New financial deal must be top priority
With billion-dollar shortfall, candidates must have plan to get province, Ottawa to boost funding
We’re in the heart of mayoral campaign debate season (I watched four in two days at the end of this week, and I’m moderating one next week). And we’re entering the beginning of lawn-signs and TV ads season.
Is anyone paying close attention yet?
People in my world of political junkies are, of course. But out there in the great wide city, I’m not as sure. I’m still getting questions about who’s running (a whole lotta people), or when election day is (it’s June 26), or whether John Tory is running again against Olivia Chow (well, see — no, he’s not).
That there’s some general disengagement from municipal politics is not a shock. But given the city has a wide-open race for a historically strong mayor’s office, and that it comes during an affordability crisis, amid a general sense of fear and loathing over the state of the city, and with the government mired in a giant budget hole, it’s fair to ask: if people aren’t paying attention now, when will they ever?
On Friday, after the debates of this week, I had a few different conversations with people who seemed disappointed that no grand unifying vision for the city had yet emerged to grab our attention. Instead, at Thursday’s debate, we got a lot of talk about the basic math problem posed by the city’s budget hole.
I think these may be related things. The apparent lack of excitement among voters and the perceived lack of great visionary projects from candidates may both result, in part, from the lack of dollars available to the city to do basic things.
I mean, I wrote recently about how the lack of housing anyone can afford — the issue that is coming to define this campaign so far — is absolutely crushing to the spirit of people caught in the real-estate thresher. A friend who has moved away from the city called it “Toronto tunnel vision,” the state in which you find yourself unable to focus on anything except how you’re going to afford a place to live that suits your family’s needs.
I have, at times in my life, been in a position where well more than half of my income went to rent, and there just wasn’t enough left over to meet other needs. My experience of that, which I think is common in the city now, is that it becomes very hard to make any plans for your life, or to work towards achieving goals that are more than a day or two away. When the immediate question facing you is if you can scratch together bus fare to get to work tomorrow, it narrows the scope of your ambitions and dreams.
And that’s Toronto right now. There’s a billion-dollar budget shortfall this year. Another one baked into next year’s budget. A giant $46-billion shortfall over the next decade. The city is negotiating day to day if it can afford to host a barbecue for Canada Day at city hall, while cutting services and raising fees.
That’s the situation mayoral candidates are entering.
Some — like Josh Matlow — are open about needing to raise taxes to do anything at all. Others, like Ana Bailão saying she’d upload the highways and Brad Bradford saying he’d open contracts to non-union labour, are proposing plans that might free up a couple of hundred million dollars. Mark Saunders is suggesting he’d summon another visit from the Magical Efficiency Fairy who has consistently failed Toronto in the recent past.
But no matter which option you look at, they don’t get the city’s finances all the way there, or even most of the way there.
They all say we need a new deal for Toronto from the provincial and federal governments.
The problem is Toronto politicians have been saying it for years. And recently Doug Ford has been flexing his muscles to impose pain on Toronto, not rain cash on it. Meanwhile, the federal government has also turned off the tap. You can argue that it’s unfair that the federal government sends us a number of refugees that create a crisis in our shelter system without sending dollars with them, that it is absurd that the TTC is the only major transit system in North America expected to fund essentially all of its operations from the fare box and city property taxes, that the economic engine of Canada could sputter and seize up if the problems caused by COVID-prompted office vacancies hollowing out downtown aren’t addressed. You’d be right if you argued those things. But you still can’t bank on the province and feds delivering for us, can you?
So what do you do if you’re the city government? Like a resident struggling to pay the rent, you stretch every dollar and cut back on all luxuries and skip many essentials. And you scale back your ambitions, postponing doing most of the things that would move you to a more stable future.
And what do residents do after that? They get used to a city government that is delivering less of what they need and want, less of what makes the city a great place to live. And they get used to not being able to expect the city’s plans to pan out as promised. They disengage.
Solving that financial problem is up there with housing as the most important issue facing the city. There simply isn’t a viable way the city can do it alone. Securing a new financial deal for Toronto would be among the most important and lasting city-building legacies any new mayor could deliver. Getting a mandate to demand a deal like that would be a core part of what a winning candidate would require to succeed in the job. All candidates are mentioning the need for better funding. I’m not sure any of them has yet made it define the campaign in the way it could, or possibly should, if we’re all being honest about what will or won’t work to address the city’s needs.
There’s less than a month until election day. I love a grand unifying vision as much as the next guy. But I’d happily settle for simply finding a way to break us all out of Toronto tunnel vision.