Toronto at the tipping point: Bringing a once-great city back from the brink

This is an excerpt from Saving Toronto: 10 City Builders Tell Us How (Dundurn Press), edited by Anne Golden and Ken Greenberg. The book is a wake-up call with practical solutions to stop Toronto’s decline, including cutting its massive infrastructure deficits, constraining urban sprawl, and empowering cities with authority and a portion of sales tax. In this excerpt, Golden first diagnoses the problems.

When Premier Bob Rae asked me to chair the Task Force on the Future of the Greater Toronto Area in 1995, I accepted enthusiastically. The Task Force was created to respond to growing concerns about the health and workability of the city-region.

It was becoming apparent that the secure and satisfying quality of life that people in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) had been enjoying for the decades following the Second World War was under threat. The region’s lagging economic recovery from the post-1989 recession had revealed its vulnerability in the changing global economy. Torontonians were feeling that the systems they had relied on — from municipal finance to governance to public transit — were breaking down and no longer able to meet their needs.

Here we are 30 years after that, and concerns about Toronto’s viability are back.

We used to be seen as the city that works. British actor Peter Ustinov once famously described us as “New York run by the Swiss.” Today, the descriptions of Toronto are very different. They focus on Toronto’s problems and their apparent intractability. Whereas Toronto used to top the lists of the best cities in the world to live in, we now make the list of one of the world’s most congested cities. Toronto is increasingly described in the media as a city where you can’t afford a house, can’t get anywhere, and nothing works. Today, Toronto is at a turning point.

Toronto has experienced several turning points since its “Hogtown” days, a nickname derived from its once-thriving meatpacking industry.

In the late 1800s, Toronto evolved from a modest settlement to a lively industrial centre. Trade and migration grew with the coming of the railroad, and significant immigration from Europe contributed to its expanding cultural landscape. The early twentieth century was a time of creating iconic buildings, parks, and public services and is described as a time of civic pride and cultural flourishing. The post–Second World War era marked a pivotal moment for Toronto, with the influx of immigrants from around the globe, notably from Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean, which significantly diversified the city’s population and cultural fabric.

The post-war economic boom led to job creation and urban growth. But the late twentieth century saw a decline in manufacturing jobs along with rising unemployment and serious social problems, including poverty, homelessness, and crime. These are issues that I became absorbed in as president of United Way (1989–2001) and as chair of the Task Force on Homelessness (1998). And by the early twenty-first century, residents were feeling that Toronto was in decline. Toronto’s reputation was changing from a thriving metropolis that worked to a city grappling with major challenges.

As recently as a decade ago, urban visionaries were still optimistic, and I had great hopes for Toronto. In 2016, in accepting the Couchiching Award for Public Policy Leadership, I gave a speech contending that we were “on the threshold of a new era for cities.” Global mega-trends, such as the technology revolution and the migration of people everywhere into cities, were setting the stage for positive urban transformation. I was impressed by the explosion of interest in city building, pointing to a spate of new books that argued that the crisis in our urban centres was creating a movement to make our cities sustainable, livable, and more competitive.

I believed that the idea that cities play a pivotal role in driving economic prosperity; in nurturing innovation; in allowing people to live healthy, happy lives in livable, walkable communities; and in protecting our environment and ecosystems upon which life depends had become accepted wisdom. There seemed to be a growing sense of urgency about the need to develop our cities differently, to embrace a more compact form of urban development and complete communities.

However, while there have been some successes, we are not seeing the overall progress that many of us had expected. We are dismayed by traffic jams, deteriorating infrastructure, sky-high housing costs, and worsening transit service, typified by long delays and weekend shutdowns.

Multi-year setbacks and cost overruns have made the Metrolinx Eglinton Crosstown the poster child for the mismanagement of public transit projects. In Ontario, both health and education services are facing major systemic challenges, leading to concerns about accessibility and quality. Because of its population density and diversity, as well as unique issues such as housing shortages, homelessness, and other social problems, the impacts of declining health and education services are particularly severe in the Toronto region.

As noted, these problems are long-standing. But their level and intensity are new. We have largely ignored them, and they are worsening such that this turning point can fairly be described as a tipping point.

The existing issues and efforts to reverse Toronto’s decline have been exacerbated and complicated by Donald Trump’s second term as U.S. president. His focus on “America First,” protectionism, and a confrontational approach to international relations, particularly with Canada, is impacting our economy, our politics, our social contract, and our cultural environment. The economic impacts of Trump’s threats and trade war include costs, shifts in trade relationships, and a general atmosphere of uncertainty, affecting economic growth and job stability across the country.

Trump’s aggressive actions against Canada have emboldened Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s approach to land-use planning in Ontario; under the guise of protecting the province’s economy from the president, Premier Ford has introduced legislation that undermines local democracy and accountability. Trump’s polarizing rhetoric and actions have altered the social and political climate everywhere, adding to the challenges of maintaining social cohesion in the cultural mosaic city-region of Toronto. We can see debates on human rights and public policy becoming increasingly contentious, leading to divisive and sometimes violent protests. Trump is pushing Canadians to consider the question of what kind of society we aspire to be.

If we do not address the underlying causes of our malaise, predictions that Toronto has entered an irreversible downward spiral may come to pass. Can Toronto re-establish itself as a great place for people to live and businesses to prosper?

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