Ryerson University symposium takes up the challenge of city-regions
Published on Saturday December 08, 2012
http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/art...posium-takes-up-the-challenge-of-city-regions
Laurie Monsebraaten
Social Justice Reporter
It is a happy coincidence that the influential Economist magazine featured Toronto’s government “gridlock†in its Dec. 1 issue, says Anne Golden.
The former Conference Board of Canada president is using the same transportation metaphor for a symposium she is hosting next week on the future of Toronto and other large urban regions.
Golden, now a distinguished visiting scholar at Ryerson University, began planning her invitation-only gathering of respected urban thinkers six months ago, before chaos erupted at Toronto City Hall, prorogation shuttered the provincial legislature and Premier Dalton McGuinty threw in the towel.
But in light of Mayor Rob Ford’s legal woes, a possible provincial spring election and new leadership at Queen’s Park, Golden’s symposium: Governance Gridlock: Solving the Problem for 21st Century City Regions, couldn’t happen at a better time.
“With everything that is going on right now, I think there is a real opportunity for us to put this important issue back on the political agenda,†says Golden, who is co-chairing the event with Ryerson University President Sheldon Levy.
She hopes a report on participants’ suggestions for change will be ready early in the New Year for municipal and provincial politicians to consider.
It has been more than 15 years since Golden’s GTA task force examined governance, tax reform, service delivery and economic development in the Greater Toronto Area.
“The status quo is no longer an option,†Golden said at the time. “The GTA is a single economic entity. We are all in it together. And we need to develop the political capacity to make decisions on this basis if we are to succeed and thrive in the future.â€
But Queen’s Park never acted on her controversial recommendation to abolish the area’s five regional administrations in favour of a single GTA government to co-ordinate economic development, regional transit and planning, highways, waste management, police, water and sewer services from Burlington to Oshawa.
Instead, the Mike Harris government amalgamated Toronto into a megacity of 2.6 million, and downloaded housing and public transit onto municipalities, setting the stage for many of the battles playing out at city hall today.
In the early 2000s, the McGuinty Liberals tried to impose some order on the region. They created the Greater Golden Horseshoe Greenbelt to curb urban sprawl, the Places to Grow Act to direct growth, and Metrolinx to plan regional transit.
The Liberals also introduced the City of Toronto Act that gave Toronto a stronger mayor and more power to raise new revenues through measures such as the vehicle registration tax and the land transfer tax.
But with Ford turning his back on the new taxes, traffic gridlock increasing across the GTA and transit battles between Metrolinx and area municipalities far from over, Golden’s 1996 task force plea for a better way of doing business rings just as true today.
“If anything the situation has worsened, not improved,†Golden says. “The problems we identified in the task force remain.â€
Governance is not just about government structure, she notes. It is also about the way we elect or appoint political leaders and how we raise and control revenue. It also about how we engage business, community and union leaders, the public sector, voluntary organizations and citizen groups.
City-regions are the drivers of economic prosperity in the global economy, Golden notes. They are magnets for innovation, global investment and migration.
To succeed, they need money, governance structures and leadership to effectively guide where people will live, work, play and get around while attracting and keeping jobs, fostering well-being and protecting the environment.
“Everybody agrees cities are the engines of the economy. It’s almost a cliché,†she says. “All the major issues facing Canada from health and education to immigration and infrastructure, all are centred in cities. So what’s the answer?â€
Many of the 26 symposium participants agree city regions need more political power, money and respect from senior governments. But they acknowledge there is little public or political appetite to create new government structures during a recession when budgets everywhere are in deficit.
Instead, more single purpose bodies responsible for specific regional issues — such as Metrolinx for regional transit — may be the way to go.
Economic development, social housing, immigrant settlement, alternative energy, water and sewer services are just some of the services that would benefit from a regional approach, says symposium participant Alan Broadbent, chair of the Maytree Foundation and a catalyst for the C-5 initiative which brought together the mayors of the country’s largest cities.
They would be publicly accountable through boards of directors that are appointed by local councils, he suggests.
But unlike Metrolinx, which relies on Queen’s Park for funding and authority, these bodies need access to taxes or fees to raise their own money and the power to spend it, he says.
In the case of Metrolinx, a municipal gas tax, public parking tax or road toll could be considered. Other bodies could raise money through a regional sales tax or a special levy on the property tax.
Many city-regions such as Vancouver and New York have regional bodies or authorities that Toronto could emulate.
Most of them have no trouble raising the money they need through special taxes or fees tied to a specific outcome that everyone can see, he adds.
Paul Bedford, Toronto’s former chief city planner and a former Metrolinx board member, thinks a single tripartite forum of political, private sector and community leaders from across the region could meet regularly to guide regional issues.
Toronto Councillor Adam Vaughan, the only politician invited to the symposium, wants Queen’s Park to cede more power to Toronto. And in turn, he wants city council to relinquish some authority to local neighbourhoods.
“It’s about getting stuff out of the province that should be at the city level, getting stuff out of city hall that should be at the neighbourhood level, and making sure that cities and neighbourhoods have revenues that match their responsibilities,†he says.
For example, he would scrap the Ontario Municipal Board as the final arbiter for local planning decisions and allow municipalities — not the provincial Liquor Control Board — to license bars and restaurants.
He thinks neighbourhoods should control their green space through parks improvement boards, empowered with the ability to plan and spend public money raised through local development charges. In a similar vein, more public housing communities should be permitted to become co-operatives, so they can have more control over how their homes are maintained and managed, he says.
“That, to me, unlocks the gridlock and unleashes the creativity and allows a thousand little experiments to blossom,†he says. “It would move ideas and projects forward much more quickly than trying to put them through one centralized bureaucracy in a large government setting.â€
Under Vaughan’s “radical decentralization†vision, Toronto would not even need a mayor.
Ryerson politics professor Myer Siemiatycki warns that nothing will change unless the public pushes the politicians to act. So he proposes a team of young people in their 20s become local “good governance champions†to spread the word through public forums.
Former Toronto CAO and symposium participant Shirley Hoy laments the city’s “missed opportunity†to forge alliances with the regions when Mel Lastman and David Miller were mayors.
At the very least, Queen’s Park could encourage today’s local mayors and regional chairs to take a broader regional approach by tying provincial funding to regional initiatives, she says.
Hoy, head of the Toronto District School Board’s real estate arm since 2009, worries that many of the “gurus†gathering this week are no longer active players on the municipal scene.
But Broadbent figures there will be a handful of new ideas, energy and connections sparked at the meeting that will propel the issue forward.
“My guess is that people will listen to the discussion and end up saying: ‘I should be working with that person — we shouldbe working together.’ â€
here's a copy of her report, very applicable to this thread
http://www.openfile.ca/toronto/blog/2012/now-online-1996-greater-toronto-report-anne-golden
