Some Great Idea

by Edward Keenan

  And, most significantly, solutions to problems in Toronto have seldom begun at city hall. They generally arrive there from the streets, from residents and business owners, very often those fed up with the visionary foolishness of the mayor or city council. And those changes, when the fires are finally extinguished, come to be accepted and approved and finally entrenched in the identity of the city. Throughout our history, underdogs constantly win. Toronto’s collective story shows not only that you can fight city hall (or Queen’s Park, or Ottawa), but that often fighting city hall is the only way to get anything worthwhile done. Like the city itself, it ain’t necessarily always pretty. Messy, in fact, might be the best word. Toronto’s charms have often been described as ‘messy urbanism,’ but we’ve equally always worked on the basis of messy democracy. It’s frustratingly slow sometimes, and often inelegant and filled with conflict, but for better or for worse, it’s been what’s worked for us. Messiness is kind of our thing.

  But what role does the mayor of Toronto play in that messy story? It’s a puzzling question. I maintain that Toronto is not and never has been defined by elites or power brokers or visionary leaders. Yet I’ll keep coming back again and again, as I tell the recent story of the city, to the mayor. What exactly does a mayor mean to the city he or she leads? In one sense, obviously, you’ve got the job description laid out in the City of Toronto Act: the mayor leads the forty-four city councillors in drafting bylaws and overseeing the administration of the city’s government, acts as the chief executive officer, and is the official ambassador for the city at ceremonial events. But in the grander scheme of things, the job comes with a different, mostly separate and arguably more important function. The mayor is the personification of the city’s character and mood. He or she sets the tone and establishes the content of the civic conversation. He or she serves as the public face a city shows itself and the rest of the world, and acts as the voice of the city in reaction to events. The mayor, elected by the people, represents the city’s psyche.

  Which isn’t to say the mayor always embodies the will of the people. He or she can also be a foil, a goad, even a villain. Toronto Life magazine called Ford’s mayoralty the ‘weirdest ever,’ but even in Toronto he has some competition in that category, as Mark Maloney once told the Toronto Sun. There was Sam McBride in the 1920s and 1930s who was prone to physically assaulting city councillors. There was George Gurnett in the mid-1800s, who stripped an anti-corruption opponent, beat him, covered him in pine tar and rolled him in chicken feathers. His successor, John Powell, shot and killed a rebel reformer. And there was Allan Lamport, who famously said, ‘Toronto is the city of the future and always will be,’ and spent the equivalent of over $300,000 in today’s dollars secretly entertaining guests at the Royal York Hotel while he was mayor in the 1950s. So they aren’t all role models, clearly. But in setting the agenda and being the focal point of the conversation, even a bad mayor can come to represent the problems a city sees in itself, and having those problems crystallized in one person’s approach can inspire an articulation of alternatives.

  According to the thumbnail sketch that’s emerged over the past decade or so, the three mayors Toronto’s had since amalgamation serve as points on a triangle that represents the divide in Toronto’s politics: Mel Lastman was a huckster frontman for established money and power amid the chaos of the early mega­city; David Miller was the mayor of pinko downtowners enjoying growing prosperity as the megacity stabilized, oblivious to the frustrations of their fellow citizens; Ford is the mayor of alienated suburbanites who wanted to exact revenge on the prosperous elites of the city represented by both Miller and Lastman.

  The characterization falls apart in the details, as we’ll see later. Still, voters’ perceptions, simplified and distorted or not, are important, and in the ways the leaders conducted themselves as mayor, there is some truth in the caricatures.

  We look back on the Mel Lastman administration and remember bumbling, corruption and civic decay. Even as Lastman argrived in office, Toronto had endured a thorough screwing-over by a provincial government that downloaded the costs of transit and social services onto the city, cancelled its subway expansion plans and forcibly dissolved a two-tiered system of regional government that had become a model for the world to create the forcibly amalgamated new city. This larger city was less cohesive than the old municipalities had been – although in functional terms, Metropolitan Toronto had for a couple generations been a single economic and cultural region (one that now extends well beyond amalgamated Toronto’s borders to encompass the almost six million people in what is now called the Greater Toronto Area), the places evolved differently and felt remarkably different. Almost all of the old City of Toronto had developed before the world wars as a compact urban streetscape, with low-rise neighbourhoods of mostly Victorian houses on tree-lined side streets running between crowded commercial strips. The inner suburban municipalities, especially North York, Scarborough and Etobicoke, emerged fully planned during the North American boom of the 1950s and 1960s, and featured winding cul-de-sacs filled with bungalows and ranch houses on sprawling lots, separated commercial areas and industrial parks, and concentrations of concrete high-rise apartment towers along broad, high-speed arterial roads. The suburban areas, more expensive to serve and built as shrines to social isolation – or, if you prefer, privacy – had always had higher taxes and lower levels of service, and they tended through the 1980s to be whiter, more solidly middle-class and more conservative politically. That demographic divide started opening up around the time of amalgamation, though the changes hadn’t yet become the stuff of newspaper articles, and the political identities – conservative suburbs and left-leaning downtown – were firmly entrenched.

  Amalgamation led to an identity crisis. And into that stepped Mel, an unapologetically brash furniture salesman with hair plugs. In private life, Lastman had made it into The Guinness Book of Records for actually selling a refrigerator to an Eskimo, and as the long-serving mayor of North York, he was a braggart for his sleepy suburb and a well-known friend to developers. Backed by most of the establishment conservative boys from the old Metropolitan Toronto backrooms, he won office as the first megacity mayor thanks to a big suburban vote lured by the promise of a tax freeze. Under Lastman, whose two terms lasted from 1998 to 2003, the city’s politics became mired in controversy. A computer-leasing scandal that wasted tens of millions of dollars gave way to allegations of outright bribery, and confirmed a widespread impression of back-door access for lobbyists in a corrupt administration. Toronto’s post-amalgamation budget-balancing strategy during that time became an annual ritual of begging the province for a bailout. The token efforts at official boosterism were uninspired – a generic Yonge Street festival, for instance, or a summer where fibreglass moose were installed around city streets (an idea stolen wholesale from Chicago).

  When the mayor took official action in a crisis, he embarrassed us, calling in the army to clear snow or appearing on international television during the SARS epidemic and claiming not to have heard of the World Health Organization. Lastman’s personal life and demeanour were even more bush-league – it was alleged that he’d maintained an entire separate family after an affair filled newspapers, and he worried aloud that he’d be eaten by dancing cannibal tribesman if he visited Africa. Jane Jacobs talked about the decline of the city; playwright Deanne Taylor wrote about a City for Sale. It was a disgrace.

  The bitter taste Lastman’s administration left in the city’s mouth led directly to the election of David Miller. The son of a working-class immigrant single mother, Miller became an Ivy League–educated lawyer living in High Park. He spoke the language of urbanism fluently and demonstrated a cosmopolitan worldview and confidence common among the city’s economic and cultural elites. When he ran for mayor, he spoke of how the city was populated by ‘citizens’ rather than ‘taxpayers’ – the difference being that citizens are participants in shaping their city, while
taxpayers are simple consumers of services who wonder if they’re getting value for money. Miller was an avatar for the communities in Toronto who’ve shared in the boom times, who have accrued financial or cultural capital or both, who feel they’re part of building something. These groups are increasingly concentrated in the most livable parts of the central city, where Toronto’s social and physical infrastructure is strongest and, correspondingly, the rents are highest.

  Then there’s Rob Ford, a university dropout from Etobicoke who disdains sophisticated thinking altogether. His own thought processes tend toward proud simplification and are almost entirely based on the premise that saving money is the ultimate virtue. He’s a man who inherited wealth and a political machine, but who’s nonetheless claimed to be an outsider. In his own campaign, he spoke forthrightly of the population as straight-ahead consumers of government. He talked about ‘respect for taxpayers’ and ‘customer service’ to the exclusion of almost all other topics, and his bottom-line message was that the consumers of Toronto were being screwed over. His own bumbling, inarticulate, unsophisticated persona came across as authenticity, deeply resonating with voters who felt that the last two slicksters left them out of the city’s growing prosperity and excitement.

  Between the three, you have a fairly neat – maybe too neat – characterization of Toronto’s evolving and now decisively split personality in the years immediately before and after the millennium. Now, clearly they aren’t entirely representative – they’re all white guys, for one thing, and English is their first language – but in their appeal, and even more in their bearing, they demonstrate various aspects of Toronto’s psyche. Lastman masked a teenager-like inferiority complex with empty boastfulness and a wholesale allegiance to money men. Miller projected an assured moral righteousness and a confidence in his own smarts. Ford emanates the blind certainty of the wronged, a belief that the successful are suspect and that halting progress will solve all problems. To put it another way: Lastman blustered through the chaos of the post-amalgamation identity crisis; Miller began projecting a self-confident identity onto the new city; and Ford declined to accept that identity in favour of something scrappier and less ambitious.

  This book takes a look at Toronto under these three different mayors and tries to explain how we could so quickly lurch from one extreme to another, and then again to another, and how we might proceed from here. It’s the story of a time when Toronto grew both literally and figuratively, adding new residents, businesses, institutions and buildings at an astonishing rate, while displaying a previously uncommon civic swagger as it assumed a larger role as a global city, reinventing itself as it has pretty much constantly done in every previous generation throughout its history.

  It’s also the story of how this messy, sometimes chaotic, process of growth and transformation has led to a new stratification and segregation of wealth and cultural capital, a rapid process of physical and social isolation that led alienated voters to stand up and insist on being part of – or taking over – the city’s political conversation. They did this by electing a reactionary simpleton, a walking outrage machine dead set on rolling back many or most of the initiatives that had seemed, to urbanists anyway, like progress. And yet this in turn inspired its own dramatic response – a conversation among citizens – that might see the city finally able to address its outstanding identity questions and real problems and leap forward again.

  And it is also, finally, the story of an idea, a simple idea that’s long been at the heart of Toronto and one that’s made the city great. It’s the story of how that idea still points the way forward to Toronto’s next reinvention, its next stage of growth, its next great idea of itself.

  THE MYTHOLOGY OF TORONTO

  1

  Here’s a Toronto moment: I’m at an off-track betting place above the Brunswick House in the Annex. Once upon a time, Albert’s Hall, on the second floor of the Brunny, was a legendary blues bar; Etta James played there, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters. It’s still a place where people sing the blues, but there isn’t any music; today it’s a dumpy teletheatre where you can watch horse races from all over the world on banks of television sets and gamble on them using touch-screen terminals while swigging beer from bottles or coffee from foam cups. There’s a crowd of regulars, made up of some Jamaican guys, some South Asians, a couple old white guys, lots of Asian guys (yeah, guys – there are hardly any women, although not none either), all clutching tickets and staring intently at the dozens of screens and occasionally shouting, ‘Come on, four!’ or ‘Eleven! Eleven! Eleven!’ or, most often, just letting out a loud groan at the results from Belmont or Woodbine or Monticello.

  You can smoke on the back patio or, rather, on the black tar of the rooftop of the bar below, and look out over backyards down Brunswick Avenue. So I’m out there, squinting at my losing exactor bets, when one of the other smokers starts to make small talk. He’s a man in his sixties with a thick Indian accent. Am I married, he asks. Oh, yes, good, good. Do I have kids yet? Oh, three, very good, they will be the source of greatest joy. Where am I from? Here! Excellent, you are very lucky. He moved here twenty years ago. We agree that in that he is far more typically Torontonian than I am, that in Toronto being from somewhere else is completely normal, expected even. ‘Who can say what is Toronto?’ he asks. ‘No one can tell you. We are all Torontonian, people from all over. You like it? Toronto?’

  ‘I love it,’ I say.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Yes, me too.’ He smiles. ‘I think it is the greatest place in the world.’

  Toronto: the greatest place in the world. But who can say what Toronto is? Everyone can, I suppose, but everyone will say something different. I’ve been trying to summon up a picture or an episode or a perfect moment that defines my Toronto, but the best I can do is a collage of experiences from a mostly charmed life lived in the city, a tourism-brochure highlight reel that’s more autobiography than civics.

  My Toronto is the home on Victor Avenue in Riverdale where my father grew up, where we’d listen to Poppa play his giant Wurlitzer organ after dinner. Or hear stories about the time he was questioned in the middle of the night in his pyjamas by detectives – they mistook him for a member of the murderous Boyd Gang who’d escaped again from the Don Jail at the end of the street. Bake sales at St. Ann’s Catholic Church on Gerrard Street East filled with cousins and aunts and uncles and generations-old family friends who’d pinch your cheeks and sell you back the toys your mother had donated to the rummage table. Schools separated by religion but not race, where my earliest friends were black and Filipino and Korean and Native Canadian; where some of us lived in the low-income projects at Don Mount Court or Regent Park and some of us lived in the working-class single-family houses on De Grassi Street or Riverdale Avenue, but all of us lived our real lives in foot-hockey games in the concrete schoolyard.

  My Toronto means watching from my bedroom window as the 506 streetcar rumbles by, or riding it with all my hockey equipment on Saturday mornings as an eight-year-old for games at Ted Reeve Arena. Or the view from inside a subway car going over the Prince Edward Viaduct, trying to spot two red cars (for luck) on the Don Valley Parkway below before re-entering the tunnel. Or sleeping on the subway in a school uniform in the morning at age fourteen, after we’d moved to Scarborough, and then sleeping on the subway at night on the way home from parties in university.

  My Toronto is in the booze can in the alley behind Yonge Street where a girl showed me her fake tiny tits in the washroom before offering me a line of cocaine. Or a Citizens for Local Democracy rally held in a packed church in 1997 where John Ralston Saul gave a speech opposing municipal amalgamation while the silver-haired Raging Grannies sang protest songs outside. Drinking beer and smoking cigarettes and helping plot an election campaign with Jack Layton at the Only Cafe on the Danforth. Standing on the balcony at the Bamboo on the waterfront, watching newly elected mayor David Miller hoist a broom over his head. The cro
wded, giddy ferry ride to the islands, the manic street drummers outside the Eaton Centre at Yonge and Dundas, the rich baritone of the carny at the Polar Express at the Canadian National Exhibition asking, ‘Do you wanna go faster?’ and then flipping the switch on the siren that signals the end of the long, laughing, lazy days of summer.

  My Toronto is still so much more than that: wandering the deserted streets amid the office towers on King in the early morning, waiting for the subway to start running; being punched in the face by complete strangers on Danforth, on Kingston Road, on College Street, on Peter Street; climbing on the Henry Moore sculptures in front of the AGO. Wandering down Bay Street toward the Sutton Place hotel on the night I was married, with Rebecca still in her wedding dress and carrying her shoes. Watching my oldest two children being born at Mount Sinai Hospital, where I was born, too, and assisting the midwife in delivering my youngest daughter in our bedroom in the Junction.

  In Toronto, I’ve lived in Riverdale, Scarborough, at Danforth and Coxwell, in the Annex, Harbord Village, Bloorcourt Village, the Junction. In Toronto, I’ve worked for small business owners from India, the U.S., Sri Lanka, Korea, China, the Caribbean, England and Russia. In Toronto, I’ve worked at a chemical factory in an industrial park and at a day camp in a low-income housing development; I’ve cut the grass at a military base and along the sides of the highways in North York and Etobicoke; I’ve been a shoe salesman and a candy-counter attendant at the mall; I’ve been a telemarketer and walking courier in the Financial District; I’ve owned a restaurant on Yonge; and I’ve worked as a writer surveying the civic panorama. My Toronto contains multitudes. It contains my whole life.