By Alan Broadbent

The great challenge for governments in these hard economic times is reducing spending without doing harm. National, provincial and municipal governments are all considering how to economize, and are looking at cuts to programs and services.

Those who think it will be easy point to reports of auditors general as popularized in the commercial press, and believe that there are great inefficiencies to correct. They imagine pots of money being spilled daily, and scads of unworthy recipients of government supports and services who can otherwise cope without public assistance.

Promises of fiscal rectitude just around the corner have been made from time to time in recent decades, and have almost never proven out. It turns out that our governments are not cesspools of lavish spending and profligacy. Much of the federal expenditure goes to programs like the Child Tax Benefit, supports for seniors and the disabled, and others who cannot participate successfully in the labour market. Provincial expenditures go for health care and education in large part, two of the fundamental pillars of economic competitiveness and well being. Municipal expenditures go to clean water, sewage and waste management, roads and transit, and other necessary hard services.

However, there is a frontier of smart public expenditure that can produce bang for the buck. It would be tempting to call it a New Frontier, but it is in fact an old idea to which government has been oddly resistant.

It is the idea of spending on prevention rather than the cure. Preventing something from happening rather than paying to remediate its negative effects is almost always a lot cheaper. Like the old Fram oil filter ad used to say, “You can pay me now, or you can pay me later,” with “later” being the more expensive alternative of major engine work.

The late Fraser Mustard told us decades ago that paying systemic attention to a child’s development in the early years would pay immense dividends later in their ability to grow into productive and well adjusted people. “Participaction,” the federal government fitness campaign from the 1970’s, promoted fitness and healthy living. Supportive housing advocates have for years told us that giving disabled people stable housing increases their functionality enormously, reducing their dependence on the medical system, welfare, and other supports. Public transit is known to boost civic engagement, labour market attachment, and pollution reduction. And numerous other early interventions have shown they can prevent people from expensive engagements with the health, criminal justice, and welfare systems.

Yet we remain publicly addicted to old ways, and have governments wanting to spend on prisons rather than housing, roads rather than rail, hospitals rather than parks and recreation. And we pull back funding for kids’ breakfast programs at schools, or leave them sparsely funded. There are some points of light, like the Ontario government’s commitment to early childhood education.

What if governments really wanted to reduce public expenditures, and decided to focus on preventing expensive late stage interventions? What could they do right now?

• The Caledon Institute has recently raised the idea of a Jobseeker Loan, a new temporary income measure to fill the gap between Employment Insurance and welfare, which would prevent unemployed Canadians from having their assets stripped and from falling into poverty.
• In New Zealand, work funded by The Tindall Foundation is developing a social housing bond to support low income housing in the rebuilding of earthquake devastated Christchurch. The bond would combine a government guarantee of principal with private capital, underwritten by the real estate value, to fill the low end of the housing market which the market does not serve. Stable housing helps prevent people from slipping below the poverty line.
• The Toronto District School Board conducts Faith Walks and Community Walks for teachers to explore the dimensions of their school’s community. Teachers go on organized walks to discover the community, and go into the faith institutions to learn about different faiths, all of which can increase their awareness of and sensitivity to their students. This helps prevent isolation with all its attendant later costs.
• Governments can follow the recommendations of The Workers’ Action Centre to hire a relative handful of workplace inspectors to end employer abuse of contingent workers, making sure the workers are paid what is due to them and not terminated unreasonably. Lost wages from abuse result in many people falling into poverty and relying on welfare and other assistance programs. Complaints filed amount to over $40 million per year, but the real abuse is very much more because most victims don’t file complaints.

These are examples of experiments or ideas governments could adopt to avoid downstream problems of poverty, isolation, and misunderstanding, which usually lead to more costly interventions.

Creating an orientation to prevention requires new architecture of government, never an easy task. But rather than opting for a general squeeze everywhere to reduce expenditure, which can harm good things and marginally restrain bad things, redesigning government to focus on avoiding expensive downstream or late-stage interventions would be a smart approach.

And there are no times like hard times to wring out a mandate for change.

We recently returned from a trip to Germany where we visited four German cities to share some of Toronto’s best ideas in immigrant integration, and to bring back some new ideas from Stuttgart, Hamburg, Berlin and Cologne.

While Canada and Germany are very different countries, cities in both countries exercise a powerful attraction for immigrants who are moving across borders, time zones, and regions to large urban centers. In Toronto, close to half of our population are immigrants, in German cities such as Stuttgart that number stands at 40%. In Toronto, we are fond of saying: if immigrants succeed, then so does Toronto. We’ve seen that is true for German cities too.

When integration is done well, it fuels economic growth, spurs innovation and prosperity and leads to socially cohesive societies. When it is done poorly or ignored, it results in exclusion, poverty and segregation with lasting effects.

We are fortunate. The City of Toronto is seen around the world as a model for immigrant integration.

And we’ve got plenty of practical examples of how this is true:

• In our public libraries you borrow books in other languages and learn English;
• In our schools, you can drop off your kids and then get settlement advice;
• In our local colleges and universities, it is very apparent who is going to be the next generation of engineers, doctors, scientists and teachers; and
• We see more and more inter-ethnic marriages – up by 33% since 2001. With diversity, it seems, romance is in the air. The parents may or may not approve, but the young kids don’t seem to care.

You know this already, but it bears a reminder: Toronto’s defining feature is its diversity. It is why people come here; it is why other countries want us to tell them about our experiences. We must remember that to the over 50% of Torontonians who weren’t born here, Toronto offers a relationship built on two words: hopes and dreams.

But it’s not all romance. Dark clouds have formed over us. Inequality is growing in Canada. In Toronto, those at the bottom are more likely to be minorities, many of them recent immigrants. While the recent recession took a toll on all of us, it had a particular deep impact on recent immigrants, with their unemployment rates being twice that of others. The narrative of doctors driving cabs and engineers delivering pizzas is not just local mythology, it is quite real. We have too many in the immigrant community working in precarious jobs in the service sector, part-time, or seasonal. They often hold down more than one job.

Add to this the lack of affordable housing and you have a city which succeeds only in driving people out to the suburbs, where there is little or no public transportation. Their disconnect with our city becomes more and more real. Their settlement, hindered further.

You get a hint of a perfect storm in the form and shape of high ethnic concentrations in certain parts of our city. We’ve always had our “Little Italy” and “Greek Town.” But something feels different today; and, not only in the scale and size of newer immigrant-dominated settlements. They’re isolated in our cities. There’s a hold the “old country”, including older, even antiquated, values have on people’s hearts and minds. It enables them to live and work in Toronto but exist emotionally in another place altogether. This isn’t the nation-building we have in mind.

In this context, we must give new legs to the hopes and dreams of those who come to Toronto. We need to look for new instruments for new times. We must create the city that better welcomes our newcomers. We must build the relationships in our city that allow us all to achieve our hopes and dreams.

Thankfully, we don’t have to look far for inspiration.

One of the most powerful instruments for integration and cohesion is also one of the most overlooked: sports. When kids play together, when their parents stand side by side with other parents and cheer them on the side lines, you create social glue. When I first came to Canada, my daughter was a member of a gymnastics club and parents spent our weekends driving the girls to smallish towns like Lindsay and Paris. As my daughter became more adept with ribbons and jumps, I learned some of the written and unwritten rules of engagement through other parents. That was the most practical settlement experience I had – and no one paid for it. The relationships I made were real, and had a true impact on my integration. I think we have a greater chance of building a nation in hockey rinks and on cricket fields instead of in lonely ESL classrooms.

It’s time for Toronto institutions to actively move from passively paying lip service to diversity, to real inclusion. What if every Toronto institution, voluntary agency, civil society organization set out to ensure that its board of governors was as diverse as its customer base? Not merely from a sense of social justice, or equity, but from a place of responsiveness to a new public and a new customer base. Think of our hospitals, our museums, libraries, the shelters, and the food banks. Think of the people who sit around these board rooms making decisions for the public good. Most often, they will replace themselves with others they know, others who think like them, who read the same books and went to the same kind of schools.

Think about this as an investment strategy. Your smarter money managers always advise you to do this. In this case, diversify not to protect you from the shocks of the stock market, but to protect you against irrelevance, outdatedness and a lack of competitiveness.

In case you need help, just ask us. We have a list of 1,500 candidates, ready, willing, able and trained.

Toronto has been incredibly successful in Canada’s multicultural experiment. We can’t forget what makes us beautiful – hopes and dreams. We have to foster the conditions that keep us open, responsive, growing, and connected (not closed, divided, disconnected, and fractured). We need to find deliberate strategies to connect us so we don’t end up with permanent solitudes. Yes, we should and must get the instruments and attention from senior levels of government. But the glue that I am talking about, the glue between people that really makes a difference, is in our own hands, on the sports fields, and in the boardrooms.

So my hope for 2012 is for all of us to get a tad sticky and to put our fingers in the glue.

For more information on Maytree’s visit to four cities in Germany, visit Good Ideas from Toronto: An Exchange of Immigrant Integration Practices.

By Alan Broadbent

The Occupy Wall Street movement has puzzled many people. The lack of organization, elaborated message, or visible leaders has left some people asking for more, and the presence of young people with no clear political or social agenda in the tent parks has left others wondering if it is just a dropped-out caravan.

The simple message of the 99% facing off against the 1%, the vast majority against the very rich who have corralled the bulk of the wealth created in the last quarter century, seems pretty clear, but is portrayed as not enough of an analysis.

But the data doesn’t lie. The gap between the richest and the poorest has been growing, as has the gap between the richest and the rest. And in the developed world the middle class has been disappearing.

Maytree’s belief has always been that inequality breeds instability. Along with mass migration and environmental degradation, inequality within and between nations creates the breeding ground for insurrection and crime on one hand, and poor health, low productivity, and social torpor on the other.

Canada has the good fortune of having active think tanks who have been working on these issues. The Caledon Institute of Social Policy over its twenty-year history has created innovative policy like the Child Tax Benefit to close the income gap, and its proposed new architecture is a practical approach to adult income supports (Towards a New Architecture for Canada’s Adult Benefits, Ken Battle, Michael Mendelson and Sherri Torjman, June 2006).

The Mowat Centre at the University of Toronto’s School of Social Policy and Governance has just produced a study of Employment Insurance. The working group was co-chaired by Maytree president Ratna Omidvar and former Saskatchewan premier Roy Romanow, and the project was led by Mowat Centre director, Matthew Mendelsohn. The report illustrates the inequality of treatment Canadians receive across the country in their access to EI benefits, and makes a series of strong recommendations to increase fairness and make the program truly workable.

The C.D. Howe Institute has also done work recently on EI reform, advocating too for the abolition of regional eligibility criteria.

Despite this good policy research and increased public awareness, Canadian governments seem less concerned in recent years about growing income inequality. Both business and government mantras focus on driving down costs and seeking austerity, with much of the brunt being born by employees who find wages and salaries stagnating or retreating.

Government policy, and the focus of many social agents, has been focused on income redistribution, conceptually moving money from big pockets to small ones, which in reality has moved money from medium sized pockets to small ones. Less attention has been paid to the initial distribution of incomes, to making sure that people are paid living wages at the lower end of the scale, and not paid egregiously at the upper end.

The debate has taken place with a sense that little other than fairness or merit is at stake, depending on your point of view.

But the stakes might be higher than we think, and the Occupy movement may be the harbinger of more serious discontent. Some have linked Occupy with the Arab Spring and the violent overthrow of kleptocratic tyrants, and they have been branded as dramatics or hysterics.

We remain persuaded that inequality breeds instability. And instability can have unpredictable outcomes. Paying closer attention to some of the equality remedies arising from Caledon, Mowat and others seems like a good risk remediation strategy.

By Alan Broadbent

Much of the work in Canada is done in a broad sector variously called The Community Sector, The Third Sector, The NGO (Non Government Organization) Sector, or The Charitable Sector. These descriptions define it as non government and non business. The Sector itself is broad, ranging from small volunteer organizations, through entities with one or two staff, to large institutes with many staff and very large budgets.

What they all seem to share, with few exceptions, is scarce funding and stretched management. While society seems to tolerate very high salaries in the corporate world, based on the presumption that businesses are creating wealth and value, it begrudges high salaries in the community sector because it falsely does not perceive either wealth or value creation. And whenever economic hard times are upon us, the budget cutting knives slice first at community organizations and their employees.

The enduring result is that community organizations are funded as austerely as possible, and their management teams are thin and stretched. Each senior manager is called upon to wear many hats: chief executive, manager of human resources, chief financial officer, head fundraiser, technology guru, program manager and dishwasher all in one person, all in one day, every day. Everyone who has held a senior management job in the community sector has experienced this, and few of them complain about it.

What it means, then, is that they have to be awfully good to be able to do so many things at a high level. But where does a mid-career person facing promotion go to learn so many things in a time-effective way?

This is the question Maytree sought to answer eight years ago with the Five Good Ideas lunch-and-learn program. What we sought to do was distil essential good practice across a broad range of management topics so that managers could pick out the highest leverage ideas to improve their own performance. We invited experts on key topics like finance, human resources, strategy, technology, government relations, and governance to deliver five good ideas that would enhance performance. We were delighted that so many excellent people responded to our invitation, and even more delighted that there was such a strong response and attendance from people in the community sector.

Maytree is launching Five Good Ideas, the book, published by Coach House Press. It is a collection of the lunch-and-learn presentations, and is a quick and easy reference for managers. Whether you are trying to figure out how to manage your board, structure your communications, deal with a union contract, or raise funds, Five Good Ideas can help you begin thinking about it more effectively. It can be as close as the top right hand drawer of your desk.

It is our hope that Five Good Ideas will be a real help to community sector managers, and in fact to all managers whether they be in government or business, because the elements of good management are common to all. Our observation and experience is that managers in the community sector bring a high level of talent, commitment, and endurance to their work, and we believe Five Good Ideas will make them even better, and will provide a helpful companion whenever needed.

Right in the top right hand desk drawer. Five Good Ideas.

>> Learn more about the Five Good Ideas book.

By Alan Broadbent

In all the recent chatter about “foreign workers” and unfair advantages to immigrants, the policy history and rationale for targeted approaches for targeted groups has gone largely unnoticed.

It’s not as if this is new medicine. In the early 1900s, under the leadership of Prime Minister Wilfred Laurier and his Immigration Minister, Clifford Sifton, Canada sought out immigrants to settle the Prairies with a mix of incentives including land grants.

In this vein, almost all federal and provincial governments have at some point used special approaches with special incentives to support special outcomes for various groups, such as young people, women, farmers, laid off workers or aboriginals. The same is true when government targets specific industries such as forestry, energy or the automotive sector. This is after all a fundamental way for governments to deliver public policy.

What is also forgotten in the chatter is one simple fact: if immigrants prosper, so does Ontario. We benefit from education that we have not paid for, we benefit from talent that is truly global in a rapidly globalizing economy. We benefit from connections to new markets, and we are in better position to produce new products for new customers. It is no accident that Toronto has been selected by the Aga Khan to host his world famous permanent museum for Islamic Art. It is no accident that foreign students flock to Ontario, and it is no accident that we are gaining in tourism from Brazil, China and India.

The proposed tax credit is but one expression of reasonable efforts to employ immigrants at the level that they can contribute best to the economy. What is unfortunate in the ensuing debate and discussion is that a good policy idea has been distorted by politics in an election campaign.

Ontario has a choice. We can treat immigration as a cost or a benefit. If we treat it like a cost, it becomes a problem to be managed, and we look to put constraints around it and limit its effect. But if we view immigration and immigrants as assets, we will think and behave like investors, wondering how best to leverage them for maximum benefit.

Many recent immigrants who arrive as permanent residents have difficulty finding their first job in Canada. Despite being highly skilled and educated, employers often ask them for Canadian work experience either because they are unfamiliar with non-Canadian education and professional credentials, or because of unconscious prejudices they may hold. The tax credit is one way to help employers mitigate a risk they may otherwise not take.

What’s more, it’s a proven idea. Financial incentives are offered – in their case a wage subsidy – to employers in Quebec who hire immigrants or visible minorities for their first job in Canada. In 2008-09, more than 1,008 people were hired, and, of these, 80% were still employed three months after the subsidy has ended. And in case you are wondering whether the policy was used by large companies that could afford to take a risk on a staff person without the incentive, 64% of participating businesses had only 1-49 employees.

A tax credit does not, as it has been characterized by the Globe and Mail, pit unemployed people against one another. Rather it recognizes, as good public policy does, that different instruments are required for different demographics.

The tax credit is a good idea, which should be embraced by the other parties, and implemented by the next government of Ontario.

By Alan Broadbent

Canada’s protection doesn’t come cheap, even for those who have been deemed to be worthy of our protection.

Refugees applying for permanent residence from within Canada must pay a processing fee of $550 per adult and $150 per child within 180 days of receiving a decision from the Immigration and Refugee Board. Individuals who cannot afford the fee cannot be removed from the country, yet they cannot become permanent residents either, delaying their access to Canadian citizenship.

Last month, the government proposed a regulatory amendment that would remove the 180-day limit. This would certainly be a welcome reprieve for refugees who need more time to save for the fee.

But it doesn’t deal with the real issue, that the fee is simply unaffordable. A family of four must find the resources to pay $1,400 which is more than a month’s salary at minimum wage.

The lack of access to permanent residence keeps refugees from integrating fully into our communities, resulting in personal costs to them, and costs to the general public in the form of increased reliance on Canadian social services. For example, the fees:

• Delay integration into the workforce. Protected persons who cannot afford the fee can renew their work permits and their temporary SIN cards. However, it is often difficult to find employment due to their perceived insecure status in Canada. Even when refugees are able to find work, employers who see that a person has a SIN card valid for one year (beginning with the number 9) and a temporary work permit are dissuaded from investing in such an employee.
• Delay access to post-secondary education. Young protected persons are sometimes erroneously treated by universities as if they were international students because both have temporary SINs. They may be sent statements intended for international students, requesting fees that are considerably higher than domestic rates. We at Maytree, through our Refugee Scholarship Program, have seen first hand how information sent in error can be confusing to applicants. The fear is those without guidance and access to the right information could become dissuaded from pursuing post-secondary education.
• Delay family reunification. Special provisions allow refugees to bring their families with them to Canada. To take advantage of these provisions, the protected person must be able to pay the fees for the entire family at once. The family separation that may result from the inability to pay the fees translates into stress-induced health problems, delayed settlement, and increased chances of estrangement once families are reunited.
• Delay nation-building. Becoming a permanent resident is an important step on the journey to becoming a Canadian citizen. Delaying access to permanent residence is contrary to the objectives of building Canada’s society.

Eliminating the processing fee would not be complicated or very expensive. It would entail a straightforward regulatory amendment and would reduce federal revenues by about five million dollars. (More information.) While these lost revenues would be modest for a department as large as Citizenship and Immigration Canada, removing the fees would make a huge difference in the lives of many would-be Canadians.

Let’s not stop at half-measures. Let’s eliminate the fees altogether for those who can least afford them: Canada’s inland refugees.

By Alan Broadbent

What should Canada’s population be? Are we the right size at 34.5 million? Or should we be larger or smaller? And if so, how much larger or smaller?

Population can rise or fall. The basic determinant is how many children are born, the so-called birth rate or fertility rate. For a society like Canada to stay at a steady state, women need to give birth to 2.1 babies on average. If that average is higher, the population grows; if it is smaller, it shrinks. Canada’s is just over 1.5, so our population is decreasing, based on fertility.

But other numbers influence population too: the number of immigrants who arrive, and the number of people who emigrate from Canada to someplace else; and the number of people who die. It matters what the age profile of the population is, whether there are more young people than old, whether there are sufficient numbers of people of working age to keep the economy going. Knowing the age profile of the population helps governments plan how many schools or hospitals are needed, businesses to plan what kinds of products will be in demand, and the community sector to plan what kinds of services will be needed. More daycare or elder care, more sportscars or family sedans, more kindergartens or geriatric facilities.

But Canada has no public population target that has come from a well considered process. We set immigration targets each year, the most generous per capita in the world, but to what end? Some people in the environment movement suggest that our population is too big because of the enormity of our carbon footprint. Some people in the commercial sector say we should be bigger to create bigger domestic markets for goods and services. But in the absence of a process of determining what size we want our population to be, we are just twiddling the dials, augmenting natural birth rate with a little more or less immigration.

Once, a century ago, we had a population policy. Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier looked at the vast unoccupied prairie and feared that the Americans would settle and claim it. So he decided that the west must be populated and set in motion a plan to do it. He assigned Clifford Sifton in his cabinet to establish permanent settlement. He did so by attracting cold weather farmers, firstly from the United States. They were preferred because they could bring with them cattle and equipment. Then they targeted northern Europe, and it was said you couldn’t go down any country road without seeing a Canada recruiting poster on a fence post or barn door.

The result was that in about seven years prior to World War One they increased Canada’s population by over 50%! Deliberately, smartly, and in a way that fulfilled a national interest (safeguarding the prairies for Canada) and contributed to the economy (by creating the economic powerhouse that prairie grain farms became). To achieve the latter, they did everything they could to help the immigrants succeed: there were land grants and cheap land, loans for equipment and livestock, rail lines built to get crops to market, new grain storage facilities, and communities built with schools, hospitals and commerce. It was a fundamental building block of 20th century Canada.

If we had a visionary government today, the equivalent would be to take Canada’s population to 50 million by 2020, and to 75 million by 2030. It would have to be done by increasing immigration dramatically, by bringing in the best and the brightest from around the world, and helping them succeed. Increasing fertility rates is an unlikely strategy in a prosperous country, which typically have low birth rates.

An increased population would have benefits for Canada. A larger domestic market would make us less reliant on volatile export markets, where politics can stop our softwood lumber or potatoes at the border. It would give our manufacturers longer product runs, and let them produce a broader range of products. It would let Canadian entrepreneurs grow larger companies, avoiding the current ceiling where they have grown to Canadian scale and they sell to a foreign buyer rather than expand internationally. It would allow more Canadian cities to grow to scale, creating advantages in finance, infrastructure, and social development. At the same time, it would allow Toronto, and perhaps one or two other cities, to continue to climb the ranks of important global cities. Much of the wellbeing of nations now depends on the ability of their great city regions to compete for talent and innovation with other city regions, and Canada needs to up its game.

If dramatic growth became Canada’s population policy, much would have to change. As a country we would have to emulate Laurier and Sifton, and do everything we could to make immigrants succeed as quickly as possible. Nobody wins if we don’t. Employers would have to become good at hiring from unaccustomed sources, particularly given that they would benefit so much from growing markets. Governments would have to increase and improve hard infrastructure like transit systems, roads, bridges and sewers, and soft infrastructure like schools and hospitals. They would have to change their mindset to think of millions of new transit users like a business would, new customers and new revenue. Universities, colleges and hospitals would have to develop more and better bridging programs to help newcomers succeed, not leave them to figure out their way through the system. Cities would have to plan how to attract and absorb more residents, not in distant isolated suburbs but in accessible communities with all the amenities of Canadian life. In many cases we have excellent platforms to build on for more people, and in many others we need to do more and do better.

We would have to pay attention to environmental issues by dramatically reducing the average carbon footprint of Canadians. We would have to continue to rely on our courts and justice system to protect and renew our societal values, to keep testing community standards many times each day across the country.

There is a population clock on the Statistics Canada website that will tell you what our current population projection is. It keeps getting bigger as you watch it. But there is no suggestion of where it should be going, how long it should take to get there, and why that is a good idea. That would require Canada to have a population policy.

Toronto has recently been reaping the benefits of its diversity. The Bollywood awards bring not only sizzle to our city, but also sold-out hotels and venues. TNT, the Chinese supermarket, now belongs to food giant Loblaws as part of its deliberate strategy to expand into a new customer base. The choice of Toronto as the home for the Aga Khan Museum and Ismaili Centre is also no accident but a strategic choice to locate a world class institution in a truly global city.

In other areas however, change is coming at a snail’s pace. There remains a curious diversity disconnect at the leadership levels in the GTA. Consider that only 4.2% of corporate senior leaders are visible minorities in the city region in spite of the well documented case for the financial returns on diversity.

Yet, it cannot be about the money alone.

While we live in one of the most diverse city regions in the world, visible minorities in Toronto are three times more likely to live in poverty than other groups, and between 1980 and 2000 the poverty rate among visible minority families rose by 361%.

There are many complex reasons and many complex solutions to this problem. One of them is diversity in leadership. Leaders are a powerful symbol for who belongs and who does not, particularly for young people. When they see someone who looks like them occupying a position of influence, they are more likely to aspire to it and to imagine themselves in that role.

Diverse perspectives in leadership can bring relevance to our city’s voluntary agencies. Take the example of a York region food bank that was having difficulty reaching out to their growing South Asian population. The addition of board members from this community helped the food bank realize that they didn’t have a marketing problem, but rather they needed to provide more culturally appropriate food.

At The Redwood, a safe haven for women and children fleeing domestic violence, diversity has become a deeply imbedded principle. Board members now have built the trust to face the challenges of diversity and equity with real openness and collaboration. Today, The Redwood’s board members are not just representative of their client communities, they are agents of change.

In the last twenty years, the city region’s demographics have changed rapidly. In 1991, 26% of the Toronto CMA’s population were visible minorities. Twenty years later this figure stands at 49.5%. It would be natural to expect a change in leadership at a faster rate. But this is not the case.

To some, this may seem natural. Just wait we’re told, this tide will shift. Progress will come. It’s “natural” that it will take time.

Maytree is impatient. We want to collapse these “natural” timelines and turn the diversity deficit into a diversity dividend.

We also know that we simply cannot aspire to change without taking action. Diversity in leadership won’t happen by accident. We need to be deliberate and systematic. We need to develop and deploy strategies for making change. Who you know matters. Deliberately sharing networks expands opportunities in a key way. Training and mentoring programs make core leadership skills accessible to the best and the brightest.

But perhaps it is also time to turn the old adage, “it’s not what you know but who,” on its head. Perhaps it is time to develop new approaches to recognizing, seeing and believing in the knowledge, talent, and innovation of individuals when it is in front of your eyes.

Because it’s not just important to fuel the region’s prosperity, it’s also the right thing to do.

One of the first lessons we learn in life is to play by the rules. At home, at school, on the playground, or in the neighbourhood, it is the rules that make the world go round, we are told. If it weren’t for the rules, we’d descend into chaos and confusion.

But what about stupid rules? What do we do when we’re faced with rules that not only don’t seem to make sense, but seem to run counter to our best interests? And what do we do when our best interests aren’t just personal to us, but to those who depend on us to deliver services or goods that make their lives better?

This is a dilemma that is increasingly facing people working in the community sector, as the cold hands of auditors general, regulators, and public sector funders tighten their grip on the activities in the sector. Those cold hands are abetted by hysterical and sloppy coverage in the commercial press.

The result is the imposition of rules and reporting processes comprehensively out of step with the actual risk of waste in the sector.

Starting in recent decades with dubious federal government grants for golf courses and fountains, then the Sponsorship Scandal, federal rules were tightened on the grantees, the vast majority of which were nowhere near the tainted transactions. In Ontario, as a response to the press-fuelled “scandal” at e-Health, tight “accountability” protocols were brought in which put precise limits on what could be spent for meals ($11.25 for lunch, all in), and what constituted a sufficient distance from the office for a chargeable meal (24 km.). And for those who thought they might save some money by buying groceries and preparing meals or snacks, they now had to get “prior approval” and a “written rationale” for the grocery bill to qualify. The rules were comprehensive and prescriptive.

It only got worse with the hunt for the “gravy train” in the Toronto mayoralty election. The hunt is still on. Then when the press piled on an oddly emotional commentary and report by an auditor of Toronto Community Housing, using words and phrases like “lavish” and “out of control”, everyone in the sector began to flinch.

I heard a story recently of an organization which had identified a training course for a valued employee which would help elevate them to the next level, certainly one of the best human resource tools, but the course was offered in Las Vegas. How would that look on page one of the newspaper? The agency sought advice and was told to find a similar course closer to home. They did, but it cost almost three times as much. The advice was to take it, because the optics were better.

Feedback is the key driver of intelligent systems. The problem with stupid rules is that they ignore feedback. Rules that are constructed to eliminate the need for intelligence, judgment, or human management lead to those “Las Vegas” type situations. They invite people to suspend their better instincts and “follow the rules”, even when they know the rules are making them do stupid things.

And such rule regimes tend to last well beyond any salutary remedial effect they were intended to have in the first place.

Probably the worst thing they do is cause people to flinch. And to doubt their own good judgement.

The community sector is notoriously underfunded and therefore thinly managed. Most organizations’ management teams are under-staffed, overworked, and underpaid. They make up a lot of ground through effort, judgement, and experience. Now they are losing some of that ground through flinching and filling out forms.

Governments need to recognize the unreasonable burdens they put on the sector. There is no question that the community sector can do its job better, and that it makes some decisions it wishes it could make again. In that regard they are like the business and government sectors, and maybe even like the press. But the way to make them better is not by imposing rules and reporting requirements which provide bureaucratic cover for government officials but don’t help the hard-stressed community sector serve its clients better or accomplish its work more effectively.

Government can help by making sure there aren’t stupid rules in place.

When is $500 not $500?

When it is a tax credit introduced in a federal Budget.

Most tax credits, including the ones just announced in the 2011 Budget, are designed as “non-refundable credits.” This design means that recipients of these tax benefits do not receive any direct cash payment. Rather, they obtain their benefit in the form of an income tax reduction when they file their taxes.

So Canadians should not rush to the mailbox looking for dollars. Their cheque is not in the mail.

Ottawa sells its growing collection of non-refundable credits in less than a straight-forward and transparent manner. The proposed Children’s Arts Tax Credit, for example, is cryptically described in the Budget as “a 15-per-cent non-refundable credit on an amount of $500.”

The answer, to those who can do arithmetic in their head, is $75.

A $75 tax reduction is a lot less than a $500 “amount.” Seventy-five dollars does not go very far when expenses for arts and culture programs can run in the hundreds and even thousands of dollars.

It can get worse when parents fill out their income tax form to claim the Children’s Arts Tax Credit. It will be one of a list of two dozen-odd other “amounts” that have to be summarized and then multiplied by 15 percent, producing a total amount far larger than its constituent credits. Figuring out the true value of the Children’s Arts Tax Credit from the tax form will be difficult for many applicants.

The same visibility problem holds for other current and proposed refundable tax credits. The proposed Family Caregiver Tax Credit and Volunteer Firefighter’s Tax Credit were introduced as “amounts” of $2,000 and $3,000, translating into actual benefits in the form of tax savings of $300 and $450, respectively. These measures are modelled on the existing Children’s Fitness Tax Credit and Home Buyer’s Tax Credit, whose true value is $75 (not $500) and $750 (not $5,000), respectively.

A more serious shortcoming to these tax benefits stems from their non-refundable design. If you pay no income tax, you don’t qualify for the credit because you have no tax to reduce. If you pay a small amount of income tax, you receive a tax savings much less than the maximum. So poor Canadians, who pay little or no income tax, are generally excluded from non-refundable tax credits. Most people eligible for the maximum tax savings from non-refundable tax credits likely do not need them: They would undertake the activity that the government wants to encourage whether they received a modest tax cut or not. Or at least they need a tax break less than other households that pay minimal or no tax because their incomes are so low in the first place. Ironically, these are the people who most need the assistance.

Take, for example, the case of the Children’s Arts Tax Credit. The intent of this measure is good. It recognizes the value of arts and culture in contributing to the well-being of children, their self-esteem and positive development, and the expression of their identity.

Yet it is low-income children – excluded from the Children’s Arts Tax Credit – who would benefit most from arts programs because they typically do not have access to various personal enrichment activities. These families simply cannot afford what might be considered a “frill” when they struggle daily with the choice of paying the rent or feeding the kids.

Unless the Children’s Arts Tax Credit is refundable, it is of little or no value to children who most require financial assistance to take advantage of the benefits of various arts-related programs. If the government is serious about tackling the significant social need it has identified, then it should use an instrument that is more appropriate to the Canadians who truly could benefit from this type of initiative.

Our preference is to use scarce public resources to provide opportunities for all children, the poor in particular – not simply for those whose families already can afford to buy access to these programs in the first place.

It is clear that several weaknesses of current tax credits need to be resolved. Transparency regarding their actual value – their true amount – would be a good place to start.

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Look west to the narrow curve of Lake Ontario where the people of Hamilton are showing us a future worth aspiring to.

It isn’t a land of milk and honey, a fantasy land of castles and limousines. Steeltown hasn’t gone soft.

It is better than that. The people of Hamilton have decided to pull together to lift the poorest out of poverty, to heal the whole community by mending its wounds.

A dramatic signpost that something new was happening in Hamilton occurred on October 29, 2005 when the Hamilton Spectator’s front page was blank, bearing just this small message:

The stories have been removed from this page to remind us that nearly 100,000 children, women and men live in poverty in Hamilton, people whose stories rarely make the front page. We’re going to change that.

As Spec publisher Dana Robbins said, “The Spectator did not lapse into advocacy, we leapt into it.”

But The Spec was not crusading alone. They were building on groundwork done by the Hamilton Community Foundation, under the leadership of Carolyn Milne, and by the City government itself. Attracted to those efforts were business leaders like Mark Chamberlain. The Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction was created. Poverty became a civic concern.

Like most cities, Hamilton does not have the big levers of change to improve the lives of poor people. Those lie with provincial governments and the federal government. But unlike most cities, Hamilton has decided that poverty is a major civic concern, and they are pressing forward to make poverty in their community visible, and to force everyone in Hamilton to confront and own it so that action can be taken.

At the front of the charge, with the megaphone, remains The Spec. They have a continuing series they call Code Red which highlights stories of people struggling in poverty. The series name was prompted by Carolyn Milne, a former nurse, who said that when you needed a patient to pay attention, you gave them information they could not walk away from. That is what The Spec is doing with Code Red, giving Hamiltonians information about poverty in their community that they cannot walk away from.

Every community in Canada has poverty. Most have a growing gap between rich and poor. Few of them have Hamilton’s ability to create a sustained civic effort to map and combat poverty. Even fewer of them have a newspaper with the maturity and conviction to tackle the tough issues rather than the glib headlines.

We’d do well to look to the west end of Lake Ontario.

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Canadians love numbers.

Data makes front page news. Record high temperatures! Record low unemployment! Business leaders tell us how the resource industry was the best ever, while manufacturing numbers indicate troubles ahead.

For those of us who work on immigration issues, it is no different. We wait patiently for the Citizenship and Immigration’s Facts and Figures document to tell us exactly how many permanent residents arrived the previous year, and how many temporary workers. And lo and behold, we find out that Canada exceeded its targets in almost every category. But wait, in the next breath, the government announces plans to reduce the overall numbers of family members and skilled workers. You’d better believe there will be a reaction.

But there are some numbers we don’t talk much about. And because we don’t talk about them, we don’t quite know how to handle them.

Consider this: Between 2000 and 2006 approximately 11% of immigrants to Canada moved from one province to another within Canada. While people aren’t all moving in one direction, once the dust settled, it was clear that Alberta is the clear winner, adding an additional 20,000 immigrants to their population. Most are skilled workers, originally destined for Ontario, who heeded the call for new opportunities in Alberta as these dried up in Ontario.

The Provincial Nominee Programs (PNPs), which are intended to bring (and hopefully keep) people to regions are less successful at keeping immigrants in their intended province than other programs. About 16% were on the move between 2000 and 2006, and of these 31% ended up in Ontario, 31% in B.C., and 23% in Alberta. What this tells us, of course, is that while we can try to engineer the movement of people, for the most part we will fail. Family connections and job opportunities create a strong pull factor that is too hard to reengineer. Though other Canadians are less likely to relocate, those that do are moving in the same direction.

As the numbers of provincial nominees increase (between 2006 and 2010 the numbers have more than doubled), relocation will be increasingly important to measure. Cuts to settlement funds to Ontario have been justified in part because of decreasing numbers of immigrants to this province. But we need to get a better handle on the numbers of people who are relocating to the province right now. As Ontario’s economy recovers, it is likely that the province will become a stronger magnet for secondary migration for immigrants from across the country.

PNPs are selected to fill labour market niches in other provinces, but no doubt once they arrive in Ontario they will contribute to the province’s prosperity as do the hundred thousand who arrive from abroad every year. Still, they may need extra help. A recent evaluation of the Federal Skilled Worker Program found that PNPs have lower levels of education and training, and have lower incomes than skilled workers.

We must conclude that it is shortsighted to make significant decisions on public investments in settlement with only a partial view of the facts. Our governments need to figure out exactly who comes, who stays and who moves so that it can make the best decisions in the public interest.

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In December, while most of us were thinking of the upcoming Holiday Season, many settlement workers in the city were getting pink slips. This was a result of cutbacks to immigrant services implemented by the federal government.

The government argued that the cuts are justified because fewer immigrants have been arriving to the region. This is true. Last year, the region welcomed close to 83,000 newcomers, approximately 30,000 fewer than in 2005.

But there are other numbers to consider. In Ontario, for example, newcomers were more than twice as likely as the Canadian-born to be unemployed. Unemployment numbers released in November 2009 indicated that nearly 20% of recent immigrants in Toronto were jobless. While the unemployment rate had dropped both nationally and locally for Canadian-born residents, the opposite was true for people who had been in the country for less than five years. Previous periods of recession have shown us that immigrants who arrive in recessionary periods can experience long-term economic difficulties, if they aren’t given the right supports early on.

More needs to be done now to make sure that these recent immigrants don’t fall through the cracks and fail to integrate. Saving money today simply defers the costs that we will have to pay tomorrow, costs that will only multiply with time.

In Toronto, we’ve long seen immigration as an asset and prided ourselves as a city which welcomes the world. However, a true welcome means that immigrants must find the right job, for which they have training and experience; settle smoothly into good neighbourhoods; and participate in the regular life of the community. Toronto’s indicators of successful settlement have been slipping in the last few years, with immigrants taking longer and longer to catch up.

This seems to be then a particularly bad time to cutback on an investment that will reap us benefits in the future. For one, we face increasing competition. Traditional source countries, including China and India, with their own growing middle class, will soon have increased opportunities for skilled individuals. Other countries, such as Germany, have joined the competition for skilled immigrants. For another, successful immigrants in Toronto (and elsewhere) have access to global networks, new markets and customers to help us grow our economy, if not today, then certainly tomorrow.

The speed and pace of change have put extraordinary pressure on the city, its settlement sector and other stakeholders to change, to find new services for different times, to speed things up. Cutting funding at this time is in our opinion remarkably short-sighted.

With this in mind there is another number that we should consider: 1,013,186. According to Citizenship and Immigration Canada’s Facts and Figures this is the number of newcomers who arrived to the Toronto region over the last ten years. About 46% of the region’s population is foreign-born and many still need services.

It may be good news that immigrants are no longer just choosing Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto as their first destination in Canada. But it seems too early to cut funding to the traditional landing points without making sure that recent immigrants have access to services they still need. We know from past experience, that Toronto (along with Vancouver and Montreal) exercises a powerful pull on the imagination of immigrants, if not as the first destination, then as the second. And this is particularly true when the first job dries up.

We have to decide what welcome immigrants will find. If they don’t find a welcome, they may well choose to vote with their feet and move somewhere else. It will be our loss.

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As 2010 winds down, our thoughts at Maytree are turning to what we might hope to see in 2011. The holiday season offers us all some time to reflect on the past, and to begin to think of the things that will make our country and communities better. And thus we each begin to shape our agenda for a new year.

Here are some things we see arising from 2010 that we hope to see blossom and flower.

1. The Caledon Institute has developed A Basic Income Plan for Canadians with Severe Disabilities.

Despite billions of dollars spent on a complex assortment of social benefits, many working age Canadians with disabilities end up desperately poor and trapped on welfare, the dead-end default program of last resort. While there has been some progress for persons with disabilities since the landmark Obstacles report was released 30 years ago, one area in which there has been almost no improvement at all has been that of income security. This tragic state of affairs is neither tolerable nor necessary.

The foundation of this plan is a proposed new federal Basic Income program that would replace provincial/territorial social assistance for most working age persons with severe disabilities. The Basic Income program would be a close model of the long-established and well-regarded Guaranteed Income Supplement for low-income seniors. The second reform is to convert the existing non-refundable Disability Tax Credit into a refundable Disability Tax Credit that would extend compensation for the extra costs of disability to the lowest-income people with disabilities. The refundable credit would pay $2,000 through the income tax system to every person eligible for the Disability Tax Credit. These federal income security initiatives would free up funding for urgently needed disability supports and services, permitting the provinces and territories to set up a coherent, comprehensive system of supports and services for those with disabilities.

This federal and provincial/territorial policy partnership could bring Canada into a new age of enlightened programs for those with severe disabilities, with a modest but liveable assured minimum income and a system of supports for daily living that could be among the best in the world. All this is achievable within the boundaries of our current political and administrative institutions and at a cost which is realistic in light of other fiscal choices.

2. The flowering across Canada of proven mentoring and human resource management programs for successfully integrating immigrants into the labour market.

The Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council (TRIEC) created a model which works, fuelled by The Mentoring Partnership which links immigrants with Canadians in the same line of work to counsel on job culture and open up domestic networks; and hireimmigrants.ca, which works with corporate human resource professionals to become better at hiring immigrants, a definite advantage in attracting top talent.

Now, Assisting Local Leaders with Immigrant Employment Strategies (ALLIES) is helping cities across Canada find which programs will work best for them as they strive to attract and integrate newcomers to their communities. In recent years we have turned a corner in Canada with more and more cities realizing that immigration is key to their future prosperity and well-being. The flowers are beginning to bloom offshore too, as the OMEGA (Opportunities for Migrant Employment in Greater Auckland) program in New Zealand is being heralded as a success for the whole nation.

3. Ontario’s Social Assistance Review.

Premier Dalton McGuinty, a serious thinker and actor on matters of policy, announced the Review near the end of the year, to be co-chaired by Frances Lankin, previously head of United Way Toronto, and Munir Sheikh, the former Chief Statistician of Canada. The Commission has been given 18 months to do its work and will have the support of a well-staffed secretariat.

The last comprehensive review of social assistance in Ontario was undertaken more than 20 years ago by George Thompson, resulting in the Transitions report. When Transitions was written it was limited by the knowledge and technology available at the time.

Today we have over a decade of experience using the tax system to deliver non-stigmatizing tax credits as an alternative to the rule-ridden welfare system. Information technology has exploded exponentially opening new opportunities for innovation. Most importantly, we have come to a better understanding of the limitations and possibilities of social assistance, and have learned to look at the income security system as a whole instead of focussing narrowly on raising or lowering welfare rates. Restructuring the whole system was one of the key visions promoted by the report of the Social Assistance Review Advisory Council, which set the ground for the Social Assistance Review Commission.

Ontario’s Social Assistance Review could represent a watershed in the development of social policy in all of Canada for the next decades by presenting economically and politically feasible strategies for a transformation of our hide-bound and inadequate welfare program into a modern income security system.

4. Food has become a prominent and important issue.

Access to healthy food for people at all income levels, the environmental impact of growing and transporting it, the chemical and industrial infrastructure underpinning the industry, food quality, food security, the viability of farming, and related issues of obesity, diabetes, cancers, and even food as an instrument of social control have become matters of important research and commentary. The Metcalf and McConnell foundations, The Stop and other food security agencies, and many other universities, governments, corporations and NGO’s have identified moving to a healthier and more sustainable food regime as critical to community well being and the national interest. Much of the work being done is informative and inspiring, giving hope of a better future.

5. Public parks as essential “rooms in our house”.

Across the country, people are recognizing that public parks matter, as in Toronto where the new organization Toronto Park People (TPP) is dedicated to improving Toronto’s parks. Toronto’s parks are languishing and the biggest obstacle to improvement is a culture of “no” in the parks department that limits community engagement and crushes creativity. TPP advocates for better parks for all citizens and communities by facilitating citizen engagement in their parks and building a network of local community park groups. A key focus for the group in 2011 will be a citywide Parks Summit in April that will bring together park advocates from across the city for the first time ever. TPP will also partner with the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects to sponsor a forum in March entitled “Whose Park Is It?” The group will also unveil a new website that will provide resources for local community park groups and provide opportunities for groups to connect and learn from each other.

With thanks for contributions to Michael Mendelson of The Caledon Institute and Dave Harvey of Toronto Park People.

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Congratulations to Rob Ford on becoming Toronto’s 64th mayor.

As he and the other candidates will know from ten long months of campaigning, Toronto is a complicated and vibrant city, with many actors and many dramas.

There are a number of highly engaged organizations and people working at making Toronto prosperous and equitable. Organizations like Maytree and The Metcalf Foundation, the United Way and the Toronto Community Foundation, and the Greater Toronto CivicAction Alliance each work to carry the city onwards and upwards. Corporations are deeply engaged in the community with financial support, like TD Bank’s support of the Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance and environmental initiatives or RBC’s engagement in facilitating immigrants integrating into the labour market by its support of the Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council. Corporations also help provide a critical analytical lens on the region, through such things as the work of TD Research. In addition to the work of such organizations, there are active citizens in every part of the city working to make their neighbourhoods ever better places to live and raise families.

All of this activity is aided immensely by a friendly and supportive Mayor’s office and city council. Over its three decades, Maytree’s work has flourished when it has been aligned with the interests of a mayor or councillor. And we have always been happy to be helpful to our political leaders when their work and intentions have aligned with ours. Our view is that nobody wins when our political leaders fail, so we should offer support to them as they work to build prosperity and equity, the fundamental bases of city building.

Of course the city does not belong to its political leaders alone. It belongs to all of us, and we all can play a role in city building. While an alignment with city hall is an advantage, it is not a necessary condition. In a dynamic city, many actors will continue to play many roles on many stages. This is the fact of life in cities, which must always be in motion and always striving, lest they fall back.

Mayor-elect Ford will know that there are many hands extended to help him succeed in the vital job of city building.

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The last couple of decades in Canada have seen a lively and rich discourse on immigration policy, process, and practice. Who gets in, how they are selected, how they are settled in the short term and integrated in the long term have all been discussed, written about, researched, and litigated.

And the participants in the debate are a broad range of Canadians, including politicians, academics, advocacy groups from various perspectives, lawyers speaking for their clients, public servants charged with policy and program development and implementation, and citizens.

One of the great things about this discourse is the variety of voices engaged in it. People who have been in Canada for 100 years or 100 days, who have come from 100 miles down the road or half way round the world have felt free to speak up and let their voices be heard. And one of the great glories of Canada is that this can be so.

So it is surprising that a new organization, the Centre for Immigration Policy Reform, has hit the ground complaining about the lack of discourse, or at least what they suggest is a lack of honest discourse. They disparage those who have been participating as part of an “immigration lobby”, suggesting a greedy self-interest to defy the national interest. They promise to engage in an “honest” discussion, to put the real facts on the table, to set Canada on the right course of an immigration policy that will finally serve the country properly.

The people behind this organization are elderly gentlemen with old associations with old networks. One gets the impression that the members of this organization resent the breadth and vibrancy of the immigration discourse, feeling that such policy matters should be left to the professionals.

“Don’t try this at home” for fear of endangering the nation, they seem to be saying. They complain that anyone speaking against immigration policy is branded as anti-immigrant and racist, and speak dramatically about such issues being a “third rail” that only they will have the courage to touch. But, while they puff up their paper courage and try to reframe their anti-immigration musings, it is hard to see this as anything more than the last gasp of the old white elites, enraged at the encroachment on their turf by the democratic hordes.

They are too late. The horses left the barn a long time ago.

In the first place, international migration is like a mighty river that will not be stemmed or turned. Second, Canada has benefited too well for too long from migrants landing on our shores, even the very occasional boat load that arrives to great uproar. Third, too many good people have been earnestly engaged in the discourse for too long to be told to shut up and sit down. And fourth, Canadians are tired of leaving complex questions to “the experts”, who always seem to want to exclude voices who don’t agree with them.

We are a country that knows how to talk about things, to put difficult issues on the table, and to keep talking about them as long as there is a voice to be heard. We’re also a country that has been able to distil good sense from that discourse, and then to implement it in a body of law which gets tested through our justice system every day all across the country.

We are long past the date when any one group could lay claim to knowing what is “honest” and what is right.

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It is hard to believe what a terrible city Toronto has become. One candidate says we can’t take care of the 2.5 million people who live here. Another warns darkly about “more of the same” that has left us in “the current mess.” Only one, the deputy mayor who is carrying the legacy of the incumbent regime, is upbeat on the city, but he gets drowned out in the raucous litany of abuse. Failure lurks around every corner, financial collapse is at hand, dispirit darkens every city street.

It is a bad time generally for cities in Ontario as municipal elections heat up, because in almost every city most of the candidates are running against the city where they want to be mayor or councillor. Cities are portrayed as serial failures, fiscal nightmares, administrative disaster zones, and places which fail citizens day after day.

And it all happened so fast, it all went downhill so quickly. It started with a few members of the commercial press, expressing outrage over every wandering penny at city hall, ready to out every fiscal villain for buying an espresso instead of a Tim’s. Penny pinching became heroic, the hair shirt was civic reform in action, and the race to the bottom began.

Yet we must be doing something right. Toronto keeps rising in the world ranking of cities as a financial powerhouse and a great place to live. As The Telegraph UK recently wrote, “Toronto nowadays is a progressive and welcoming city with a thriving economy, flourishing arts scene and renowned cuisine. Its education and healthcare provision are among the best in the world.” Other Ontario cities also keep improving. We deliver, with few problems, clean water, electricity, ploughed roads, social goods and services, excellent public health, and a broad range of infrastructure. It isn’t perfect, but it is very good; particularly compared to other places in other countries.

Some people call election campaigns “the silly season” because of the overblown narratives to which candidates resort. Most of the aspirants run against the government they hope to lead or serve. We would be smart to take campaign rhetoric with a grain of salt. But we, and the candidates, should also consider that the relentless portrait of failure can distort what is actually a much more positive story, and can create a narrative that curtails both the human energy and resources for further improvement and change. As we head into the last six weeks of municipal campaigns across the province, candidates might want to consider the lasting damage their words might cause.

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Recently, the American blogger Laurie Lyons wrote in the Huffington Post that “Toronto is the hot new destination for all things crazy, sexy, cool”.

Yes, really.

In her article, she highlights Toronto’s accessible art (from Luminato to Nuit Blanche), our fusion and fresh restaurants and the fact that Toronto, a city of just five million and over 200 ethnic groups and 130 languages, is also one of the most diverse cities in North America.

And growing.

Each year, the city absorbs another 50,000 new immigrants.

While smugness is never attractive, Toronto has something else to be proud of. Global cities around the world look to Toronto to understand and learn from our ongoing experiment with diversity.

For instance, in 2008 the Toronto District School Board was held up as a global model for successful social integration and equal opportunities for schools when it was awarded the prestigious international Carl Bertelsmann Prize. The City of Toronto is one of the few international cities of migration that provides information to city residents in 180 languages on services such as recycling, garbage and municipal elections. The Toronto Public Library has successfully turned itself into an institution that not only lends books, but also provides settlement services to its many immigrant visitors.

However, lest we start feeling totally virtuous, we need to remember that Toronto has still a long way to go before claiming success. To do so, it must be open to learning from other cities.

For instance, here in Toronto, there are over 200,000 permanent non-citizen residents who cannot vote for their mayor, their city councillor or school trustee – even though they live, work, own property and pay taxes in the city. Meanwhile, non-citizen residents in Dublin, Stockholm and Caracas can all vote in municipal elections. In the city of Chicago, non-citizen residents can vote in school site elections.

Similarly, while bike lanes are a hot issue in our current mayoralty race, the city of Copenhagen is successfully using cycling as a way to integrate newcomers into the fabric and streets of the city.

So while we have much to offer to global cities, we also have much to learn from them.

Globally, there is an increasing interest in cities learning from cities. New York Mayor Bloomberg points to New York’s new urban plan that drew on the experiences and ideas for “traffic reduction from London, Stockholm, Singapore, for transit-orientated development policies from Amsterdam and Tokyo, and so on.”

City-to-city learning can travel fast because it is local and grounded in the business of daily living. It is almost always practical and is therefore more readily transportable.

For the past 18 months we’ve been working with international partners in the UK, New Zealand, the US, Germany and Spain to help cities better connect around their shared issues of urbanization and migration.

At Cities of Migration, cities can hear about and share good ideas in integration. For the first time, there is an organized way for London to learn from Toronto, and for Toronto to learn from Zurich. Through webinars and the Cities of Migration website the interest in learning from and transporting successful ideas from one place to another has grown with remarkable speed.

In October, Toronto will go to The Hague to learn from practitioners from far flung cities like Malmo, Madrid and Moscow. We invite you to join us as we listen to and talk with leaders drawn from urban planning, local governments, media, employers and academics in this agenda-packed gathering.

And we will bring back ideas that have been tested in other cities – from deploying the police force in teaching English to refugees (and simultaneously building community trust) to training immigrants in the provision of culturally appropriate health care. These and many other good ideas on integration will be on show at The Hague.

We hope to see you there!

To learn more about the upcoming Cities of Migration conference, visit the conference website.

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Did anything good come out of the G20 meetings? Apart from a luke-warm pledge on maternal health (which is unclear on abortion), and which might turn out like many G8-G20 “pledges” (remember aid to Africa?), was there a benefit?

Torontonians were unified in their assessment that the summits were a negative experience. Even if they support the idea of world leaders meeting at such summits, they agreed that the protests, police activity, and closing of much of downtown were not something worth repeating.

In the days and weeks following the event, there has been much in the press documenting the negative reaction. And some civil society groups like the Canadian Civil Liberties Association have focused on the abuse of Canadians’ Charter rights.

The G20 weekend will go down as a lost week for merchants with no business and too much property damage, for many citizens who were detained for peaceful protests, and for Canadians who were required to pick up a price tag of well over $1 billion, mostly for security. And Toronto tax payers will likely have other bills to pay from city coffers.

The question is, did anything good come out of it?

Perhaps the one good thing is that such a large expenditure from the federal government put to rest their argument that government can’t act because there is no money. No money for kids who go to school hungry, no money for disabled people who need some living supports, no money for energy innovation, no money for aged Canadians to live out their lives in dignity.

For years federal governments of both Conservative and Liberal stripes have argued that there was not enough money to deal with critical needs. Even when they established important programs like the Child Tax Benefit and the Working Income Tax Benefit, they underfunded them. It was as if they were comfortable with a little less poverty rather than wanting to take a dramatic step to lift people out of poverty.

And the excuse was that there was not enough money.

The G20 expenditures exposed the government. Not enough money, when police officers were shipped in to Toronto from around the country with daily meal allowances of over $100 per day, with no obligation to provide receipts? Not enough money when they were building a fake lake within view of a Great Lake? Not enough money when they were uprooting then replanting saplings for a week lest they be used as weapons? Not enough money when new policing vehicles, shields and batons were being unloaded daily, including the infamous but idle noise cannons?

Civil society leaders should have a new confidence in pressing the federal government for funding for Canada’s social needs, now that we know the cupboard is not so bare. The extravagance of the G20 showed us that the money is there. The only thing that needs to be confronted is the government’s lack of will in helping vulnerable Canadians live productive and dignified lives. Surely they can’t argue that they’re against that.

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On July 11, 1982, Italy defeated West Germany 3-1 to win the World Cup in Spain. St. Clair Avenue erupted into a sea of celebration. For twelve city blocks all you could see was a mass of people celebrating, dancing in the street, wearing the blue colours of Italy. Every Torontonian became an Italian that day.

Fast forward to 2002. Korea advanced to the quarter finals, and Little Korea, the strip between Palmerston Avenue and Christie on Bloor Street saw another throng of people, celebrating, dancing, and then very civilly picking up the garbage on the street. And Toronto again took pride and celebrated with Korea in its accomplishment.

Toronto has danced with Brazil, cheered for the Portuguese, filled the streets for the French, doffed its hat to the Dutch, and madly celebrated when the Iranians beat the US in its group match in 1998.

In Toronto, you find supporters for every team that qualifies. Because Toronto is home to the world’s largest multicultural population, every qualifying team has a home field advantage. John Doyle, Globe and Mail TV critic, and author of The World Is a Ball: The Joy, Madness and Meaning of Soccer, writes that Toronto is probably the best place to experience the World Cup if you cannot be in the host country.

Soccer is a defining feature of Toronto’s landscape in other ways too. Soccer helps many immigrants integrate. Recent immigrants search out soccer fields to meet new people. It’s a place where their struggle in a new land can be forgotten for a while, where it does not matter whether they have Canadian work experience, or whether their English is heavily accented. The soccer field becomes the place for new beginnings.

Soccer is an easy game to play. You only need one ball, a couple of shirts for goal posts, and a few players willing to run up and down a field. Watch some people playing a game of pick-up soccer and you’re sure to be invited to join in. It doesn’t matter what country you’re from, what language you speak, what job you have (if you have a job at all, or if you’re a doctor driving a taxi). All you need is love for the beautiful game.

Every four years Toronto turns into a one-month carnival. People dress up, wear funny hats, put little flags on their cars, paint their faces, high five perfect strangers, feel their hearts pound, scream at TV screens, laugh, and cry.

And if your country hasn’t qualified, you just adopt another. Or you are adopted by another – just visit its headquarters, be it Chez La Belle Africaine for Cameroon, the Prague Deli for Slovakia or Teranga for Ivory Coast. If your team fails to make it to the next round, you just adopt another. And so, only in Toronto, Germans get together with the Dutch at the Madison to marvel at Klose’s extraordinary header (you would never see that in Europe), the Swiss Consulate invites representatives from Chile to join the Swiss at the Foxes Den when they play each other and turn the game into a fundraiser for the earthquake victims, and everyone dances with the Brazilians long after the final whistle has blown.

While we may not share the same mother tongue and cheer for different countries during the World Cup, we all come together to share this moment and to celebrate the first World Cup on African soil. And almost 30 years after I arrived, I won’t be surprised anymore by the passion, noise and celebrations. Soccer is very much part of the Canadian identity. It brings us together every four years in a wonderful one-month celebration – and in the end, where you came from really doesn’t matter all that much anymore.

Imagine, the 2018 World Cup hosted in Toronto. That would be worth cheering for.