SATURDAY,OCTOBER19,2019 | THEGLOBEANDMAILO OPINION | O3
T
his election’s first and only
English-language debate,
held in early October, was
notable to many in Canada for
what each party leader managed
to steer clear of, despite finding
time to hurl insults or lump the
two front-runners together on cli-
mate change as Mr. Delay and Mr.
Deny.
Cities.
“There’s no party campaigning
on, ‘Here’s a real serious commit-
ment for thefederalgovernment
to play a strong, sustained role in
city building,’ ” says Patricia
Wood, an urban geographer at
York University in Toronto. “Giv-
en how much Toronto and other
large cities really drive the nation-
al economy, as well as their pro-
vincial economies, I think the fed-
eral government should be in-
volved.”
The party leaders “may be talk-
ing about infrastructure,” adds
Alan Broadbent, author ofUrban
Nationand an outspoken advo-
cate for cities to gain powers in
Canada, “but I’m not sure they get
to the heart of some of the impor-
tant aspects of what would con-
stitute real assistance to cities.”
Sheer numbers underline their
point. Eight in 10 of us now live in
an urban area, according to Statis-
tics Canada. The majority of our
economic might is clustered in
our census-metropolitan areas –
a bland term for regions that in-
clude multiple towns, suburbs
and cities but operate as singular
labour, transportation and hous-
ing markets. Think not just To-
ronto, but rather Waterloo to
Whitby. Think not just Calgary
but Airdrie to Okotoks.
These cities and municipalities
now produce more than 70 per
cent of Canada’s GDP and wel-
come the majority of the more
than 280,000 new immigrants to
Canada each year. They will be
where fights against climate
change, affordable housing and
opioids are won. But to survive,
let alone thrive, these same cities
are still forced to beg larger gov-
ernments for money, as well as
navigate their shifting political
currents.
It holds these cities back.
Consider the big kid in the
room, Toronto. In early 2018, for-
mer premier of Ontario Kathleen
Wynne committed $9-billion for
transit projects in the Toronto re-
gion, and more than $11-billion
for high-speed rail on the Toronto
to Windsor corridor – only for the
newly elected provincial Progres-
sive Conservativegovernment,
headed by Premier Doug Ford, to
scrap the high-speed rail plan and
battle with the city’s mayor, John
Tory, over control of the Toronto
Transit Commission. (On
Wednesday, Mr. Ford dropped his
bid to “upload” the TTC’s sub-
way.)
Things weren’t much better be-
fore Mr. Ford. In 2017, Ms. Wynne’s
Liberalgovernment vetoed To-
ronto City Council’s 2016 decision
to toll drivers on the Don Valley
Parkway and the Gardiner Ex-
pressway to raise its own reve-
nues. Back then, an incensed Mr.
Tory was quoted as feeling like a
“little boy in short pants” asking
for money.
What type of pants Mr. Tory felt
he wore when Mr. Ford slashed
Toronto’s council from 47 to 25
representatives, remains an open
question.
Regardless, the fact is Toronto
raised just 32 per cent of its $13.5-
billion operations budget in 2018
through property taxes. The
province and Ottawa made up the
rest.
Cities across the country have
similar funding dilemmas.
Ottawa does provide these ci-
ties money, just through the prov-
inces as gatekeepers. The biggest
source is the twice-yearly gas-tax
transfer it sends to provinces for
municipalities. Since 2014, Onta-
rio has received $3.87-billion
from this transfer, Quebec $2.38-
billion, Alberta $1.08-billion and
BC $1.3-billion. Still more comes
in, project by project – most espe-
cially for transit and housing.
But cities are feeling the strain
of growth and want more. The
Federation of Canadian Munici-
palities (FCM), which represents
2,000 municipalities, has called
for federal parties to commit to
doubling the annual gas-tax
transfer, to make permanent the
10-year, $20-billion transit plan
the Trudeau government
launched in 2015 and for Mr. Tru-
deau’s $20-billion affordable
housing plan to remain in place.
No party platform has commit-
ted to every one of these requests.
Indeed, as the platforms finally
emerged, late in the game, the
FCM has instead expressed con-
cern – specifically with the pro-
posal from Andrew Scheer’s Con-
servative Party to slice $18-billion
from infrastructure spending.
“Proposed measures in this
platform appear to move in the
opposite direction, with fewer
dollars available year-over-year,”
FCM president Bill Karsten said in
a release. “To build roads, expand
transit networks and develop
housing, municipalities need pre-
dictable, long-term funding.”
Meanwhile, the Canadian
Global Cities Council (CGCC), a
group of chambers of commerce
CEOs from eight large cities, is
calling for a dedicated national
urban strategy. It’s not expecting
the election to feature this, how-
ever. “The whole thought of large
cities or metro areas as economic
engines is still new thinking,” says
Jan de Silva, chair of the council.
Experts say cities have long
been sidelined in Canadian elec-
tions. Voting calculations, Cana-
da’s political structure, the war
between regions and jurisdic-
tions over scarce dollars and the
creeping spatial specialization of
our parties goes a long way to ex-
plain why. But given how crucial
cities are to Canada’s economic
health, experts also say citiesneed to matter at the ballot box.
Can they?The first problem cities face dur-
ing elections is that city talk can
generate animosity in a country
with so many regions, Mr. Broad-
bent says.
“If you were to release a well-
articulated program on building
high-speed light rail, for example,
what cities does that matter to?
Probably only nine or 10,” he says.
“If you’re talking subway con-
struction, you’re probably talking
to three cities. It’s not easy to spin
that.”
Another problem is the Consti-
tution. Urban areas are where the
majority of us live in 2019, and
where we depend on water, elec-
tricity, transit, streets and other
services. But urban areas were not
where political power was vested
in 1867, when 80 per cent of us
lived in the sticks. Cities techni-
cally only appear in section 92 of
the Constitution, which specifies
provincialgovernments control
municipal institutions.
Mr. Broadbent says that word-
ing is unclear, but provinces have
exercised complete authority,
nonetheless. “[Provinces] have
dismissed sitting municipal gov-
ernments in order to amalgamate
them into bigger political units;
they have overturned [munici-
pal] taxing regimes; they have
usurped tax revenues.”
Federal parties have increas-
ingly deferred to provinces on ci-
ties, Prof. Wood says. But that
hasn’t always been the case. Dur-
ing the housing crisis that fol-
lowed the Second World War, the
federal government was the main
actor designing and even building
affordable homes in Canadian ci-
ties – a legacy easily spotted in ci-
ties such as Toronto, Edmonton,
Winnipeg and Kitchener-Water-
loo today.
The big shift, Prof. Wood says,
came with austerity-themed
downloading in the 1990s. First
the federalgovernment down-
loaded responsibilities to prov-
inces, then the provinces down-
loaded responsibilities to cities.
The result was that Ottawa
“strongly” shifted away from see-
ing cities as its focus, she says.
Zack Taylor, director of the
Centre for Urban Policy and Local
Governance at the University of
Western Ontario, says a further
decisive shift came earlier, in the
1980s. Back then, he says, each of
Canada’s three main political par-ties had a strong presence in the
three main areas we imply when
we say “cities” – those being in-
ner-city cores, commuter suburbs
and exurban areas. Today, he
says, the parties are increasingly
specialized.
Prof. Taylor says it helps to
think of metropolitan areas of at
least 100,000 people, rather than
1,000 or more – where that Stat-
scan “eight in 10 Canadians”
number comes from. If we do so,
we will find that between one
third and one half of the Cana-
dian population lives in just five
metropolitan areas.
“That’s the action,” he says.
“That’s where all the economic
growth is happening. That’s
where all the jobs are being cre-
ated. That’s where all the immi-
grants that arrive in Canada end
up, virtually all of them. There-
fore, that’s where all the popula-
tion growth is going. That’s why
we need a connection to the in-
frastructure needs of those plac-
es.” Simple, right? Well, not quite.
After the 1980s, the parties got
good at one area and bad or indif-
ferent in others. The Conserva-
tives, for example, became more
rural, the Liberals and NDP more
urban. All of this coincided with
the endless, postwar growth of
commuter suburbs – where our
cities are growing the fastest –
and shrinking rural populations.
“That’s really the swing,” Prof.
Taylor says. “These areas kind of
share some of the interests of
core-urban spaces but also some
of the interests of low-density ur-
ban places.” And it’s the people
who live in these in-between
spaces, he adds, that politicians –
who speak of the need to work for
the middle class – are directly re-
ferring to. “It’s trying to appeal to
the interests of people who live in
a certain kind of urban environ-
ment,” he says.
In short, we’re likely not talk-
ing about cities in the election be-
cause suburbs are the most im-
portant place for political parties
to swing votes. They’re also places
where a carbon tax can flip from
either a positive or an existential
evil – it adds to the cost of filling
up a gas tank. They are places
where transit and other programs
can be either life-savers or framed
as being for “urban elites.”
Parties left of centre have the
urban votes wrapped up – consid-
er the wall of red in the densest
ridings of Toronto or Vancouver
after 2015 – while parties right of
centre have the rural areas wrap-
ped up. The suburbs are swings
and vital to a win.
“Our politics seem to increas-
ingly revolve around a different
kind of spatial distinction be-
tween urbanites and suburban-
ites,” Prof. Taylor says. “It’s being
framed in a way that presents
these people as being different
kinds of people, as being not real
Canadians.”
Still, not all agree that cities
have been sidelined in the 2019
election.
Cities “implicitly matter” in
this election, says Edmonton
Mayor Don Iveson, who chairs the
big-city mayors caucus with FCM.They do because elections are
won and lost in metropolitan ar-
eas, he says.
Mr. Iveson says the country’s
mayors have “moved the needle”
on housing and transit – and this
might be why cities are less dis-
cussed in the 2019 election cam-
paign than one might expect. “Of
course, we’d love more discussion
about cities, but nobody’s saying,
‘We’re going to undo the national
housing strategy or we’re going to
undo the national transit com-
mitments in place,” he says. “It’s
now generally accepted this
country must have a significant
and ongoing commitment to
transit. The debate is over wheth-
er that should be permanent.”If Canada is a country of mega-
regions – of cities, suburbs and ex-
urbs that drive the economy for-
ward – how can the federal gov-
ernment improve our collective
lives? The biggie is transport link-
ages such as big rail projects, Prof.
Wood says. “When it crosses pro-
vincial boundaries (as is the case
for connections between Mon-
treal and Toronto, for example) it
seems to me there’s some logic
for the federal government get-
ting involved,” she says. “That’s
where they could be doing more –
policies that speak to cities more
broadly and better connect
them.”
Prof. Taylor agrees. Given met-
ropolitan areas are unified hous-
ing and labour markets, the best
way to drive down housing prices
or increase the labour pool is to
make moving across these areas
faster and easier. “If people can
travel longer distances with less
inconvenience in shorter
amounts of time to have higher
paid jobs, that’s good for everybo-
dy.”
Ms. de Silva, with the Canadian
Global Cities Council, says the
“good for everybody” point in-
cludes all of Canada, too. Metro-
politan regions are driving Cana-
da’s overall economic growth, she
says. To help them thrive, we
must identify the pain points
holding these places back.
As part of this, the CGCC is now
investigating the country’s large-
st metro region, the 34 municipal-
ities that encompass the massive
Waterloo to Toronto corridor, to
find what’s standing in the way of
growth. Half of Canada’s manu-
facturing happens here, she says.
But we still think of individual
units rather than the whole.
“We’ve underfunded enabling in-
frastructure for the movement of
goods and the movement of peo-
ple” in this region, Ms. de Silva
says. “We’ve got a huge conges-
tion problem.”
It’s holding us back. These is-
sues are complex for elections,
Ms. de Silva adds, but Canada will
hopefully get there. We trail the
United States, Australia and Eu-
rope in recognizing the economic
centrality of cities, but we may
catch up. “Hopefully, for the next
election cycle, this won’t be such a
new, complex subject – it will be
something that we just under-
stand.”GHOSTTOWNS
Eight in 10 Canadians now live in an urban area. But cities have long been sidelined in Canadian elections
TIMQUERENGESSER
OPINIONEdmonton-basedwriterwhois
currentlywritingabookandisan
advocateforlivablecities
Partiesleftofcentre
havetheurbanvotes
wrappedup...while
partiesrightofcentre
havethecountry
wrappedup.The
suburbsareswings
andvitaltoawin.MostofCanada’seconomicmightisclusteredincensus-metropolitanareas.InthecaseofCalgary,above,thatregionextendsfromAirdrietoOkotoks.JEFFMCINTOSH/THECANADIANPRESS