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.

Five Good Ideas

1. Reach beyond the usual suspects
2. Empower your membership
3. Give the media what they want
4. Embrace Deep Democracy
5. Advocate for democratic renewal

Five Good Resources

1. Commercial Advertisements:  The best way to learn about design and marketing is to study the ads that surround us.  On the bus, in the newspaper, online.  How are companies using images, words, fonts, shapes and colours to convey their message?
2. Right-wing radio: Get out of your bubble. Expose yourself to different views to understand how and why other people are looking at the same issue through a different lens.
3. Mailchimp: Having a long list of supporters, endorsements or volunteers is great.  But using a database that allows you to send customised targeted messages, based on various personal criteria – that’s really powerful. MailChimp is one affordable online tool. www.mailchimp.com
4. FairVote Canada: Learn about FairVote Canada, and join the ranks of those who are fighting for proportional representation. www.fairvote.ca
5. Ranked Ballot Initiative of Toronto (RaBIT): Proportional Representation doesn’t work well in our municipal context, but a small simple change to runoff voting could transform our political culture, making it more inclusive, friendly and fair. Hop to it! www.RaBIT.ca

Stuttgart

Hamburg

Berlin

Cologne

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.

The report describes:

• Characteristics of self-employment and entrepreneurship amongst immigrants;
• Challenges faced by immigrants in starting new businesses;
• Existing services, programs and policies available in the Greater Toronto Area for immigrant entrepreneurs;
• Lessons learned from other jurisdictions; and
• Preliminary observations about the efficacy of existing supports for self-employed immigrants, and gaps in services.

The research finds that there are a suite of services for entrepreneurs in the GTA, but that there is a paucity of supports targeted towards the unique barriers immigrants face when starting a business. It identifies the need for future research and suggests possible policy and program ideas for various stakeholders.

Download Immigrant Self-Employment and Entrepreneurship in the GTA: Literature, Data, and Program Review (PDF).

Since the whole presentation was three hours long, we’re giving you the option to watch the individual segments.

• Peter Boehm, Ambassador of Canada in Germany: Welcome
• Ratna Omidvar, President, Maytree: Introduction
• Alan Broadbent, Founder and Chairman, Maytree: Historical context and background on the Canadian experiment and the hyperdiversity of Toronto
• Elizabeth McIsaac, Executive Director, Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council (TRIEC): Changing labour market outcomes
• Donna Quan, Deputy Director – Academic, Toronto District School Board: Ensuring Student Success
• Matt Galloway, Radio Host, Metro Morning, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC): Winning hearts, minds and market share
• Peter Sloly, Deputy Chief of Police, Toronto Police Service: Policing for a new demographic
• Panel after the presentations

Click here to view the embedded video.

Donna Quan is Deputy Director, Academic in the Toronto District School Board. She provides leadership for the Academic “learning for all” agenda for approximately 260,000 students from Kindergarten to Grade 12.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Elizabeth McIsaac is the Executive Director of TRIEC. She has worked with TRIEC since it was launched in 2003 as a Maytree project. She has also held various positions at Maytree, most recently as the director of policy.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

From November 28 to December 2, a delegation from Toronto, led by Maytree’s president Ratna Omidvar and chairman Alan Broadbent, will visit four cities in Germany: Stuttgart (Nov. 28), Hamburg (Nov. 29), Berlin (Nov. 30 and Dec. 1), and Cologne (Dec. 2), to share good practices in immigrant integration.

Toronto’s delegates are:

• Matt Galloway, Host, Metro Morning, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Matt will speak about how CBC has reinvented itself and achieved national success by paying close attention to who lives in the city;
• Elizabeth McIsaac, Executive Director, Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council (TRIEC). Elizabeth will speak about how working with businesses can ensure that recent immigrants find employment in their field;
• Donna Quan, Deputy Director – Academic, Toronto District School Board. Donna will speak about how the public education system plays an important role in the integration of immigrant youth and their families; and
• Deputy Police Chief, Peter Sloly, Toronto Police Service (TPS). Peter will speak about how TPS has changed itself to reflect the new demographic reality of the most diverse city in Canada.

In each city, Toronto’s delegates will also have an opportunity to visit with staff of German projects to learn about local immigrant integration practices. One of the hoped-for outcomes of this exchange is for each delegate to bring back a good idea that his or her organization may be able to implement.

In the following video, Ratna speaks to the important role cities have to play in the welcoming and successful integration of newcomers. At the end of the day, integration and inclusion is an inherently local phenomenon.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Alan Broadbent speaks about the successful model of immigrant integration that Toronto’s institutions are working hard to establish, how it’s useful and important for us to celebrate and share these successes, but that we also have much to learn from others.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This exchange of ideas is organized in partnership with the Canadian Embassy in Berlin. We also thank our German partners, the Robert Bosch Foundation and the City of Stuttgart in Stuttgart, the Körber Foundation in Hamburg, the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Berlin, and the Bertelsmann Foundation in cooperation with the Ministry of Labour, Integration and Social Affairs, North Rhine-Westfalia, in Cologne.