City Doing Many More Things Much Better

Toronto: An Imperfect “10”

It’s hard to believe it’s been 10 years since the amalgamation of the City of Toronto.

There have been some growing pains since then-Premier Mike Harris ignored referenda showing overwhelming opposition in each of the municipalities of the former Metro Toronto to the megamerger. With such auspicious beginnings, it’s no wonder it wasn’t an easy decade.

The balance sheet was supposed to be, well, “balanced” by eliminating duplication in the delivery of services. But the city was forced to deplete its cash reserves just to keep the lights on.

There is a lot more poverty – visible poverty that makes so many of us uncomfortable – than there was 10 years ago. The air is thicker, and not only during summer. There are fewer and fewer high-paying industrial jobs in the 416, and it takes forever and a day to travel in, around, through, over, under or anywhere near the city – by car or by transit. We have two transit systems (GO and TTC) that boast some of the highest fare box-recovery ratios in the world yet provide service that is inadequate and increasingly unreliable.

And yet, I can’t recall being so excited about living in this city. There is a growing momentum pushing a stronger, bolder Toronto forward, on three fronts:

- our face is changing – recent Statistics Canada figures show half of our population was born in another country, making Toronto now more diverse than Miami or New York;

- our physical space is changing – from gentrification to reclaimed industrial lands to a skyline on steroids, two-year old pictures of the city seem suddenly dated; and

- the pace is picking up – people in the GTA currently have the longest commutes times in the country but the TTC is kicking things up a notch this year and there’s an actual plan and real momentum for an expanded regional rapid transit system.

Of the 1.6 million people who moved to Canada in the past five years, almost one-third (430,000 people) moved to the GTA, and half of them came to Toronto, adding up to almost 10 per cent population growth for the region. Many new arrivals are coming from India and China, and, increasingly from Latin American countries including Brasil.

These links to emerging economies will become more important as Toronto continues to etch out its status as a global city and measure its success against its global peers. Toronto continues to fare well when ranked against other major urban centres as a global financial and cultural centre, in general business competitiveness and overall quality of life. Whether it finishes first or tenth in any one “list” is irrelevant: each survey will have its own weaknesses and slightly different weighting of categories could produce different rankings. What’s important here is that Toronto is on the list, and in aggregate is doing well and gaining momentum.

The space occupied by now more than 2.5 million people is also transforming. The vertical skyline continues to push north and out towards the east and west along the Harbourfront. And it’s not just exciting new projects like the 80-storey tower at 1 Bloor East, or the 60-storey residential gem, Aura, planned for the southern tip of College Park, it’s also Trump and Shangri-La and Four Seasons. On the business side, the Bay-Adelaide Centre is finally rising, and RBC is building an elegant new tower across from the CBC building. On the cultural side, Liebeskind’s ROM Crystal opened recently, with the revitalized Art Gallery of Ontario and the Royal Conservatory of Music coming soon. There’s the Film Festival Tower, the boot-shaped L tower rising over the Hummingbird Centre, the list goes on.

On the transit track, there is also light at the end of the tunnel. With a whack of new buses this year as part of the TTC’s Ridership Growth Strategy, there should be reduced crowding during peak periods. The province has shown a serious commitment to funding capital expansion for regional rapid transit through MoveOntario 2020, and is looking into ways to lighten the burden of operating costs. The Greater Toronto Transportation Authority (now known as Metrolinx) got off to a slow start but has made a credible effort at maintaining momentum with its list of “quick-win” projects.

The city has new sources of revenue, and will be looking at other measures to squeeze a few extra bucks out of its citizens with new taxes to pay for a host of green initiatives as well as bike lanes and improved transit. The Transit City plan is bold; it is also flawed but it represents new thinking by the city and the TTC. And in the next few months we can expect a report from Queen’s Park looking into uploading the costs of provincially mandated programs from municipal budgets.

And our mayor, David Miller, gets it. He introduced the motion that eventually led to the rejection of a design proposal for the new Corus Entertainment building along the waterfront. That project is important because it will bring jobs to the area, but the developers have been told that their design would have done little to enhance public space or the skyline, reinforcing the need for great architecture in the first significant building on the waterfront.

Miller is also a leader among international mayors vying for grand marshal rights in the Greenest City parade. The fact that this friendly competition even exists, and is a source of bragging rights, tells me we’re going in the right direction. And who doesn’t love a parade?

Dynamic, new, transit-friendly, mixed-use neighbourhoods are also sprouting along former industrial lands along the lake shore. In the East Bayfront area, residents have worked with planners and hashed out an LRT proposal for the area that will mirror the revamped Queen’s Quay line to the west with rail running on one side of the street instead of down the median.

When uber urbanologists like Glen Murray and Richard Florida choose Toronto to live and learn and teach in, that tells me we’re going in the right direction. Not because all of their ideas are great, but they're pushing the envelope and challenging us to think differently. Right here, in Toronto. The burgeoning growth in the surrounding 905 region will be good for the city as a strong core for the Golden Horseshoe.

Toronto is not perfect. One, and there are many, striking example of this came in a recent report from the University of Toronto (itself a rising star internationally) showing great disparities in quality of life, that there are “three cities” of varying socioeconomic success within the city’s borders.

Then there is the context of a federal government that is hostile to cities in general, and to Toronto in particular, at a time when the Canadian Federation of Municipalities says our municipal infrastructure is falling apart.

But Toronto is going about its business – and some of that business has shifted from growing not only in a physical sense, but also growing up in a sense of maturing and developing a stronger sense of itself. Some of that confidence was reflected in the skyline last year when the CN Tower, no longer the world’s tallest free-standing structure, tarted itself up with energy-efficient LED display lights from tip to base.

We’re not perfect, but we’re doing many more things much better.

We’ll never be perfect -- what dynamic city is? -- but we are pushing the envelope, and not just the building envelope.

I will put more thought in future posts to things that are going well in the city and will probably save my vitriol for the upcoming federal election. I figure if I say it enough times an election may actually happen.