Towards Democratizing Municipal Governance
A United Way study from 2015 ranked Toronto as the city with the highest level of inequality in Canada. It highlighted that the wealth disparity between households was growing twice as fast as the rest of the country. Unfortunately this trend in rising inequality has yet to reverse. Neighborhoods are gentrifying at a rapid pace, especially those adjacent to Eglinton Avenue West where new transit constructions are underway. Developers and the municipal council now choose condos and luxury flats despite the city’s shelter system being overburdened and unable to meet rising demand.
The situation is significantly worse for the BIPOC community. In fact, the Human Rights Commission found that Black people face 20 times the risk of being killed by the police compared to their white counterparts. A large percentage of Black people reside in the outskirts of the city marred with inadequate transportation and lengthy commutes. There have been complaints of racialized individuals experiencing difficulty in finding homes as a consequence of landlord prejudice which is exacerbated by low rental vacancy rates, which now hover at 1%, along with a declining supply of affordable housing.
The knee-jerk reaction is to blame everything on provincial transfers, inadequate federally funded housing, delayed transportation development, and reduced local taxation. And yes, to a degree this seems to be the case, but shouldn’t we also consider the possibility that the inequality in Toronto may be compounded by how it is inherently run? Could it be that the way Canadian cities are managed prevents them from properly addressing problems such as racism, structural inequality, and planning?
You might retort with the existence of community councils and their participation in the budgeting process. And my answer to you is that given the poor constitutional standing of municipalities and the need to sustain their significance in a country that is urbanizing at incredibly fast rate, democratic local governance ought to be regarded as an essential step.
