Olmsted’s “results” after forty years were impressive enough. The results 140 years after Confederation are even more impressive. For in a country that has flipped from rural to urban but still treasures the natural beauty of the landscape, it is places like Montreal’s mountain that make Canadian cities so remarkably livable.
CANADIANS, and even some Torontonians, love to ridicule Toronto as “the centre of the universe,” but in some ways it is. It’s the major centre. It’s where the big theatre productions come on tour and sometimes begin. It’s where the big international literary and film festivals are held. And it’s the perch from which the national media survey the rest of the country, even if at times condescendingly, even if at times cock-eyed.
Toronto serves as a wonderful foil for those who don’t live there—How about them Leafs?—but in truth it’s a remarkable city composed of dozens of interesting neighbourhoods that can be as dramatically different from one another as are the regions of Canada. It’s a city of terrible traffic but magnificent ravines, a city that produces violent headlines, particularly Monday mornings, but is considered safe by those who live there and alarming by those who don’t. It was once known as “Toronto the Good” but can be very bad indeed. It’s large enough today to accommodate almost every imaginable opinion and impression, even the wrong ones.
“I do not pretend to understand Toronto,” Bruce Hutchison wrote in The Unknown Country. To him it seemed an island apart, the most insular of cities, yet at heart a small town. How curious that today that definition would be embraced by those who live there.
The city, in Hutchison’s time, was second fiddle to Montreal. Yet to him Toronto felt more apart, more aloof from the rest of the country. It was a place filled with people far too busy to have time for the likes of him. He found it stuffy and possessed with “a piety here which annoys.”
Toronto is well used to being slagged. “Toronto is like a fourth or fifth-rate provincial town, with the pretensions of a capital city,” Anna B. Jameson wrote in her 1838 book Winter Studies and Summer Rambles. “We have here a petty colonial oligarchy, a self-constituted aristocracy, based upon nothing real nor upon anything imaginary.” More than a century later, in 1946, “We All Hate Toronto” was a popular drama on CBC radio. And several years ago an Edmonton group calling itself Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie had a small hit with “The Toronto Song,” in which the band dumped on everything from the CN Tower to high rents to the air that’s unclean—“And the people are mean!”
Much of this resentment is brought on by the city itself. Toronto, for example, is the heart of Canadian publishing and reviewing, meaning that the very definition of “regional” writing—therefore minor, rather insignificant, sort of like folk art—is any scribbling done beyond sight of the CN Tower. But the resentment goes only so far. As British Columbia humorist—sorry, regional humorist—Eric Nicol once warned, Canadian unity “cannot depend forever on hating Toronto.” The Toronto of today is not Bruce Hutchison’s Toronto, not Anna Jameson’s Toronto, not even the Toronto of Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie. It is a city of excellent theatre, fine restaurants, high-end shopping, fabulous island escapes, superb public transit, homelessness, periodic gun violence, pollution, and a waterfront that developers seem determined to keep from the people. In other words, it has become the world-class city its inhabitants once dreamed of and the rest of Canada once ridiculed.
It is also now Canada’s largest city by a significant stretch—and, by definition, where people want to live. And especially those people coming to Canada to start a new life.
The Pier 21 of today is Pearson International Airport. And the train that new Canadians take is now a subway or a light rail heading into downtown Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver.
The new coming to Canada go where, for some time now, the old have also been going. To the cities.
CANADA, ALMOST UNNOTICED, became a country of great cities in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Calgary, once laughed at by Allan Fotheringham for looking as if it had just been uncrated but not yet assembled, went from being an oil-obsessed place with little to offer to a fine city with good light-rail access, soaring house prices in the suburbs, and a downtown redevelopment that made the Eau Claire shopping area and river trails the envy of any growing metropolis. Edmonton, with its dramatic ravines and vibrant bar scenes, was suddenly hard-pressed to stay ahead as the provincial centre for culture, a contest that was good for both cities and led to a blossoming of theatre and music. Saskatoon became a city of education, high-tech industry, and economic diversity, no longer the struggling switching yard and supplier to the outlying farm world. Winnipeg, with a new downtown arena, the best ball park in Canada, and the common-sense development of the Forks area by the rivers, became a city where only those who’d never been there chuckled at the cold winds blowing over Portage and Main. Winnipeggers, meanwhile, used their downtown tunnels to shop in bad weather, perhaps taking time out to rub Timothy Eaton’s bronze toe for good luck.
In every major centre in the country it was much the same story. St. John’s was booming while the rest of the province of Newfoundland and Labrador seemed to be emptying out. Halifax, with its wharf development alongside Pier 21, was a city for poking around in, filled with historic sites and good restaurants and bars featuring the best Celtic music in the country. Fredericton had its world-class art gallery, the Beaverbrook, with its famous Dalis and Turners and Gainsboroughs. Quebec City, despite losing its hockey team, was still a city of extraordinary charm and élan, with the Boardwalk on a warm May day with a vanilla ice cream dripping over your cupped hand perhaps the finest stroll available in this country. As for Vancouver, nothing need be said that hasn’t been said a million times. With the mountains in the background and the sea in every backdrop, it may have the most beautiful setting in all of North America. On a clear, warm day there’s simply no better city to find yourself in—and not a bad place on a cold, wet day, either.
In the years since Pier 21 closed down in 1971, urbanization and increased immigration to the cities have meant that almost two-thirds of Canadians live in centres with more than a hundred thousand people. And with more than three of every four new Canadians heading for cities, it’s a percentage that will only increase in the coming years.
That reality is also being felt in politics. Years ago, then Toronto mayor David Crombie argued that “city dwellers are the only majority group I know that allows themselves to be over-governed, under-represented and ignored.” And their situation was far, far fairer at the time he spoke than it is today.
“Somewhere between asylums and saloons,” British Columbia’s Joanne Monahan, former head of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, has said, “that’s where you find municipal government in the Canadian Constitution.”
In the first decade of the twenty-first century big-city mayors began talking of a “New Deal” that would lead, they hoped, to expanded legal powers for cities, among them the ability to tax, or to take a cut of, the massive gasoline royalties being collected by the federal and provincial governments. Reports began to appear, including the Toronto-Dominion Bank’s A Choice Between Investing in Canadian Cities or Disinvesting in Canada’s Future, whose title essentially gives away the storyline. In 2003 the Toronto City Summit Alliance reported that “quite simply, Canadian federalism is not working for our large city regions.” The Laidlaw Foundation and the Canada West Foundation said much the same thing.
Canada, it seemed, was in the midst of a … civic war.
Perhaps the most eloquent of the New Deal supporters was New Democratic leader Jack Layton, himself a former Toronto city councillor and once head of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. In Layton’s 2006 revised edition of Speaking Out Louder he detailed the unfairness of the current political structure. Winnipeg, for example, accounted for two-thirds of Manitoba’s economy while more than 50 percent of the taxes paid by its residents went to the federal government, 43 percent w
ent to the provincial government, and less than 7 percent went to city government. In Layton’s own Greater Toronto Area the numbers were even more striking, with Ottawa netting some $17 billion in residents’ taxes while the province’s net take (tax revenue less payments back to the city) was $3 billion. “Canada’s cities,” Layton wrote, “generate enormous revenues for the federal and provincial governments. What the cities get in return is a pittance. Federal, provincial and territorial governments control the spending of over 95 percent of all tax dollars. Municipalities control less than 5 percent.”
“We’ve got the responsibility,” St. John’s mayor Andy Wells said at a 2002 symposium, “but we don’t have the legislative authority and the fiscal tools.”
The city mayors warned that they were all facing current and coming infrastructure crises, from potholes to public housing, transit to waste disposal, but with limited means to raise the required money. Cities have to rely almost exclusively on property taxes and are almost totally excluded, by law, from collecting personal, fuel, and sales taxes. Most such capital expenditures, therefore, fall to the provincial governments—and critics say the provinces are woefully underprepared for the coming infrastructure crush.
In the Greater Toronto Area, for example, a 2006 report predicted that within twenty-five years—when the GTA population is expected to reach eight million—Toronto’s roads will have to handle a hundred thousand more cars during morning and afternoon rush hours with another fifty thousand transit riders looking for buses and waiting for space in subway cars. “The hard, cold facts of the matter are that today, there is no such thing as a GTA transportation plan,” said Richard Soberman, the civil engineering professor who oversaw the study.
According to the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, $60 billion was needed just for necessary repairs and maintenance of cities’ existing infrastructures—without even considering the monies required for such future needs as the GTA faced.
Canadians have little realized the extent of urban sprawl in recent years. A Statistics Canada report on “The Loss of Dependable Agricultural Land in Canada” pointed out that, between 1971 and 2000, the amount of urban land increased by 96 percent. This meant, particularly in southern Ontario, that the best farmland was seen as the best housing land. Good agricultural land began disappearing at worrisome rates. It also meant that the greater the sprawl, the greater the transportation needs. Between 1999 and 2003 the number of registered motor vehicles in the country increased by more than one million—the second car by now more necessity than luxury. Urban transportation, including public transit as well as improved roads, became an increasingly important issue—the need far outstripping the available funds.
The same Statistics Canada report said that urbanization over those thirty years ate up the equivalent of three Prince Edward Islands. That would be taking P.E.I.—where you can often drive for miles without seeing another car, where the open fields seem to roll on forever—and turning three times that space into strip malls and industrial parks and housing developments where the buildings are packed so tightly together the only way you can walk from the front yard to the back is by turning sideways and sucking in your gut.
Back in 1980, when “the vanishing land” was very briefly a public issue, Environment Canada projected that, by the turn of the century, urbanization would gobble up land roughly the size of the same Maritime province. Critics at the time thought it a gross exaggeration.
THE URBAN–RURAL SPLIT has had several repercussions. Rural Canadians feel increasingly abandoned, increasingly left out of the prolonged economic boom that has centred on the main cities, particularly in Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia. City dwellers are also irritated whenever they happen to think about the somewhat anachronistic distribution of power in this country that not so long ago was so very rural.
Little Prince Edward Island, for example, has fewer people than many federal constituencies in Montreal, Toronto, and the Lower Mainland of British Columbia, yet P.E.I. is guaranteed four seats in the House of Commons thanks to a 1915 agreement that says no province can have fewer MPs than senators at any time. Put another way, P.E.I. gets four senators for a province with a population considerably less than Sudbury while each of the two fastest-growing Western provinces, Alberta and British Columbia, gets six.
Even so, it’s unlikely that any Canadian living in rural Canada feels more significant, or powerful, than any Canadian living in one of the five city centres. Not when the loudest voices in recent years have been the cries of the major city mayors, chief among them Toronto mayor David Miller.
Electoral reform, in whatever form it ultimately takes in this country, will almost certainly give increased powers to the urbanized economic centres. And while a reformed senate—even if it one day approaches the Elected, Equal, and Effective triad once proposed by the Reform Party— is intended to help balance the regions, it would still be urban focused.
When Glen Murray was mayor of Winnipeg he was one of the driving forces behind the search for a New Deal for cities. If the country is 80 percent urbanized today, Murray told me one day in Winnipeg not long before he left city politics for an unsuccessful try at federal politics, it will be 90 percent urbanized by the year 2020. In his view, if the nineteenth century was about empires and the twentieth century about nations, then the twenty-first will ultimately be about modern city states.
He saw “a real immaturity in Canadian political organizations” that would need to be addressed in the coming years. With city power on the rise, provincial power would have to dwindle. “If the federal government treated the provinces the way provinces treat cities,” he warned, “there would be civil war.”
THE TRANSFORMATION from rural to urban hasn’t been restricted to Canada, of course; the United States too has increasingly become a vast hinterland with pockets of virtual city states. David Brooks’s recent essay in The Atlantic Monthly asked, “Are We Really One Country?” But the American Two Solitudes, if we may call it that, is far more split along political lines, divided as it is between the red states of the heartland, which voted for George W. Bush, and the blue states along the seaboards, which didn’t vote for Bush. Brooks perceives a split so profound that the reds have no idea what life in the blue states is like, and the blues no sense of life in the reds.
Red of course stands for Republican conservatism, blue for Democratic liberalism. In Canada, where, conversely, red is the colour of the Liberal vote and blue the Conservative, the elections of 2004 and 2006 demonstrated a similar split, with red prevailing in the cities and blue in the smaller communities and countryside.
A country divided.
And following the January 23, 2006, election even more a contradiction than ever, with a minority Conservative government in charge and the Liberals largely reduced to those city centres that were, in so many other ways, running so much of the country: Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa. Tory blue, however, was solid in Alberta, where oil and gas had turned Calgary and, by extension, mushrooming Fort McMurray in the oil sands into the main economic engines of the country.
Stephen Harper’s slim victory in 2006 may have averted yet another crisis in the rolling panic attack that is Canadian unity. Eighteen months earlier, when the Liberals had squeaked out a minority victory under Paul Martin, the West had recoiled in anger. It meant, to them, that Eastern voters—Ontario in particular—had decided to stick with the Liberals despite the ongoing sponsorship scandal and the clear signals from the West that it was well past time for change. The West had the economic power; the West had the growth; but the West felt powerless in determining Ottawa.
I was in Calgary at the end of June 2005, watching in the Roundup Centre as the air went out of the thundersticks the Tory faithful had been holding in anticipation of victory. The anger was palpable.
“There is no Canada!” Elizabeth Craine told me. She’d worked for the Conservative Party since John Diefenbaker’s time and had that very day served as a scrutin
eer for Harper in his Calgary Southwest riding. “There is no Canada,” she repeated as supporters and candidates stood around the Centre looking as though they’d just been struck by lightning. “There’s Quebec. There’s the Maritimes. There’s Ontario. And there’s the West. They’re all different.
“Let’s wake up to reality—it’s time for us to form our own country.”
She was hardly alone. Western alienation—a distant cousin to Quebec separation—has been around since Riel, since railway route decisions, since Montreal and Toronto bankers controlled farm loans, since Pierre Trudeau brought in the despised National Energy Program, since Meech Lake failed to address the West’s desire for senate reform. It flares periodically—Alberta even has its own separation party—and, had Harper not won in early 2006, likely would have blown as dramatically as Leduc No. 1 did back on February 13, 1947.
The rage following Martin’s victory was undeniable. A professor in Calgary emailed me to predict that the country would disappear within ten years. Voters in British Columbia began talking about joining with Alberta and putting an end to Canada altogether.
“I’m not a wild-eyed lunatic,” Elizabeth Craine told me that night. “None of us are out here. We just want to see things change. And we can see now that it doesn’t work and it can’t work. This country is never going to be anything but frustration. Why can’t we divide it up? Lots of countries get divided up—and they survive.”
Canada, of course, did survive long enough for Harper to claim his own minority. The slogan the Reform Party had adopted on its founding back in 1987—“The West Wants In”—was finally a fact. “The West is in,” former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed told me when I went once again to Calgary, this time to listen to the thundersticks pounding in celebration. “Even if it’s a minority government, it will be a positive thing for Canada.”
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