One election prediction can be made with total confidence: Toronto won't win.
No matter which party triumphs in next week's vote, Ontario's largest city will be left begging Queen's Park for handouts. It will still lack the authority to raise the revenue it needs to provide basic municipal services. It will still be unable to shore up its aging infrastructure, unclog its jammed transportation arteries or prevent the development of permanent enclaves of poverty.
We can rail against our fate. Or we can get imaginative.
Other urban centres with much bigger problems than Toronto have turned things around. What it takes – and what this city has yet to develop – is a can-do culture.
This doesn't mean Mayor David Miller should stop fighting for a fair deal from Queen's Park and Ottawa.
It doesn't mean Torontonians should stop demanding that a reasonable share of their taxes be invested where they live.
It certainly doesn't mean the city can solve all of its financial woes.
But, as urban planner Joe Berridge told a roomful of civic leaders this week, some of our shackles are self-imposed. We have a change-resistant municipal bureaucracy and a parochial council. We are better at criticizing senior levels of government than seizing the initiative.
"Toronto is structurally broken," he acknowledged. "But that is not going to change soon. We need to look for pragmatic answers."
Berridge, former manager of Toronto's planning department and now a partner at Urban Strategies, was speaking at a pre-election lunch organized by the Institute for Research on Public Policy.
It frustrates him that a city with Toronto's assets – an accessible waterfront, a vibrant cultural sector, a thriving research network, a liveable downtown and a diverse, tolerant citizenry – is held back by hidebound management.
"Successful cities take risks," he pointed out.
Paris gambled that it could get thousands of citizens out of their cars by setting up a city-wide network of rent-a-bike kiosks. It worked. Within months, people were cycling to work, cycling to market, cycling along the Seine River. It had become fashionable to travel by two-wheeler.
London gambled that it could introduce an all-purpose electronic money card that would allow citizens to ride the subway, go shopping, pay their bills and do their banking. It worked. The Oyster card – which provides a small stream of municipal revenue – has become the credit/debit/transit card of choice.
Manchester, a decaying industrial city whose inner core had been devastated by an IRA bomb, gambled that it could be one of England's great metropolises. Its mayor and the civil service envisioned and ran their city like a leading-edge business. It is Berridge's favourite example. "I've yet to hear any Canadian who would describe himself as a municipal entrepreneur."
Toronto is in a fiscal straitjacket, Berridge allowed. Its major source of revenue – property taxes – is stagnant and small (approximately 3 per cent of the gross domestic product).
But there is still room for creativity.
City hall could spin off Toronto Hydro, Toronto Water and Toronto's building permit office, creating autonomous, revenue-generating businesses.
It could hand off its bus and subway system to the newly created Greater Toronto Transportation Authority, a provincial agency with a mandate to develop a region-wide transit system.
It could commercialize the gold mine of information in the municipal database, without compromising the privacy of its citizens.
It could work out deals with its unions to outsource services that can be delivered at lower cost independently.
"Canadian cities are not poorly managed, but they are ordinarily managed – and ordinary doesn't cut it anymore," Berridge said.
He sympathizes with Miller as he attempts to sell two new taxes – on land transfers and vehicle registration – that would alleviate the city's immediate financial woes.
He sympathizes with civic activists as they attempt to sell the idea that a strong, self-supporting Toronto is critical to Ontario's economic future.
"But this is not part of the current election."
We can wait and fume. Or we can get moving and let the province catch up.
1 comment:
City hall could spin off Toronto Hydro, Toronto Water...
are you fucking crazy?
I don't want any private company handling our water for profit. Maybe when you're dead and gone it won't affect *you*.
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