TORONTO VOTES: Urban-suburban "politics of division" still a factor in mayoral campaign

Residents of the so-called inner suburbs and the "downtown" of old Toronto, the argument goes, didn’t want to merge and don’t have the same values.

Like it or not, Rob Ford, a councillor from the megacity’s northwestern corner, used that argument four years ago to become mayor.

After seven years under a left-leaning mayor, David Miller, Ford portrayed Miller allies in old Toronto as spendthrifts and the young megacity as close to financial collapse.

To suburban voters who shared his dislike of bicycle lanes and streetcars, Ford offered something the city’s core already had – subways, starting with an extension of the Sheppard line to the Scarborough Town Centre.

Ford walloped his rival George Smitherman, an ex-Liberal MPP from Rosedale. He won most easily in north Etobicoke, western North York and in Scarborough, while Smitherman ward victories were kept to old Toronto.

Four years later, almost everybody who doesn’t live near a subway line still wants one, a fact the politicians can’t ignore.

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• Dec 31, 1969
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But municipal and provincial representatives have settled on one suburban subway project – extending the Bloor-Danforth line from Kennedy station in Scarborough to Sheppard Avenue – as a city-building exercise.

Olivia Chow is left opposing the Scarborough subway, arguing it’s a needless expense compared to the light-rail line judged appropriate for the area by transit experts, but her stand has hurt her Scarborough support.

Both Chow and John Tory – who supports building the extension alongside his scheme for frequent commuter rail, called SmartTrack – have spoken of the need to end the "politics of division" at city hall.

You can see the downtown-versus-suburbs fight, Tory added, in the failure to work together on a transit plan, and therefore "in our traffic and transit nightmare."

Before he handed the candidacy to his brother Doug – who hasn’t laid out a transit platform, but said he hopes to serve hard-working people and not "the special interest groups and the privileged few" – the ailing Ford promised more subways, including extensions to replace light rail already approved along Sheppard and Finch Avenue West.

Critics said his plan made no financial sense but Ford, after riding the money-losing Sheppard subway to Don Mills, insisted density follows subway construction and pays for it.

"This is what people want," he said, adding when offered light surface rail, many residents would rather have nothing.

For Jim Karygiannis, an ex-MP running in Scarborough-Agincourt’s Ward 39, where Ford beat Smitherman by a 40 per cent margin, a subway project in Scarborough south of Hwy. 401 isn’t enough.

"People north of the 401 should not be second-class citizens," Karygiannis said this month, arguing his future constituents deserve a subway too, "and they’ve given me my marching orders" to fight for a Sheppard extension to McCowan Road.

"People in Scarborough should stand up and say they’re not going to take it anymore," he added.

Yet there are signs of a generational shift coming as new families move into suburban neighbourhoods.

"I see that wedge being driven, the ‘us versus them.’" but a different generation – more experienced with life in different parts of the city - will perhaps not think of it the same way, said Stephen Holyday, running for council in Etobicoke, where several longtime council incumbents from 2010 have stepped aside, including Holyday’s father Doug, Etobicoke’s last mayor.

"The City of Toronto is one unit now and that’s the way that we live," said Holyday, a candidate in Ward 3 who noted residents’ definition of "downtown" is expanding, growing.

"Maybe one day – maybe not in my generation – Etobicoke will be considered downtown."

Holyday, who has commuted from Etobicoke to downtown for 15 years, said in this election "the talk is transit" because politicians understand its importance.

"We’re never going to unify as a city until we overcome that problem with congestion," he predicted.

There is another divide, though, that of Toronto’s widening income gap, which politicians have seemed more reluctant to address.

The Toronto Community Foundation spelled out the city’s paradox in 2010: How can Toronto be so praised for its "liveability" and also be "severely unaffordable," with a deepening gap between rich and poor?

Before the last election, David Hulchanski, a University of Toronto professor, showed the city dividing into three – with family incomes rising in the wealthy core and poverty pushed to the less expensive edges.

The number of Toronto’s predominately middle-income neighbourhoods, which made up 63 per cent of the city in 1970 and only 23 per cent in 2010, continues to shrink, Hulchanski reported recently.

"This is evidence of the growing income polarization of the city between very high income neighbourhoods and very low income neighbourhoods."

Chow has referenced Hulchanski’s work, saying parts of the city – in which 29 per cent of children live below the poverty line – have been "left behind" and their residents need to matter more.

She seems to argue the subway-building approach of Tory and the Fords is too narrowly focused, picking "which neighbourhoods succeed, and which don’t."

Since the violent summer of 2005, the city government built community social service hubs and other resources in "priority neighbourhoods" within the inner suburbs.

Toronto councillors continued the strategy this year, but switched focus to some new neighbourhoods and adopted a new system for measuring success. They also dropped the "priority" label for another – "neighbourhood improvement areas" – they thought was more politically acceptable to residents worried it produced a stigma.

These "poor areas" were never treated as the city’s "priority," so a division between them and the rest of Toronto remains, and their residents haven’t benefited, said Antonius Clarke, who in 2010 ran unsuccessfully for councillor in North York’s Ward 8.

"They are voters, and they do have issues that need to be addressed. But for some reason no one is addressing them," he said last week.

A subway is being built through North York, but one that bypasses his own "priority" neighbourhood, Jane-Finch, added Clarke.

Still, he said he and his advocacy group, the Inner City Union, want to unite the city by focusing on what makes its residents the same, rather than different.

"A lot of people want to see this as a black problem. It is more than that. This is (also) an immigrant issue," said Clarke, whose group is inviting mayoral candidates to debate "priority neighbourhood" issues at North York’s Yorkwoods Library Theatre on Oct. 10.