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Slip-sliding away in Toronto
MARGARET WENTE
From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
Every day on my commute to work, I pass by a vast wasteland that lies between Lakeshore Boulevard (most of which is nowhere near the lake) and the water. There isn't much to see. The highlights are an abandoned tank farm, a kosher slaughterhouse, a recycling depot, an abandoned generating plant, and hundreds of acres of derelict, polluted land. A grand scheme to turn this land into a thriving hub of commerce was first proposed in 1911. We're still waiting.
Welcome to Toronto, the city whose great future is always in the future. Our motto should be Lingua factiosi, inertes opera — all talk, no action. At least we've finally bought a hole to dump our garbage in. That's the biggest breakthrough we've had around here in years.
Our mayor is running for re-election next week. His unofficial campaign slogan is, “Great guy, great hair, great city.†I guess two out of three's not so bad. And he is compos mentis, which is a big step up from dotty mayor Mel. But it's too bad he has no serious competition, because our poor old city is about to hit the wall.
We're not great, and we're no longer even good. Instead, we are rapidly turning into the hole in the doughnut — and I'm not talking Timbits. Most of the jobs and offices are going elsewhere, west to Calgary, and out to the exploding ring city known as 905-land. Don't be fooled by that building boom you see. Almost all of it is sky-high condos full of little boxes. Soon, all the people in the little boxes will be commuting to the suburbs, crawling out of town on highways that are increasingly gridlocked. Urban experts are comparing Greater Toronto to Vienna surrounded by Phoenix — a compact central city surrounded by vast tracts of low-density sprawl. If only! A more accurate description would be Vienna without the charm, with homeless people sleeping on the grates outside the opera house.
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Our election campaign has been full of wind about things that don't matter. Crime? Despite the spate of gangs and guns, which seems to have subsided, Toronto is among the safest cities on the planet. Garbage? No other citizens on Earth are so obsessed with their own waste — a sure sign, as Freud would note, of our arrested civic development. A downtown airport on the Island? The Mayor says it will wreck the waterfront, to say nothing of the rogue airplanes that will crash into the mile-high condos. In fact, the only people who will notice are a handful of hippy-dippy Island-dwellers — along with grateful travellers who'll be able to bypass the horror that is Pearson.
Only two issues really matter in Toronto, and they are the doughnut effect (growing) and the dough (shrinking). The city of Toronto has 100,000 fewer jobs than it did in 1990, and commercial office development has all but ceased. Between 1999 and 2005, Calgary added more than twice as many new head-office jobs as Toronto, and 905-land added 50 per cent more. During that period, Toronto built only 1.6 million square feet of new office space. Calgary and 905-land built 12.5 million square feet each.
The reasons nobody wants to locate in Toronto are simple: sky-high business taxes, and gridlock. Business tax rates are two to three times higher in Toronto than in 905. Businesses in Toronto pay a billion-dollar premium to be located here. Meantime, their employees can't get to work from the suburbs without a maddening commute.
The Mayor talks tax reform — eventually, by which time our downtown will be deserted. The province also has to do its bit. The city needs more money from the higher-ups and more taxing power. But who would trust the NDP-dominated City Hall to spend it wisely? Not me. They don't care about attracting business. They'd rather spend their time banning pesticides. And so the province will keep bailing them out, year after year, until the next recession hits and the bucket springs a leak.
Mr. Miller has some challengers. One is Pitbull Jane Pitfield, who doesn't have a chance but does at least have balls. Another is Liberal ex-operative Stephen LeDrew, a bankrupt who seems to be in the race because he's got nothing better to do. The Mayor will win by default. Meantime, my city is slip-sliding away, and nobody can seem to do a thing about it. It all makes me want to saddle up and ride right out of town — if only I could get there from here.
mwente@globeandmail.com
AoD
Slip-sliding away in Toronto
MARGARET WENTE
From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
Every day on my commute to work, I pass by a vast wasteland that lies between Lakeshore Boulevard (most of which is nowhere near the lake) and the water. There isn't much to see. The highlights are an abandoned tank farm, a kosher slaughterhouse, a recycling depot, an abandoned generating plant, and hundreds of acres of derelict, polluted land. A grand scheme to turn this land into a thriving hub of commerce was first proposed in 1911. We're still waiting.
Welcome to Toronto, the city whose great future is always in the future. Our motto should be Lingua factiosi, inertes opera — all talk, no action. At least we've finally bought a hole to dump our garbage in. That's the biggest breakthrough we've had around here in years.
Our mayor is running for re-election next week. His unofficial campaign slogan is, “Great guy, great hair, great city.†I guess two out of three's not so bad. And he is compos mentis, which is a big step up from dotty mayor Mel. But it's too bad he has no serious competition, because our poor old city is about to hit the wall.
We're not great, and we're no longer even good. Instead, we are rapidly turning into the hole in the doughnut — and I'm not talking Timbits. Most of the jobs and offices are going elsewhere, west to Calgary, and out to the exploding ring city known as 905-land. Don't be fooled by that building boom you see. Almost all of it is sky-high condos full of little boxes. Soon, all the people in the little boxes will be commuting to the suburbs, crawling out of town on highways that are increasingly gridlocked. Urban experts are comparing Greater Toronto to Vienna surrounded by Phoenix — a compact central city surrounded by vast tracts of low-density sprawl. If only! A more accurate description would be Vienna without the charm, with homeless people sleeping on the grates outside the opera house.
Related to this article
Latest Comments Comments
* Another great column. Mayor Miller would be great if he weren...
* 1 reader comments | Comments closed
Follow this writer Follow this writer
* Add MARGARET WENTE to my e-mail alerts Globe Insider
The Globe and Mail
Our election campaign has been full of wind about things that don't matter. Crime? Despite the spate of gangs and guns, which seems to have subsided, Toronto is among the safest cities on the planet. Garbage? No other citizens on Earth are so obsessed with their own waste — a sure sign, as Freud would note, of our arrested civic development. A downtown airport on the Island? The Mayor says it will wreck the waterfront, to say nothing of the rogue airplanes that will crash into the mile-high condos. In fact, the only people who will notice are a handful of hippy-dippy Island-dwellers — along with grateful travellers who'll be able to bypass the horror that is Pearson.
Only two issues really matter in Toronto, and they are the doughnut effect (growing) and the dough (shrinking). The city of Toronto has 100,000 fewer jobs than it did in 1990, and commercial office development has all but ceased. Between 1999 and 2005, Calgary added more than twice as many new head-office jobs as Toronto, and 905-land added 50 per cent more. During that period, Toronto built only 1.6 million square feet of new office space. Calgary and 905-land built 12.5 million square feet each.
The reasons nobody wants to locate in Toronto are simple: sky-high business taxes, and gridlock. Business tax rates are two to three times higher in Toronto than in 905. Businesses in Toronto pay a billion-dollar premium to be located here. Meantime, their employees can't get to work from the suburbs without a maddening commute.
The Mayor talks tax reform — eventually, by which time our downtown will be deserted. The province also has to do its bit. The city needs more money from the higher-ups and more taxing power. But who would trust the NDP-dominated City Hall to spend it wisely? Not me. They don't care about attracting business. They'd rather spend their time banning pesticides. And so the province will keep bailing them out, year after year, until the next recession hits and the bucket springs a leak.
Mr. Miller has some challengers. One is Pitbull Jane Pitfield, who doesn't have a chance but does at least have balls. Another is Liberal ex-operative Stephen LeDrew, a bankrupt who seems to be in the race because he's got nothing better to do. The Mayor will win by default. Meantime, my city is slip-sliding away, and nobody can seem to do a thing about it. It all makes me want to saddle up and ride right out of town — if only I could get there from here.
mwente@globeandmail.com
AoD