12-page special section: How the GTA voted and results from across Canada,
If you want to have a good time on Election Day, bring a baby to the polls. I brought mine on Monday morning to the steps of Birchcliff Bluffs United Church, where residents of Toronto’s Scarborough Southwest riding lined up — masked and physically distanced — to cast their ballots in the federal election. From the comfort of her stroller, my one-year-old daughter laughed hysterically for no apparent reason at the spectacle, showing far more enthusiasm for democracy than any of the adults actually participating in it.
I caught Birchcliff resident Keith Chow on his way out of the church where he voted for Liberal incumbent Bill Blair, former chief of the Toronto Police Service. Unlike my one-year-old, Chow was subdued. “He passed the test,” Chow said about why he voted for Blair and the Liberals. What do you mean “the test?” I asked. “The test,” he said — as in, the pandemic.
In other words, while running the country during a crisis, the Liberals didn’t run it into the ground. For this reason, Chow told me, “I don’t think now is a time to change dramatically.”
I don’t think now is a time to change dramatically.
There isn’t a sentence in the English language that captures the low spirit of this snap election cycle more succinctly: an election few wanted that culmi
nated in massive lines snaking through the city at reduced polling sites.
It’s a sentence that captures the spirit of Toronto too, a city that despite its large size and cultural diversity, tends to favour the status quo in federal elections. Toronto only embraces dramatic change where its condostudded skyline is concerned. When it comes to federal politics, we vote for more of the same. We vote overwhelmingly Liberal.
We may say we want to do the right thing on poverty, equity, and affordability but we ultimately lack the guts to elect leaders from the party that actually gives those issues top billing.
“Canadians go for the known and the comfortable and the familiar and we’re not so familiar with the NDP at the federal level,” says Shauna Brail, associate professor at the Institute for Management and Innovation at the University of Toronto Mississauga.
This rule applies to Torontonians, too: “Urban Canada is still overall a relatively conservative-leaning group, not in terms of the party, but in terms of being comfortable with what’s known,” Brail says.
What’s known is what’s safe. And right now safety counts for a lot. Safety from COVID-19 in the form of vaccine access and vaccine mandates, safety from bankruptcy in the form of financial assistance from the federal government. Safety from ever more uncertainty.
Cities arguably bore much of the brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic, their transit vehicles vacant, their cores hollowed out, their workforces decimated, their ICUs crowded.
Toronto is no exception. Despite the wide availability of vaccines, the Delta variant is here and the city faces a fourth wave of COVID-19. Things are not “back to normal.” Not even close. According to recent data collected by the Strategic Regional Research Alliance, only nine per cent of downtown office workers have returned to inperson work in the core. The TTC is a long way off from recovery.
“What we’ve seen in terms of the pandemic is how crucial the federal government is to supporting Canadian cities,” says Brail.
“The TTC is bleeding money because of a loss of riders. Without federalgovernment support I don’t know what would happen to our transit system. The municipal government certainly doesn’t have the financial support and the federal government does. What we want, from an urban perspective, is their leadership on bringing people and money to the table.”
Opinions may differ on which federal party is best equipped to deliver the people and the money to lift Toronto out of its pandemic misery. But as far as Toronto is concerned, it’s the same old song.
Cities arguably bore much of the brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic, their transit vehicles vacant, their cores hollowed out, their workforces decimated, their ICUs crowded