M
Mike in TO
Guest
Remarks by John Tory, MPP
Leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario
East York Rotary Club Remarks
Thursday, September 28th, 2006
CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY
I am delighted to be here at the East York Rotary Club which does so much to build strong communities and to help people.
I wanted to take the time available today to talk to you about what I think we need to do at the provincial level to help build a strong Toronto. A strong Toronto is vital to a strong Ontario, and the Province has an important role to play in ensuring the vitality of this great city which I am proud to call my home.
While this list of five key items is not exhaustive, I do think that our three orders of government, working together on these important priorities, could have a profound positive impact on the future of this city. I can assure you that any government I lead would have a keen focus on these matters and demonstrate the kind of leadership and partnership which have, quite frankly, been missing.
First, in my view, Toronto itself and the surrounding region urgently require an economic strategy.
We must bring together business, labour, the non profit sector and the academic community to chart a course for this city region.
If we think we can sit back and read clippings about the automotive industry, positive as they may be, or just assume that our crucial financial services industry will continue to carry us through, I believe we are in for a rude awakening.
Foreign acquisitions of Toronto-based companies, and a continuing shift of financial services to larger world financial markets, just to name two trends, mean that letting the good times roll, as Mr. McGuinty suggests, is not really an option.
While there has been some excellent work done by the Toronto City Summit Alliance in areas such as research and collaboration between bench and business, we have not yet even begun to flesh out a strategy which can help us keep the jobs we have and attract new investment to this city and this region.
Second, we need to see a transportation strategy.
I learned a lot when I was running for Mayor. I learned from Mayor Miller and others that a real plan for public transit was less about glitzy one off subway announcements and more about the hard work of improving transit service, especially in more remote and marginalized areas of the city. This means keeping the system in a state of good repair, integrating it to a greater extent with other transportation options and using bus, streetcar and LRT options whenever possible since subways are expensive and have a very long time frame. Extending existing subways will take overcrowding to new levels, another reason why any such extension should be part of a larger plan.
As a candidate for Mayor, I supported the TTC Ridership Strategy and am pleased that significant parts of it have been implemented by Mayor Miller and the City Council. But an even greater effort is required in the coming years and this will require consistent and reliable participation by the Government of Ontario.
As I have said on a number of prior occasions, this requires, in my view, the re-emergence of a transit funding formula, to which all three orders of government commit themselves for at least a five year period, preferably longer. This would then permit a transit plan to be implemented incrementally, year after year, the way just about every other major world city does it.
It’s time for our current way of operating, namely do nothing for ten years and then announce one big project is replaced by a real plan. We are simply not keeping up.
A transportation plan also requires a real regional agency to plan and set priorities. The Greater Toronto Transportation Authority, set up by the current McGuinty Government is a toothless tiger, with no obvious mandate and no source of funding. Months after the legislation was passed, nothing has been done to put anything real in place.
Third, Toronto needs an environmental plan.
This has a number of important elements. First, the waterfront. We simply must get going. The good news is that the money is there from all three levels of government. The bad news is that the people who approved it, Mel Lastman, Mike Harris and Jean Chretien have all long since retired from politics and relatively little has been done. It’s one of those rare instances in which the money is there and the will is not. It’s usually the other way around.
My approach would be one of agreeing on a plan with the City and giving the City more wide ranging responsibility to get on with it. As Premier, I would be looking for a waterfront that was anything but ordinary. We just can’t do more of the same. I would look for a waterfront with totally sustainable, scaled, mixed development, totally self sufficient in dealing with its waste, a world leader in design and energy innovation with substantial access to greenspace and recreational amenities.
This kind of balanced, innovative renewal of the waterfront will create substantial new value and new revenue for the city government and the other governments as well as becoming one of the world’s most desirable places to live, work and play but we have to get on with it, and I am prepared to have the city in the lead, subject to solid accountability.
A second part of an environmental plan is a plan to deal with waste. This plan must be the responsibility of local government but it must also happen as a requirement of the province and with the active assistance of the province.
We must do everything we can to address with urgency the unsatisfactory degree to which many condo and apartment buildings still don’t have proper recycling facilities and in my view, we must stop dithering and fretting and get on with a serious, objective examination of the role energy from waste can and should play in Toronto’s future – the kind of modern, safe technology adopted by sensible cities around the world.
Other kinds of leadership on waste that I would expect from the province range from thoughtful expansion of recycling (as opposed to ad-hoc beer store bottle return schemes) through to increased responsibility for wasteful packaging.
Now let’s talk about the recently announced acquisition of the Green Lane landfill site for a moment.
The city itself did nothing improper in acquiring a landfill which was legitimately for sale and had been fully approved by the McGuinty government, but that purchase still comes nowhere close to a much-needed long term plan which enables Toronto to look after its own waste. In contrast to the current government, I would insist this kind of plan be developed under a Progressive Conservative Government.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I am from Toronto. Born and raised here. We all can appreciate the size and scope of this great city in relation to our neighbours in the balance of the province. Along with that scale difference comes a certain responsibility to our neighbours.
Toronto recently recognized its responsibility as a good neighbour and voluntarily signed an agreement together with the province to reduce garbage going to Michigan and ultimately eliminating reliance on this option by agreement. I believe the City’s responsibility to its neighbours in the London area should be no different.
We should recognize Green Lane for what it is -- a short-term, interim answer. And one that causes great concern for many of the people in the London and St Thomas area, as you could well imagine. I recognize this short-term solution as a legitimate one from the perspective of Toronto residents however I firmly believe that Toronto should and must develop made-in-Toronto solutions which enable it, within a reasonable period of time to sign another good neighbour agreement to reduce and ultimately eliminate by agreement reliance on the Green Lane option.
If the will and the means were there to do it for Michigan, surely we can do it for London and St. Thomas as well, and the Province must be involved for making that happen here, just as it also was for Michigan.
We also need to work with the city on energy initiatives as part of an environment plan. More green roofs, higher energy efficiency standards for new buildings and consistent, positive incentives to conserve, not expensive bureaucrats and ad campaigns which is Mr. McGuinty’s idea of a conservation policy.
And finally, design. This is as much a part of an environmental plan for Toronto as the rest. Far too often, we have been prepared to be satisfied with the ordinary or worse when it comes to design, and while this is principally a local government responsibility, I would be interested in doing what I could as Premier to encourage a much greater focus on outstanding design as a key element to the success and dynamism of Toronto.
The fourth area of focus for a John Tory Progressive Conservative Government would be a real new deal for Toronto. The recently passed City of Toronto Act tinkered with governance and gave the City government new powers to levy taxes on taxpayers who can’t even afford current tax levels.
What it did not do, and what Mr. McGuinty has refused to do, despite his promises, is to address the fiscal imbalance which exists between the Government of Ontario and municipalities such as Toronto.
Mr. McGuinty has talked about this for three years and done next to nothing. His latest contribution was yet another review, this one lasting 18 months, and forcing us to endure the spectacle of the city begging the province for money for another two or three years.
This exercise can be completed faster, it should be completed faster and a government led by me will complete it faster and begin a phased implementation of a new deal early in our term in office.
Finally, last but not least, all governments must work together on a real, comprehensive plan to revitalize all of our challenged and marginalized neighbourhoods. It cannot be a source of pride to any of us that in the past 20 years, the number of neighbourhoods facing serious economic, social and physical challenges within our city has dramatically increased.
I believe such a revitalization plan, which should be agreed to and continuously moved forward by all three governments in the coming years, must address existing housing stock, recreational facilities and a hand up for the people who live in those neighbourhoods.
Solid, agreed to, funded plans for housing stock must extend beyond Regent Park, where work has begun, to include every challenged neighbourhood in the City over a defined period. It must involve a partnership of all three orders of government and the private sector, with details and commitments agreed to now, year by year, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, the same as for transit. A real, funded, long term plan, not the one off measures favoured by Mr. McGuinty.
This revitalization simply must include better recreational facilities in those neighbourhoods. I have visited many of them over the past number of years, as a community activist and then as a political leader, and those who need the most in fact have the least, and there hasn’t been a concentrated effort to make it otherwise.
Mr. McGuinty correctly identified the opening up of schools to the community on a broader basis as one way to provide some greater access to recreational and community facilities. Years later, this past summer, I visited a Scarborough neighbourhood , and while listening to tragic tales of gangs, guns and drugs, I could look across the street at the local school, locked up, the yard closed to kids, a taxpayer financed building sitting empty while kids sat on the curb with nowhere to go. That’s being repeated over and over again.
We will not be able to effectively battle the crime that is such a major concern in our city until we address the matter of police presence in these communities, fix the justice system by ending outrageous sentencing and bail deals and giving kids and families the programs and facilities they need.
The revitalization and renewal plan must include a hand up for the people who live in those neighbourhoods. I have been in those neighbourhoods, one after another, for years now. These are good, hardworking people, often recent immigrants, often single parents.
They are not looking for a handout or a freebie, just a bit of a helping hand. Maybe a homework club for the kids. Perhaps a literacy program or other form of adult education for them. Definitely some reform to the tax laws which often create unfairness and disincentives to work and some recognition of the fact we can’t leave social assistance programs static for years on end when the world is changing around the people who need them.
Finally, that revitalization must include our commitment to address one more crucial priority, namely a much bigger effort to give people in these neighbourhoods real access to opportunity.
The residents of these neighbourhoods will tell you of the frustration they experience even finding out where to go or who to call about different kinds of jobs. We often forget that these people just don’t have the network of friends and contacts others do and that this is especially true for newcomers to Canada.
They will describe instances in which the very fact they live in one of our challenged neighbourhoods carries with it a stigma which sees their job applications languish.
We must do a better job reaching out to these people and to these communities. Let’s proactively take some of the big employers out to these communities to ensure greater access to these opportunities.
I also believe we will have to get beyond our current self-congratulatory mode with respect to diversity and decide if we are going to show some real leadership in ensuring that communities of immigrants and minorities do not become marginalized or isolated. This includes a much more aggressive effort to create a better understanding between and among various groups if we are to be true to our claim that we represent a great experiment in Canadian and global citizenship.
So these are a few of my thoughts as to some of the Toronto priorities I would concern myself with if I had the privilege to serve as Premier.
They come from the heart of someone who has, with his wife, raised his family and made his career here, who has worked hard as a community builder and who would, as Premier, be committed to building a stronger Ontario – a big part of which is a strong Toronto.
Leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario
East York Rotary Club Remarks
Thursday, September 28th, 2006
CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY
I am delighted to be here at the East York Rotary Club which does so much to build strong communities and to help people.
I wanted to take the time available today to talk to you about what I think we need to do at the provincial level to help build a strong Toronto. A strong Toronto is vital to a strong Ontario, and the Province has an important role to play in ensuring the vitality of this great city which I am proud to call my home.
While this list of five key items is not exhaustive, I do think that our three orders of government, working together on these important priorities, could have a profound positive impact on the future of this city. I can assure you that any government I lead would have a keen focus on these matters and demonstrate the kind of leadership and partnership which have, quite frankly, been missing.
First, in my view, Toronto itself and the surrounding region urgently require an economic strategy.
We must bring together business, labour, the non profit sector and the academic community to chart a course for this city region.
If we think we can sit back and read clippings about the automotive industry, positive as they may be, or just assume that our crucial financial services industry will continue to carry us through, I believe we are in for a rude awakening.
Foreign acquisitions of Toronto-based companies, and a continuing shift of financial services to larger world financial markets, just to name two trends, mean that letting the good times roll, as Mr. McGuinty suggests, is not really an option.
While there has been some excellent work done by the Toronto City Summit Alliance in areas such as research and collaboration between bench and business, we have not yet even begun to flesh out a strategy which can help us keep the jobs we have and attract new investment to this city and this region.
Second, we need to see a transportation strategy.
I learned a lot when I was running for Mayor. I learned from Mayor Miller and others that a real plan for public transit was less about glitzy one off subway announcements and more about the hard work of improving transit service, especially in more remote and marginalized areas of the city. This means keeping the system in a state of good repair, integrating it to a greater extent with other transportation options and using bus, streetcar and LRT options whenever possible since subways are expensive and have a very long time frame. Extending existing subways will take overcrowding to new levels, another reason why any such extension should be part of a larger plan.
As a candidate for Mayor, I supported the TTC Ridership Strategy and am pleased that significant parts of it have been implemented by Mayor Miller and the City Council. But an even greater effort is required in the coming years and this will require consistent and reliable participation by the Government of Ontario.
As I have said on a number of prior occasions, this requires, in my view, the re-emergence of a transit funding formula, to which all three orders of government commit themselves for at least a five year period, preferably longer. This would then permit a transit plan to be implemented incrementally, year after year, the way just about every other major world city does it.
It’s time for our current way of operating, namely do nothing for ten years and then announce one big project is replaced by a real plan. We are simply not keeping up.
A transportation plan also requires a real regional agency to plan and set priorities. The Greater Toronto Transportation Authority, set up by the current McGuinty Government is a toothless tiger, with no obvious mandate and no source of funding. Months after the legislation was passed, nothing has been done to put anything real in place.
Third, Toronto needs an environmental plan.
This has a number of important elements. First, the waterfront. We simply must get going. The good news is that the money is there from all three levels of government. The bad news is that the people who approved it, Mel Lastman, Mike Harris and Jean Chretien have all long since retired from politics and relatively little has been done. It’s one of those rare instances in which the money is there and the will is not. It’s usually the other way around.
My approach would be one of agreeing on a plan with the City and giving the City more wide ranging responsibility to get on with it. As Premier, I would be looking for a waterfront that was anything but ordinary. We just can’t do more of the same. I would look for a waterfront with totally sustainable, scaled, mixed development, totally self sufficient in dealing with its waste, a world leader in design and energy innovation with substantial access to greenspace and recreational amenities.
This kind of balanced, innovative renewal of the waterfront will create substantial new value and new revenue for the city government and the other governments as well as becoming one of the world’s most desirable places to live, work and play but we have to get on with it, and I am prepared to have the city in the lead, subject to solid accountability.
A second part of an environmental plan is a plan to deal with waste. This plan must be the responsibility of local government but it must also happen as a requirement of the province and with the active assistance of the province.
We must do everything we can to address with urgency the unsatisfactory degree to which many condo and apartment buildings still don’t have proper recycling facilities and in my view, we must stop dithering and fretting and get on with a serious, objective examination of the role energy from waste can and should play in Toronto’s future – the kind of modern, safe technology adopted by sensible cities around the world.
Other kinds of leadership on waste that I would expect from the province range from thoughtful expansion of recycling (as opposed to ad-hoc beer store bottle return schemes) through to increased responsibility for wasteful packaging.
Now let’s talk about the recently announced acquisition of the Green Lane landfill site for a moment.
The city itself did nothing improper in acquiring a landfill which was legitimately for sale and had been fully approved by the McGuinty government, but that purchase still comes nowhere close to a much-needed long term plan which enables Toronto to look after its own waste. In contrast to the current government, I would insist this kind of plan be developed under a Progressive Conservative Government.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I am from Toronto. Born and raised here. We all can appreciate the size and scope of this great city in relation to our neighbours in the balance of the province. Along with that scale difference comes a certain responsibility to our neighbours.
Toronto recently recognized its responsibility as a good neighbour and voluntarily signed an agreement together with the province to reduce garbage going to Michigan and ultimately eliminating reliance on this option by agreement. I believe the City’s responsibility to its neighbours in the London area should be no different.
We should recognize Green Lane for what it is -- a short-term, interim answer. And one that causes great concern for many of the people in the London and St Thomas area, as you could well imagine. I recognize this short-term solution as a legitimate one from the perspective of Toronto residents however I firmly believe that Toronto should and must develop made-in-Toronto solutions which enable it, within a reasonable period of time to sign another good neighbour agreement to reduce and ultimately eliminate by agreement reliance on the Green Lane option.
If the will and the means were there to do it for Michigan, surely we can do it for London and St. Thomas as well, and the Province must be involved for making that happen here, just as it also was for Michigan.
We also need to work with the city on energy initiatives as part of an environment plan. More green roofs, higher energy efficiency standards for new buildings and consistent, positive incentives to conserve, not expensive bureaucrats and ad campaigns which is Mr. McGuinty’s idea of a conservation policy.
And finally, design. This is as much a part of an environmental plan for Toronto as the rest. Far too often, we have been prepared to be satisfied with the ordinary or worse when it comes to design, and while this is principally a local government responsibility, I would be interested in doing what I could as Premier to encourage a much greater focus on outstanding design as a key element to the success and dynamism of Toronto.
The fourth area of focus for a John Tory Progressive Conservative Government would be a real new deal for Toronto. The recently passed City of Toronto Act tinkered with governance and gave the City government new powers to levy taxes on taxpayers who can’t even afford current tax levels.
What it did not do, and what Mr. McGuinty has refused to do, despite his promises, is to address the fiscal imbalance which exists between the Government of Ontario and municipalities such as Toronto.
Mr. McGuinty has talked about this for three years and done next to nothing. His latest contribution was yet another review, this one lasting 18 months, and forcing us to endure the spectacle of the city begging the province for money for another two or three years.
This exercise can be completed faster, it should be completed faster and a government led by me will complete it faster and begin a phased implementation of a new deal early in our term in office.
Finally, last but not least, all governments must work together on a real, comprehensive plan to revitalize all of our challenged and marginalized neighbourhoods. It cannot be a source of pride to any of us that in the past 20 years, the number of neighbourhoods facing serious economic, social and physical challenges within our city has dramatically increased.
I believe such a revitalization plan, which should be agreed to and continuously moved forward by all three governments in the coming years, must address existing housing stock, recreational facilities and a hand up for the people who live in those neighbourhoods.
Solid, agreed to, funded plans for housing stock must extend beyond Regent Park, where work has begun, to include every challenged neighbourhood in the City over a defined period. It must involve a partnership of all three orders of government and the private sector, with details and commitments agreed to now, year by year, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, the same as for transit. A real, funded, long term plan, not the one off measures favoured by Mr. McGuinty.
This revitalization simply must include better recreational facilities in those neighbourhoods. I have visited many of them over the past number of years, as a community activist and then as a political leader, and those who need the most in fact have the least, and there hasn’t been a concentrated effort to make it otherwise.
Mr. McGuinty correctly identified the opening up of schools to the community on a broader basis as one way to provide some greater access to recreational and community facilities. Years later, this past summer, I visited a Scarborough neighbourhood , and while listening to tragic tales of gangs, guns and drugs, I could look across the street at the local school, locked up, the yard closed to kids, a taxpayer financed building sitting empty while kids sat on the curb with nowhere to go. That’s being repeated over and over again.
We will not be able to effectively battle the crime that is such a major concern in our city until we address the matter of police presence in these communities, fix the justice system by ending outrageous sentencing and bail deals and giving kids and families the programs and facilities they need.
The revitalization and renewal plan must include a hand up for the people who live in those neighbourhoods. I have been in those neighbourhoods, one after another, for years now. These are good, hardworking people, often recent immigrants, often single parents.
They are not looking for a handout or a freebie, just a bit of a helping hand. Maybe a homework club for the kids. Perhaps a literacy program or other form of adult education for them. Definitely some reform to the tax laws which often create unfairness and disincentives to work and some recognition of the fact we can’t leave social assistance programs static for years on end when the world is changing around the people who need them.
Finally, that revitalization must include our commitment to address one more crucial priority, namely a much bigger effort to give people in these neighbourhoods real access to opportunity.
The residents of these neighbourhoods will tell you of the frustration they experience even finding out where to go or who to call about different kinds of jobs. We often forget that these people just don’t have the network of friends and contacts others do and that this is especially true for newcomers to Canada.
They will describe instances in which the very fact they live in one of our challenged neighbourhoods carries with it a stigma which sees their job applications languish.
We must do a better job reaching out to these people and to these communities. Let’s proactively take some of the big employers out to these communities to ensure greater access to these opportunities.
I also believe we will have to get beyond our current self-congratulatory mode with respect to diversity and decide if we are going to show some real leadership in ensuring that communities of immigrants and minorities do not become marginalized or isolated. This includes a much more aggressive effort to create a better understanding between and among various groups if we are to be true to our claim that we represent a great experiment in Canadian and global citizenship.
So these are a few of my thoughts as to some of the Toronto priorities I would concern myself with if I had the privilege to serve as Premier.
They come from the heart of someone who has, with his wife, raised his family and made his career here, who has worked hard as a community builder and who would, as Premier, be committed to building a stronger Ontario – a big part of which is a strong Toronto.