Who are your political neighbours?
As I began to take a close look at the new map of Toronto wards recently, I was reminded of the old civic aphorism, “Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you.”
Variations of this phrase are sometimes attributed to a sentiment expressed by the ancient Greek statesman Pericles who was trying to encourage the citizens of Athens to pay attention to events around them during the Peloponnesian War.
While Toronto is not currently at war, the political landscape is shifting profoundly around us, and the ward you live in now may not be the same one come fall and the municipal election.
It’s a good idea to take a peek at the new map and understand where you’ll fit into a reconfigured Toronto. If you don’t think this matters to you but have grumped about anything from a pothole to transit, then that aphorism was meant for you.
Toronto will be divided into 47 wards, up from the current 44. As many areas have rapidly increased in population, a ward boundary review was under- taken in recent years. Some wards currently have 100,000 people, and others around half that.
The new wards should each have a population of about 61,000 by 2026.
Municipal wards are the least well known electoral areas of all three tiers of government, as it’s the one that traditionally receives the least attention from voters, even though it affects our day-to-day lives more than the provincial or federal levels of government.
We can identify easily with our neighbourhood, but Toronto’s wards are an invisible but important layer, with borders that sometimes follow natural and human-made divisions that make immediate sense to us, but also often cross ravines, valleys, expressways and rail corridors. These barriers tend to prohibit a ward identity from forming, so it’s hard for many wards to live in our imaginations. Some downtown wards could be crossed on foot in 10 minutes, while ones farther out might take an hour.
To make it more difficult, the new wards also don’t have names, just a number designation, so there’s no longer an intuitive connection to geography and sense of place as there used to be.
Old wards had names such as Parkdale-High Park, Willowdale or Toronto-Danforth. Though imprecise, they gave a sense of where in the city they were located.
Finding my own place in my new ward, and seeing where its edges are, gave me a sense of the other neighbourhoods I’m going to be connected to, though it will take some time before I don’t have to continually refer to the map for other wards.
There are many interesting changes.
Take current Ward 27: it spans the Rosedale valley and includes a large portion of Rosedale itself as well as some very dense downtown neighbourhoods that have grown rapidly. The Current Ward 27 councillor, Kristyn Wong-Tam, will be running in new Ward 22 that begins at College St. and runs south to the lake and includes the Toronto Islands.
Much of the Rosedale section of old 27 will now be part of Ward 34, a geographically massive ward that spans the Don Valley and encompasses East York neighbourhoods too. Some new wards, such as Ward 21 in the dense southern area of the downtown east side, have no incumbents, while Ward 16, centred around Lansdowne and St. Clair Aves., has two incumbents, Ana Bailao and Cesar Palacio, who previously occupied two separate but adjacent wards.
It makes for interesting politics for sure. Confused? This is why maps are so important as they show the changes visually and we can see exactly where we fit into the new arrangement. This week the city also released detailed ward profiles online that provide considerable demographic data to help you get to know who your neighbours are.
Not everyone was happy with the new boundary proposals. During the review in 2016 some residents of the Beach neighbourhood were vocally upset they might be part of a new ward that included Scarborough. Imagine! In the end the border between new Wards 37 and 38 remains on Victoria Park Blvd., maintaining the old split between Toronto and Scarborough. The good people of Scarborough, then, need not worry their name is besmirched by association with persnickety Beach folk.
Perhaps more onerously, since we all paid for the drawn out and expensive process, a group led by Coun. Justin Di Ciano challenged the new boundaries at the Ontario Municipal Board and later in Superior Court, but their objections were dismissed.
There is, as ever, power in where lines on a map are drawn and is why they can be contentious, so find yourself on the new ward map and see who your new political neighbours are, because they’re going to affect your life.