Every day on ground zero of the biggest intersection in Toronto, street artists and corporations battle it out for a piece of the sidewalk.
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Armed with chalk and overturned buckets they face off against free giveaways and special promotions, while each year the tower of neon billboards and flashing lights crowning Yonge and Dundas Square climbs a little higher.
But thanks to the Beautiful City campaign the scale might be tipping a little more in the artist’s favour.
Three hundred young Toronto artists rallied at City Hall Tuesday, May 5 to campaign for a billboard tax that could create $18 million a year for the Toronto art community. That would include a historic 53 per cent increase in municipal funding for artists, festivals and art institutions, as well as almost $100,000 for public realm improvement in each Toronto ward every year and $300,000 for each of the 13 priority neighbourhoods to fund youth arts programs.
Toronto currently only spends $13 per-capita on arts and culture, compared to $32 in Montreal, $54 in New York and a whopping $80 in San Francisco.
In the meantime, Toronto’s ugly wallpaper problem has gotten out of hand.
While states like Vermont, Alaska, Hawaii and Maine have outright bans on billboards, in Toronto they rule the streets. Miles of yawning ads plaster everything from bus stops to recycling bins. There’s over 1,000 square metres of ads in a single TTC subway train[PDF].
All while half the billboards in Toronto don’t even have permits. In four years, IllegalSigns.ca has filed over 650 complaints against illegal billboards in the city.
There’s a lot of money at stake. A single billboard can cost an advertiser around $200,000 a year. Toronto billboards are in the hands of roughly half a dozen media companies who have refused to provide financial data to help city workers structure the proposed two per cent tax with minimum impact.
“You’re not just up against billboards, you’re up against the largest media conglomerates in the world and they’ll throw anything they can at you to stop you,” said Trinity-Spadina councillor Adam Vaughan. “They don’t want you to know how close we really are.”
The final draft of the bylaw will be brought before City Council June 2.
