Vote for the kind of city you want
The future of your city is in your hands today. It’s up to you. So get out and vote, would you? This has been a weird municipal election year in Toronto — kind of slow gearing up, then turned on its head by Premier Doug Ford’s eleventh-hour changes to how the whole election and city government will work, and then emerging as interesting and somewhat confusing as the campaign debate began in earnest.
But now it comes to the end. You will have heard from the candidates by now about why you ought to vote for them. You may have heard from editorial boards and activists telling you who they think you should vote for. You’ve likely heard from polls and pundits who they think will win.
But it ain’t over quite yet. The finish isn’t up to them — it’s up to you. Up to us.
Quite a lot hinges on the result. We have ongoing crises in the city: of housing affordability, of overloaded transit, of traffic congestion, of gun violence. How we tackle those problems, or how they continue to tackle us, hinges on the results of this vote.
And not just the mayoral vote, but all the city council races, too. The city will be shaped by all of them working together, and a number of big-picture citywide decisions may very well come down to one councillor’s vote. In the rejigged council scheme, a lot of wardlevel races today may be decided by a few hundred votes or less.
Even away from the most pressing issues, the city’s government is the one that determines how much of life is lived on your block and in your workplace.
How your garbage gets picked up, whether the splash pad is open at your local park, whether a condo tower can be built at the end of your block, the speed limit on the street you live on, whether the bus you rely on to get to work runs every five minutes or once an hour.
The city government doesn’t just determine how city life is lived in some big, abstract, generational way. It’s a factor in your life every day.
Anyone who says they don’t care about the city’s government either doesn’t understand what that government does, or is lying.
The best-functioning democracies involve people all the time, not just on election day — consulting them, gathering their opinions, responding to their concerns, day to day, week in and week out. And Toronto’s city government does typically offer opportunities for people who want to get involved, to make speeches to committees, join local boards and commissions, respond to surveys or attend consultations. Councillors answer their phones and emails and (the best ones, anyway) listen and help. How much they and the government they represent are able to continue doing that in a new 25-councillor system is one of the questions that will be determined in the near future. It’s not clear exactly how things are going to work.
But however involved or not constituents are day-to-day, there’s one day, every four years, that they get to set the whole agenda. To decide who will make the decisions about who gets to be involved, who gets listened to and who gets ignored, how much money should be collected and how it will be spent.
It’s the easiest of the ways to participate in shaping the city’s future, but also among the most influential: voting. If you still aren’t sure who to vote for, information about the candidates is only a quick Google search away. If you’re not sure where to vote, or how, or who is running in your ward, or what ID you need to bring with you to the polling stations, you can find answers quickly at the My Vote Toronto website.
Why wouldn’t you want to do that? Why would you leave the decisions about your life, about what happens in your neighbourhood, about the opportunities available to your kids, about the conduct of your police force, about the options available to you for getting around — why would you leave those decisions in someone else’s hands? You and I get to complain about the fools at city hall every day, all year. But we only get one chance every four years to choose those fools, and choose which ones to kick out. That chance comes today. So don’t waste it. Get out and vote for the city you want to live in.