Street has become, in author Allen Abel’s words, “one of Canada’s seamiest thoroughfares, a streetscape pockmarked with all-nude strip clubs, fetish-apparel vendors … and pornographic video stores.” Add to that Yonge Street’s reputation for “upstairs prostitution and round-the-back drug deals,” its high visibility of vagrants and panhandlers, the occasional shooting, and one begins to appreciate the depth of the problem.

Ron Sosklone: “The problem that we discovered is that the area had become so blighted, both physically and the perceptions people had about it being hostile and dangerous, we concluded that it was going to take much more radical surgery to get it turned around.”

Safety and clean-up efforts together with a three-year Facade Improvement Programme were the first steps taken in rehabilitating ailing Yonge Street. Then in 1996 the Downtown Yonge Street Regeneration Programme, a joint public/private undertaking by the City of Toronto and the Yonge Street Business and Resident Association, unveiled an ambitious redevelopment plan.

Eighteen months in the making, the plan called for a new public square with 225 meters of new retail frontage surrounding it. Six months later, City Council approved PenEquity Management Corporation to design and develop an entertainment-retail-dining complex at the north-east corner of Yonge and Dundas Street East.

But today, five years after PenEquity inked its development contract with the city, none of it has been built.

Yonge-Dundas Square, however, has been. The Square is set to have an official opening this spring, two years behind schedule. The recipient of two major design awards, the gently sloping green granite square is also the roof of a new three-floor underground parking garage. A raised stage over the parking garage entrance is expected to be the site of concerts and other public events.

City Councillor Kyle Rae, whose 6th Ward includes the Yonge-Dundas area, believes the Square must have the freedom to be entrepreneurial.  “Dundas Square is in the middle of a retail-entertainment area,” he says. “I don’t think it should be operated as though it’s a municipal square; but, in fact, it needs to be looked at as a commercial opportunity.”

With an annual operating budget expected to exceed three hundred thousand dollars, the management board will have no choice but to operate Dundas Square as a commercial entity.

The city wants the space to be entirely self-financing within three years. The management board has developed a business plan that chairman Ron Soskolne hopes will meet those demands without “compromising the civic quality of the square.” That means resisting sponsorship opportunities – like selling the naming rights to the Square’s 22 fountain jets. Soskolne prefers instead to rent the space for commercial events.

“I.e., events which will be sponsored by major corporations, but provide a major element of public entertainment in doing so,” says  Ron Sosklone. “ On that basis we expect to generate quite a lot of revenue over the year.”

The management board then intends to sell services for those events – like sound systems and seating – and take a percentage of food, beverage and merchandise sales. Still another source of revenue is expected to come from commercial video screens hanging from the zinc canopy at the corner of Yonge and Dundas streets.

Ron Sosklone: “By those sorts of means we think we’ll be able to make the square financially self-sufficient over a three-year period. Had we implemented a lot of those ideas, like selling the naming of the square, we could have yielded a lot more money. But this square is not about making money; it’s about being an amenity first and foremost.”

But even if terms like “municipal square” and “commercial entity” are not mutually exclusive, is there risk of a sellout at Dundas Square? Councillor Rae believes there’s not.

Kyle Rae: “I don’t think it will be overly corporate or commercial. There’s no corporate ownership of the square. Any decisions made for the future of the square will be made by council. And I don’t think council is going to give up its ownership of the square, nor its interest in making sure that the square works for all people of the city.”

If the square can’t realistically hope to attract all people of the city, Ron Soskolne hopes it will attract at least some of the approximately 50 million people per year who visit the Eaton Centre.

Ron Sosklone: “They represent the full age spectrum and mix of people that we’re looking for in every respect, it’s just a matter of getting them to come out and enjoy some of the additional amenities. In my mind the key to that is the urban entertainment center concept, which will draw a much bigger crowd down to the street, and we’ll actually begin to draw people out of the Eaton Centre; not because they’re going to shop down there as an alternative, but because they are going to extend their stay downtown to take in some of the other activities.”

With Dundas Square soon scheduled to open and talk of construction beginning this winter on PenEquity’s long-delayed redevelopment project, lower Yonge Street is slowly being transformed. Organized Yonge Street business and property owners are paying additional tax levies toward graffiti and litter removal. Sidewalks along a 10-block stretch of Yonge Street have elegant new granite banding to match the surface of Dundas Square.

“The street has begun to heal, but it still has a way to go,” says Soskolne.

Interviews

The following is an interview with the Globe and Mail’s John Barber at his office, September 2002.

Stephen Miles  Is Toronto still the city that works?

John Barber  Yes and no. I don’t think those clichés ever really captured the full reality. Even when it was the city that worked, it depended on what you were looking at. Now, in terms of the things that used to work, I think the city is not very functional; its government is not as good as it was, either at the local or the regional-provincial level. There are some real policy gaps and real obvious signs of deterioration in the city.

On the other hand, there’s a whole different reality; which is Toronto as a cultural place, and I don’t know whether you talk about that as something that works or not, but it’s certainly happening. The ethnic demographic melting pot effect of this place right now is really, really dynamic, and without saying good or bad, it’s very impressive – it makes an impression! And that seems to be working pretty well. I think that works, although there are very worrisome signs, about income distribution for instance.

SM   I want to talk about the signs of deterioration and also the policy gaps, both at the city level and the provincial level.

JB  The signs of deterioration are sometimes very physical and obvious. People will talk about garbage pickup. [In] Toronto, the cliché was always that it was a famously clean place. It’s not now. Manhattan is better taken care of. When I was growing up in the '70s that place was nightmarish and Toronto was the “city that works.” And now our city’s not nightmarish, but its really pretty dirty, and places like Manhattan, even after its traumas, are looking really good. That’s one aspect.

Then there’s a larger human aspect; it’s the growth of the social problems that we had more or less in hand 20 years ago with a lot of spending, a lot of good policy on housing especially, a generous welfare system. That’s all gone right now and we’re seeing much more homelessness. Obviously there are panhandlers on every corner, and there are signs of social distress.

SM  What has happened over those 20 years? Is it the current administration?

JB  Certainly the administration we’ve had – the economic conditions we’ve had for the last 15 years have been very difficult, and the political choices have been very hard. That’s the larger economic picture. There’s been a lot of retrenchment on the kind of spending that we did have, for sure.

Also, the city is growing. The city is growing fantastically and growing pains are very obvious here. What worked for a a quite compact city of 2 million or so with a very strong core doesn’t work for an urban region of 4.5 million with tremendous new demographic social strains. There’s been a global change in the nature of this city, and we’re trying to hang on to some of the civic and political strands, that we know helped us in the past that are difficult. Housing policy is an obvious example.

SM  When you say that times have been tough, do you mean on Toronto specifically or nationally?

JB  What’s happened is Toronto and Canada have always been very closely identified. But I think one of the things that has happened is that the city has dis-attached from the national economy in a fundamental way. My frame of reference goes back to the late 1980s and the debate over free trade, which was a big thing here in Canada. We adopted free trade with the United States, which was the beginning of NAFTA, one of the early examples of trade-liberalization and globalization that the world has embraced. For this regional economy, that was very traumatic, because it had been built up, basically, behind a wall of tariffs, and Toronto’s role was to serve the national market – supply it with manufactured goods, etc.

Free trade changed all that radically, and we became rather than the economic capital of an east-west country, we became another regional node in North American economy. And 200,000 jobs disappeared. We’ve just got back, despite a lot of population growth on the fringe, to the number of jobs we had in 1989 – that’s 14 years later. Toronto sort of fell out of the picture, and even though people recognize that the growth of Toronto is a critical national issue, nobody understands anymore, there’s no gamebook for that. So there’s kind of a policy gap which involves adapting to this global and continental economy.

SM  Were those negative consequences from free trade predicted and was there a lot of resistance to it? And what is the current sentiment, if there is an overriding sentiment, about the effects of NAFTA?

JB  I don’t think there is a consensus. If you look at the elections, the people in Toronto were willing to embrace it. And there was a real feeling throughout the 1990s that we were losing out on globalization, that somehow things had gone wrong, and that the opportunities for new growth and investment weren’t happening. I think they are now and Toronto is quite successfully finding its way in this new world. If you ask the man on the street in downtown Toronto, half of them would be working for financial institutions that very much look beyond the borders of this country for their futures.

I think we’ve been able to adapt to this new age, and we’ve been able to take advantage of it to a large extent because there’s something very open and dynamic about the city’s economy, and very opportunistic. We’re good at certain things. People very much look forward to Toronto’s future I think on many levels; not only the elite level, but at the grassroots level: as a global city, as a city that can take part in that economy, at least firmly in the second tier if not as one of the world’s capitals. There is a sense that we can compete and we want to; there’s a general, positive attitude about that.

But the problem is that our social and political approach is still based on the old, especially on the national level. They have a very difficult time dealing with a place like Toronto. They’re still concentrating on resource issues and regional assistance. The idea of an economic policy that’s designed to foster the new big urban economies just doesn’t exist in Canada; we’re quite far behind in that way.

SM  In the early '90s a lot of spending was cut. With the economy improving, is there now a consensus that feels that big [government] spending is something of the past, even with the improving economy?

JB  I don’t think that the traditional models are supportable, and we went through a lot of high-amplitude politics in order to discover that. For example, in the early 1990s we had a socialist government [in Ontario] and they started counter-cyclical spending with a vengeance in the worst downtown of the local economy since the Great Depression. And it didn’t work. That created a backlash because taxes were going very high, and it was almost for certain working people better to be on welfare at that point than it was to have a job. They were spending a lot on housing, but the production of housing was so expensive under those schemes [that] it was absolutely unsustainable.

So we had this huge reaction where this really tough-minded right-wing government took hold and went just as far in the other direction, in terms of cutting spending. So we’ve been through both extremes in the past decade. And now the general consensus is that there has to be more spending, that the balance is just not there, and that we’re falling way behind in some of the areas where government spending, if not just on the old model but some sort of targeted program spending, is necessary for infrastructure renewal and for new social policies.

If you talk to the Board of Trade, they’ll say the same thing I’m saying right now. We have bankers issuing reports saying “Look, we’ve got to find ways to get more government spending into Toronto.” They’ll find all kinds of new models; everyone is looking for new models and ways of doing that efficiently, in ways of showing a payback. I think that’s one of the keys to investment in a modern urban economy is that it pays itself back.

The old ideas of big spending have gone, but so have the ideological ideas about creating dependency; we’ve been through that, all that propaganda. I think people are really focusing on targeted ways of addressing some of our problems which require public spending absolutely.

SM  You’re convinced that both Lastman and Harris are on board with that sort of thinking?

JB  They’re completely yesterday’s people. I’m looking forward to a time when our politics becomes more empirical and tactical, rather than ideological. Harris the premiere has gone; the person [Ernie Eves] who has succeeded him is much more of a centrist. The government is still there, but the government that has succeeded him which will be looking for re-election in a year or so, is much more empirical, much more pragmatic, much more centrist, much more aware of some of the spending priorities that need to be addressed.

As far as the city administration goes, that’s a whole different story, that’s been a real problem. The mayor is not a serious political figure in any way, but he’s going too. One way or another I’m praying and believing that we’re going to see serious practical politicians replace some of these old ideological warriors, and very slowly we’re seeing a consensus agenda emerge on what we have to pay attention to. Whether anything happens is something else.

SM  How does the mega-city play into this?

JB  As a columnist back then I was very, very much against the mega-city. I thought it was a terrible political initiative that would be an expensive boondoggle, and would not accomplish its goals of saving money or making government more accountable. I hate to say that I’ve been proven right beyond my wildest dreams. Everybody knows it’s been a disaster.

It’s that political disaster which basically removed, has turned municipal government into a negative force. They just haven’t been able to move forward in any way. It’s really unfortunate. Just the difficulty of reorganizing the city has absorbed city government’s energies. And there have been corruption scandals, too, that are unprecedented in the history of this city, at least in my time. So it’s been a very, very negative experience for this city, and it’s certainly an important part of the reason why Toronto as a city is floundering to a degree it hasn’t.

But most of us recognize that it’s not going to go back to what it was; that this structure is like any other structure, it can be made to work. And I’m looking forward to a day when the bugs are worked out, and we can actually make this ungainly thing operate the way its supposed to.

SM  What would you say are the most urgent issues facing the city? If you were mayor, what would you be addressing today?

JB  Housing. It’s just so dirt simple. That is the key to maintaining the social peace that has characterized Toronto’s development in the late 20th century and which is now threatened. We have to have a big program, we have to have serious programs for producing more affordable housing. We have to find more creative ways of doing that than we have in the past.

Toronto’s success has been based on the fact that we really have always had government programs to create affordable housing – whether they’re tax breaks for wealthy lawyers which are semi-productive or whether they’re mortgages for non-profit co-ops, which can be either a good or a bad idea. We’ve always been doing that and we’re not doing that now and nobody can find a way of doing it properly. There are some models, mainly American models, because we haven’t had the experience over the past ten years that many American cities have had in bringing new housing into existence. We can learn, we really have to catch up.

That’s the thing I would concentrate on if I was the mayor – some very specific policies to encourage home ownership. These things can be done without a lot of money, without a lot of direct investment. You can create the policy climate that encourages the production of housing without spending a lot of money and we’ve just got to get on with it.

SM  What about high-rise condo construction? For the most part, these are not mixed-housing arrangements. The effort in the U.S. in various cities is to build downtown and have people come back, and I assume that is also the impetus here. But it’s failing on the level of affordability.

JB  It’s a very mixed picture. That’s one of the greatest things happening in Toronto right now. We have since 1976 had a lot of strong policy supports for downtown, for living in downtown. There’s always been a strong residential constituency right downtown and policies to restrain the growth of this universal office district downtown. That’s been paying off in the last construction cycle; there’s been a lot of development: a lot of parking lots are being filled in with condominiums. And I just think that’s fantastic. It creates a whole new constituency and just strengthens the constituency for the core. The strength of the core is one of the critical issue in any modern city’s growth in the 21st century, and that’s terrific.

And they’re not necessarily unaffordable. This is a way, really, for allowing young people to come in and get a foothold in the central area. We’re talking prices in the 100[-thousand]’s – and up, of course. But a lot of those units are very small and as close as you can get in the current commercial context, where you’re spending $20,000 on marketing. That’s the way the system works unfortunately.

I tend to look at the housing construction in the central area as being a net gain. The gentrification is on balance a good thing. But there’s a glaring absence of good working-class housing, for people who are going to work here. It’s not everybody who’s going to be pulling in 80 G’s on a dot-com job, just out of college. The housing available, especially in the inner suburbs for working people, is just terrible. This doesn’t help. It’s good in itself, but its not the whole picture. I really think affordable housing and mixed environments is very possible; we’ve done it in the past and we can continue to do it in the future and we should really get on with that.

SM  To talk now about the issue of homelessness: one thing that’s striking to me is not that there is homelessness, but that most of the homeless are white. It doesn’t seem to be the case of immigrants who have marginal skills or their education is not recognized, as much as it is seemingly native-born Canadians who are struggling; who have in some cases come from regions in the country which are basically closing up.

JB  That’s probably true. Toronto no longer attracts migrants from the rest of Canada, really. The immigrants who come here are the hardest working people in the world. You’re absolutely right, you don’t see them trying to make a living downtown with their hats turned over [to collect change from passersby]. I think the people you do see in these circumstances are not just poor, they’re generally pretty messed up people – mainly drug addicts. Also a smaller and really fast-growing population of indigent native people, who come off the reserves around Ontario and all around Canada. Those are some of the sub-populations – alcoholics, drug addicts. I don’t know the ethnicity of that group. I wouldn’t personally expect our immigrants to be in those circumstances; these are all people who are striving and who are living five to a room and working three jobs at a time.

But there is a lot of social distress among the immigrant groups too, at the same. It’s expressed in a different way, and not necessarily on the streets of downtown. You should go to some of the suburban areas that are more heavily immigrant than downtown. Downtown, especially in the central areas, is probably the least multi-ethnic part of Toronto.

SM  I saw on a street corner a couple days ago a man selling Outreach Connection newspapers [for the homeless]. I asked him if he was homeless. He wasn’t. He’s retired, he’s been retired for ten years. I asked him if he had seen homelessness increase in the last five years. He said absolutely; three- to four-fold in the last five years. When we talk about the problem of homelessness in the city and the homeless themselves, where were they ten years ago and why are there so many today?

JB  That’s a really good question. There’s a sub-population of people with real life-skills issues, as they say – drug addictions and whatnot. They were being taken care of in institutional settings more often. There were places for them and there were programs for them.

SM  And now the money has dried up?

JB  There are no places for them because we’re not building them anymore, and there are no programs for them because we’re not offering them anymore. That’s pretty straightforward. These are the people at the bottom of the society and you have some services for them, to keep them whole, or else you don’t and they fill up the shelters. That’s a huge part of the problem. We used to have a lot of support for housing, housing not for people who were just poor, but people who are arsonists, drug addicts, people who had real strong social problems.

We’ve had this problem with de-institutionalization across the continent, where the mental health facilities no longer have in-patients. De-institutionalization works fine as long as there is a community to go to. But the community turns out to be a cot on a floor of a hideous Victorian-style flophouse; that’s what we’re spending our money on now, which is more expensive than actually taking care of these people.

Then there’s the other component, people who have been evicted. They just have no place to live, families. These are people who need public housing; who would ordinarily be in government-provided units; because they’re not incapable of working, they’re just not capable of supporting themselves and their families. To rent in Toronto is ridiculous; the amount you get on social assistance doesn’t come close to what you need to actually rent an apartment, especially if you’re a family.

SM  So as you said earlier, the balance is just not there.

JB  One of the things I’m writing about tomorrow is a scheme whereby one person has developed a model for affordable home ownership that essentially allows him to produce as a developer units that are equal, that people can buy in conventional condominiums that carry for the average rent in Toronto. If we had policy supports for that kind of initiative, we could be bringing thousands of housing units for rent or for ownership that a lot of people could afford and that would solve a lot of the actual homeless problem. A lot of people will tell you the homeless problem is just a matter of mental health. Well, that’s part of it, but a lot of it these days in Toronto is ordinary working people who can’t afford a place to live.

SM  Well, obviously the city is not falling apart, it’s not on its last gasp or anything. And people living in the city still have a lot to be proud of. What are some of those things that you would point to?

JB  I think the most amazing thing now, at the beginning of the 21st century, is this ethnic and racial dynamic. Nobody’s ever really been here before. New York 100 years ago was kind of like this. But I don’t think there was as great a variety of races and languages that were spoken even then. This is part of a worldwide phenomenon, and it’s the future I think. And we’re way, way out there in terms of how to establish a functioning multi-racial, multi-ethnic, completely globalized society. That’s really exciting; culturally it holds tremendous promise. We’re just beginning to see where that’s taking us. That’s what amazes me about the city. I hope that it’s a positive experience.

SM  And the city is absorbing this influx of people from around the world with a great deal and tolerance?

JB  Well, I think so. It looks like that. There are racial problems here, obviously. There’s an obvious and growing correlation between the color of your skin and your income. The promise with a place like Toronto is the promise of any big North American city: you can make yourself better; social mobility is possible.

Toronto is becoming much more of a black city than it ever was. But if being black means being poor for more than one or two or three generations, there is a really serious problem here. That’s evident, that lack of social mobility among certain groups and we’ve gotta watch out for that racial-economic divide opening up. It’s like we’re walking across a beautiful glacier, but there are all kinds of deep crevices and we’ve got to re-concentrate on the social supports that allow people – especially in housing and education – to have a chance and break through.

SM  In that context, would you say that blacks in Toronto are the ethnic group, so to speak, most at risk?

JB  It’s hard to say, because black in Toronto means about a dozen ethnic groups; people who would identify themselves as quite different. It’s a great big swath. But there is a correlation between the color of your skin – whether you’re Tamil or whether you’re Jamaican – and your prospects. That’s really disturbing. There are certain at-risk groups, for cultural and economic reasons. It’s very, very dicey in this city; we went through a big problem with racial profiling a long time ago.

All these difficulties in assimilation you always will find. You look at the Tamils, for instance. There are real problems in that society. They’re strongly establishing themselves in Toronto; they’re wonderful people. But they’ve got some real social problems that all have to do with the state of war in their own country, which is played out on the streets of Scarborough every day (Scarborough being a suburb of Toronto).

SM  And how is that being played out?

JB  Shootings, gangs. The dislocations in that society must be enormous. Youth gangs are one of the social supports that actually holds them together; it’s a negative but it’s also a positive.

SM  Has the city become much more violent over the last few years?

JB  I don’t think so. The statistics don’t bear that out. Police will tell you it has been. If you look at the homicide rate, it’s not going through the roof. It’s notably lower than most big American cities, because guns are still hard to come by. But shootings are not uncommon at all. Gunplay in the suburban parking lots is pretty common in Toronto.

SM  Would you say that was the case ten years ago?

JB  I didn’t feel it. But the city in the past ten years – there have been a million more people come here. There’s a real Wild West quality. We do have an excellent police force and we spend quite a lot of money on it. There’s tremendous support for the police force. I think that’s one of the reasons why we’ve been able to control things quite well. That’s a crude form of social control, a big strong police force.

SM  I’ve backed you up about ten years. Now to go back further, in that article you wrote [“Different Colours, Changing City,” Globe and Mail, February 20, 1998, 1], you talk about the Toronto of your youth and how different it was from the Toronto we know today. If you could just elaborate on that.

JB  I guess the cliché of Toronto is that it was a very stuffy Anglo-Saxon city; a hard-nose, hard-working commercial kind of place with a really waxy provincial culture. That started to change when I was young. We certainly saw it. We had waves of immigrants we never knew before. And the city I think was culturally much more exciting. At the same time, it had a quality – I wouldn’t want to say of a small town, but of a well-managed place. There was a lot of confidence in Toronto, about how to thrive in this new environment that we were entering.

I think if you talked to somebody a little bit older than me, they would remember the stuffy city of the '50s. I remember the exciting, capable city that worked – the '60s and even the '70s. We had a wave of reform politics here in the 1970s in which the city government here in Toronto was one of the most progressive, interesting governments on the continent. There was a real optimism, a buoyancy, about our ability to seize this new future that we all saw, that we all welcomed and to do well with it.

And now I don’t think that people are nearly as confident about that; that the growth of the city has made it more unmanageable. And it’s still exciting, it’s much more exciting than it ever has been. But it’s also turned into a bit of a wild ride. And we’re having to grow up to that second level of thriving amid chaos that you see working well in places like New York. More and more I look to New York and the social and economic history of New York to find out where we’re going, and how to survive it.

SM  What about the question of continuing immigration? It was the Toronto Sun on Sunday that had the headline “Canadians Want to Clean Up This Immigration Mess.” I don’t think that you would describe the current situation as an immigration mess; but is there something that needs to be done to refine the immigration policy as it exists today? Or is it just fine?

JB  Every government activity is going to be a mess, that’s the nature of bureaucracy. There are all kinds of things that need to be fixed. So you could say that. My own feeling is that there’s nothing anybody could do even if they wanted to. You could build a 20-foot fence around the country and it wouldn’t matter, it wouldn’t change. Especially when the critical mass builds up and we’re an immigrant city, we’re a trans-national city; and not only will families continue to come here under the terms of family reunification, but they’ll continue to out-migrate too.

There’s a dynamic of cultural exchange that no government policy is going to change. People don’t realize that yet. They still think that immigration is like a set of levers in a special room in Ottawa that you can pull and push and somehow change. To most Canadians that’s a realistic assessment, because the world out there is so different from the world in here, and most of them just don’t know. I have friends who come from other cities and smaller areas, the Maritimes or out West, and they say, “Is this what’s Toronto’s like now?” I mean, nothing prepared them for it. They’re completely stunned, because it’s so completely different. It’s not something that you can manage ethnically with a few simple policy levers. It’s its own thing.

SM  Then you think the policy of immigration should remain as it is?

JB  The government actually has a goal of 200,000 immigrants a year. And they’re not making it. I think realistically we’re going to maintain very high levels of immigration here. Whether it’s good or bad is kind of beside the point; whether it’s too much or too little is kind of beside the point. There’s a dynamic in place.

First of all, there’s a demand for low-cost labor; basically we sell citizenship for the opportunity to have people who are going to work minimum wage in our economy. It’s a pretty cut-and-dry arrangement: business knows that it needs those workers, so there’s a lot of political support for [current] levels of immigration. Also, the immigrants themselves have political power. They’re going to make life miserable for a politician who tries to do a kind of [Jean-Marie] Le Pen kind of thing.

I think there’s a basis of support for the policy we have right now, for the definition of the city as an immigrant city that’s going to remain. There are a lot of people in Quebec and New Brunswick that don’t understand that at all and may not agree with it. But it doesn’t affect them. So I don’t see them really calling the shots. I don’t think there’s going to be a national backlash against immigration.

SM  I’d like you to expand a little bit on the statement you make in this 1996 article [“Remarkable Experiment Playing Out,” Globe and Mail, August 22, 1996] where you say “there are striking differences between the complexion of Toronto and other legendary U.S. immigrant cities.”

JB  Well, I think that it’s because there’s no native black population in Toronto; it exists. But they’re so overpowered that you’d hardly know that they exist. They’re not a strong cultural social force here.

I’m thinking of Miami also in a sense a lot of immigration is homogenous; it comes from Latin America. So you have large populations of Hispanic, native blacks, other immigrants clustered largely around that. But the complexion of Toronto is more mixed. You’ve got a huge Asian migration; you’ve got large-scale West Indian, and then South Asian, too. So there’s not particular dominant groups. Most of the visible minorities are second generation.

I guess my point is, we don’t know what’s happening here because so much of our population is immigrant. We don’t know what it’s going to look like or feel like or taste like or what the Torontonian is going to be of the future. But I’m really excited to find out.

SM  You mention the Torontonian of the future. In some ways it seems like that the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant is the Torontonian of the past.

JB  The WASP is a person of the past. But we’re enormously privileged; not in the sense always that we have more money, but we got here first and we’re established, and we have the nice cottages. It’s a syncretic process, it’s not a replacement process. If you want to live in what I call the bubble, which would be growing up in north Toronto, and sending your kids to private schools, and doing all that … those kids are growing up in the Toronto that I grew up in. There’s no question about it. There’s a lot of enclaves within the melting pot and they’re pretty sturdy.

SM  Enclaves, but would you characterize the city as having a segregated makeup?

JB  It wouldn’t be so obvious, because it’s not a white-black, north-south kind of a thing. It will come to resemble that in the future, if things continue to slide in the way that they have been socially. We’re going to have to wait for the next generation to break through those barriers, because I still think that they’re pretty strong. That’s why, for instance, I celebrate the public school system here, because it’s so successful in breaking through some of those barriers. And really, I can’t say enough about how brilliant the public schools in this city, especially in the cental part of the city, have been. Maybe they’re not the best schools in the world, but in terms of social education, they’re spectacular. And, again, we’re losing them.

SM  Because of spending cuts?

JB  Because of spending cuts. Three hundred million dollars is missing from local schools over the past four years and it has an effect. In a way, immigrants are like native-born. We’ll always be in our own worlds in a way. But it’s children who construct new relationships in new societies and I’m concerned that the cross-cultural exchanges that take place in school are not going to be as effective as they have been, because we have a public school system that is declining. People are sending their kids to private school that are much more ethnically homogenous. And the government is actually encouraging people to use quasi-vouchers to take their kids out of [public] school, which not only means sending Britany to [prep school] and getting a tax break for it, it also means sending Ibraham to Muslim school and getting a tax break for it, rather than sending them to Huron Street public school, and being indoctrinated with this secular gospel of racial harmony that we espouse here. Public schools do a wonderful job of that.

SM  It seems that Toronto, as you say, is so different from the rest of the country and is already perceived as this island. There are questions of Canadian identity and it seems that the social fabric of the country has been somewhat weakened by the strong contrast that exists between Toronto and the rest of the country.

JB   I don’t know that many Canadians or Torontonians have really come to grips with that. When I was growing up, the last great spurt of Canadian nationalism was really a made-in-Toronto phenomenon. Toronto’s been not only the business capital of the country, but has been the place that conceived the basic ideas of English Canadian nationalism. You see it in institutions like the CBC [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation], and there’s a propensity for every local endeavor to become national, including the Globe and Mail – we’re a national newspaper. But that’s almost a remnant impulse.

The new Toronto has almost nothing to say about Canada, in that same way. The attachments of new Toronto are global, entirely global. Nobody from Canada comes here anymore. It used to be that most of our immigration came from within the country. Well, they don’t come here at all anymore. People who come here come from other parts of the world. And they maintain their relationships with other parts of the world. And their political aspirations, too. I think that there is something that is quite different happening that removes Toronto from the national identity, as you said, in a way that we haven’t come to grips with yet.

What we’re seeing now is the West is starting to establish and take great concern to some of these national issues; they have their political parties and they have a very strong focus on what happens in Ottawa. Here in Toronto, you don’t even know there’s a government. They don’t even have flags over the post offices anymore. It’s bizarre how detached we are from the national government in any kind of way.

SM  In some ways, you could compare it to Quebec.

JB  Well, Quebec is different because Quebec is very much a nation within a nation, very self-consciously a nation. I don’t think Toronto is nearly that self-conscious that way. I think Toronto is a place that is productively indifferent to some of these issues that concerned the nationalists.

SM  This segues neatly into one of the more interesting points you make in the 1998 piece, which is the disjunction that is apparent in national politics; where there’s been a remarkable ethnic transformation in Toronto but the city plays essentially the same role as it did in the past. That’s an interesting dynamic to explore.

JB  I do think that there’s movement in different directions completely. But these things are never cut and dry. You could get excited and say the rise of autonomous urban economic regions is eroding the power of nation states and making them obsolete. I’d say, yeah, that’s true. But don’t count on them disappearing in our lifetime. There’s a process that’s occurring here. It’s occurring very much in southern Ontario, which I think is a real prototype of the kind of regional state that seems to be the model of the future in the developing world; a trans-national or post-national regional state. I don’t know if that’s necessarily going to be reflected in any political changes, I don’t buy that part.

SM  "Regional state.“ Could you clarify that term?

JB  It goes back to the way our country has been developed, and the major changes that occurred with free trade and globalization. Basically, the idea with Canada was that we’d have a separate nation up here and a separate economy here, too. So they built a tariff wall and established a kind of comity, whereby the West and the East were producing natural resources and we’d sell them manufactured goods and that we’d have a somewhat self-sufficient economic arrangement. Of course, they [the West and East] were saying it was terrible, [that] we were the imperial center that was exploiting the hinterlands. That was true to a certain extent, but it was all very much acted out in a national context.

There has always been a very strong urge to continental integration in our economy. The people who settled here 150 years ago were not interested in the Canadian economy; they were interested in markets in upstate New York. That trend toward continental integration has won out with the coming of free trade and so the role that we played in the national economy doesn’t exist anymore, and we have to work as a business center that’s going to operate on a global basis and on a regional basis. And that requires policies that reflect our needs in that context. The diplomacy that matters right now is not Queen’s Park (which is our provincial government) and Ottawa. It’s Queen’s Park and Ann Arbor and Albany and all our other trading partners, both globally and in the Great Lakes region. That’s where our future is, not in the context of the national economy.

The following is an interview with academic Jenny Burman.

Stephen Miles  Where does Toronto fit specifically in a global perspective and a Canadian perspective?

Jenny Burman  Let me start with Toronto in Canada. Toronto has always been seen as the kind of economic engine of Canada, because it’s seated in one of the richest provinces, Ontario. And, really, it’s been the center of Canadian big business. That’s where Bay Street is, which is the closest thing Canada has to Wall Street. A lot of money, a lot of investment, comes in and out of Toronto.

In a national framework, Toronto is the city that you love to hate. If you’re outside of Toronto, it dominates the news often. There’s a daily newspaper, the Globe and Mail, which people refer to tongue-in-cheek as "Toronto’s national newspaper”; it’s very much Toronto-focused.

At the same time, there’s also this ongoing thing that people like to talk about in Canada, about the differences between Toronto and Montréal. So Montréal is thought to be, OK, economically depressed, but there’s more happening culturally, it’s more exciting. Toronto they used to call “Toronto the Good,” or the “Big Smoke.”

“Toronto the Good” was referring to an uptight, conservative “WASP-y” place. And now that’s completely changed because Toronto, as you know, is an important host destination for immigrants and refugees. Suddenly [since the late 60s], you’ve had a whole different type of immigrant and refugee coming to Canada, and many of them ended up in Toronto.

So you’ve had a demographic transformation that has really led to all kinds of interesting urban-culture transformations. That began with different waves of immigrants, starting in the late 1960s, coming from the so-called Third World, and totally upsetting the old “Toronto the Good” – because Toronto used to really be like that. And there were lots of problems, with anti-Semitism, racism; there still are, but now WASP-y Torontonians make up less than half the population. So it’s actually more than half visible minorities, so to speak. And that’s happened in 30 years.

And then there’s the suburban sprawl that’s happening; now there’s a mega-city. [Toronto’s] going to be a much different force globally in 20 years from now than it is even now.

SM  What are some of the critical issues in play surrounding development and gentrification in Toronto?

JB  There have been lots of very lively and sort of dirty struggles in areas like Cabbagetown, which is an inner-city area in Toronto; which, as you probably know, has been completely gentrified in the last few generations. But it’s flanked by some of the poorest neighborhoods in the country.

You might also look into redevelopment of zones that have been dead zones for a long time. The Eaton Centre downtown is being rebuilt; there’s a whole new vision of what that square [Dundas Square] downtown should be like; which is all in keeping with what the mayor wants. Mayor Lastman, who is a real buffoon, really has a lot invested in this idea of Toronto as a world-class city; and so all kinds of investment is made in tourist-friendly aspects of Toronto.

Meanwhile, socially, the homeless rates are increasing. The so-called Tenant Protection Act of 1997 has made it much harder to find affordable housing. Money’s being taken out of social housing, social assistance. So you have this real polarization. But for Lastman, what’s important is that it’s a place that’s presentable to the world.

SM  And that is the corporate world?

JB  Yeah, the corporate world. Or the traveling world: the Americans who will come and spend a lot of dollars. So, yeah, you have a lot of investment in business, but also you have a lot of waterfront redevelopment. If you’ve been down to the waterfront in Toronto, you see that the Gardner Expressway runs alongside it, which is a real eyesore. Urban activists have been trying to get them to take it down for ages, and I think finally they’re going to. But that’s because it will beautify the waterfront and make it more accessible to tourists, not because of any concerns of highway cutting though neighborhoods or that sort of thing.

SM  To stay on this issue of development in Toronto and the corporate associations that we can make – specifically Dundas Square, which you just referred to. I spoke with someone [Ron Soskolne] yesterday who is involved with the project and his concern is that it’s going to become too commercial in order to cover the costs of constructing and operating the space. He’s trying to reject as much of that as he can, and is trying to put up video billboards and have short-term corporate sponsorship. All of this gets into the issue of globalization that is taking place. Having just been to Toronto, the corporate identity that the city has assumed, to me, seems more flagrant than it does in Chicago, for example. If you could talk about the issue of globalization.

JB  There are different ways to talk about globalization. One of them comes down to a corporate homogeneity, or what we call in Canada, “Americanization.” A lot of people use globalization to mean something that’s synonymous with Americanization.

But if you think of globalization as cosmopolitanism or the kind of ground-level series of population shifts and cultural transformations, and what I was referring to before as the diasporic city, you think about the roots running in and out that affect people’s every day lives – attachments to other countries, to other cultural tradition. It’s an interesting way of looking at Toronto as a globalized place.

I understand, on the one hand, yes, there’s foreign investment; there are downtown areas that look very much like a homogenous global culture-slash-American culture – like video billboards. But I’m interested in ground-up cultural transformations that manifest in changes over time. So you have these kinds of events that turn away from Toronto in a particular way.

So there are different ways of thinking about Toronto as a world city. There is the fact of 100-odd languages, people from however many countries in the world. Mayor Lastman kind of reels off these numbers all the time. He’s kind of collapsing these things, saying this is a world city and we need it to be a world-class city; which means it is inviting to corporate investment – a city that can host an Olympics some day and that kind of thing. I’m more interested in the differences between ground-level cultural transformations and entrenched power structures: like the fact that although the demographic makeup of the population has totally changed, the makeup of the City Council or Bay Street or the powers that be, haven’t really changed at all. The idea of a growing indifference to mainstream Toronto, a growing polarization between the last of “Toronto the Good,” and the new millennium Toronto.

And so what’s worrisome to me is that it’s not changing the political structures as quickly as it could be. But what’s promising to me is, nonetheless, as the writer Dionne Brand says, Toronto is “colorizing beautifully,” in ways that can’t be legislated, controlled or managed by municipal or provincial or federal levels of government.

There are some interesting things that are going on that might lead to more money for social housing and certain things in Toronto. As you might know, Jack Leyton, an important advocate in anti-poverty projects, is running for the head of the NDP [New Democrat Party]. He has been one of the people who has put cities on the agenda. So there are ways now that the federal government is talking about supporting cities “infrastructurally,” in ways they haven’t before. It’s been more popular for the feds conventionally to be anti-Toronto, so they’re not thought to be playing favorites. And certainly the former provincial premiere Mike Harris was explicitly anti-city in some way; [he] had a real anti-big city, anti-concentration-of-power-in-Toronto mentality.

SM  What about Harris’ successor?

JB  Ernie Eves? To be honest, I’m just waiting for the Conservatives to be voted out before I have anything positive to say about what the province might be able to do for the city. So while Eves is not quite as fanatically anti-city and anti-poor as Harris was, I don’t expect any big policy changes at that level, because nothing is going to be done to overturn the damage that Harris has done in terms of tenant protection, cuts in social assistance, cuts in social housing, etc. And nothing’s really being done to address the pathetic shelter system in Toronto, that homeless people can’t fit in and often don’t want to stay in.

SM  And do you expect the Conservatives to be booted out the soonest possibility that there is to do so?

JB  I was really surprised when they got in last time, with only 40 percent of the popular vote; but that’s how the electoral districts are zoned. It’s interesting because Toronto is a liberal stronghold. The Conservatives get voted in provincially, but they don’t get voted in municipally. So next time, who knows. Maybe because of all this pro-city rhetoric we’re hearing, who knows, other people in the province will be more likely to vote Liberal. But it’s a messy thing, because the other parties at the provincial level don’t have popular candidates to put forward – the New Democrats and the Liberals, they would be the only hope for replacing the Conservatives. Before the Conservatives we had the New Democrat Party under the premiere Bob Ray and there was a real swing against Bob Ray’s policies. But now surely there should be a swing against Harris’ and Eves’ policies, because it’s really affecting people at an everyday level.

SM  How does mega-city play into this? And when you refer to the ideological composition of the city, it seems that it would have changed maybe somewhat dramatically due to the process of basically enlarging what is defined as the city.

JB  Absolutely. Because it was really the old Metro Toronto that was anti-Conservative, that showed different trends from the provincial trends. And they were voting primarily Liberal and [New] Democrat. Now you have suburban voters who maybe more closely approximate rural voters. So in the next election you will have a whole different picture of Toronto.

SM  You’ve said that Toronto can no longer be usefully explained through the language of multi-culturalism. I’d like you to elaborate on that.

JB  I think that the language of official multiculturalism – which has been part of the federal scene since the late '60s, and was certainly entrenched in the late '70s and early '80s – has been a very useful diversity-management project. It’s been a way that, federally, people could think about how to balance assimilation with cultural retention. So how to balance people’s desires – what was deemed to be their desire – to hang onto what they knew when they first arrived and move into a more mainstream Canadian body politic.

So why I’m saying that it’s no longer particularly useful anymore to talk about cities this way is because of globalization, and because of facilitated trans-national communications, and attachments. That is to say that when people immigrate – and I’m not talking about refugees who can’t go back – there are greater possibilities for continued involvement in the old place. Now air travel is much cheaper to begin with; telephone communication is much cheaper; you have Internet communications. So you have continuing connections to the former site that changes everyday life in the Canadian city. So people don’t need to re-create a nostalgic “originary” home, because they have dynamic, living, ongoing connections with other places.

And then that in turn changes the city, because you bring that stuff to bear on the city through all kinds of things – through commerce, through what kinds of businesses you open, through the kind of culture you produce. So you have music, you have a popular Caribbeanized hip-hop scene in Toronto that’s been really influential in spreading cultural currencies. And it also changes the mainstream, so that you don’t need the old multicultural way of thinking about how capital-O “Others” deal with mainstream Canadians, because the mainstream is changing too.

SM  One thing I want to talk about that relates to this is a premise that is being examined by the Culture of Cities project. It’s this question: “in the face of globalization, can distinct cultural identities remain intact?” To look at it one way, as you described it earlier, Toronto’s distinct cultural identity is passé; and in another way, it is very much in flux. So how does that question relate to Toronto specifically? In other words, the struggle, as it were, to keep these distinct cultural identities intact, from specifically a Toronto perspective.

JB  I think what you have to look at in relation to that question is the ways that people entrench themselves in facsimiles of the old Toronto. So you have to look at power structures, and perpetual old-boys networks, and things that really have held over. There are vestiges of the old Toronto left; and they have an awful lot of power: if you look at Bay Street, City Hall, “enclave” neighborhoods. The way Toronto used to be, it was very much layed out in a ghettoized or ethnicized communities: you had a very marked Little Italy, and a marked Chinatown, etc., etc.

[Now] Chinatown certainly is still visibly Chinatown, according to the businesses; but Kingston Market has been colonized by young punks and now young condo owners. So these are all becoming mixed neighborhoods – except for the old places like Rosedale, which are the old “Richie Rich” neighborhoods. And those don’t change. Those [neighborhoods] were never thought about as “white” neighborhoods, ethnicized because all the WASPs live there. But those, in a certain way, are the most stable neighborhoods left in Toronto; so Bridle Path and Rosedale, you don’t have those changing as fast as the other ones are changing.

It’s an interesting project to look back and ethnicize those neighborhoods, and [realize] there is some kind of pattern here, that there is some kind of consistency between the old Toronto and a much more hybridized, cosmopolitan space.

SM  How would you characterize the current wave of development which was evident wherever I looked during my visit to the city? And what issues are there for concern? For instance, the development along the Harbourfront has been a recurring concern of people I’ve spoken to, on both aesthetic grounds and for the lack of mixed and affordable housing which this development represents.

JB  I think one of the main issues that I would be concerned about [with] this new wave of development would be housing. What kind of housing is going into these newly developed areas? And the answer, obviously, is condos, condos and more condos. Not that there are not enough people to buy up these condos; but every time that happens, there are fewer rental units available, and that will really force low-income people out of each neighborhood that is tagged for serious redevelopment. The continued condo development is the thing most worrisome to me because of how it will further polarize the city, in terms of rich areas and poor areas.

SM  I want to ask if there is anything that we’ve missed, that you’d like to elaborate on.

JB  One of the reasons that I really love Toronto is the promise of Toronto; because I think it has the real potential to be a city of refuge. It has a lot of impressive social services for immigration, it has a lot of established third-, fourth-, fifth-generation immigrant communities. So it does have a cosmopolitan flavor that can make it a very inviting place for people to move to. And I like that idea.

But what I’m afraid of it is the fact that is becoming a more expensive place to live, and a harder place to live downtown. And eventually, if it goes at this rate, people who do live downtown now will be priced out. What I’m worried about is the very things I like about it in terms of its cosmopolitanism, all those possibilities will be closed down by development that makes the city impossibly expensive, and returns it, slowly, to a kind of new version of an old Toronto.

SM  And do you think that rent control needs to be reimplemented?

JB  Absolutely. There are lots of groups who support that kind of thing. Yes, the legislation needs to change.

SM  Finally, you seem to be confident that the Gardner Expressway will go at some point. What kind of timetable are you looking at in making that hopeful prediction?

JB  It’s the big myth of the dismantling of the Gardner. Various parties keep promising to do it, and then it doesn’t happen and then it’s supposed to happen but you see new construction keeping it open. So I don’t know. But I’ll pull some figure out of the sky and say in three years it will be gone.

Jenny Burman a postdoctoral research fellow at the Culture of Cities Project, an interdisciplinary, international research project funded by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Her most recent work is concerned with cultural transformations in the urban landscapes of Toronto and Montréal due to trans-national affiliations, as well as the conceptual shifts – away from “multiculturalism” – that these demand. (2003)

The following is an interview with Councillor David Miller, conducted in his City Hall office, September 2002.  

Stephen Miles  Can Toronto still claim to be the city that works?

David Miller   Toronto can no longer honestly claim to be the city that works. I think the decline probably started 20 years ago. We took for granted that we were a city that knew how to plan, that we were a city that had a great transit system – and we [still] do. But it is a transit system that serves only part of the urban area. It doesn’t even serve the full city of Toronto in the way it should. Whereas in the past people would come to Toronto to learn from the TTC [Toronto Transportation Commission] how to run an urban transit system, now they don’t, they’ve just stopped. Now other places are the innovators, other places have the excellence. Transit is particularly important because it’s the backbone of the city; in some ways it’s the arteries. If your transit system doesn’t work, the whole city doesn’t work.

It’s true about city planning as well. We were confident in ourselves. We were confident in simple things: we had clean streets. We were also confident that we knew how to build cities, because we had that belief. Politically, people started fighting around the edges, instead of thinking of where the city [was] going to be in 20 years. At the same time, our political system didn’t deal very effectively with preventing urban sprawl. People have just now woken up and said: “Well, wait a minute, our planning hasn’t worked. How are we going to deal with that?” There are lots of things you can cite in the city that you see everyday, and it’s not the kind of city it could and should be.

SM  When did that alignment between the growth of the subway system and the growth of the city cease to exist? And what are some of the factors that have contributed to this problem?

DM   It’s debatable when it stopped; certainly [during] the last 15 or 20 years we haven’t built rapid transit. We’ve had a few successes, a few links. You can now go from Union Station to Exhibition Place by streetcar.

The flaw in the transit system is, first of all, the suburbs were built for cars; so they’re not of the densities that support a transit system. So the people from the suburbs come in in their cars – they do everything in their cars. That’s the number one flaw. It’s not the city’s fault per se, but it’s having a huge impact on us because it means that people coming to Toronto to work are all coming by car, and creating congestion.

Second problem is, our transit system is built to serve downtown. So if you want to get from a place that is one bus trip from a subway stop or a streetcar trip to downtown, it’s excellent service. But if you want to get from northern Scarborough to northern Etibicoke to work, which a lot of people do nowadays, the service doesn’t work very effectively for you at all, because you might have to take four buses.

The third thing was the recession caused by free trade in the early '90s really hit Toronto very hard, and politically in '95 it hit Ontario hard. If you go back, in Ontario in '88, '89, '90, and '91, every single day a factory closed. We went overnight from thriving, because our industries were protected by tariffs, to a rustbelt. Overnight. One of the political dynamics of that was we elected a conservative government in '95 which cut out the funding for transit. And the TTC ever since then has been struggling.

So it’s a combination of things: a lack of vision, political infighting, and direct political choices that had serious long-run ramifications.

SM  You’ve brought us up to date now. What about looking forward?

DM  Looking forward, I think we have to think about the city as not just getting people downtown, but people moving around. The economy’s changed. People have different kinds of jobs. What made the TTC successful before was people living within striking distance of the subway or streetcar could use it for all their transit needs. Well, the service on the bus routes isn’t very good now.

If you look at all of this together, what does that tell me? First of all, you need to relate transit to planning, and the city has to be planned in a way that makes effective transit possible. Secondly, you have to do some things beyond rapid transit. There are certain places that need rapid transit, but we could also in some of the suburbs build east-west busways. You could take one of the lanes [of a given east-west arterial] and make it for buses. It’s virtually free. It might be controversial, but things like that will work as long as we say to ourselves: in order for the city to work, transit needs to have the number one priority. If we give it to the car, it won’t work.

Those things can have a tremendous difference, if you make a commitment and say to people: “We’re going to put that in. There’ll be a bus every five minutes. We don’t care if it’s full or empty, we’re going to guarantee you that there’s a bus every five minutes.” Then they’ll actually say, hey, wait a minute, I don’t have to wait 20 minutes if I miss the bus. It’s actually like a subway train. And when other cities like Ottawa have done this it’s been very very effective.

SM  If you could just elaborate on why public transit issues are so critical and why they need to have priority.

DM  I grew up riding transit. I realized you can live very, very well in a city riding transit. I know that in my bones; it’s part of me. The reason it’s important from a city-building perspective is [that] transportation is critical. If you don’t have good transportation, the city doesn’t live and breathe. And you end up being a place that is governed by what works for cars, instead of being governed by what works for people.

In Toronto’s case at the moment, we’re under pressure from the suburbs because they’re car-oriented places. We really need transportation solutions that will allow the city to function, just allow people to get around simply. We know from recent strikes that when the TTC shuts down the whole city shuts down. Unless you offer people a first-class choice for transit, they’re not going to consider it an option to live car free. Without a number of people making that choice, we’re going to be dominated by cars, which has enormous adverse side effects. The air is filthy in Toronto now. We have smog days all the time. There are so many negatives to cars in a city-building context.

Our experience in Toronto shows that people love to take transit, they just want it easy. If it becomes difficult and they have to make too many changes and wait too long, they don’t do it. If it’s easy, they all do it and they’re happier.

SM  What are some of the other urgent issues facing the city?

DM  One is planning. A lot of the challenges Toronto faces are because of the urban sprawl that has happened. And the only tool we have to address that is to try to build in the city. One of Toronto’s gifts that it still has, but is under stress, is our neighborhoods. Those are great, so we want to keep them. If we can encourage people to move into Toronto in a way that still allows the city to work, we will address a lot of these issues. If you do that on Main Streets – it’s called Main Streets intensification – those people are going to use transit. There are some challenges to getting that sort of vision through council; in fact, we are going to be debating that this fall.

[Toronto’s official 30-year plan] is an environmentally-friendly vision, it’s a people-friendly vision, it’s a transit-friendly vision. But some groups of citizens are nervous, because it means their neighborhoods will get bulldozed and just replaced with apartment buildings, which is what happened in Toronto in the late '60s and early '70s because there was just wild development. What you need to do is control that development and direct it so that it works for the city as a whole. The intent of our new official plan is to try to do that. But there is some concern – legitimate concern – among some citizens about whether it will or not. That’s an important issue because if we don’t start building in the city, we’re going to be in trouble.

Homelessness is a huge issue in Toronto. By profession I’m a lawyer. I started working at my former law firm in 1982 as a summer student. There was one homeless man who lived downtown. He lived in a city-owned parking lot at King and University. That was 20 years ago. So I’ve watched with my own eyes … the homeless population multiply. Some of that’s to do with changes to the way mental health issues have been served or not served. Some of it’s to do with the cost of housing. This current provincial government eliminated rent control, because the landlords said if you eliminate rent control we’ll build housing. They didn’t build more housing and the rents went way up and the biggest single group of people who are becoming homeless is families who just can’t afford to live anymore and are getting evicted. That’s a very serious issue.

Homeless is a terrible phenomenon. One of the solutions is housing. Housing needs to be built. The city can do some, but in a Canadian political context we need funding from other levels of government to build housing. It used to be the case that the federal government had a housing strategy that helped the private sector build affordable housing. But that’s gone along with rent controls, and that’s a terrific challenge for the city.

Another challenge I think is building the beauty of the city. We don’t have a very good track record of keeping our heritage buildings. In part to be fair to us, we don’t have the legislative tools American cities have. The only legislative tool we have is to delay demolition for six months. That’s it.

If you list a heritage building and somebody comes in and says, “I want to keep the façade and build a condo on top it,” the only thing you can say is, “No, you can’t demolish it.” What ends up happening is you negotiate for the best you can get.

So we know we can’t protect the old heritage buildings, but we can do things from an urban design point of view to encourage new architecture to be attractive and interesting and exciting and make the city a wonderful place to walk around. We’ve hit and missed on that; some places we’ve done a good job, some we haven’t. But that should be an objective for the city as a whole.

SM  It sounds like there needs to be reform to what the definition of a heritage building.

DM  The law in Canada only allows municipalities to do what they’re told to do by the provincial government. It’s very prescriptive. So in heritage, the provincial law basically allows us to designate and list properties, and basically just allows us to prevent demolition for six months. We use that as a negotiating tool, and get some other things. But we have very little actual power; we have to be creative. That can be remedied. American cities have tax credits and the province is trying to give us a tax credit, but the legislation got screwed up and it doesn’t actually do what they thought it would do. So there is some hope for that. But we need some tools. If you don’t have the tools, it doesn’t matter what your good will is, it ultimately won’t work.

SM  And there are people working to make these tools available?

DM  Yes, there’s been a little bit of progress. That does hit to another issue that’s problematic for Toronto. First of all, the amalgamation of 1997 has been very problematic and still hasn’t sorted itself out. But we’re now Canada’s sixth largest government. It gives us the opportunity to be enormously influential, but we’re still governed as if we’re a small town. Literally, the laws that govern Toronto, although they’ve been tinkered with over the years, were written in 1867. Toronto then had a population of 35,000 people.

Now every single language in the world is spoken in Toronto. It’s a very different place. Instead of laws that say you can do this and only this, we need laws to say, OK, the responsibility of a city government is to govern heritage and roads and parking and then allow us within those areas to do what council decides democratically.

SM   Last week when I was walking along Harbourfront, there were a lot of condos going up and it occurred to me that a lot of that space could have been used as park space.

DM  No question about that. Harbourfront was a missed opportunity. We’re working on the rest of the waterfront. To me the first issue is: what is the public green space? Make that first. Make sure it’s there and actually being used so it can’t get taken away. If it’s up and being used, people will never let it get taken away. It’s true in the neighborhoods. This is a weakness of our planning process, because when someone builds a building they have to give money toward parks. That’s all well and good, but what’s hard is acquiring land and making new parks.

And we need to have a planning process that says we want land, we want land in the community. There’s a large development in my ward; we actually managed to get both from the developer. Some of their land is going to be a park that’s publicly usable, although they’re going to have to pay to maintain it. I think that’s the model. We need to build parks. We’re operating, basically, in a city where the parks are pretty much the same as they were 40 years ago and the population is significantly bigger.

SM   Is this sort of thinking shared by other councillors and the mayor or is there a consensus to accommodate the developers?

DM  The opinions of council are remarkably diverse and I wouldn’t want to speak for any thoughts of the mayor. My sense of council is there are some people who are rubber stampers for developers and there are others, like me, who feel that development is an important tool to help the city grow well if it’s guided right and if citizens have a real say in how it’s going to shape their community. And then there are others who just want to say “no” to any development. And in our process when you say “no,” the developers appeal to the Ontario Municipal Board and end up winning. The result when you do that is way worse than when you try to guide the development process with good policies and rules about things like parks, sidewalks, streets, density, where it has to be in relation to transit. That kind of thing.

SM  The condos along Harbourfront don’t seem to be promoting mixed-income housing.

DM  It’s certainly true. One of the things we need in our official plan is a provision to deal with affordable rental housing. That’s what mixed income housing is. The condos on the Harbourfront, it’s really a disaster. They had parks on paper, and the parks kept shrinking as they had to pay for things. And they should have done what I said before: built ‘em and then developed around [them] if there was any room left. They tried to create affordable-purchase condos and did that by building little tiny units.

SM  You haven’t exactly identified villains, and I haven’t asked you to. But who are the villains?

DM  I think the villains are all of us. There are parts of the development industry that [are] too greedy and too politically powerful. They’re a villain. The provincial and federal governments have horrendously neglected the city, particularly in the area of preventing urban sprawl, but also in things like supporting housing and transit. The Clinton-Gore administration in the States has done a wonderful job of rejuvenating cities with policies that are pretty straight forward. We have none of them, virtually none.

SM  What would some of those be?

DM  National housing policy; we don’t have a national housing policy. We don’t have a national transit policy. Until this year under the Conservative government in Ontario they didn’t fund transit. We yelled and screamed enough; they now fund a third of our capital program. When I was elected they funded 75 percent. I’ve only been elected eight years.

The reason this all matters is because all of our funding comes from the property tax. We don’t have a city income tax or city sales tax or hotel tax. And the property tax is one that is somewhat inequitable and random and you really can’t finance certain programs out of [it].

I think the current provincial government in Ontario has a lot of the blame. Amalgamation was probably not the best idea in the first place, but was very rushed and politically motivated. They didn’t like the government. It was sort of like Margaret Thatcher getting rid of Greater London Council. The government in Toronto was perceived to be left wing; they [the Conservative Ontario government] were hard right radical Republican Tories, which isn’t a Canadian tradition (our Conservatives are different than Republicans traditionally). They decided they wanted to get rid of it. No thought, no planning. And then they proceeded to cut all sorts of funding the city had and give us responsibilities we didn’t have in the past; all of which made amalgamation even harder, because there was no money to go around.

I think probably [municipal] politicians should be blamed, too. Sometimes it’s easy for us stand up and oppose a development, for example, when a development might actually in the long run happen to be good in its place. I think the biggest [problem] for politicians was there wasn’t a real vision; there wasn’t someone saying, where’s Toronto going to be in 20 years? I think that’s the challenge for us who are elected now; to say to people: if we want to be a Toronto in 20 years that is “New York run by the Swiss,” we need to do these things. We need to build housing that’s affordable; we need a transit system that works across the whole city at an affordable price; we do need to have some development – the right kind of development; we need to build parks; and we’re going to need to pay for those things.

SM  And one of the consequences of amalgamation was further spending cuts on top of the spending cuts that had taken place at the provincial level?

DM  That’s correct. There’s been a decade of spending cuts at the municipal level. A lot of politicians got elected on tax freeze promises. In the property tax, when the economy grows, it doesn’t grow; you don’t get any more revenue. At every level of government, when the economy grows you get more revenue. We don’t. So when you promise a tax freeze when the economy is growing, things like oil cost you more and you have no money to pay for it.

People got elected at the municipal level on promises that basically meant cuts. That happened for seven years, then amalgamation happened. The mayor got elected on a tax freeze promise. The province downloaded all sorts of costs on to us and we spent another five years cutting services. And you can see that in the streets: our parks aren’t what they used to be because we dramatically cut the budget for maintenance of them; the sidewalks aren’t what they used to be. The life of the city; the city used to have an enormous impact on that through its grants programs. They’ve all been frozen, but they’re now used for twice as many people as they used to be. So, in effect, they’ve been cut in half. All of those things have made what you see on the streets.

SM  Has the impetus behind these spending cuts and tax freezes been the result of an ideological shift – “the era of big government is over”? Or is it the stark reality that the downtown in the economy …

DM  The early 90s were partly the result of a downtown in the economy. There were some really tough choices and they were impossible ones.

SM  But since then there’s been a huge ideological shift?

DM  It’s a huge ideological shift. In the last ten years, federal and provincial government’s revenues have doubled and ours have been flat. There’s been this ideological change and I think it’s starting to bound back. I went to a meeting a couple weeks ago with some very prominent businessmen to talk to them about running for mayor and one of the questions was about taxes. I said I don’t believe we should have a tax freeze and one of the businessman who runs a major Canadian corporation said: “That’s right. I’m prepared to pay for services as long as you run them well.”

And that attitude is starting to come back. I don’t want to overestimate it, but people are starting to realize that this mythical promise of the right wing, that we’ll cut taxes but you’ll still get all the same services, is ridiculous. You don’t. What it means is visible decline and the kind of city that you have. I think people are starting to recognize that the promises made by the radical right just aren’t real.

SM  One thing we haven’t talked about, in any direct way, is immigration and the ethnic composition of the city, and how that has changed over the last 40 years – especially during the last ten years.

DM  I think it’s one of the greatest gift Toronto has.

SM  How is the city absorbing the numbers and the diversity of those numbers?

DM  The city motto is “diversity is our strength.” I’m not sure we implement that as fully as we should. But there is a genuine belief in this city amongst most people that the diversity we have is tremendous. If you came to Toronto after the war like my mother did – she left again, but she came after the war – she said it was such a quiet place that you were not allowed to play cards on Sundays, even in your house. That was a by-law. Now within walking distance of my house I can have food from 75 countries, made by people who came from that country as adults. It’s just a remarkable thing.

There are some issues. One of the problems we have in Canada is we have a terrible system for evaluating foreign-trained professionals, and trades people. People get recruited as a teacher and they get here and they can’t practice their profession. So the stereotype of people with PhDs driving cabs is somewhat true in Toronto, and it’s a really bad thing. It’s a constitutional dysfunction. The federal government is responsible for immigration, but the provincial governments are responsible for regulating the professions. So you end up with different people evaluating their credentials; which is ridiculous, and I’m working on a number of initiatives to address that. But that’s a separate thing.

There are occasional tensions of a racial nature. There were some riots on Yonge Street in the early '90s that were very very serious, and I’m not sure that we addressed all the underlying tensions. But on the whole, it’s a great thing for Toronto and it’s one of our greatest assets.

SM  On Sunday the Toronto Sun, which is obviously a tabloid newspaper practicing irresponsible journalism, ran a front-page headline reporting that polls say, “Canadians want to clean up this immigration mess.” There was no reference in the story made by anyone to it being “a mess”; it was obviously an editorial statement that the paper was making. But the poll suggests that Canadians want to impose some restrictions on immigration. What do you make of that and where do you stand on what Canada’s immigration policy should be?

DM  I think it’s reasonable to assume that without having read it, I disagree with anything the Toronto Sun would ever say. The polls always show that people in Toronto have a different attitude than the rest of Canada about immigration. In Canada, immigration is an urban phenomena. Toronto alone gets half the immigrants to Canada. Most Canadians are immigrants, like Americans. I believe our immigration policy generally gets it right. There are some problems with it: it’s not strong enough on family reunification. I think we need the federal government to insure that people are able to practice their professions. When my mum came in 1967 – came back to Canada, she had already been here and taught, she came back as a teacher – and they told her she wasn’t qualified. It was just absurd. It’s been going on for at least 40 years. So it’s time to fix that problem.

I think there are some tensions. But I think if you examined those polling numbers, you’d find that predominately the people who are really most concerned about immigration are people who are a little bit removed from it in the smaller towns and don’t see it as much. That’s my sense.

SM  If you could just identify some of those tensions – in the city.

DM  There’s bigots and there are some people who aren’t accepting of people of other origins. And it arises from time to time. I find that sad. But I think those tensions are pretty much confined to smaller groups. There’s been some terrible things happen. A Jewish man was murdered recently and it was pretty obvious it was because he was Jewish. He was Hasidic and he was killed. But that is very rare in Toronto.

SM  What sort of future do you predict for Toronto? Are you confident?

DM  I think the next municipal election is going to determine that future. If we elect a mayor and a council that are prepared to recognize the weaknesses Toronto has and not just gloss them over and take seriously a whole range of issues – [that] we need to start putting money into funding programs, and we need to physically start rebuilding the city – I think the future for Toronto will be really bright. But if we don’t have that leadership, it’s gonna keep declining and it will probably decline faster.

SM  You are a likely mayoral candidate?

DM  I haven’t made an announcement yet; it’s not timely yet to make an announcement [Mr. Miller has since announced his candidacy]. But I really believe what I said about the next election being a turning point. I intend to run because I think we need some strong leadership with that kind of clear vision. And when you go out and talk to Torontonians – if you listen to them – one way or another, that’s what they’re all saying.

SM  And when is the election?

DM   November 10, 2003, and the polls close at 8:00 p.m.

The following is an interview with writer Andrew Pyper, conducted in his home, September 2002.  

Stephen Miles  Can Toronto still claim to be the city that works?

Andrew Pyper  To my mind, it’s still a city that still works relative to a lot of other cities that I’ve visited on this continent or the European continent. Having said that, that’s a pretty low threshold in a lot of respects. Can it make the claim as the “city that works” in some kind of special, noteworthy, follow-this-model sense? I’d say no. There’s just too many palpable, visible, walk-by examples of it not working.

In this neighborhood – this is the Queen West area of downtown – where, on the one hand, you do have streets like the street I live on where in the last year there have been three or four houses that have been bought or renovated, improved, which seems to be an encouraging economic, downtown inner city sign. Meanwhile, the population of the back alley has gone from one to three, of more or less permanent residents, homeless people, who live there. You have, on the one hand, these encouraging economic signs of development and improvement and, on the other hand, quite obvious signs of problems; problems that are being neglected.

That’s a long way of saying that while it still works relative to perhaps Newark, it’s not working, given all of the resources and the opportunities that this city has – unlike, say, Newark, probably.  It’s not working at all.

SM  How long have you lived in Toronto?

AP  I’ve lived in Toronto in total for six years, spread out. I was a student at law school here for four years, and then moved away for two, and have returned for another two and a half.

SM  What are some of the contrasts you’ve observed between the two times you’ve lived in Toronto?

AP  When I was here during law school I was a student, so everything would be viewed through the prism of casual, still comfortable student poverty. So a lot of the relative luxuries of the city – restaurants, bars, clubs – were closed to me. I was aware of these things, but rarely would I allow myself to indulge in them. Now I’m enjoying relative comfort, where I can sort of enjoy those things. And the opportunities for that, I think, are multiple.

That would be my principal observation of improvement between, say, 1994 and 2002 – really great improvements on fun stuff to do, fun ways to spend your money. There are now more interesting and up-to-the-minute world-class ways to blow dollars in Toronto. And I think that’s to the great delight of Torontonians who have always been aspiring to a sort of mini-New York. And in many respects it has achieved that. We’ve got our Prada store now, we have our Chanel outlets, we have $100-a-plate restaurants, worthy of probably a Michelin star or two. Now, those are maybe dubious improvements, but they are, I think, on a certain level, improvements nevertheless.

SM  While you can walk out of a $100-a-plate restaurant, you might trip over a native-born Canadian who is homeless and really down on his luck.

AP  Yeah, that is absolutely the case. It’s maybe more accelerated here. Maybe we’ve been sort of catching up, in some respects, with the more already-noted examples of that, which is, of course, a sad catching-up.

There’s probably many factors. There’s undoubtedly the current Conservative government. The provincial government has had a large hand in creating this [decline] through massive tax cuts, erosion of the social safety net, et cetera – much-remarked upon.

To my mind, a hugely contributing factor is the perception on the national level of what Toronto is. It is perceived, outside of Toronto – and you needn’t go far; by outside Toronto I mean in the suburbs of Toronto and beyond – it’s perceived as the unfair, disproportionate recipient of federal dollars – goodies; that people who live here are arrogant, self-involved, ignorant and even hostile to those in the hinterland; and that we’re all rich here, sort of giggling, à la Richie Rich, on our bags of gold coins.

Those perceptions, we could argue about their validity as observations. But more important than their truth value is their prevalence as a perception, which has led to widespread political neglect of cities in general across Canada, but Toronto in particular, because it’s the biggest and it bears the weight of these perceptions/misperceptions.

So it’s very hard to stand up – as an individual, a group, a community, a politician – right now in Canada and say, “Toronto’s in trouble, it really needs help.” I think the level of sympathy outside Toronto would be next to nil.

SM  And that’s a level of sympathy that would be next to nil from both the man and woman on the street and also the legislators working in Ottawa?

AP  Yeah. I can’t think of any constituency that Torontonians could turn to right now and have a sympathetic hearing.

SM  Cities across Canada – whether you’re looking at statistical data or you’re there making observations – seem to have all experienced some decline, but it seems like Toronto is leading the pack. And that’s just a hard case to make, you think, no matter how bad it gets.

AP  Yeah. It’s hard on a number of levels. You can present all the Ph.D. research or recent census results; in other words, hard data. I think it takes a long time to destabilize or deconstruct those perceptions of wealth, greed, insularity, once they’re established. And they’re very much established now. So its not a particularly favorable climate for sober exchange of data on Toronto’s decline, when sort of knee-jerk prejudice is more convenient.

SM  Well, and speaking of knee-jerk prejudice, there’s obviously an enormous disparity between Toronto’s multicultural composition and that of, you know, a small town in southern Ontario, or even in contrast to other somewhat large cities in Canada. Is that part of the dynamic here, too? That Toronto is so different that – “it is part of Canada?” – that sort of perception. 

AP  Well, it’s a curious thing. I think where New York, say, is the biggest city in the United States and a melting pot, highly multicultural, famously so; within the United States it may, in some sense, be regarded as a city-state unto itself – sort of New York and the rest of the place. But it’s not condemned for that reason within the United States, generally speaking. It’s, in fact, celebrated for that. Whether you’re speaking from Madison or L.A., there’s a lot of respect and credibility and praise that goes with that specialness.

For whatever reason or reasons, Toronto occupies a similar place in the Canadian context; and yet that specialness gives rise more often to neglect, parody, again, this prejudice of “you can’t have any real problems because either, a) you’ve brought them on yourselves, or b) I don’t believe that those problems exist.”

Talking about multiculturalism, I don’t think any Canadians would blame or feel distant from Toronto’s condition or situation because of multiculturalism per se. I just think that all of the things that make Toronto unique in the Canadian context are strikes against it.

SM  What would you identify as the issues that are most urgent right now facing both Toronto city government but also the average Torontonian?

AP  I think the most urgent things facing Torontonians are things most Torontonians wouldn’t acknowledge. So the most pressing problems are the problems that only a few of us see. Homelessness. I think most Torontonians don’t see it. They may also politically not want to see it. But as a matter of their daily lives, say, commuting from King City down to King & Bay or Bay & Bloor and then returning back, these problems are invisible to them. So when they hear reports on occasion that homelessness is a problem that’s not being addressed in Toronto, they, with some reason, respond with indifference, because it doesn’t arise in their commuting 905, semi-suburban lives.

But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, of course. There are basically two corridors [in Toronto] – Bloor and Yonge – and you have to get off that crosshair in order to see these problems that are the most pressing. I think not only have the poor gotten poorer, remarkably and very quickly over the last few years, but the poorest are suffering at a higher level than they were even five years ago.

SM  And why? Twenty years ago, from the recollections of people I’ve spoken to and things that I’ve read, this wouldn’t even be an issue we would be talking about at all.

AP  Oh, definitely the homeless population has increased. But why in the face of an increasing homeless population has there not been anywhere near an adequate political response? I think most of that blame can be delivered to [former Ontario Premiere] Mike Harris’ doorstep, not just as a party as a leader, [but] his promotion of policies that have either encouraged the growth of the homeless population, or certainly neglected it. His values, his world view are very much in step with the affluent middle- to upper-middle-class suburbanites that is the largest voting bloc in the province. So I think he’s developed or encouraged a political culture of getting on with business, of cutting the crap: where the crap is sympathy for others; developing a city that’s healthy for all; where the crap is taxes, where the crap is inconvenience; where the crap is people who irritatingly knock on your window as you idle in your mini-van and ask for money. So there’s a level now, I think, of acceptance of being impatient with those irritating and slightly ugly social problems that are growing.

SM  We’ve been painting a gloomy picture [of Toronto]. And certainly there are things that people living in the city can continue to be proud of. What would some of those things be?

AP  Well, it’s a funny question: What can Torontonians collectively agree on being proud about? To my mind, my colleagues, or my generation, the people I hang out with, if asked that same question would probably come up with answers like, “Well, this is the city with the most opportunities for what I want to do.” Whether what you want to do is lawyering, filmmaking, novel writing, journalism, anything kind of media-design related, you have to acknowledge the relative opportunities in Toronto as compared to any other city in the country.

The things I find interesting are here, and here times 10 to anywhere else probably. But is that a value to be proud of? No. Is that an institution you celebrate? Not really. It’s a level of access that is attractive.

But honestly, off the top of my head, I guess I could manufacture some pride over Harbourfront Festival – actually, I wouldn’t have to manufacture pride over that. We have certain cultural institutions – the [Toronto International] Film Festival among them, of course – that are important and fun, and one takes pleasure in knowing that they’re here. But I must say, when you asked the question, there wasn’t a reflex to grab my Toronto flag and start waving it.

SM  Certainly the city has absorbed an enormous influx of Third World immigrants in particular during the last 10, 15 years, and for the most part, there seems to have been a favorable outcome, so far. Is Toronto a notably tolerant city in your view? And is this something you might say Torontonians can [be proud of]?

AP  Yeah, I would say that. There’s something Toronto can be proud of. It takes its multicultural status quite casually, which is the way you should take it, of course; it should be something you’re not even aware of.  So that ease, that comfort of living in a city where your neighbors are not from the same place that you’re from ultimately, is really quite wonderful. And I know it doesn’t exist in Montréal, which is in an ongoing way very aware of its neighborhoods, aware of its cultural components, aware of difference. And that can be really fatiguing, if not outright damaging.

SM  The next question I want to get into backlash relating to immigration in the city. The Sun [newspaper] on Sunday had this cover story, “Canadians Want to Clean Up This Immigration Mess.” And they had statistics revealing that a majority of Canadians either wanted to refine “somewhat” or “dramatically” the immigration laws. I talked to some people in the Beaches today, immigrants, and they’re saying the same sort of thing. What do you make of that? And would you say there is a palpable backlash, given [any] anecdotal evidence?

AP  I think it’s something that you could find. But you’d find it harder to find someone to voice those kind of Sun-sentiments in downtown Toronto than you would in most other parts of the country. That’s not to say you can’t find that sentiment in Toronto – the Sun is a popular newspaper.

SM  Read by many immigrants.

AP  Read by many immigrants, yeah. That’s a great Canadian paradox right there. But again, when I speak about Toronto, I really do speak about sort of south of the 401 [expressway] to the lake. In those precincts, I think there isn’t very much dissatisfaction with current immigration policies. And I just don’t hear much about current immigration policies being a mess, as they are practiced or as the effects have been observed in downtown Toronto.

I think sentiments like the Sun, i.e. “we’re letting in too many of those brown people,” is a sentiment that would be held in places that, oddly enough, probably haven’t experienced that much immigration in their communities. I’m thinking of neighborhoods/large residential development tracts in the suburbs, largely all-white in blocks [where] the people are self-segregated anyway. I think it’s in those places that people probably feel this sense of messiness, or that we’ve got to stop this.

SM  In talking about Toronto and its fortunes and misfortunes and decline that’s been observable during the last couple decades, one cynically and opportunistically could make the connection between visible minorities and there’s been a lot of trash on the street and there’s a lot of sirens going off in my neighborhood.  And one person today did make that –

AP  “I’m hearing more sirens, I’m seeing more non-white people on the street.” It doesn’t take a genius to make the connection. Yeah, I guess that’s out there, in a thoughtless, barroom, hyper-conservative-response-to-terrorism kind of way. But maybe I’m again sort of refusing to believe, and maybe this is based more on hope than observation, but I don’t hear it here, where “here” is downtown central Toronto. It would really be an almost impossible position to maintain, given that if you lived in central Toronto, you’d be talking, quite literally, about your neighbors, which doesn’t, of course, stop racists from expressing racism, but it would be hard to sustain.

SM  What about mega-city? From the chronology you gave, I don’t think you were here when that was being battled in 1998. But would you say that the amalgamation is a major factor [in Toronto’s perceived decline]?

AP  Yeah. I think it was an instrument that was sold to the people of Ontario – of Toronto – as cost saving; this will be more efficient. And it’s indifferent. “This isn’t a political move, this is just good sense.” And “streamline.” Words like that.

On another level, though, it was an instrument that allowed for the government of Ontario to neglect, without apology, problems that were distinct to downtown Toronto. If you amalgamate, if you just call this sort of big rectangle that goes from the lake to King City, just call that Toronto, then the particular problems that are unique to downtown Toronto can be easily overlooked, whereas [they] couldn’t before if you had a border around it.

So what looked to be apolitical, or just strictly an efficiency-based decision, was, of course, politically based. And it succeeded. It was a brilliant tactical turn by the Conservatives, because it has allowed them to treat Toronto like this bloc of similarly situated communities. And, of course, it’s not.

SM  Now, you can sit here and make certain criticisms of the city. But is it the kind of snowball effect where at some point you could foresee yourself getting out?

AP  I could see myself getting out more as a consequence of having a job that permits me to live more or less wherever I choose to. It’s a privilege that I may want to exercise. Now, that privilege may be exercised sooner rather than later if we don’t collectively make an effort to stop or stem [the current problems that are growing].

For me, a more pressing factor that might lead to my leaving here would be if this perception of Toronto the arrogant, Toronto the overstuffed, Toronto the head-up-its-ass, Toronto the easily hateable; if that sort of grows and continues within the rest of Canada, I can see myself being so fatigued by that I would leave the country altogether. I just find that ongoing name-calling and prejudice – and I’m not even talking about foolish and easily-dismissable people like writers for the Sun newspaper chain, I’m talking about so-called legitimate journalists, commentators, politicians et cetera. So I think the hate-Toronto campaign would be something that would potentially lead to my leaving the place.

The following is an interview with Councillor Kyle Rae, conducted by phone.

Stephen Miles  I want to first talk about the visible decline that’s evident in Toronto over the last 10 or 15 years. One of the symptoms of that is homelessness. You see it on almost every street corner. What are the causes of it and what needs to be done?

Kyle Rae  I would say that since the early '90s, homelessness has become a greater problem in Toronto. Part of the problem has been that there has been a drifting into Toronto of people who have been excluded from their communities because those communities have not wanted or have been unable to handle the increased number of people who are homeless – through alcohol, drug, psychiatric disability, or health concerns. And people often then drift into the big cities to get support.

Another piece of the puzzle has been that in 1993 the federal government terminated its affordable housing program across the country, which was a travesty; which has meant that we no longer have any support from the federal government in terms of building affordable rental accommodation.

In 1995, the provincial government changed; it became a Conservative government. And that government terminated its affordable housing program.

So the two senior levels of government in Canada that have responsibility in Toronto walked away from the building of affordable housing; which has been a disastrous decision, across the country and in this province. And the manifestations of the failure of developing affordable housing is most starkly evident in Toronto.

At the same time the provincial government in 1995 cut welfare checks by 23 percent; that 23 percent cut seriously affected those who were on welfare being able to pay the rent. We had an inordinate amount of economic evictions from residential buildings. Soon after, in 1998, the provincial government introduced the eradication of the rent control program, which was in place in this province since 1978.

So there are several issues that have really exacerbated the problem around homelessness. I would say it’s the result of federal and provincial government failing to do their part to make safe quality housing available in this city.

SM  And is the government at the provincial level taking any responsibility for this? Or are they, in fact, taking credit, where the welfare-to-work program is concerned, for instance? They seem to be championing the program as having been a great success, where, obviously, the other side of that issue is it’s been a terrible failure.

KR   I’m not going to deny that some people have been able to retool and re-skill themselves through the welfare program. I’m sure there are individuals who have succeeded through that. However, people who are psychiatrically disabled, or mentally disabled, or addicted to alcohol or drugs are not going to find that an easy way of getting back on their feet. What they need is drug rehabilitation programs, which we don’t have. We just do not have the beds, and we do not have the programs in the province to deal with the problem. Same with alcohol and same with people who are labeled psychiatrically disabled. We’ve de-institutionalized them, and they live on the street – thinking that that’s somehow more humane than having them institutionalized. So now they eke out an appalling existence on the streets of our city.

The provincial government can take some credit in providing an alternative to a small percentage of those who find themselves homeless. But it certainly does not eradicate the problem, and the other policies they’ve implemented have created a greater crisis.

SM   What about at the municipal level?

KR  It’s very difficult for the city to try to provide a housing program based on a municipal property tax income. You cannot do it. There are no municipalities that are able to do that without federal and provincial money. We are the only G-7 country that does not have a federal housing program. We don’t have a province that’s prepared to get into housing. There is a major policy failure on the part of our senior levels of government. So it’s left the municipal government working on this on our own. The provincial and the federal government programs that had existed from the late 1970s until 1993 (in terms of federal), and 1995 (in terms of provincial), have now been downloaded onto the property tax payer of the municipalities.

So the provincial and federal governments; not only did they get out of funding new housing, they have walked away from funding these subsidies. They’ve loaded that onto the back of the municipalities, which makes it very difficult for municipalities to find the funds to expand the program. We’re running around trying to find the money to upkeep properties that were built in the '70s that are now decaying; their infrastructure’s falling apart, the elevators need renovating, windows need to be double glazed, the roof needs to be repaired. So we’re having difficulty maintaining what we have, when, in fact, what we need to be doing is accelerating the building program.

It’s an appalling dilemma that we find ourselves in: we’ve got two levels of government that are deadbeat dads. They are senior levels of government responsible for housing; it’s in their portfolios, it’s in their mandates. And they have walked away from them and it is a national shame.

SM   Will you talk for a moment about the shelter bylaw before council?

KR   There are several parts of the new amalgamated City of Toronto that had bylaws in place that allowed for shelters to be introduced into areas. There were also parts of the amalgamated city where they did not have this bylaw. What the new City of Toronto is trying to do is introduce a shelter bylaw that is uniform across the city, that will allow shelters to be introduced into certain zoning areas. The problem is that some of the suburban parts of the city do not believe they have any responsibility for addressing the issue of homelessness. They deny or they don’t realize that homelessness is not a manifestation of the inner city; but, in fact, the inner city is where the problem ends up being contained, because residential suburban neighborhoods refuse to accept responsibility for this issue.

Toronto, I think, is trying to turn that tide. I think American cities have been an example of how you don’t want to see an urban center be destroyed and fall into decay when you abandon the inner city to those who you don’t feel you can deal with. In Toronto, what we were watching were policies that were trying to push shelters into the inner city because: “Well, mostly people don’t live in the inner city, and it’s mostly businesses and the business people leave at 5:00. So there’s no problem in dumping the problems we don’t want in our suburban neighborhoods in the downtown.” When, in fact, Toronto has over the last 20 years worked very hard to make sure that our inner city, the core of the city, is a residential – not just a business – environment, and we’ve built co-ops and non-profits and condominiums through the downtown. So I don’t think it’s appropriate to use the American model of dumping the problem in the inner city as has happened over the last 50 years in the States.

What we need to do is integrate shelters throughout the city, so that they aren’t concentrated and that there is an opportunity to pull themselves out. If you put all the shelters into one area, you create a ghetto; you create a despair neighborhood. And that does not help anyone who finds themselves in a shelter. But you can’t get out of that morass if all you’re surrounded with is that same problem. You need to be given hope. And creating a ghetto of homelessness is not going to help you generate hope.

So the municipal bylaw that was being introduced by council is to try to get an understanding that shelters should not be concentrated in one area; that the downtown is already overburdened with the responsibility of managing the problem of homelessness; and, in fact, there needs to be a dispersal of shelters and services for the homeless across the city, because it’s all of our responsibility, not just the downtown.

SM   Staying downtown, Dundas Square is set to open soon. You expect there to be problems with municipal interference.

KR   The Square was funded by the City of Toronto, by the tax payers of the City of Toronto. There are the usual structures in place that municipalities use to manage their property. But this square is located in the heart of the business district and entertainment area in Toronto. And it’s felt that it is important for the square to be able to operate in that competitive market, rather than in a municipal-charitable mode. I think it needs to be looked at as a commercial opportunity and a neighborhood opportunity. I think it needs to have the freedom to be entrepreneurial, and not just a city agency. It needs to be able to be two things, not just one.

SM   I know there’s been controversy recently surrounding funding the square – making it self-sufficient after three years and how that’s going to be done. You think these will be resolved in a favorable way that will benefit people living in the city.

KR   That’s right. There’s no corporate ownership of the square. Any decisions made for the future of the square will be made by council. And I don’t think council is gonna give up its ownership of the square, nor its interest in making sure that the square works for all people of the city.

SM   Now on the issue of litter, you’re quoted in one [recent] story as saying, “The city looks like crap,” and that you fear that outsiders will come into the city and won’t believe the deterioration that has taken place. Coming into Toronto last month, I didn’t find the city clean at all. Certainly it’s cleaner than certain parts of Chicago that I frequent, but I would tend to agree with your statement that the city looks like crap.

KR  I know several American visitors who come up here every year. What they have told me is that they’ve seen over the last five years a significant deterioration in the condition of the streets: the untidiness, the litter that has accumulated. People often like to point to the city that you’re not doing the job, when, in fact, the City of Toronto does not put the litter in the streets; it’s the public that puts the litter in the streets. And there seems to have been some sort of attitudinal change that has occurred, where people no longer think that they need to be part of the solution of keeping this city clean; that there’s something drastically wrong in the attitude of people who are coming into the downtown.

Guests still say, this is cleaner than the town where they’ve come from, but it’s not as clean as it was five years ago. They do still think it’s cleaner here in Toronto than it is in Chicago, New York or L.A., but they don’t think we’ve been maintaining our cleanliness. So there’s a gap there.

SM   Has there been a decline in street and sidewalk cleaning services in the last five or six years?

KR   I think with amalgamation the number of staff were released from the city, and I fear that some of it was in that area of public works. Then you’ve got the services being stretched across the new amalgamated city. I don’t think there were as many litter pickers in the other parts of the municipality as there were in the inner city; because you recognize in the downtown you have a high incidence of littering and you need to be more vigilant. I think the number of staff has been reduced compared to where we were five years ago.

And that’s part of the problem with amalgamation: you often get political leaders or heads of departments thinking that all parts of the city should be treated equally or you’ll have a problem with the politicians if you don’t treat everyone the same. When, in fact, the city is not the same across the municipality; there are concentrations of residents which means you have to have different levels of service. In quieter parts of the city you have a different level of service – high-rise apartment buildings and condos require a different kind of care than single-family detached neighborhoods in the suburbs. For some reason, and I think it’s a parochial, childish attitude that you can find in the minds of members of council, there is a failure to recognize the different needs in different parts of the city.

SM   But that being true and the decline in services being the reality that you describe it to be, you consider the crux of the issue to be this attitudinal change.

KR   I do. I really think it’s not the city that’s making the litter, it’s the public. The public is leaving things lying around, they’re not looking for garbage cans. I watch out from my office window young people just leaving cans and bottles on stairways, instead of going over to the garbage or holding onto it until they walk past the garbage can.

SM  And what explains that do you think?

KR   I think it partly has to do with the immediate gratification our society seems to demand these days. Give me what I want right now, or else I’m not going to live by the rules if I don’t get what I want immediately. So there’s an impatience, there’s an entitlement and there’s an expectation of instant gratification.

SM  It’s interesting when you talk about instant gratification, because whether I’m in Toronto or Chicago, most of the litter I see is from fast food restaurants.

KR   That’s right! [laughs] Give me my food now, I don’t care how much wrapping is on it. You’re right, it’s fast food crap. The fast food industry is the major source of the litter problem.

SM   Finally, if you could talk about the 30-year plan that will be before council later this month.

KR   At the end of October we will complete three years of consultation; 180 meetings with resident associations working through the new official plan for the City of Toronto. It’s been a Herculean effort by the planning department to weave together the old city – the prewar city of Toronto – and the new suburban parts of the city into one official plan.

SM  Do you support the plan and are you prepared to vote in favor of it?

KR  The official plan has been worked on for three years and I’m very pleased to be an advocate for it. It’s quite clear, if you look at it, that it makes very little changes to the inner-city or the downtown. What it’s trying to do is weave the new parts of the city into the old, and it’s using planning studies of avenues where intensification of residential and transit should occur as the spine along which our new city should be focusing its intensification.

For the most part, there is very little change in the inner city where I represent, and it’s very easy to support. There are secondary or part-two plans that are being eradicated because many of them were done in the '70s and '80s and no longer have any force, because the intent of those plans have now been built out. So there have been some losses in terms of secondary plans. But I’ve not had a great deal of complaint from residents about that, because they realize that those plans have now been realized, and they no longer need to be in place.

SM   And what about this three-year process, these public meetings? Do you think that there have been enough meetings, too many, too few? And how would you characterize these public discussions?

KR   For three years the staff have worked on this. There have been 183 meetings with resident groups and lobby groups and there are groups that are still unhappy about the plan. But members of council have been fear-mongering that this official plan will destroy their neighborhood. The reason why they’re saying that is that this official plan will be removing any height or density numbers from the plan for the first time. And although we’ve wanted to do this for many years, it has not been achieved until this year.

So members of council who oppose the plan have been arguing that the protections, in terms of zoning and height restrictions, will be lost; when, in fact, they exist in the zoning bylaw and they will continue to exist until the zoning bylaw will then be amended by staff and consultation with neighborhoods and then approved by council. So the first step is to clean up the official plan and make it that visionary document that an official plan is meant to be. Then deal with the specifics of height and density in the zoning bylaw, which we hope to see in the next five years.

SM   And when critics of the plan, such as Howard Moscoe, criticize the plan on the grounds of the lack of these height and density restrictions, would you say that they are misinformed on what exactly is happening and are thereby spreading misinformation?

KR   I think they are jumping on a bandwagon. We’re moving into an election period next year and members of council who want to appear to be bashing the bureaucracy of the city, or appear to want to jump on the bandwagon with other councillors who are saying that they are protecting neighborhoods; when, in fact, what they are doing is inciting neighborhoods. I think [certain councillors have] thoughtlessly jumped on the bandwagon. And I think Councillor Moscoe is one of those. And I think he regrets the comments he made.

SM   I’d like to ask you, in your support of the plan: do you think that the plan addresses this issue of affordable housing and mixed-income housing?

KR   It does address it. But, unfortunately, it’s very difficult for us to address it when we have a vacuum created by a federal and provincial government that don’t bring dollars to the table. As long as we do not have a national housing strategy, as long as we have a provincial government that is unwilling to pay for the capital development of housing, then the City of Toronto will be hobbled in its ability to address the issue of affordable housing.

SM   Are you optimistic about the city, and the quality of living that residents will experience over the next 30 years?

KR   I live in hope. Part of my hope is that there’s a provincial and federal election coming in 2003 and 2004, where I think we need to put the federal and provincial governments’ feet to the fire; that if they’re not prepared to invest in their major economic engine, they have no business leading this country. I think there is going to be a groundswell of debate about representation, about federal and provincial politics and about the future of this country. And if you don’t look after the economic engine of the country, it’s gonna fail. I think that’s the debate that we’re going to be seeing over the next year, year and a half; where the major cities, the major urban areas of the country, are going to be forcing their provincial and their federal government to act.

The following is an interview with Ron Soskolne, conducted via phone.

Stephen Miles   I’d like you to characterize the Dundas-Yonge area in terms of its importance to the city and the need that was there several years ago to sort of radically re-imagine the space.

Ron Soskolne   I guess the short way of putting it is that Yonge and Dundas is regarded by most people as the center of the downtown core, from the point of view of public life, pubic activity. That has been the case for the last 30, 40 years. It was probably more the case 20, 30 years ago, before the process of suburbanization and various other changes that have occurred in the downtown really depleted the downtown Yonge Street area of most of its role, from the point of view of being the one place in town that people used to come to shop, to be entertained, to go to church, to go to the dentist and so on. As well as the fact that a lot of the employment that used to be centered on this part of town has moved westward as the core has shifted and expanded. During the past 20 years there has been a process of the various activities moving away from the street, and the result being that the street went into somewhat of a downward spiral.

That process came to a dramatic crisis about six or seven years ago. There were a few incidents. At one point, when the street was full of body-rub parlors – which are essentially brothels – a young kid was raped and murdered [this incident occurred in 1977]. The next thing that happened, after the Rodney King verdict was announced, a lot of young kids went on a rampage and broke shop windows on Yonge Street. That was sort of a wakeup call for the city. That led to political action and action on the part of the business community to try to do something about it.

The other big factor that I didn’t mention specifically in the demise of this part of Yonge Street was the creation of the Eaton Centre, which is located beside Yonge Street [and] which is about a thousand feet in length. Eaton Centre was built in the 1970s and was a very glamorous, but in planning terms, a typically suburban shopping mall. The downside of the Eaton Centre is that it sucked almost the totality of the high- and middle-income retail life of the street into the mall and left a vacuum out on the street. The upside is that it is still the most heavily used shopping mall in the Toronto region and the store sustains a traffic level of about 55 million people per year, in terms of its shopping activities in the downtown core.

The solution to the problem came when the Eaton Centre started feeling the negative effects of what was going on outside, in terms of crime and deterioration. It became in the interest of the Eaton Centre to join the effort mounted by the local business community to lobby the city to do something about what was going on on the street. In about 1994, the Yonge Street Business and Resident Association was formed, by the getting-together of the local business community and the Eaton Centre. And they initiated the regeneration program that has subsequently led to the creation of the new square and the project around it.

SM  And the final plan that came about, which is being implemented as we speak; through what process did that plan come about? And what other options were seriously considered?

RS  The plan came about through the work that I did with the Yonge Street Business and Resident Association, initially trying to attract new customers and new business to the area by means of providing businesses and building owners with an incentive to fix up their buildings – sort of building improvement grants, which were only moderately successful.

The problem that we discovered is that the area had become so blighted, both physically and the perceptions people had about it being hostile and dangerous, that we concluded that it was going to take much more radical surgery to get it turned around. So that led to an analysis of what the possibilities were: what could we hope to attract into the downtown in terms of real estate investment, in new property that would be attractive in the marketplace? And the conclusion we came to was that the street could be successful if it were redeveloped to include a major urban entertainment center.

And that led to the conceptualization of the project in relation to two major objectives: one was to create a dramatic change in what we call the sense of place in the area; the means to that end was the creation of the new public square which is about to be opened in November; and the other objective was to bring into the market a substantial amount of brand new, up-to-date retail space anchored by a large cinema complex.

That was the concept, to develop the square and surround it with those kinds of activities. The way in which the city went about that was to find an area that would, first of all, be optimal for that purpose; which had relatively large land holdings; and in which it would not be undertaking destruction of any important historic buildings. The Yonge-Dundas intersection met all of those criteria, in addition to the fact that it was right at the front door of the Eaton Centre – and therefore had access to those 50 million people I talked about – and was also at a major subway station.

SM  How has the plan been received by residents, particularly those who will be most affected by it?

RS  Almost 100 percent positively. There was very very little objection. The only objections to the plan came from the kind of very conservative – you’d call them right-wing Republican folks – who thought it was inappropriate for the city to be engaging in this kind of activity. But aside from that crowd, the plan was resoundingly supported by all of the citizenry of Toronto. In fact, those citizenry have become a little frustrated, because it’s taken quite a long time for the cinema complex and the other projects around the square to get going.

SM  According to an article in the Toronto Star published a couple weeks ago, the commercial plan, as you see it, threatens to compromise the civic quality of the space – where funding the property from month to month is concerned.

RS  That was about the proposal that had been received in relation to placing advertising on the public square itself and using naming opportunities and very heavy commercial promotion to raise money to operate the square. And my comment was in relation to the extent to which that proposal proposed to commercialize the square was inappropriate.

SM  And you specifically rejected the Available Media approach?

RS  That’s right.

SM  Could you describe that approach?

RS  The Available Media approach was one which presented us with a kind of menu of options. Several of those options were quite acceptable if they were implemented from time to time. For example, if occasionally the square were to be made available to some kind of company that produces a product, and the company wanted to paint their logo over the big canopy, that could be okay for a week or two during the year. But if that logo became an integral part of the canopy on a year-round basis, that would be inappropriate. Some of the other proposals were to sell the naming rights to the fountains on the square, so that you would have a name plate on every fountain jet of a corp; things like that which I thought were excessive.

Had we implemented a lot of those ideas, like selling the naming of the square, we could have yielded a lot more money. But this square is not about making money; the square is about being an amenity first and foremost.

SM  This being part of the regeneration process that some parts of Toronto are currently experiencing, you were quoted recently as saying, “The street,” meaning Yonge Street, “has begun to heal, but it still has a way to go.” What are some of the things that still need to happen on Yonge Street – and we’re talking about Yonge Street beyond the intersection of Yonge and Dundas, I assume?

RS  Oh, yes. This project was seen as a catalyst that would have the effect of improving the retail environment and the street environment for the length of the street from Queen up to College Street – or a little bit further than that, which is the length of the Business Improvement area which the square is a focal point of.

When I say it’s got a ways to go, what I mean is, although we’ve got a lot of new retailers into the area, companies that have signed long-term leases and put money into their stores to make them into good quality stores, by and large those still tend to be at the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum, which tend to appeal to the lower- and middle-income market.

My hope is that we’re going to quite substantially expand the range of retail opportunities so that we get a broader section of the income spectrum, and the age spectrum, coming down to the street – there being shops and restaurants and movies, that will cater to that broader income spectrum. In my mind, the key to that is the urban entertainment center concept, which I think will draw a much bigger crowd down to the street. And we’ll actually begin to draw people out of the Eaton Centre – not because they’re going to shop down there as an alternative, but because they are going to extend their stay downtown to take in some of the other activities.

SM  How sweeping in ambition are these plans? To be specific, are you looking to push the porn shops and the strip clubs off the street?

RS  No. It’s a matter of balance. The porn shops and the strip clubs, they’ve been there ever since I’ve know Yonge Street, and they’ll go on being there. The problem that occurred was when that became the predominant use on the street, and the retailing shrunk to almost nothing, except for stuff that was really bottom-feeding. I don’t believe that our goal is that ambitious in the sense of some kind of social engineering. Really, all we want to do is get the same crowd of people that’s already going into the Eaton Centre, to come outside.

If you look at many cities in the States, the problem they’ve had is that people just don’t come downtown at all. Here we’ve got them, they’re there, there are 50 million people a year in the Eaton Centre and they represent the full age spectrum and mix of people that we’re looking for in every respect. It’s just a matter of getting them to come out and enjoy some of the additional amenities.

SM  And would you identify this plan as being one of several plans that are currently being implemented that will have this sort of wide-ranging effect?

RS  In Toronto? Not really. This is the only plan that I know of that the city has initiated, that is designed to do what this plan is trying to do. This is the city taking steps to deal with its main street, its heart. You have to understand that this is a city that up until 10 years ago didn’t perceive itself as being susceptible to this sort of urban decay. It took a lot of persuasion initially to get the [City] Council to understand that this was a problem that really needed to be addressed in this way.

SM  Are there other problems that the city needs to be addressing in moving beyond this plan itself?

RS  The city has generally been screwed over the last seven or eight years, in terms of the amalgamation that happened here and subsequent to that being really starved for resources. It’s been given huge new responsibilities and really no money with which to deal with those things. So the standard of maintenance of public space, for example, went off a cliff. People from the States used to come here and say “My god, you can eat off the streets.” Now people look at it and say this is worse than most American cities in terms of the level of upkeep of the public space.

I think that the city has got a lot of issues like that to address: its school system, and in particular, there’s a very serious problem with homelessness on the downtown streets, and Yonge Street is one of the places where that’s a problem. That’s one of the issues.

SM  To return to the issue of cleanliness and upkeep; coming into to Toronto as an American, I think my expectations were how you desribe them, because some of the materials that I had read were a little out of date. My impression, especially being around Yonge Street, was this is just as dirty and decaying as any street I’ve seen in, say, Chicago.

RS  Exactly. Try Detroit. It’s gotten pretty bad here. When I say “try Detroit,” I mean that Toronto’s getting to be on a par with parts of Detroit.

Ronald L. Soskolne is a real estate development consultant who specializes in large-scale mixed-use developments and public/private projects. His usual practice is to associate for a limited period of time with clients who require, on a short-term basis, a high level of development expertise for the execution of specific projects.  Such clients are usually municipalities, developers, private corporations or not-for-profit corporations.  They have included entities such as The Walt Disney Company, Yonge Street Business and Residents Association in collaboration with the City of Toronto, Shell International, Canary Wharf Limited, and the City of Detroit.