Is Toronto going downhill?

'Changing Toronto: Governing Urban Neoliberalism' by Julie-Anne Boudreau, Roger Keil, and Douglas Young. University of Toronto Press 2009. 247pp.
'How Toronto Lost Its Groove' by John Lorinc in 'Walrus Magazine' November 2011. pp. 24-33.


  What sprawls over 7100 square kilometres, has five and a half million people, and is sometimes loathed by the rest of Canada?
   There's no prizes for you if you answered correctly, "Tarana." Toronto, the biggest and most powerful city in Canada, still rules the roost. But in the last 20 years it's taken a beating.
 First up came Mike Harris, the very conservative  Conservative premier of Ontario. Between 1995 and 2000, he forced Toronto to join a new bigger city, with five of its neighbours.
     Then he dumped on this new megacity, a whole lot of welfare costs and other social program expenses. Then he did a whole lot of other things that made many rich people richer and many poor people poorer. But many people supported Harris.
    "The Tory victories," write the authors of 'Changing Toronto', "were mostly built on that party's strong support in rural and exurban areas. " Around Toronto,, in huge suburban areas like Vaughan, Brampton and Ajax-Pickering, voters endorsed  Harris's "Common Sense Revolution' as he called it.
    When Tory times ended in 2003, the new Liberal premier Dalton McGuinty moved Ontario slightly to the left and treated Toronto with more respect than Mike Harris had. But Toronto's problems remain. They include two-tier government, homelessness, endless traffic jams, smog blankets and skyrocketting home prices.
    The most multicultural city in Canada is also finding it hard to absorb the 40,000 people who stream into it, every year.
     All of this is well-explained in 'Changing Toronto' a book with three authors that came out a few years ago. Sometimes academic prose clogs the book. But overall, the three authors have given us a portrait of a city with problems.
    John Lorinc brings the Toronto story up to the fall of 2011. His essay 'How Toronto Lost Its Groove' outlines the policies of the city's new ultraconservative mayor Rob Ford. But as Lorinc points out, "Toronto's woes go well beyond the mayor's fiscal populism."
    "Toronto,' says Lorinc, "persists in thinking smalll and cheap." Lorinc also gives us a history of the city with special emphasis on the post-1945 years.
    We people outside  Toronto,  he insists, should worry about the city's fate, rather than rejoice about it. Toronto contributes a massive 20 per cent to Canada's Gross National Product. So anything that damages Toronto hurts Canada. And though small by world standards, Toronto's present problems could be the ones that many Canadian cities will face in the not too distant future.