Fair deal overdue for neglected jewel
It’s no secret that getting from A to B in Scarborough is a schlep, whether you’re a student waiting for a bus on Eglinton Avenue East or a journalist walking from a parking lot to a lecture hall on the evening of a mayoral debate.
On Wednesday, it took me a solid 20 minutes to get from my car to the University of Toronto Scarborough campus, where the city’s leading mayoral candidates met for an uncharacteristically rowdy debate.
But I wasn’t delayed for obvious Scarborough reasons (i.e. failing transportation, the result of longstanding political neglect). I was delayed, rather, because the scenery was so goddamn beautiful.
Scarborough’s many problems aren’t a secret to the rest of Toronto. Ironically though, Scarborough itself is a secret, not to those of us who live here and love it deeply, but to Torontonians who know next to nothing about this place.
Until a couple years ago that was me: a fool whose mind went to crime when I heard the word Scarborough, as opposed to the truth — trees as far as the eye can see. A fool who thought fusion was a word on a fancy menu, not a way of life.
When I moved east, a relative remarked that I’d never be able to find a Jewish bakery in my new neighbourhood. It turns out I didn’t have to because Bread King Bakery, the Tanzanian-owned family business down the street from me, makes a mean challah.
All of this is to say there is no place in Toronto like Scarborough, nor likely in the entire world.
If Toronto is the economic engine of the country, Scarborough is arguably the cultural engine of the city. At Wednesday night’s debate, in a rare moment of optimism, mayoral candidate Josh Matlow acknowledged this fact.
“This is the greenest part of our city,” he said. “This is the land of Mike Myers and the Weeknd and Lily Singh. This is a remarkable place and we need to see it as that.”
Yet, most of the time politicians and media organizations see Scarborough as an afterthought or a charity case. For decades, government has failed this place miserably on so many fronts, but most egregiously on transit.
Government’s treatment of Scarborough’s transit riders — from the ill-fated RT to the perpetually delayed subway extension, to the underfunding of a promised dedicated busway — is an epic poem of broken promises and neglect.
It’s worth noting that multiple candidates onstage at Wednesday night’s debate had some hand in writing that poem. It’s no wonder many Scarborough residents are cynical about the mayoral byelection, a reality epitomized by a pair of UTSC students who sat behind me, quietly trolling every candidate on stage; even their own alumna, Mitzie Hunter, whose plugging of her website “mitzieformayor.ca,” they found particularly hilarious.
But no candidate in this race has a spotless record when it comes to Scarborough. The question is who among them is most likely to benefit it moving forward?
The answer is an honest broker: a candidate unafraid to do the thing that must be done that no one likes. That is, raise taxes.
The city’s financial nightmare cannot be escaped without at minimum, a modest tax increase: a reality that candidates Matlow and Olivia Chow acknowledged on stage Wednesday. But mayoral candidates who claim they can solve Scarborough’s problems without raising taxes are either delusional or lying.
Mark Saunders, the former police chief, would have voters believe he can dig the city out of its financial hole by finding efficiencies. Unless the efficiency he finds is Scarborough itself, his plan is a fantasy.
Scarborough needs a mayor who lives in the real world. That is, a leader who does more than talk about the bluffs and beef patties; a leader with the spine to make the tough choices required to finally get this place a fair deal.