Some Great Idea

by Edward Keenan

  A whole line of thinking proudly insists this multicultural identity demonstrates how tolerant and open-minded we are. Thre whole phenomenon is too often framed, both by those bragging about our virtues and those pointing out our faults, as a social-justice issue, a reflection (or indictment) of our charitable (or uncharitable) nature, a statement on the moral status of our society. It’s a misguided, or at least incomplete, argument. Absolutely and obviously, tolerance and open-mindedness are laudable qualities, and fairness and justice are important reasons to fight prejudice and xenophobia. But, really, evidence of our upstanding character is among the least noteworthy things ethnic diversity contributes to the city.

  As a source of civic strength, ethnic diversity, particularly from the new immigrants who comprise about half of Toronto’s population, gives the city a set of ideas and perspectives to build on that draws from the knowledge, history and traditions of virtually every culture in the world. Joseph Conrad, who achieved fame writing in his third language, English (and had some working knowledge of six languages altogether), reportedly said he couldn’t fathom the limited perspective of a unilingual person – his knowledge of different languages allowed him to think different thoughts, in different ways, leading to greater understanding. As a unilingual anglophone, this makes perfect (and lamentable) sense to me.

  Different cultural perspectives let you think differently. I’ve heard that a number of times in a number of ways from business people in my career as a reporter. For instance, from Hadi Mahabadi, who heads up the innovation headquarters of Xerox Canada in the GTA. Mahabadi was born in Iran and moved to Canada as a young engineer after the 1979 Revolution. ‘I was very well-known, and I had offers from Japan, Germany, the Netherlands,’ he told me in 2010. ‘But I knew Canada was a very multicultural place. I knew the social programs were good, how nice Canadians are.’ Mahabadi also knew something about innovation – he’s the holder of more than seventy U.S. patents personally, and the staff of eighty-nine researchers he leads at Xerox patents about 140 ideas every year. He told me diversity is a key to innovation. ‘Innovation is impacted by many factors,’ he said, ‘but one of the key factors is diversity of thought. When you have a diverse group of people brainstorming, you come up with more and better ideas.’ This isn’t just a platitude for him, it’s his corporate practice: his research centre employs people from thirty-seven different countries, most of whom were educated in their homelands. After the centre introduced its ‘diversity of thought’ policy to aggressively seek out differences in background for the team in 2004, it saw a 17 per cent yearly increase in the number of patents it produced.

  Take that idea out of the corporate realm and apply it to a city. You can see that the density of different backgrounds in Toronto is likewise a resource available to governments and businesses and allows for more and better ideas to take root, for varied experiences and ways of thinking to shape decisions and progress. Our neighbourhoods, too, are shaped by the blending of those different backgrounds. This is evident in the restaurant options available in Toronto, to cite one obvious example: you can take a culinary trip around the world simply by travelling the TTC lines. Kimchee, beurre blanc, wasabi, tabbouleh and chili are all commonplace. Which creates a richer diet for epicureans here, but also sets the stage for innovation: one of Toronto’s most celebrated chefs, Susur Lee (an immigrant from Hong Kong), is renowned for a cuisine that effortlessly merges Asian and European techniques and ingredients to create something new.

  In 2008, Ted Corrado, the head chef of C5 restaurant at the Royal Ontario Museum, laid it out, explaining how he blended the traditions he learned at his Italian immigrant mother’s knee with the internationalism of the city he was raised in. ‘Growing up in Toronto, you can’t help but be exposed to all the different cuisines, all the cultures we have here,’ he said. ‘These are things we take for granted – Chinatown, Little Italy, India Bazaar, Korea­town. There are so many options for us. It’s what we know and personally it’s what I know, and it’s how I relate to food.’

  This kind of cultural contribution can seem trivial but has a huge impact on how the city functions and feels. When I worked in restaurants, we were always advastounded at the love Torontonians have for sidewalk patios – inevitably there comes a day in February when the sun is shining and customers ask you to set up a patio table for them even though it’s so cold you can still see your breath in the air. Many of our main streets are characterized by people sitting out on the sidewalk eating dinner or having a drink. This is hardly unique to Toronto, but it is a thing that immigrants brought here: the waves of Italians who arrived after the Second World War were harassed by police when they set up to drink coffee and chat on the sidewalk in Little Italy and (back then) the Danforth. Over time, al fresco dining culture became not just an accepted quirk, but a defining feature of Toronto’s streets.

  As we talked, Hadi Mahabadi highlighted another way that recent immigrants contributed to his corporate ambitions. In an increasingly global market, he said, employees with experience from around the world bring valuable insight into differing regional needs and preferences, as well as bringing contacts to their home country and knowledge of how to navigate its culture and institutions. It’s true of Xerox’s innovation office, and truer still for Toronto’s business culture. I have heard similar stories over and over again from entrepreneurs. Jeffrey Min, an immigrant from Korea, founded the grocery store chain Galleria in Toronto using contacts back home to open up a supply chain between his native country and his adopted one. In addition to the grocery stores here, he built an empire on a Korean import business and a customer-service management technology that connects consumers here directly with suppliers in Asia. Another example: Toronto clean-tech nanotechnology company Vive Nano was founded in 2005 by Filipino immigrant Jordan Dinglasan. By the time it opened a second office in Toronto in 2010, two thirds of its staff of eighteen were made up of immigrants. The company employed an ‘India strategy,’ since the giant South Asian nation was known to be interested in nanotech environmental solutions. They said they pursued that strategy largely by networking in the South Asian community in Toronto, bringing on board Toronto-born, ethnic Indian consultant Hari Venkatacharya to help out. Soon the company had contracts in the subcontinent, the bedrock for a long-term strategy based on international sales.

  If the world is now defined by global communication and trade, Toronto has within it detailed knowledge of virtually every other country on the planet, fluency in virtually every language, and direct familial and cultural ties to every corner of the world. Like some kind of civic Kevin Bacon, we are connected to the rest of the globe through personal contact. What we’re talking about is a cosmopolitan retooling of – and improvement on – the ancient idea of Empire, one based not on conquest and colonization but on immigration and incorporation. It’s the strength of embrace: the sun never sets on the Toronto empire.

  One further distinct characteristic of Toronto’s demographic makeup – and a huge asset to our self-definition as a ‘meeting place’ – is that the city is overwhelmingly populated by people who have chosen to live here. Only a quarter of Toronto’s adult population was born in Canada to Canadian-born parents, and of those a large number moved here from elsewhere in the country. They say there’s no Catholic like a convert. Toronto’s a city of converts.

  4

  I’ve noted the truth in the long-standing complaint that Toronto seems sometimes to have too little shared history, that there aren’t enough stories about this place alive in our memories to give it firm definition. But there are some characters from the story of Toronto’s past whose names you still encounter.

  Bishop John Strachan ruled early Toronto like it was a family business and has a street and school named after him. Metro Chairman Fred Gardiner gave his name to our most controversial road. Nathan Phillips, our first Jewish mayor, has his name on city hall’s front yard. William Peyton Hubbard, who served as the cit
y’s first black acting mayor in a bunch of interim appointments during his fourteen consecutive terms as an alderman starting in the 1890s, gets notice every year during Black History Month. Lester B. Pearson was a native son who won the Nobel Peace Prize and served as a beloved prime minister, and so we have an airport named after him. Frederick Banting and Charles Best invented insulin in 1921 at U of T, and there Marshall McLuhan foretold how media technology would create a global village. Around the city, places named after Enoch Turner and Egerton Ryerson and David and Mary Thomson remind us that someone built this place we live in.

  In most cases those names exist only on street signs and buildings, and the stories they point to are rarely part of public conversations. But there are three huge exceptions, three figures whose stories are alive in the debate we continue to have about Toronto today: William Lyon Mackenzie, Toronto’s first mayor; Roland Caldwell Harris, the city’s World War–era public-works commissioner; and Jane Jacobs, the internationally renowned urban and economics theorist and activist. They haunt us still, invoked regularly as founding figures of Toronto whose proud legacy we’ve inherited. Their most significant acts and ideas, in fact, laid down the principles on which we govern ourselves today. Together they form a Holy Trinity of Torontoism.

  About 90 per cent of the curriculum of my history classes from grades 7 to 9 involved the study of William Lyon Mackenzie, the politician, newspaperman and armed insurrectionist who was our first mayor. The guy’s kind of an all-purpose civic hero today: Rob Ford, in his first official speech as mayor the day he was sworn in, said he wanted to emulate Mackenzie; City Councillor Adam Vaughan, the mayor’s biggest, most vocal enemy, has a giant portrait of Mackenzie hanging on the wall of his office at city hall. We might not all agree on much in this city, but we agree on the rebel mayor.

  Born in Scotland, Mackenzie moved here as a young man in 1824 and founded the Colonial Advocate, an agitprop newspaper that railed against the ruling class of Toronto and Upper Canada (as Ontario was known in Ye Olde Pre-Confederation Era). In one of his greatest hits as a journalist, he named and documented the membership and activities of the Family Compact, a small brotherhood of bureaucrats who ran the colonial administration like it was a private club. One list reproduced in former Toronto mayor John Sewell’s biography of Mackenzie showed the specific nepotism and corruption of the relatives and friends of the intermarried Boulton, Sherwood and Jarvis families, and their friend Bishop John Strachan, including their government salaries.

  Mackenzie’s rallying cry was democracy, and he carried the mandate for reform into the provincial legislature, where he repeatedly clashed with the royally appointed cabinet. In 1834, he was elected the first mayor of the newly incorporated City of Toronto under a reform banner, promising to end the cronyism and corruption that had run rampant in a city whose population had just tripled in three years. (Take note: the very first mayor of the city campaigned on a ‘throw the bums out’ platform.) He cleaned house, but his council refused to raise taxes enough to adequately deal with an inherited debt and the desperate need for new sewers and sidewalks. After a cholera epidemic that killed about 5 per cent of the city’s population, he led a council that was politically polarized to the point of paralysis. Rather than standing for re-election, he ran for, and won again, a seat in the provincial assembly.

  In 1837, Mackenzie led an armed rebellion, marching south from Montgomery’s Tavern near Eglinton along Yonge, that was put down in three days. He was exiled to the United States. A decade or so later, when Canada adopted ‘Responsible Government’ reforms in line with what Mackenzie had been demanding, he was allowed to return. He won election to the new federal parliament, where he railed in favour of more ‘true’ democratic reforms, including an end to the Church of England’s involvement in government administration, stopping subsidies to monopoly railway corporations and abolishing patronage bodies. By pretty much every account, he was a hard guy to get along with, prone to slandering his allies over minor differences of opinion with the same gleeful abandon with which he libelled his enemies, and in his later years he became an outright crank, advocating the takeover of Canada by the U.S. He died in 1861 and is buried at the Toronto Necropolis, which today is right next to the Riverdale Farm on the west bank of the Don River.

  Looked at a certain way, Mackenzie was a failure as a politician and a rebel leader. But his relentless advocacy for democratic principles, in a fledgling city in the budding country that would become Canada, is considered by historians to be among the most influential efforts in our history. John Ralston Saul has made the argument that the roots of Canada’s ‘Peace, Order and Good Government’ constitutional framework are contained in Mackenzie’s declaration of rebellion.

  That Toronto’s first mayor was a rebel and a reformer – that is, that from the very beginning we were a city struggling against the tidy, self-serving plans of the elite – is of tremendous symbolic significance. Mackenzie’s legacy didn’t just emerge from the wilderness; it rose in direct response to a status quo that was corrupt and abusive, and his primary tool for fighting it – the one that proved more effective in the long run than guns – was to draw attention to that corruption and abuse and to demand better. The principles he championed, of open government, fair dealing and the enfranchisement of immigrants and regular citizens, are principles that have continued to propel Toronto throughout its history. Democracy can always be improved, and there will always be an elite – political, economic, cultural – trying to govern the city as they see fit. And often, just as in the life of Mackenzie, that elite will succeed, momentarily, in pushing past a popular uprising only to see themselves cast as history’s villains after the persistent struggle of the people eventually changes the structure of that power. Those changes become the legacy that tomorrow’s city inherits.

  Roland Caldwell Harris – known far and wide as R. C. – wasn’t a politician or a rebel, but an inside man, a bureaucrat and the most effective civil servant in our history. If Old Bill Mackenzie’s legacy was a little weak in the provision of public works, our second patron saint dramatically corrected the error.

  And that wasn’t his only difference from the original Hogtown hero. Unlike the consummate outsider Mackenzie, Harris was born and raised in the corridors of power – or at least near them. A Toronto native, Harris grew up close to the original city hall on King Street, where his mother worked as a cleaner. After he was married and working as a newspaper reporter, he and his wife actually lived in an apartment inside the new city hall at Queen and Bay (the one that is now called Old City Hall, the ornate Romanesque Revival building designed by E. J. Lennox that is used today as a court building). Eventually he was hired by the city and, in 1912, was appointed works commissioner, a position he’d stay in for thirty-three years until he died of a heart attack. Harris was an overweight, cigar-smoking, teetotalling, Church of England–attending member of Toronto’s Orange Order establishment, who carried a camera and volume of poetry with him wherever he went.

  Living inside city hall gave Harris a pretty good look at what problems were facing the city: back then, the building overlooked Toronto’s most notorious slum area, the Ward, which sat where Nathan Phillips Square is today. Residents of the Ward and other impoverished neighbourhoods had no indoor plumbing, and sewage ran through the streets to drain untreated into the lake – the source of the city’s drinking water. The lack of sanitation probably claimed the life of Harris’s own infant son, Emerson, who died of a water-related infectious disease. This tragedy was a commonplace in the squalid Toronto of the period: the infant mortality rate was a staggering 14 per cent.

  As the journalist John Lorinc has written in Spacing and the Globe and Mail – accounts of Harris’s life and works to which I owe my understanding of Harris and from which I am largely paraphrasing here – Toronto had been exploding with growth at the time. In the seven years leading up to Harris’s appointment as works commissioner, Toronto’s po
pulation had swelled by 72 per cent and its surface area had expanded 76 per cent through the assimilation of surrounding suburbs. Much of the city’s downtown core had burned to the ground in the Great Fire of 1904, but even the parts of the city untouched by flames had very little infrastructure to serve the booming population. The streets were muddy and clogged with traffic and the lake was a cauldron of infectious disease. When Harris arrived in office, Toronto was suffering water shortages that were the result of the deteriorating pipes running in from the lake.

  Harris stepped bravely into the crisis, stick-handling various political administrations to commandeer vast sums of money for his building projects. He seems to have been gifted not only at presenting his vision to the public with beautiful drawings and detailed plans and an easy manner with the press (important at a time when all big public-works projects were approved by referenda), but also at navigating both the structure of the bureaucracy and the social systems of the Masons and Orangemen who held power in the city. It was the age of professional bureaucrats – when lifelong civil servants often wielded more power than the politicians, who faced annual elections – and Harris, as the head of the board of control, was Toronto’s most celebrated and skilful pro.

  Placed in charge of transit, he disbanded the corrupt private operators who ran the streetcars, formed the Toronto Transit Commission and then oversaw the westward expansion of the transit network. He ordered the demolition of outhouses, modernized the sewage system and then established a network of water reservoirs and filtration plants. By 1920, the infant mortality rate had been cut in half. He paved over 1,100 kilometres of new roads and constructed new high-traffic arteries into what were then the suburbs, installed sidewalks throughout the city and oversaw the erection of most of the city’s noteworthy bridges. As Dalhousie architecture professor Steven Manell told Lorinc, ‘The significance of Harris a hundred years later is that we’re still living fundamentally in the city he imagined.’