Dion won’t be a strong leader. Harper is after a dictatorship. Layton wants to be Prime Minister. May’s voice will be heard. So far, the 2008 campaign has been a leader-centric circus, with the party bosses dominating each day’s headlines. But as the race revolves around who said what when (and from whom they lifted it), very little is said about specific issues. And even less is said about issues that pertain to Toronto. The major parties have promised inordinate amounts of funding for all kinds of initiatives, and yet very little of it appears to be directed towards the biggest populations — namely those living in urban areas.

As the Spacing Toronto blog noted last week, a recent Angus Reid poll determined that only 1 per cent of those surveyed said municipal/city issues were at the top of their election concerns. But this is a chicken-and-egg scenario, as the leaders haven’t brought them up either. And yet roads, highways and poverty — all municipal issues — were ranked No. 1 by 13 per cent, while transit and housing — city issues again — were close behind. 

Speaking with some of the city’s committee members, policy analysts, urban advocates — and listening to the Urban Issues in the Federal Election panel at the University of Toronto — I get the overwhelming message that Toronto needs a great deal of money in order to take care of a number of essential issues (infrastructure, transit, housing, culture) if it is going to remain competitive as a world-class city.

Infrastructure
It’s the word on everyone’s lips, and rightfully so. This category is the biggest concern, as it technically includes everything from sewers to roads to transit (the last a separate issue below). And it’s the most consistently costly issue for cities, Toronto in particular, to deal with. After all, with 2.6 million people, plus the commuters and tourists driving our roads and flushing our toilets, you can expect that Toronto’s infrastructure might wear out a little faster than Brandon, Manitoba’s.

The city is slowly addressing its ancient water infrastructure. But since Toronto taxpayers cover this expense exclusively, there is still billions of dollars’ worth of work to be done. Of course, this problem is more or less invisible to everyone, until the city imposes a water-tax increase or your basement is flooded by overrun storm drains. The city’s public-works chair Glen DeBaeremaeker stresses the importance here, saying, “These are basic, essential services, not fancy projects. This is flushing your toilet and driving to work.” And when the city can’t afford this sort of upkeep, the deterioration is much worse and more expensive to fix.

If the present situation remains unchanged, the future could be even more problematic. Councillor Adam Vaughan explains that we need to look at creating infrastructure that will be able to deal with climate change. This requires first admitting that climate change is already happening, and then looking at ways to retrofit infrastructure with an eye toward environmental impacts.
 
Transit
It’s no surprise that despite the infrastructure concerns, DeBaeremaeker considers transit to be the No. 1 issue. Not only is the lack of funding standing in the way of continuing service — we’re still $1 billion short on improving the current fleet — but expanding the transit network has been such a talked-over subject that even the recent Metrolinx announcements seem like just another pipe dream.

The Metrolinx plan, however, represents an integral way of thinking about the city. It’s what board member Paul Bedford refers to as acting like a region, and using the power of population — like the entire GTA — as leverage to get things done. Sure, this transit plan is massively ambitious, but Bedford reminds us that there will be 10 million people living here within the next 25 years. Building in small sections (“stubways”) like the Sheppard line and the York University extension isn’t going to do much to move that many people. Instead, he suggests that an investment in the neighbourhood of $9 billion a year for the next 25 years could make this happen.

In terms of paying for all this expansion, Toronto City Summit Alliance’s Julia Deans warns that the lack of predictable funding is a huge problem. “Money from the gas tax and for transit is helpful,” she says “But it is largely unpredictable. So the city has to incur a debt load and is basically mortgaging the future of Toronto.” She says that transit is a good indicator of just how problematic the lack of federal interest in infrastructure is, especially since Canada is the only OED country without a national transit plan. “Competitively we are in a terrible place,” she adds. “We’re the fourth most congested region in North America and we’re poised to move into second place.”

Housing
As with transit, Toronto would benefit greatly from a national housing strategy. And yet once again, there is none to be found in any of the parties’ platforms. Despite the efforts of the municipal government to try and tackle the situation with initiatives like Streets to Homes, Vaughan admits, “Having adequate funds has never been more important and never less talked about. This is the No. 1 issue and we’ve been arguing for it for years.”

And this goes well beyond housing the homeless, which is another unaddressed issue. Deans explains that housing is a big concern for both low and moderate-income households as affordable stocks are not being built and people are spending far more than the advised amount on rent. But since housing involves all levels of government to some extent, she argues that the federal government needs to lead, in order to ensure the problem can be tackled in a coordinated way.

Arts and Culture
While Stephen Harper may have had some brief success pitting the “ordinary” people against the gala-guzzling artistic elite, Toronto is privy to the reality of the artistic community: most artists are closer to the poverty line than the Bridal Path. But the filmmakers, writers and musicians who are successful necessitate entire industries created around their artistic visions.

At the Urban Issues panel, The Globe and Mail’s James Bradshaw used a great quote from Winston Churchill from when the British PM was told to cut arts and culture funding in order to help pay for the World War II effort: “What are we fighting for then?” Things are not so dire here, but it’s easy to lose sight of culture and arts during economic upheaval, despite the fact that the something like 600,000 Canadians are employed in the arts. And yes, some of them are in bands called Holy Fuck, but some of them write award-winning novels and employ entire divisions at Random House.

Part of the reason people are drawn to cities is that they are centres for arts and culture. This is true in Toronto as much as it is in Calgary (which is apparently Canada’s “most cultured city”). And with 80 per cent of the population living in urban centres, Canada is essentially an urban nation — as Richard Florida would argue. But he extends this distinction to the whole concept of economic growth: that economic growth depends on a concentration of people. This is not only why urban areas need to lead and to help the rest of the country, as Florida said during the Urban Issues panel, but also how citieswill be able to accomplish that task.

Conclusions
As Spacing editor Matthew Blackett says, we know the issues in this city and we know Toronto consistently gets shafted, but no one really seems to acknowledge it. He suggests that voters need to pressure the politicians in their ridings to move beyond the party platform and speak to the communities they are trying to represent. Headline issues like the economy and the environment should be addressed on a municipal level, since cities drive the economy and mass transit will be a major part of carbon reduction. In what may seem like an odd thought, Blackett says he yearns for Paul Martin in the 2004 election, noting that at least his platform was based on cities and an urban agenda. Right now, we’re already four years behind on that kind of progress.