Maytree Conversations

Alan Broadbent, Maytree’s Chair, recently presented at the Vancouver Urban Forum. Video and a text summary of his presentation are available below.

“Cities have been left with constitutional arrangements, with insufficient powers, with little fiscal resilience, and with weak governance structures… They rely on the kindness of strangers. But very often these strangers, which very often are the other two levels of government, the provinces and the federal government, have different agendas and they have different priorities and they have different pressures. And this really leaves cities in the state that they have no real control over their destinies… The new deal for cities has to not be about handouts, but about taking some control of our destiny and some responsibility for it… If not, Canada will continue to pay a high price for having governmental arrangements that are so comprehensively out of step with our future challenges.”

Watch the video and read the notes below for some of Alan’s ideas, solutions and what we can learn from other jurisdictions.

(Summary notes by Jennifer Giesbrecht & Michael Wallberg)

“Every time I’ve met him, my life has changed,” said host Sam Sullivan of the next speaker, Alan Broadbent. Founder of the Maytree Foundation and Caledon Institute of Social Policy, and author of the book “Urban Nation,” this longtime advocate for poverty and immigration challenged the VUF audience to re-conceptualize the modern Canadian city.

He began by reminding everyone that one hundred and forty-five years ago, Canada was 80 percent rural. Now it’s 80 percent urban. Unlike the old days, Canada’s metropolitan areas are now responsible for the wellbeing of sizeable and diverse demographic groups — a situation that no longer suits traditional government arrangements.

According to Broadbent, the strongest evidence that the current system is extremely out of date is the gross overrepresentation of rural areas in both the federal and provincial legislatures. With representation of certain rural areas reaching an alarming ratio of 50-1, Broadbent lamented that urban issues are frequently brushed aside in current political debates, even though they require some of the most urgent attention.

Broadbent also stressed that, due to the current constitutional arrangements, cities are much too over-reliant on property taxes, a relatively inflexible revenue source that leaves them prone to economic distortions.

Another imbalance Broadbent pointed out is that Canadian cities today carry great burdens in the areas of health care, education and immigration yet enjoy none of the associated decision-making power. Broadbent stressed that, to properly support the urban population, these arrangements must change.

Although Broadbent acknowledged that new powers would also come with new and difficult obligations such as increased municipal taxation, he also described a number of success stories in Europe and the U.S. where urban communities provided overwhelming support for municipal projects. While these stories were quite inspiring, however, Broadbent still warned that if Canada does not upgrade its constitutional arrangements, these may be the very cities that leave us in their dust.

Related links:

• Urban Nation: Why We Need to Give Power Back to the Cities to Make Canada Strong
• Promoting practical policies for a stronger Canada – insights from Alan Broadbent and Sherri Torjman
• Webinar recording: Urban Nation with Alan Broadbent
• City for Tomorrow

On October 28th, Alan Broadbent led a discussion about the place of cities in Canada. Alan’s presentation focused on the major themes in his book: Urban Nation: Why we need to give power back to the cities to make Canada strong.

The book lays out an argument centred on the vision that we must revitalize our commitment to our urban centres, giving them more control over money and decisions. Why? City-level government is the body citizens encounter most regularly and the one that most influences their lives. Cities generate a disproportionate amount of the country’s wealth and are home to the vast majority of Canada’s populace, yet they are hamstrung by a lack of financial and governing clout with which to exercise any real control of their destinies. The result is crumbling cities and disaffected residents who quickly realize municipal government – or any government for that matter – cannot or will not listen to them.

Alan makes a clear case for creating cities as a powerful order of government, with greater autonomy to meet the needs of their population. In order to do that, cities need an equal seat alongside their federal and provincial counterparts at the governing table.

In addition to this long-term vision, he makes a number of recommendations to the federal government. These include supports in the area of housing, transportation and immigration.

(runs 52:24)

Find out more about Urban Nation: Why We Need to Give Power Back to the Cities to Make Canada Strong.

This morning, Alan Broadbent presented on the Cities Centre breakfast panel: On the Outside Looking In? The Many Mysteries of Governance in the City of Toronto.

Alan spoke about three key issues currently facing the City of Toronto:

1. City Council Size vs. Structure: is Council too big, or is the problem a lack of organization and discipline?
2. Who Votes: should non-citizen residents of the city be permitted to vote in municipal elections?
3. Money: in terms of revenue, should large cities be treated like mature orders of government?

Listen to a summary of Alan’s speech:

(Run-time: 5:39)

Download the mp3 (right-click to save to your computer).

Alan is the author of Urban Nation: Why We Need to Give Power Back to the Cities to Make Canada Strong.

Bill Murdoch, Progressive Conservative MPP for Bruce-Grey-Owen-Sound, thinks Toronto should be made a separate province in order to break the city’s hold on the Ontario legislative agenda.

This brings to mind a comment former Toronto mayor Mel Lastman made a decade ago while attending a meeting of U.S. mayors in Miami. Looking at the relatively ample assistance U.S. cities got from the federal and state governments, he said maybe Toronto should separate from Canada in order to get a better deal.

People at the time dismissed it as part of Mel’s craziness, and people will likely say the same thing about Murdoch’s musing.

But maybe it isn’t so crazy.

In my book Urban Nation (2008), I wrote that Canada’s cities were the orphans of Confederation, creatures of the provinces locked in constitutional arrangements that are almost a century and a half out of date. Our large urban regions are now the economic, social, and cultural engines of the country. They compete with other large urban regions around the world to create prosperity and well-being.

In Canada, these regions create the wealth that gets shared with the rest of the country through our redistribution and transfer arrangements. It is in our cities that the capital pools are assembled to take the oil, gas, and minerals out of the ground, where the factories and laboratories are built, and where much of our modern industries of information and design are based.

But our cities are not in control of their own destiny. Like Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire, they are very much reliant on the kindness of strangers. They have few residual powers and limited revenue tools, being overly reliant on property taxes and barred from levying income or sales taxes, the big revenue generators. They are closely controlled by provincial governments and generally ignored by Ottawa. Their role in Confederation is to send money and keep quiet.

And they are under-represented in our federal and provincial parliaments. At the federal level, the average rural riding has 75,000 residents, the average urban riding 120,000. Rural topics tend to get more floor time in Parliament – much more talk about hoof and mouth disease than HIV-Aids, about grain rail rates than urban transit.

The big cities might benefit from being cut free. Toronto might enjoy having the powers of a province. It could certainly use the revenue that comes from income and sales taxes. That money could result in better transit, more low income and supportive housing, better immigrant integration services, a renewed lakefront, and a myriad of other benefits.

In fact, it might be so much better that the neighbouring municipalities might want in on the deal. Bill Murdoch thinks just the City of Toronto should go, the so-called 416, but the Toronto region, now called the Greater Golden Horseshoe, shares a common profile of urbanization and has a strong fabric of dynamic threads. The entire area might decide to leave Ontario together.

Of course, being Canadian, the newly autonomous province would want to continue supporting the less wealthy parts of Canada. It might not want to continue exporting all of the estimated $20 billion that currently leaves the region for other parts of the country, but it would certainly be prepared to contribute a fair chunk of it.

Bill Murdoch’s comments reflect a view that is common in Canada. Very few people feel our constitutional arrangements are working for them and people in their area. Too much of government seems remote, too many policies and programs ill-tailored, too many politicians unaware.

New provinces are an unlikely solution, given our unhappy history with constitutional change. But empowering local governments to do more, equipping them with revenue tools, and looking for local solutions to local problems might make more people feel like their governments understand and are working for them.

Originally published in The Mark