Toronto Election 2010
Housing and transit are not just the biggest infrastructure issues facing cities today, they are also the biggest social, economic, and equity issues. A healthy city must be able to house people of all income levels in a stable way, allowing them to build social capital in neighbourhoods and live close to where they work, play, and shop. The ability to move around the city easily, to work, to worship, to play, and to buy things, weaves relationships throughout the city, creating a strong civic fabric.
The 2010 municipal elections will see other important issues raised. Many, like immigrant settlement, waterfront development, or anti-poverty initiatives, will relate to housing and transit. They will have significant “city building” aspects to them that will respond to the demands that the large numbers of new city residents will make over the coming four years. Other issues will have more to do with the processes of running the city – whether work is done by city employees or contracted out, for example.
The question of municipal finances will be hotly debated – whether the city has been saddled with limited revenue tools which will never meet its needs or is simply spendthrift and wasteful. Within that debate will be the old chestnut of residential versus business property taxes. Property tax has an uncanny way of inflaming passions among normally civil people. Also within the financial realm will be the consideration of whether the city should sell some of its assets, and to what purpose the proceeds should be put.
Substance and process will intertwine during the 2010 municipal campaigns, thrown into relief by the receding recession and torqued up by political rhetoric. *The Mark* has invited a number of writers to comment on various issues as the campaigns unfold in cities across Ontario.
Toronto’s Lost Voters
by Myer Siemiatycki
Politics Professor, Ryerson University.
- First Posted: Mar 12 2010 08:04 AM
- Updated: 3 months ago
One in seven Torontonians are barred from voting in the municipal election because they are not Canadian citizens.
So far, the buzz around the October 2010 Toronto municipal election has focused on who is running for mayor. It’s time we paid more attention to who will be voting for those candidates.
When it comes to casting ballots to select our city council, Toronto has a deep democratic deficit that severely undermines the legitimacy of our elected officials. When only a third of eligible electors turn out to vote in Toronto elections, how representative and responsive can any member of council be? And when more than one in seven of Toronto residents aren’t even permitted onto the voters’ list, how democratic is our municipal election system to begin with?
Toronto’s sorry state of voter participation needs to be an issue in this year’s municipal election campaign. A fundamental starting point is voting rights for the hundreds of thousands of immigrant Torontonians currently barred from casting their ballot in municipal elections.
What keeps these residents off the municipal voters’ list is that they are not Canadian citizens. Municipal voter eligibility rules in Canada are set by the provinces, and in Ontario (as in other provinces) Canadian citizenship is a pre-requisite. So, even though they pay municipal property taxes, make Toronto their home, and depend on its municipal services, immigrant non-Canadian citizens lack voting rights.
The number of non-Canadian citizen residents in Toronto is huge. The 2006 Census counted 380,135 of them. This represents 15.4 per cent (more than one in seven) of the city’s 2.47 million population. This is equal to the entire population of Halifax, twice the population of Regina, and four times the population of St. John’s, to cite three other provincial capital cities in the country.
What’s wrong with this picture of immigrant electoral disenfranchisement? Lots, but here’s the shortlist.
No Taxation Without Representation. All the foreign-born, non-Canadian citizens kept off the voters’ list live in Toronto and pay property taxes as tenants or homeowners. Yet they have no vote in selecting their municipal representatives.
Voteless Neighbourhoods. Toronto is officially classified into 140 neighbourhoods. Given newcomers residential settlement patterns in the city, Toronto has neighbourhoods where over 30 per cent of the population are non-citizens, and therefore ineligible to vote. Often these neighbourhoods have distinct needs and assets that go unrecognized because they lack a political voice.
The Stakeholder Principle of Municipal Rights. Cities don’t operate under the same “membership rules” as the federal or provincial government. The best example is the fact that non-residents can vote municipally, but not federally or provincially. If you pay property taxes to a municipality on a property you own or rent, you can vote in that municipality’s election, even if you don’t live there. Immigrant non-Canadians meet this membership requirement of paying property taxes. The fact they also live in Toronto further strengthens their claim.
Creating Cities of Belonging. Immigrants have demonstrated their commitment to Toronto by leaving their homeland to live here. Immigrant integration works best when newcomers feel they are recognized and valued. Over 85 per cent of eligible immigrants eventually become Canadian citizens. But it does take time - a minimum of four years given the residency, citizenship application, and testing requirements. Toronto municipal elections are held every four years. This means that, depending on their arrival date, an immigrant can wait anywhere from four to eight years to vote for their mayor, city councillor, or school trustee.
Many Other Countries Give Non-Citizens Municipal Voting Rights. More than 40 countries (half of them in Europe) now extend the municipal vote to non-citizen immigrants. This includes the UK, Ireland, Netherlands, Sweden, and New Zealand. Like them, we should regard municipal voting rights as a way of signaling we want immigrants to participate in the political life of their chosen country.
A grassroots movement is growing to extend municipal voting rights to non-citizen immigrants. Under the campaign banner “I Vote Toronto,” close to 70 organizations in Toronto have endorsed the call for non-citizen voting rights in the city.
What exactly does Toronto (one of the world’s great immigrant cities) gain by preventing hundreds of thousands of immigrant residents from voting on municipal election day? We certainly know what is lost. A few years back, while visiting Toronto, Dublin’s Mayor Michael Conaghan was asked how immigrants there feel about being able to vote in that city’s elections before they become citizens of Ireland. He replied: “They like the idea of being asked for their vote. They feel a part of the city, and I think that’s important…I suppose they feel they’re not being dismissed.”
And what do Toronto’s candidates for mayor, city councillor and school trustee say on the subject?
Listen to an interview with Myer Siemiatycki here.
This is one in a series of essays on the big issues in Toronto's upcoming municipal election.
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