I live in Toronto. Toronto the Good has been pretty good for me. I came here from Alberta in the 1990s, soon after the start of the Ralph Klein fiasco.
I was able to establish myself easily enough in Toronto. I was able to get the kind of medical care I needed to control my serious disabilities. I was left alone to live my life.
The thing about being a vulnerable person in Toronto is that you can get help. The kind of intolerant, judgemental attitude one finds in Alberta and, it seems, in much of rural Ontario, is not tolerated here. Trouble makers like me still get attacked, but attacks seem to fall flat or even rebound to my advantage.
I believe that the tolerant attitude, and willingness to defend others who are being harmed, comes from the early influence of the Quakers and similar religious groups in the settlement period. They formed a big part of the early loyalists. This attitude seems to have been reinforced by generations of immigrants fleeing turmoil and intolerance elsewhere.
The screwheads are present here, as everywhere. They control politics as they always do, but they are not able to totally crush society as in many places.
People are little interested in politics here. They just want public services delivered efficiently and to be left alone. This culture, which seems to be held over from colonial times, includes disdain for partisan activity, and instead, the idea of seeking to influence public policy by “speaking truth to power”.
There is a good side and a bad side to this approach to democratic involvement. Alas, in the age of neoliberalism it does not work well. I believe that this has caused much of what I liked about Toronto when I first came here to go rotten since then.
I was astonished at the inadequacy of the response to the Harris government’s abuses. I was disgusted with the degeneration of public interaction with government that began then and has continued. The usual public busybodies seemed totally unable to process the new reality that government did not have to listen to them.
I soon followed the lead of most Torontonians and largely tuned out local politics. I became a political scientist and studied government, particularly local government, and democratic theory. I now have a pretty good idea of what has gone bad with Toronto the good.
Read on.
Now to explain some reality which most ‘political’ people will not want to know. First of all, Canada is not a democracy and never was. The sovereign democracies on Planet Earth can be counted on one hand.
This model of government in which ‘representatives’ are elected from wards or districts is how an oligarchy, rule by an elite, works. The populace get to vote on which oligarchic faction to align with.
Some talk of real democracy as being about sortition, meaning random selection of decision making bodies, or mass assemblies, or referenda. However, democracy is about results, not process. Any process can be rigged if it is allowed.
In a democracy of result, government is organized to meet the interests of the ordinary people. This requires a process of deciding what those interests are and how to fulfill them. This cannot be done through debates and polls and votes, and such nonsense.
In a real democracy, decisions are made by epistemic processes; in other words, based on evidence and logic. Reality is that no decision will exactly suit everyone. If a democracy is to function, most people must trust the process, and accept that common interest is more important than their personal interest.
As well, in a real democracy, important positions are not filled through elections. Winning a popularity contest qualifies no one to manage a complex administration. Qualified people are appointed to such positions, and are monitored and given guidelines by deliberative bodies.
Things are run like this almost nowhere. Oligarchs and juntas will not tolerate it. This is the biggest reason why conditions are deteriorating over most of the world right now.
Unrest is spreading across the globe. More countries are being run according to the common interest. Like most changes in the world, this development will come a little slow to Canada.
Conditions will continue to deteriorate in Canada. It will be especially bad in Toronto because we have so many problems to start with. The biggest problem is the above mentioned culture of tolerance and ‘reasonableness’, which is out of time and place.
This mindset is beginning to change at an accelerating pace, and more so among the younger generations. People realize that the present political and economic systems never really worked and are now falling apart. This is not mere ‘cynicism and apathy’.
This is people in Toronto doing what reasonable people do when they are under bad government and there is no way to do anything about it for now. That is, they disengage and wait for the elite to destroy itself, and for the conditions for serious change to develop. So, fewer people are voting, and fewer people are running for election.
Those are the facts to be understood.
Torontonians have seemed indifferent to many ridiculous abuses in the past twenty years. A very well worked out transit plan was thrown out in 2010 by a ridiculous, crooked, crack addled buffoon in the mayor’s chair. If the plan had proceeded most of Toronto’s transit problems would have been solved by now.
His brother became premier, and in the same abrupt and unanswerable way, changed the number of seats in the middle of an election.That this could be legal shows the inadequacy of our legal system. Four years later, in the same way, he gave the mayor new and very arbitrary powers.
During this time, most people in Toronto have indicated a willingness to pay more taxes for better services. Yet government heeds the small minority of libertarian loudmouths. It acts like it has an obligation to freeze taxes permanently, which is obviously unsustainable.
Most people are alright with ‘densification’ and with measures like ‘rooming house’ licenses and basement suites, to create more affordable housing. These measures are continually thwarted, often by councilors posturing as ‘progressive.’
Most people are not angry about all this because it has not caused them real harm, so far. They are resigned to it, that politics in Toronto is corrupt elite politics, and always has been. The result has always been poor government.
Different elite factions have their own ideas about how they want the city run. They roughly divide into the ‘car lobby’, the ‘real estate lobby’, and the ‘social agency’ lobby. The city worker’s unions are also powerful.
The social agency lobby is powerful but is no friend of poor people in Toronto. The unions have considerable power but use it only to protect their own member’s interests. The various ‘public advocacy’ groups are fronts for various interests and have only coincidental connections with the public’s interest.
The different factions destructively fight for control of the city. They prevent construction of new infrastructure because it was not what they wanted. They will even tear down half built, or even completed, infrastructure which their rivals had built.
As well, all of the destructive interference from the province into the governance of the city has been about one faction recognizing it was about to lose control. So they go to their cronies in provincial government to reverse the situation. Outsiders are left baffled as to why there is so little real opposition to this jackassery.
The Toronto public knows that there is nothing to be done and the harm can be managed. The other elite factions do nothing to stop these disruptions or prevent future ones, because they are guilty of the same malfeasances. They do not want to do anything that might wake the public up or give them some real power.
That is the situation as it is.
Toronto does not exist separate from the world around it. Some of its problems are unique, but others are the same all over Canada or even the world. But it is coming to a point where things absolutely have to change.
The inability of Torontonians to do anything about their dysfunctional government has nothing to do with the ‘creatures of the province’ nonsense. That is in fact a judicial lie. Those who wrote the Canadian constitution never intended that.
City governments have always been especially threatening to imperialism and oligarchy. Cities are where real wealth is produced, new ideas develop, and revolutions break out. So, cities and their politics must be restricted to the greatest possible degree.
The province gets away with so much in Toronto, which would not be tolerated in most places, because the good citizens of Toronto the Good suffer from an excess of ‘reasonableness’. However, much of this nonsense is starting to really hurt a lot of people. They are starting to realize why.
The province can go too far. We saw in the confrontation with the school unions that the Canadian public is becoming more ready to be unCanadian, and to do things like support a general strike.
The public is beginning to realize that something has to change, and to become receptive to doing what needs to be done. But they need a clear idea of what has to change and how to change it. The public cannot do this spontaneously.
Change will take a really competent leadership, who have a clear idea of what to do, and can communicate it effectively. It will be hard for such a leadership to become effective in the face of all the tools which elites have available to defeat it. A revolutionary leadership will have to be able to defend against media slander, police intimidation, and efforts to infiltrate and disrupt.
Yes, it is about making a revolution. This should not be a particularly radical idea these days. However, leadership will not come from the fossilized Marxist groups, but from people of character and competence, with experience at planning and organization.
The old ‘Storm the Bastille’ model of making a revolution needs to be retired. Recent experience shows that there are better ways to do it, though violence and disruption, or the implied threat of it, is still usually required. A rule of thumb is; if the economy can be shut down for a week, the regime usually caves.
That is how change is made.
To repeat, change will be made by competent people who have a clear idea of what they are trying to do, and can inspire enough people to act. Everything does not have to be torn down and rebuild. More sublime approaches usually work better.
The thing Toronto really needs is a written constitution for Ontario, which establishes local governments as separate entities. This is what those who wrote the country’s constitution were aiming at. Local oligarchic elites had other ideas.
Once the dam breaks and the Greater Toronto Area is able to organize itself in a logical way, that will be the end of Ontario. This is one of the main reasons for the suppression of Toronto government. However, Ontario really does need to be broken up, into at least three provinces or sub provinces.
Obviously, all this will not happen through any electoral or legal process. Existing power structures are not going to let themselves be put out of existence. Change will have to be imposed from outside the existing structures. That is the point of the soft revolution.
Much can be said of how government in the Greater Toronto Area should be structured once we get the elites out of the way. Much is said of how we need ‘The Six’ back; federated structures which allow for the subsidiarity principle, government functions carried out as locally as possible. In fact, we need ‘The Twenty Six’, because many functions, such as transit, can only be effectively managed across the whole metropolitan area.
As for the shape of deliberative bodies, there are many alternatives to ‘representative’ systems which can be largely waterproofed against ‘big money’. The basic building block of any real democracy is the local assembly, in an area small enough that everyone can attend. A useful feature in the ‘western’ context, where elites usually try to saturate public functions with their own agents, is sortition; choosing delegates at random from among a qualified pool.
The last thing we need is a ‘strong mayor’. In fact, the mayor should be a mostly ceremonial position. The way a real democracy works, to repeat, is that the legislative body appoints qualified professional managers to carry out executive functions.
This is what the changes need to be.
These are the real issues facing the ‘body politic’ of Toronto. The ‘politically active’ public does not seem to be aware of or interested in them; apathy of a different kind. I am apathetic to listening to these kinds of people lined up at the wailing wall at city hall to whine about the bully kicking over their apple cart once again.
We have just had a demonstration of how governments of the Ford variety can be made to back off. The ‘bill 28’ attack on education support workers was stopped by the threat of a general strike. This is much different from the Harris years; the union movement has actual leaders.
We have increasing examples from abroad of publics getting a clearer idea of their real needs and learning how to organize to achieve them. Reasonable Torontonians need to be alert to what is happening in the greater world. We are now in the traumatic twenties and being civil and reasonable is not going to get us very far.
Things are going to get worse in Toronto. For things to improve, a sufficient core of the Toronto body politic needs to start getting uncivil and unreasonable. They need to realistically work out what kind of change they want, organize to achieve it, and then bring it about through mass mobilization.
This is not going to happen spontaneously. Effective leadership will be required. If the right kind of leadership does not emerge, things can always get worse.
I would prefer that things not keep getting worse. When conditions deteriorate, the most vulnerable are hurt the worst. I am now fairly secure from economic trauma, but I know what it is to be really vulnerable and I empathize with the vulnerable in these times of trauma.
Toronto is still a good place. I want it to stay that way.