The ‘province of Toronto’ a perfectly sane idea
Happy flag anniversary, fellow Ontarians! As readers of Peter Price’s column in the Star’s opinion pages on Wednesday learned, May 21 marks 50 years since our province adopted the modified Red Ensign as our official flag.
To which I imagined many readers looked up from their newspapers and said, “Huh. Ontario has a flag?”
Well, not much of a flag, Price’s essay showed; ours is a relic of stubborn loyalty to the British Empire adopted hastily in “revenge” for former prime minister Lester B. Pearson’s introduction of the Maple Leaf. A red field with the provincial seal of arms on it and a Union Jack in the top corner. A flag that is hard to tell apart from Manitoba’s, so lacking is it in distinction.
Which is appropriate. Because as Price hints toward the end of his piece on the flag Ontario “deserves,” this is a province without much in the way of identity. What comes to mind when I mention Ontario? A place where “Good Things Grow,” as the old jingle had it? The official slogan, “Loyal She Began, Loyal She Remains”? Or maybe, more likely, the licence plate slogan, “Ontario: Yours To Discover,” which functions as a better motto about our collective identity than the official one. Now there’s a line that hints at the void the province leaves in the imagination, implying the follow-up, “And If You Do Discover It, Let the Rest of Us Know What You Found.”
People from other provinces almost never fail to identify those places as where they are from — it often seems like people from Quebec, Newfoundland and Labrador, P.E.I. and Alberta more readily identify with their provinces than they do as Canadian.
It’s an identifying habit they share with Americans, who unfailingly volunteer their home as being “Oregon” or “Ohio” or “Texas.”
But ask someone from Ontario where they’re from and they usually respond “Parry Sound” or “the Soo” or “Toronto.” It isn’t that there aren’t great, distinctive places with proud histories and strong communities in Ontario, it’s just that they don’t seem to have much in com- mon with each other save for recycling at the Beer Store and complaining about whoever’s in office at Queen’s Park. Admit it, when I began this piece by calling you a “fellow Ontarian,” it was probably the first time anyone except a provincial politician has ever called you that. It’s such an unfamiliar concept, I had to check whether to spell it with an “o” or an “a” in the last syllable.
From here in Toronto, the province is most familiar now as a bad guy: carrying dominion over income and sales tax revenues while giving short shrift to the city’s priorities. Every time a big debate arises — transit, social housing, even highway maintenance — the core argument revolves around how the provincial government will not kick in its fair share, distracted as it is by the priorities of those in Thunder Bay or Kingston or Moosonee.
Those places have a right to their own priorities too, and shouldn’t have to take a back seat to us. But nor should we have to take a back seat to them.
The solution seems obvious: Break the amorphous, unwieldy administrative entity of Ontario into provinces that make sense. I’m not sure what makes sense in the rest of Ontario, but it’s clear that the Greater Toronto Area — or better yet the Golden Horseshoe — would be a perfectly sane province.
The sense of identity of people in Toronto and Hamilton and Niagara Falls is already intertwined somewhat: we share a climate, a regional economy (including interlocking real estate and job markets) and a set of shared mental landmarks visited on school trips and family road journeys.
Depending on where you draw the boundaries, we’d immediately become the largest (or second or third largest) province by population, we’d remain the economic engine of central Canada, and the media and financial capital of the country. Toronto all by itself is already larger than all of the Atlantic provinces combined.
We’d still grapple with big issues about how to spend money and why, and we’d still encounter regional divisions in priorities, but at least our debates concerning how to govern ourselves and build would centre around the obvious fact that what happens in one part of the new province affects the rest of it. That’s something that can’t be said about the current province, where commuting from Toronto by airplane is part of life for some members of the legislature.
Lest this all sound a bit like a smug Torontonian looking to shunt his fellow provincial citizens into the wilderness, it’s interesting to see that the last time making Toronto a separate province became a news issue, it was at the suggestion of Owen Sound MPP Bill Murdoch in 2010. He thought rural areas of Ontario like the one he represented would be better off without us.
On this occasion, it may be suitable to note that Toronto already has its own flag, one free of overt colonial baggage and, I’d venture, already more recognized than the Ontario ensign. Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwire