Imagine what Toronto would look like if we had put librarians in charge of running the place a long time ago.
Librarians would not have allowed a car-crazed condo-tower gold rush to crush the city. Librarians would integrate everyone regardless of age or background into a healthy, well-fed, multilingual, vibrant society.
Too bad. Stupidity rules. And stupidity says penalize the Toronto Public Library system for achieving the world-class status that otherwise eludes this Titanic town.
Sure enough, this year’s proposed budget includes a 10 per cent funding cut to the TPL, despite the fact that more people visit libraries here than in any city in North America – or anywhere, I’d say, though they don’t. Nineteen million a year.
It’s a freezing Sunday afternoon, November 24, and I give up counting every possible seat in the council chambers is taken by the overflow crowd of library supporters.
A hot Dixieland band distracts from the lack of any apparent heating other than human. Maureen O’Reilly, president of the 2,300-strong Toronto Public Library Workers Union Local 4948, chairs the meeting. She introduces her 87-year-old mother, who’s sitting comfortably in the mayor’s chair.
Balloons and books for children are upstairs in the councillors’ lounge. The library system no longer has a recognized classification of children’s librarian any more. Young people are criminalized while penny-pinching perpetrates this immeasurable crime against youth.
Pennies are no longer in use except when it comes to libraries. When amalgamation was forced on Toronto in 1998, libraries got just over 2 cents’ worth of every budget dollar. Since then, the amount has decreased. Acquisitions, staffing, access and buildings have all suffered. This rescue meeting proposes restoration and reinvestment to the tune of 4 cents a day per resident.
Over the last 20 years, there’s been a 44 per cent increase in library usage while the 98-library system has absorbed more than $800 million in cumulative cuts.
The most popular thing in town survives on an annual allowance of just $169 million as the blank cheque handed to police careens toward the billion-dollar mark.
As usual, it’s up to the book-reading/immigrant/women and children elites to kick up a fuss. Fortunately, our librarians are prepared.
We watch a short fact-packed film by animators James Braithwaite and Josh Raskin celebrating our book centres as part of “intellectual infrastructure.”
Tricia Hennessy of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives calls Canada a “safe haven for progressive thought,” which is cute. She shows a series of graphs illustrating the ski-slope dives of funding, staffing and acquisitions, and questions why the government refuses to supply the demand. She describes the “business” model as “how to drive a really good thing into the ground.” Exactly.
Hennessy points out that, interestingly, other services – fire, parks and recreation, sanitation – have not been forced to take the hit that libraries had to.
The city paid consultants KPMG back in 2011 to assess the library system they advised the lowering of standards, American-style. O’Reilly and library board member Councillor Janet Davis point to proposals being floated for “study halls” – rooms in the library with no books or computers available, and no library staff. Just a security guard.
Library activist Alejandra Bravo tells of the crucial role the institution played in her adjustment to the city and how it became a place to escape the heat with her baby. She lists poetry and other programs offered only in libraries, not schools. “Young people can find themselves. The library is a neutral space where everybody can feel at home,” she says.
The revelation that 51 per cent of TPL workers are now part-time, with no benefits or pension, prompts cries of “Shame!”
Davis encourages residents to call their councillors and invites all to deputations Monday and Tuesday, December 2 and 3, in Committee Room 1.
As I exit the Hall of the City of the Future that never was, I find heat blowing out the door.
news@nowtoronto
