Toronto Election 2010

If the city is to overcome its challenges, it will need help from its own citizens.

Every discussion of Toronto’s future tends to identify a similar set of daunting challenges. In no particular order, these typically include: the annual budget gap between spending and revenue; making the post-amalgamation mega-bureaucracy more responsive to citizens; re-invigorating regionalism in the GTA; making better use of our extraordinarily diverse human capital; facing the increasing income polarization across the city and the resulting lack of affordable housing; lessening our dependence on cars and fossil fuel; and dealing with our waste.

This intimidating list could easily be cause for despair. Yet these discussions usually end with the fierce affirmation that, notwithstanding all of the above, Toronto is a remarkable city with an engaged, resourceful, and talented population and we are, for the most part, grateful to be here. The challenge lies in bridging this gap – strengthening our resolve to forge ahead despite the sometimes fatalistic perception that there is little room to maneuver when so much is blocked and under-resourced.

While it is certainly true that our city (and other Canadian cities as well) is an underfunded net exporter of wealth that has been shortchanged on the resources it should be getting back from senior levels of government, this is not the whole story. There are many things that we can do for ourselves. Untapped potential can often be found by using the assets we already have to greater advantage. The first should be to throw open the doors of city hall to civil society.

The city continues to pass over many opportunities to embrace the active and engaged civil society in our midst, These motivated, inventive, and agile civic actors can dramatically enhance the capacity of government by rapidly bringing different parties to enlarged tables. We need to get beyond our traditional limiting stance that government should do it alone.

We already have a wealth of highly motivated and skilled civic entrepreneurs and innovators who have already formed powerful and effective umbrella groups. These include the Toronto City Summit Alliance, whose impressive accomplishments include DiverseCity, Greening Toronto, and the Emerging Leaders Network, and civic actors like the Canadian Urban Institute, the City Centre Institute at U of T, and People Plan Toronto, among many others. To date, the reception at City Hall has been chilly. It is time for that to change.

In a small but telling example, City Council recently reversed the draconian administrative decision to forbid all skating on ponds, originally done to limit liabilities and save the cost of testing the ice, and is now seeking partners to better make use of community capacity. Similarly, there was a successful community-led campaign to keep swimming pools open. Meanwhile, neighbourhood groups across the city are forming “friends of” groups and associations to play key stewardship roles for their local parks. Efforts like these should be welcomed.

Deeper and broader bottom up citizen involvement to complement top down government programs will not only allow us to do more with less, but will also greatly enhance our capacity for honest public discussion of hard issues and thoughtful risk-taking on seemingly intractable issues. But to make this work, there will need to be some changes in the way municipal government works to overcome a growing sense of alienation and frustration among regular citizens.

Many Torontonians are starting to realize that our amalgamated city is simultaneously too big and remote and too small and insular to make many decisions effectively. To really make it work, we have to break it down into smaller knowable units to empower neighbourhoods and give meaningful access to City Hall. The Community Boards of New York provide a good model for this. At the same time, we need to look at the big picture and strengthen constituencies for regional cooperation across current municipal boundaries.

In the planning arena, we desperately need to restore “home rule.” Our continuing subjugation to the Ontario Municipal Board has led to an enormous and unhelpful diversion of resources and attention. We have to extricate ourselves from its clutches and take back the planning reins to proactively guide change, not let it be decided by litigious skirmishes with unpredictable outcomes. The province has given Toronto an opportunity to wean itself from this embarrassing subservience and we need to take advantage of it.

The people of Toronto are doing all kinds of extraordinary things. It only makes sense to harness that energy for the good of the entire city.

This is the first of a two-part series on Toronto's civil service by Ken Greenberg.