In this excerpt from his new book Some Great Idea: Good Neighbourhoods, Crazy Politics and the Invention of Toronto, Edward Keenan shows the reality behind Toronto's urban/suburban split, and explains the appeal of our national conundrum, Toronto's Mayor Rob Ford.
When David Miller hoisted a broom above his head at the Bamboo in 2003, and when Rob Ford had a plastic lei placed around his neck at the Toronto Congress Centre seven years later, both represented enormous grassroots victories. The analysis of what followed doesn’t change the lesson both illustrate—that the conventional wisdom of political insiders and pundits can be, and regularly is, thwarted by the people of the city.
But their similarity actually leads to the core philosophical difference between the two: Miller’s promise was to enable people to better participate in city government; Ford’s was to make city government a better servant to more people. It may seem like a slight distinction, but it speaks volumes. And you could see it most clearly articulated in the language each politician used. Ford, famously, talked endlessly about ‘taxpayers.’ Miller openly rejected that characterization and preferred to talk about ‘citizens.’
Obviously, most voters are both citizens and taxpayers. (Some of the poor and homeless pay no property taxes, but they all pay sales taxes, at least. And many residents of the city who do pay taxes are not actually Canadian citizens, so they can’t vote.) But the contrast in terms is less revealing for the legal or dictionary definitions than for the way they frame the relationship between government and governed. Under the kind of social contract outlined by the great Western philosophers Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, a citizen enjoys a relationship with government that carries both rights and obligations—there is the implication of participation in elections but also in the smooth functioning and development of society. In ancient Greece, citizenship was highly exclusive but it endowed freedom and privileges while involving active participation in a government assembly. Our concept of citizenship today is far broader—not exclusive to the wealthy or titled—but still involves being endowed with rights by virtue of a relationship with society that also carries certain duties to fellow citizens, both through the state and in private life. We speak of someone volunteering for a charity or helping an old lady across the street as acts of ‘good citizenship.’ The government is made up of citizens, governs only with the consent of the citizens and involves citizens by allowing and sometimes demanding their participation.
The term taxpayers, however, frames the relationship of a person to her government as primarily an economic transaction. One pays taxes to government. What does one get in return? This is a portrayal of the taxpayer as primarily a consumer of government, but even in that it emphasizes a limited part of their consumer relationship. People in this formulation may be voters, they may be users of infrastructure, receivers of grants, visitors to parks, recipients of services. Maybe. But as taxpayers, their important role is in writing cheques. The emphasis on the taxpayer-government relationship focuses on what is taken from citizens rather than on what they receive as a benefit or in what things they are able to participate.
At the Gladstone event during David Miller’s 2003 campaign, he addressed this contrast directly. He said it was important that the city’s residents be thought of as citizens rather than as taxpayers. Miller spoke about the stirrings of a ‘movement’ of which he was a part, saying his goal was that after his first term, he wanted people to look back and say, ‘Holy shit! We’d forgotten what we could do together as citizens.’
Rob Ford didn’t get into any philosophical discussions about his vision of the taxpayer as the most important role in society. But he hammered away at the phrase ‘Respect for Taxpayers’ during his campaign, and relentlessly asserted that their money was being wasted. If one was in doubt about his concept of citizenship as pure consumerism, it was dispelled by his other emphasis, on ‘customer service.’ Those two sides of Ford’s definition of citizenship, as ‘taxpayers’ and ‘customers,’ frames a relationship that’s largely passive, and no different from the relationship you have with a corporation—you give them money, they give you goods and services, and their only guarantee to you is that you get what you pay for, and you’ll pay as little as you can.
My characterization of those two different terms may make it clear which I think is more appropriate. And that might say something about my political opinions, but it also says something about the place I live, my relationship to my neighbours and the position I occupy in society. A concept of constituents that portrays them as active participants in society and government, I’d suggest, speaks to those who are already actively participating in society and who would like to see their efforts bear more fruit; a call for more participatory democracy will resonate most with those who have been actively trying to participate. Look at me: a journalist living and working mostly in the old City of Toronto through the Miller years, paying close attention to policy and voicing my opinions regularly—already a participant. A concept of my role that portrays me as a partner in the work of building the city is flattering to me, and also fits into my egocentric idea of how the city is progressing.
However, those who feel they are isolated from the larger city they live in, who interact with the public sphere mainly when they write their property tax cheque and when they put their garbage out or wait for a bus or get pulled over by the police—or who at least perceive those moments to be the extent of their relationship with government—might think a customer-company analogy is completely appropriate. They might have no reason to believe that people like them will ever be involved in making decisions beyond the ballot box, and they may not even see why they would ever want to. If the neighbourhood you chose to live in largely because it was what you could afford seems to be declining, and if the incomes of the people around you are falling, you might think the city you live in is rigged in favour of others who seem to be getting richer. And if the city services in your area are thin on the ground, parks far away, transit inconvenient and unreliable, you might reasonably think the government is not working for you. If you live in a place like Woburn, where residents say a lack of any sense of ‘community’ or ‘neighbourhood’ is one of its defining characteristics, talk of empowering residents to participate might just seem wacky and out of touch.
And if, despite all this, your taxes keep going up? Then the most attractive thing a politician can promise is probably better services and fewer costs, preferably at the same time. That’s what you would ask of a company you did business with. To borrow a favourite Ford analogy, if you think of the government as a business, there’s a difference in what appeals to people who think of themselves as shareholders in the company, and what appeals to those who think of themselves as customers of the company. We are all both, of course. But a lot of things can influence which side of the transaction you see yourself on most often.
I have a sense of this, because during the 2010 election campaign, by chance, my family moved from Miller Land to Ford Nation. Before the campaign, we lived in an apartment at Dundas and Pacific, in the rapidly gentrifying Junction neighbourhood you always read about in the Style section of the Globe and Mail. This is where you’ll find Crema Coffee Co., an artisanal café that serves one of the best lattes in the city. Across the street, there’s a Starbucks, right next door to a doggy spa. Dundas West and the area around it is the part of the neighbourhood where the Junction Arts Festival is held, the place where all the weekend flâneurs drool over salvaged architectural artifacts at Post and Beam, and where parents wheel their strollers into Vine Avenue Park for singalongs and hot-dog barbecues and buy T-shirts that say ‘My Park Is Di-Vine’ to raise money to paint the wading pool. My own kids go to school down there, on Annette Street, where they have a French immersion program and the students score well above the provincial average on standardized tests. This part of the Junction is where my family eats brunch on the weekend. It’s where we take our one-year-old for playtime. It’s where we buy our organic vegetables. Real estate prices here have risen faster than any other in the city, by 44 per cent in the four years before this book was published.
That part of the Junction is in Ward 13—which has been represented at different times by David Miller, former premier Bob Rae and beloved former mayor David Crombie—and it’s where NDP-backed candidate Sarah Doucette beat right-leaning city council incumbent Bill Saundercook in the 2010 election. In addition to the Junction, Ward 13 includes the famously leafy, livable neighbourhoods of High Park, Bloor West Village, Baby Point and Swansea. In Ward 13, Mayor Rob Ford was crushed at the ballot box, earning less than 35 per cent of the vote.
But all that cultural, retail and progressive political life is on the other side of the tracks. Literally. The Junction we live in now—north of the CN Rail underpass, at Keele and Junction Road—is a five-minute walk and an entire world away. It’s Rob Ford Country.
**
When maps showing the distribution of votes for Ford and Smitherman in the election appeared, they confirmed the political and cultural divide between the old, downtown City of Toronto and the former municipalities of York, North York, East York, Scarborough and Etobicoke. The Junction sits right on that now-defunct border. That division was not some new miracle of Rob Ford’s populist magic—maps showing the votes for David Miller and John Tory in 2003, or Mel Lastman and Barbara Hall in 1997, look similar, if less starkly pronounced, in their vote distributions. But if I want an illustration of the cultural divide, I don’t need to look at a map. I just need to take a walk around my neighbourhood.
From my front lawn, across four lanes of jam-packed, high-speed traffic, I can see a giant warehouse complex where the parking lot is full of tractor trailers and signs advertise vacancies with access to rail. All around, we’ve got big-box stores, just like in a real suburb: Home Depot, Rona, Canadian Tire, Future Shop, Staples and, beyond them, Walmart, Metro and a TD Canada Trust with a drive-through ATM. There are hectares and hectares of parking lots. Coffee? There’s a Country Style with a drive-through. Restaurants? Take your pick: McDonald’s, Harvey’s, Swiss Chalet, Tim Horton’s and a Subway a little farther along.
If you’re thinking about buying or fixing a car, there are more than a dozen new and used car lots within walking distance to the north and west, and as many garages. In fact, we share our back lane with a couple of auto mechanics, in addition to an ironworks and a linen-supply company. There’s a working rubber factory around the corner. A block and a half northeast of us, near one of the best Italian cheese factories in the city on Mulock Avenue (where people line up for fresh, still-warm ricotta on weekends). We thought we might be getting some new condo towers, but city hall turned down the application because it wanted to preserve the industrial nature of the neighbourhood, and local businesses were worried that an influx of new residents would make the area unfriendly to the heaviest of heavy industry. There’s a parkette across the street from the vacant lot where the condos won’t be going, but we don’t take our kids there because it’s empty and dirty.
This part of the Junction is in Ward 11, home to such unsung neighbourhoods as Rockcliffe-Smythe, Mount Dennis and Weston. Sixty per cent of voters in Ward 11 supported Mayor Rob Ford in the 2010 election, and an even higher percentage of us re-elected right-wing councillor Frances Nunziata, who went on to be the council speaker in Ford’s administration.
As a dues-paying member of the so-called downtown Toronto elite who is now resident in Ford Country, I found it particularly interesting to hear my friends raging on about the selfish suburban bigots who elected Ford. There was a feeling that overweight white guys driving expensive SUVs were raining on our Pedestrian Sundays. There seemed, actually, to be some bigotry involved in the caricature of the Ford voter—modelled after the red-faced rage machine himself—that led people to start semi-serious discussions about municipal separatism.
I could go on and on about the anecdotal divisions between Ward 13 (home to High Park and Max’s Fine Foods) and Ward 11 (where, on a single block of Eglinton, there are five ‘traffic-ticket specialists’). But the distinctions that separate us are more than anecdotal. Though we’re neighbours, the progressive wonderland just south of the tracks is whiter, richer and better educated. In Ward 13, the median household income is $61,987, according to the 2006 census, roughly 45 per cent higher than in my new neighbourhood in Ward 11. In Ward 13, only 16.3 per cent of the population are visible minorities, versus 52 per cent in Ward 11. Almost half of Ward 13 residents have a university degree, while only 16.7 of us north of the tracks do.
These are trends that exist city-wide, as I detailed earlier. If you took the election map depicting Ford and Smitherman voters and looked at the demographic data, some pretty stark differences begin to appear— it’s the Hulchanski report played out at the ballot box. The median individual income in Ford Country is just under $35,000, while in Smitherman wards it is over $50,000. Households in wards that went to Ford had an average of 1.2 cars each, while Smitherman’s wards had fewer than one car per household—and correspondingly, statistics show that the former use transit far less often. The majority (53 per cent) of residents in Ford’s wards were visible minorities, while less than 30 per cent of residents in the Smitherman wards were. Voters in the Ford wards were also significantly more likely to have dropped out of high school and less likely to have completed university.
Of course, there are wealthy white people who voted for Ford and poor non-whites who voted for Smitherman. But when you map it, you see something interesting. Rosedale, St. James Town, Cabbagetown and Regent Park—affluent and impoverished neighbourhoods that butt right up against each other in the dense central city—all voted against Ford. Meanwhile, the neighbourhoods that supported Ford, including wealthy ones like the Bridle Path and Royal York, and poor ones such as Malvern and Jane-Finch, are geographically and psychologically isolated from each other—and from the rest of the city. In the dense, transit-heavy neighbourhoods of the downtown core, people voted for progressive candidates. In the sprawling, isolated neighbourhoods of the suburbs, people rich and poor alike chose Ford. Every single polling station in every single priority neighbourhood showed a win for Ford on electionday. Three of the four pilot sites for Tower Renewal voted for Ford. Virtually all of Eglinton Avenue, the pending site of Transit City’s flagship underground LRT line, voted for Ford. To downtowners, at least, these people seemed to have voted against their own interests.
But why? As a resident of Ford Country with connections to others in Scarborough, Don Mills, Etobicoke and North York, I can hazard a guess. Most of the people who would have been served by those initiatives were unaware they existed, or didn’t think they would work. The places they live are geographically isolated from city hall and the seamlessly networked downtown core, and that geography supports an attitude of disengagement. What people up my block and in my parents’ neighbourhood share, among other things, is the sense that city hall is a faraway place populated by people unlike them, and that their neighbourhoods have somehow been left out of the discussion. Almost none of the dozen random people at Eglinton and Keele I spoke to one day in the week after the election knew that the proposed LRT line there would run underground, therefore making it a subway in all but name. They had visions of the slow-moving, over-budget, traffic-snarling St. Clair streetcar line dancing in their heads. Rob Ford and his brother Doug constantly underscored this impression during the campaign and after it, promising that Transit City would be just like St. Clair. Simply put, while Miller had attempted to improve the suburbs through many of his showcase policies, the message had not been sufficiently imparted to—or was not appreciated by—the intended beneficiaries.
If you don’t have the sense that you are a part of a vibrant community that’s getting better and where you and your neighbours are making it better—an impression you might get if you lived near Dufferin Grove Park or Vine Avenue Park south of my house – then what you notice about city politics is what hits you directly: TTC strikes, garbage strikes, new tax notices, snarled traffic, constant construction. And it isn’t like people living in the outer city are unaware of how downtown has been developing and succeeding: those who live in Scarborough or Etobicoke often work downtown, travel into the city for hockey games or live theatre, go to the Eaton Centre to shop or to the bars on Queen West to see live bands. And so even if you live in one of the neighbourhoods in the city where everyone seems to be getting poorer and services don’t seem to be improving all that quickly, you can still see that for the people in the city who can afford to live right in the heart of it all, everything’s getting fancier—new coffee shops and pet salons are serving the shiny new condo towers and the city is installing new bike lanes that make it easier for those living there to get around even as they seem to slow traffic for those who need to commute into the area.
If you are aware of the efforts to make your neighbourhood more like the ones downtown—and you need to be paying close attention to really know about those efforts—you can also see how long that kind of transformation is likely to take. Installing a bike lane on Markham Road is not going to do much to make cycling a viable means of regular transportation out in Woburn. And so maybe there’s some chance that in twenty or thirty years your neighbourhood might be more walkable and vibrant and have real rapid transit, but your taxes are going up today, and are apparently helping to pay for the renaissance of downtown urbanism. When you do start paying attention come election time, things like $12,000 parties just confirm the gut instinct that the money isn’t coming back into your neighbourhood.
It’s an uphill battle explaining how building new roads will increase gridlock (since traffic always rises to meet the supply of roads), while getting people on bikes and, especially, onto streetcars will actually decrease congestion. It isn’t an intuitive idea. What is intuitive is that the city could save money by getting staff to water their own office plants, as Ford repeated often on the campaign trail.
You could call Rob Ford profoundly uninformed, unpolished, hotheaded and simple-minded—and I think he is all of those things—but those qualities seem unimportant next to the fact that he seems to get it and to genuinely care about the people who are not involved in the urban conversation. In his shaddapabout- nuances rhetoric and his rage at seemingly unnecessary waste, they see their own frustrations reflected, their own impatience with the condescension of a so-called elite. And in that, they see a lot to like.
From the book Some Great Idea, © 2013, by Edward Keenan. Published in 2013 by Coach House Books. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.